In today’s digital world, social media advertising plays an important role in the purchasing cycle. It’s a cost-effective way to get your product or service in front of new and existing customers for consideration, but how do you do it? Here are five tips for designing a social media advertising campaign optimized for higher results.
Know your target audience
Who are you trying to reach? Deciding who your ad will be geared towards is a fundamental factor of a successful campaign. You should consider your average customer and figure out which attributes are shared. Determining your target audience should include considerations like age, gender, interests, marital status, family status, and employment. Once you have identified your audience, you can then build targeting parameters around those attributes that will help you reach your ideal customer.
Set goals for your campaign
What are you trying to achieve? If you aren’t sure what your goals are with a social media campaign, it becomes impossible to determine success. It’s important to design every social media campaign with a clear goal in mind (i.e. what results matter to me with this campaign?). Goals can include clicks, page likes, event responses, etc., and encompass everything from brand awareness to conversions. It’s important to decide prior to campaign launch what your specific campaign is intended to achieve. Once this is decided, you can make sure every detail from the image to the copy is designed to drive users toward completing your ideal result.
Use high-quality visuals
Choosing premium images and videos plays a crucial role in the success of social media marketing campaigns. As an advertiser, your ad becomes a reflection of your business. Low-quality images promote the idea of low-quality products or services, which is not what consumers want. Social platforms are extremely visual, so the assets you use to represent your brand should be chosen with that in mind. Clean images with minimal text are encouraged by most platforms; they also tend to flow organically with the non-sponsored content that is appearing on a user’s social feed, which can encourage ad engagement.
Use the right call-to-action
Where do you want your ad to guide users? This is what you should consider when you choose a call-to-action (CTA). If you are marketing for a university looking to drive college enrollment, you may consider choosing a CTA that invites users to “apply now.” The ad could then direct to the application landing page so that users can submit their application. If you run a retail store and are looking to promote your new fall line, perhaps your CTA would be “shop now.” The CTA should guide users toward the next step, whatever that step is for your specific marketing campaign. Most platforms now have a pre-determined list of options for CTA buttons, so choose the one that best fits your campaign goals.
Monitor and optimize your campaign
This may seem like an obvious step, but it’s one that often gets forgotten. You spend so much time building and designing your campaign for success, why would you abandon it after launch? It’s important to monitor the performance of your campaign as it delivers to make sure you are achieving the results you are looking for. Focus on the big picture rather than individual metrics. Perhaps you built a campaign to encourage new customer sign ups and you see that your ad is driving clicks, but the number of submissions you are receiving isn’t where you want it to be. Recognizing this issue during the campaign flight can allow you to address it while there is still time and budget left for the campaign. Maybe you see that users are navigating to the submission landing page via the ad, but because the boxes to input personal information are all the way at the bottom of the page, users are missing it. In this case, you could just rework the landing page to make it more user-friendly and voila! You have solved the issue without undoing the original work it took to get the campaign live.
For more information on how Compulse Integrated Marketing can help your company with existing and future social media marketing efforts, contact us by visiting www.compulse.com, or call us at 844-821-2154.