11 paid social media advertising tips

1. Know your paid social objective

Before beginning any campaign, you should clearly know what your objective is. Whatever it is you are looking for; more sales, more engagement with your content or more people to hear about your brand or product. Make sure you select the right campaign objective and campaign type for your end goal. In many cases, you cannot change the paid social ad objective later and it won’t be optimised for the results or report on the results you truly want if you get it wrong initially. 

        Campaign: Awareness campaign focused on impressions or results

       > Objective 1 – Brand or Product Awareness

       > Objective 2 – Growing Your Social Following

        Campaign: Engagement campaign focused on engagement results

       > Objective 1 – Maintaining interest / Keeping in touch / Brand loyalty

       > Objective 2 – Brand or product consideration (on social platforms)

       > Objective 3 – Growing your influence

       > Objective 4 – Increasing your reach

       Campaign: Clicks focused on website and outbound clicks / landing page views

       > Objective 1 – Increasing interaction with your website content

       > Objective 2 – Brand or Product Consideration (on product pages)

       > Objective 3 – Consider Following on Another Channel (e.g. a blog, vlog, podcast or other social platform)

        Campaign: Conversions

       > Objective 1 – Purchases

       > Objective 2 – Sign-ups / Registrations

       > Objective 3 – External followers (outside the social platform e.g. a blog or podcast)

2. Consider your target audience and your options

Who is your advertising audience and what action do you want them to take? Social platforms have a wide range of options when it comes to creating an audience, and it would be a waste not to consider them all. You can target the interests of a potential customer, whether they are interested in your competition, how they have previously interacted with your business, website or social profile, and you can even upload existing customer lists and retarget those individuals. To expand your market, you can take successful audiences and your customer lists and build lookalike audiences built of people who are similar to your target audience. If you advertise to several audiences at once, you can decide to set your budget at a campaign level (which will optimise for results) or at an ad group level (which allows you to set the budget per audience). Consider all of these options when you are creating audiences and don’t be afraid to test one against another. What works for one company may not be right for you – so remember to test and learn.

3. Using personas in your paid social ad campaigns

If you already have personas, you can build social advertising audiences based around their likes, interests, gender, age and location, and it would be wise to build prospecting audiences with the information you already know. If you don’t, it is definitely worth creating personas for your paid social media advertising campaigns. Consider your most loyal customers and your ideal customer and think of some characteristics that are relevant to them. Think about why it is that they would be interested in your brand or why they need or like your product and turn it into a document you can use to filter down the wide audience available to you on social media. Name each of these personas and share them with others in your company. Then discuss these personas when planning any activity and make sure any content created is targeted at at least one of these personas. This will make your paid media campaigns more targeted and more cost-effective. 

4. Be consistent with your cross-platform campaigns

If you want that bounce rate lower, or for people to purchase or engage regularly, you need to make sure that your paid social adverts match your website, brand guidelines, tone of voice and any other concurrent marketing campaigns. Loyalty and trust is built on consistency, and so if people click on a digital advert and feel it hasn’t taken them to somewhere that is consistent with what they clicked to get there then they will click off and you’ve wasted an opportunity. 

To keep on top of which social media ads are where, you might want to consider a content calendar for your overall paid social media marketing strategy. And, if you are unsure of which platforms to use together or where you definitely need to keep your ads consistent, take a look at your multi-channel conversions in the ‘Conversion’ section of Google Analytics. This will show you the common multi-touch point routes that happen before your customer converts.

5. Create standout ad copy

The best performing paid social ads often have the best copy, so keep your language clear, short, snappy and targeted at the customers’ likes or pain points. Be sure to highlight why your brand, service, content or product are great, and with what they can expect to learn, achieve or get. Include your USPs, especially ones that are prominent on your website and grab their attention with emojis or personal language such as ‘you’ and ‘your’. 

6. Consider being topical or offer-driven 

Social media paid promotion is often most successful when the content seems current. Being topical means that more people will already be thinking about a certain topic and thus more engaged on your ad without any extra budget or effort by you. Topical posts often spark the most conversation, tags, shares and clicks because people are already searching for, or talking about the topic before you’ve entered the conversation. This means you can enjoy a nice boost from the organic impressions that will offer you. 

Another way to be current is to create offers with a visible end date. These can be focused around times of the year e.g. a spring sale or perhaps a flash weekend sale. Whatever you choose, creating short-length ads with offers creates a sense of urgency and pushes people to purchase or sign-up faster, especially if you offer a visible, no-quibble cancellation or return policy. 

7. Optimise your imagery

One way to help your social media paid campaigns is to optimise images and videos. Create bright, engaging, relevant imagery in square sizes optimised for mobile. Often, videos and images with people have the best engagement, but feel free to split test these types of media against more graphic ads or content without people. Include closed captions for videos as many people will scroll down their feed on silent and only turn on the volume for your ad if you’ve piqued their interest. It is also a great help for those with any hearing difficulties and helps your site to be more accessible to all. Lastly, try the various types of formats such as single image ads and carousels to find the best performing ad format for your business goal. 

8. Keep your content fresh

One common mistake is keeping your ads running for too long. You can tell if your ad is getting stale by the decline in results, but also by the ad frequency score. If your ad has been shown, on average, more than 3 times to an audience member, then it is definitely time to advertise to a new or lookalike audience. If you have already changed audiences and you’ve saturated that audience, then it is time to think about finishing that ad and creating a completely new one. If you still have the same content to share, consider different ways of displaying the same content (carousels, videos, etc.) along with different messaging and copy. If you constantly have something new to say, definitely change up your ads weekly or fortnightly.

9. Paid advertising should be based on informed decisions

Your paid social marketing campaigns should start as theories e.g. ‘I think my audience will like this’ and develop into a more certain ‘they do’ or ‘they don’t’. To achieve a kind of formula for your ideal ad, you should split test various elements such as content type, messaging, imagery, ad format, audiences, campaign type, budgets and budget allocation. Always test one element at a time, keeping everything else the same. Doing this will eventually help you come up with a checklist of what usually makes a great ad for your business. To start with, you should use the information you might have gathered from your organic social posts. Begin boosting popular posts and/or creating ads from them and then find similar content to what you know gets the most engagement. Remember to always measure the performance of your ads and never stop trailing new ideas. Lastly, check regularly on performance in the Ads Manager and use the reporting features of each social platform to inform the decisions for your strategy going forward and to prove the worth of social advertising to you and other stakeholders at your company.

10. Don’t forget about quality scores

Always keep an eye on the delivery and quality score of your ads, as a better score often means a higher impression share. Try out any recommendations that are suggested and make sure you take advantage of features such as responsive ads, as this option allows the social network’s algorithm to help you get the best performance for your ad, which is especially helpful in the early days of your paid advertising account. Ideally, you are always aiming for a high quality score (closer to 10) and for your ad to show as ‘performing above average’. If you find that your quality score is low, try out new imagery, copy, formats and audience segments, and look out for restrictions or issues that might be hurting the performance of your ads. If you do not know where to find your score, it is worth noting that ‘Quality Score’ is named differently throughout the various social platforms e.g. ‘Relevancy Score’ on Facebook or ‘Quality Adjusted Bid’ on Twitter.

11. Expand on what works and stop what doesn’t

Finally, the key thing to remember with paid social media advertising is to do more of what gets you the results you’re after, and to be ruthless at culling the campaigns that don’t work. If an ad creative is working, expand the audience to lookalikes or create a follow-up ad to the same audience with part two of the content. A similar themed blog or a complimentary product to the one they’ve purchased for example. If it isn’t working, stop the campaign, look at the data to find out why, adjust it and try again.

And there you have it. 11 paid social media marketing tips to help you become a budding social marketer. For further information or for our expert help with your paid social campaigns, get in touchwith today. Let a leading PPC agencyhelp you disrupt your market.