It is becoming more apparent how important social media is to small businesses looking to expand beyond their current reach or want to get noticed. According to a survey, over 70 small business owners use social media to double their marketing efforts.
More than three billion people actively use social media, which means approximately 40% of the global population is logging on to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and/or another platform regularly. However, you are not the only business online trying to gain attention from new and existing customers; other businesses are trying to boost their growth with social media.
To gain a more competitive advantage in the social media space, you must incorporate social media advertising into your small business marketing strategy. Social media ads will play an increasingly crucial role in your business’s ability to drive sales, provide excellent customer experience and improve brand awareness.
What are Social Media Ads?
Social media ads, also known as social media advertising, are defined as social media platforms to serve paid ads to your target audience. Social media advertising is significantly impactful as it allows you to deliver your message to your ideal buyers throughout their purchase journey. With social media advertising, you can take advantage of the users’ demographic information and target your ads appropriately to your exact target customers.
You can target users with hundreds of parameters, from demographic data (such as age, gender, income, level of education, and marital status) to browsing preferences and social behaviour. Also, networks are offering advanced targeting options to increase personalisation and relevance.
Here Are Some Best Practices for Running Social Media Ads for your Business
Know Your Target Audience:
Before you start with your social media advertising efforts, know the audience that matters to what you are selling. Knowing your target audience is one of the best ways to maximise your budget and efficiently spend your ad dollars to ensure you reach your business’s goals. To do this, first, make a profile of your target customer and segment them into particular demographic information (gender, income, level of the education).
Survey your existing customer base, or refer to demographic information you’ve already gathered about your audience, including details included in mailing list sign-ups. Once you have a target customer’s demographic profile, choose advertising platforms that make sense for that audience and your location.
Choose the Right Platform:
Now that you understand who your target market is do your research on the various ad platforms available to make sure your advertisement will reach your target customer. For example, if your target consumer is under 21 years old, mobile advertising through Snapchat might be a great choice. If you have a fashion line, it is better you use Instagram for your advertising since it’s more visually appealing and would make sense for your target audience.
Do Away with Vanity Metrics:
Vanity metrics don’t help you understand your marketing strategies’ performance; rather, they make you feel good. While it’s tempting to obsess over followers and likes, those metrics don’t necessarily serve your business goals. For instance, as a small business owner, you would get more out of a small, local following than a large following, including people who will never visit the businesses’ physical stores.
Of course, sales numbers aren’t the only valuable metric. You might also monitor the traffic social media drives to your website, engagement rates for individual posts, or even specific types of engagement, such as retweets versus likes. Every metric can give you an in-depth knowledge of business and help you make the right decisions for your business.
Create Engaging Content:
Engaging content is defined as content (graphics, images, posts, video) that gets followers to engage in some way: like/favourite, share/retweet, comment/respond, etc. Facebook, Twitter, and the likes recognise these engagements and reward businesses, the more their content receives engagement.
Write short and catchy content:
The written content you provide must create a response from your audience. This is done best by keeping your content clear and precise and relative to your audience, on-message and on-tone with your brand, and relative to ongoing trends.
Add images and video:
Content that’s easy to consume and interesting to look at or watch is more likely to be engaging. Images and video help draw your audience in and retain them by being funny, culturally relevant, or educational.
Analyse and optimise your social media ads:
After you launch your ads, it’s important to check in on them. You’ve done the work in identifying goals, audience, and budget — now you need to see if your strategy makes sense. Try to optimise your Cost Per Click (CPC) and Cost Per Impression (CPM) rates. This means looking at ad success and determining ways to tweak it, so it performs better. Sometimes this means changing up the target, and other times it requires modifications to the creative.
Conclusion:
Before you start with launching a social media ad, sit down and document your strategy. If you document the goals, audiences, tactics, and results of your campaigns, you can endlessly iterate and improve. It all comes down to what works for you and your business.