Social media advertising is a branch of digital marketing that uses social networks to buy attention with the goal of driving action.
The social media landscape is complex, with many different channels to choose from – Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snap, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc. But at the end of the day, it all comes down to one thing: buying attention. This means ad costs, budgets and spending. And the ultimate goal is to drive action – acquisition, retention and efficiency.
However, when we apply this same thinking to eCommerce, we are faced with an uncomfortable truth.
You shouldn’t only measure success on ROAS when doing social media advertising because it won’t be effective. We see it all the time:
- Stuffing Facebook ads with top performers, instead of fresh content
- Building ten-asset DCTs, without optimizing or testing the ad creative
- Pushing your best type of ads into retargeting, along with your budget
The final sign that something is going wrong is when a company starts offering more and more discounts to try and increase sales.
The solution: Attribution. Here is the problem: ROAS can tell you if an ad if working, but it does not explain why it is working. The solution: Attribution can give context to how effective an ad is.
No, the key to an exceptional online marketing plan is to unhook your brain from a siloed approach to results and replace it with good, old-fashioned advertising thought-work. That need is why we’re going to uncover:
Digital advertising provides the opportunity to learn.
It is important to learn what sort of things your customers respond to positively so that you can continue to do more of those things. Additionally, it is useful to know what doesn’t work well so that you can avoid those tactics in the future. Finally, it is helpful to understand where and how your customers interact with your advertising so that you can make the most effective use of your resources.
The success of our creative strategy can be measured by how useful and practical the information is that it provides you.
We learn from our losses and use them as opportunities to improve. Similarly, we should celebrate our wins and use them as motivation to continue working hard to achieve our goals.
What is Social Media Advertising?
Advertisements that are served to users on social media platforms are called social media advertising or social media targeting.
Social media platforms use information about their users to show ads that are relevant to those users. When the people who the ads are trying to reach match up with the demographics of the social media platform’s users, advertising on that platform can be very effective, leading to more sales at a lower cost.
This blog post covers everything you need to know about social media advertising, from creating a campaign to different types of ads. You’ll also find practical examples of how to put them into practice.
Social Media Advertising Examples
1. Experiment with different ad types 2. Create irresistible ad content 3. Test, test, and test again 4. Target a specific audience 5. Use social media tools To get started with advertising on social media, here are five tips: 1. Try out different types of ads to see what works best for your brand. 2. Make sure your ad content is attention-grabbing and relevant to your target audience. 3. Test different versions of your ads to see what performs best. 4. Narrow down your audience to those who are most likely to be interested in your product or service. 5. Utilize social media tools and features to improve the visibility of your ads.
Audience Targeting
This means that you need to change your approach depending on who you are targeting.
You can learn more about your customers by doing a keyword search, surveying them, and interviewing them. This will help you create clear customer personas, which will allow you to target them more accurately.
It is important to target both new and potential customers, as well as to retarget existing customers. This will help customers remember your brand even if they have already made a purchase. It is also more cost-effective than advertising to potential customers.
Promote on Social Media Platforms
It’s important to have a strong social media strategy if you want your social media advertising to be successful. You can promote and reuse your existing content across different social media platforms to help tell your brand’s story and make it more noticeable.
Paid Search and Social Ads
You can create tailormade PPC search ads for customers who have visited your online store before, and depending on which pages they viewed, using remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA). This is a great way to target users who are familiar with your business.
You can increase the effectiveness of your advertising campaign by targeting both those who are already familiar with your brand, as well as those who are not, by combining paid search with social ads.
One way to increase the effectiveness of your pay-per-click ads is to target potential customers with social ads first. This will help build brand awareness and familiarity with your products. As a result, when they see your PPC ads later on, they will be more likely to click on them.
Improve Quality Score
Your quality score is a metric that search engines use to determine how relevant and high-quality your keywords and PPC ads are. A high quality score means that your ad will rank higher in search results and you’ll pay less per engagement.
You can find out which paid ads are top-performing by posting organically to social advertising platforms and tracking engagement with each ad.
Optimize User Engagement for SEO
SEO is a key way to bring traffic to your website which will result in more sales. User engagement is a potential factor for ranking on search engines like Google. This engagement is based on metrics including click-through rate (CTR), bounce rate, and conversion rate.
Even if user engagement isn’t something that search engines consider when ranking pages, a high click-through rate and a high conversion rate will still get you better organic search rankings and more conversions.
Steps for a Creative Strategy Guaranteed to Work
Product – What You Should ‘Really’ Sell via Social Media Ads
If you’re a small business that only sells one type of product, this step is easy.
If your bestseller is dominant and you’re just aligning it with recent DTC trends, you can skip step two.
This means figuring out which of your products are most valuable and focusing your creative efforts on them.
With those data points firmly anchored in eCommerce analytics, ask yourself:
Which of my high-profit products has the least amount of ads?
Which high 60-day LTV products have sales volume but are not bestsellers?
The potential for these products is limitless. They could help your business in a big way if you can get your hands on them.
In the case of Bambu Earth, it did.
but then in August, we implemented a new system that fixed it We were close to shutting down the clean-beauty brand we acquired in 2019, despite customers’ positive feedback. We couldn’t make the advertising account work on a large scale, but we implemented a new system in August that fixed the issue.
Looking at the 60-day LTV from a step back revealed something different.
We found that customers were worth 40% more when they bought certain products, like mini-kits. These products performed much better than the others.
The discovery of how badly the ad account was doing led to a change in strategy. Now the ads feature a quiz that helps customers find the right products.
The truly staggering part?
Although we increased our advertising budget, our ROAS (return on advertising spending) decreased, indicating that we are not getting as much profit from our ads as we could be.
In spite of everything, the business was able to grow by 415% compared to the year before in 2020, and then by 63% in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the fourth quarter of 2020. The profit margin was around 20% overall.
Person – Who to Research (Humans Over Demographics)
Instead, people buy the result of what your thing can do for them People don’t buy your product just because it exists. They buy it because of what it can do for them.
They are not buying the product, they are buying what the product does for them. Like Eugene Schwartz, author of Breakthrough Advertising, said “Really, every product you are given to sell is two products. One of them is the physical product… the other is the functional product- the product in action- the series of benefits that your product performs for your consumer, and based on which he buys your product.”
. We can become even more specific than Schwartz by adding a third dimension, identity.
For example, our Slick Products brand sells cleaner for your off-road vehicles. Initially, Slick’s main competitor was not a different dirt bike cleaner.
It was dirt-bike enthusiasts’ homemade and very-cheap cleaning concoctions.
There was a need to validate spending money on a special cleaner, which meant letting the community know that the product fits their lifestyle.
Problems with identity are usually not talked about. This is because they can be embarrassing and make someone feel vulnerable. Another reason is that if you have to say you’re cool, then you’re probably not.
The way you address a problem can depend on what kind of problem it is. If it’s a functional problem, you should address it verbally, for example by speaking about it in an advertisement. But if it’s an identity problem, you should address it in a non-verbal way, for example by choosing a particular influencer or design.
Platform – Where Channels Shape Creative
Restriction breeds creativity.
There are several restrictions on digital advertising, and being successful means knowing those restrictions and being creative within them.
Embracing and embodying each platform’s limitations dictates your success.
This is true for all social media networks, not just Facebook and Instagram. This includes LinkedIn and any other networks used for lead generation.
Even though social media advertising is better understood than ever before, it’s still very new as a creative medium: unless you’re under 23 or so, you spent your childhood consuming advertising such as television commercials or still ads in magazines.
Clients often come to us with the preconceived notion that their commercials should follow the classic TV storytelling arc, something that is deeply ingrained in their subconscious. This is especially true for those with legacy businesses.
Production – How to Concept Digital Marketing Campaigns
We’ve gathered the right information in the previous three steps.
Now it’s time to get our ingredients together and cook:
- Develop the offer
- Determine brand awareness
- Write the first three seconds
- Gather social proof
- Build your sales sequence
Performance – Why Iterating, Learning & Improving Matter Most
Great creative drives action.
Simply put, if your advertising and marketing isn’t driving sales, then it isn’t effective.
We prefer the paraphrase because it is easier to see how an ad is supposed to change someone’s behavior.
The goal of your ad should be to get someone to stop scrolling and pay attention to your content. You want them to be engaged enough to stay on their phone and even share it with someone else.
Then it needs to make them tap the link.
Your ad is essentially a magic spell intended to get the reader to take a specific action.
ROAS can be used to determine whether an ad is effective. It cannot explain why the ad is effective.
Purchase is the ultimate action we want to drive.
However, there are many actions that must be taken before someone makes a purchase. We believe that measuring these leading indicators gives us a better understanding of the reasons why.
We use a system of metrics calle AIDA which tells us how people experence our creativity in order to do that. AIDA stands for attention, interest, desire, and action.
AIDA is an ancient behavioral model that is still used today. St. Elmo Lewis, it covers the series of effects an ad should have on a consumer:
- Attention: Interrupt the reader and get them to stop
- Interest: Transform that attention into an emotional response
- Desire: Intensify that response into a tangible want
- Action: Move them into a measurable outcome
Wrapping Up
Social media advertising consistently delivers scalable leads, making it one of the most efficient and effective ways to reach your target audience and turn them into customers, especially in the eCommerce landscape.
As more and more retailers start using social media, it is important to understand how it works and start to improve your own strategy. These tips will help you to be ahead of the competition.
It can be very difficult to make your content noticed when social media algorithms and search engine rankings are constantly changing. Although it is free to use organic search, it is unlikely that your content will go viral without spending any money.
Paid social advertising is the most effective way to generate traffic and sales from the outset. In 2021, 75% of Gen Zers and 48% of millennials are making purchasing decisions based on social media ads, and social media ad spending in the US was valued at $40.3 billion in 2020.
If you own a business, large or small, you need to advertise on social media. This is especially true if you want to stand out from the competition, get your content seen, and boost sales.
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