Social media is necessary for any company that wants to be successful and grow.
Advertising helps businesses to promote themselves and sell their products to their audience members. With billions of people using social media, businesses can reach a larger audience through this medium.
Social media advertising is a powerful marketing tactic that can generate leads, revenue, brand awareness, and more. This guide provides an overview of why developing a digital marketing strategy is important for businesses, how to create a strategy, and examples to help get you started.
Social Media Advertising
In order to increase revenue, social media advertising should target your buyer personas, audience, and customers. This can be done by promoting your brand, product, or service via social media posts and ads.
You may be wondering if this type of advertising is effective and whether it is a good use of your time and money.
How effective is social media advertising?
Approximately 2.38 billion individuals use Facebook on a monthly basis. Did you know there are over 500 million users on Instagram every day?
According to a study, 74% of global marketers already invest in social media marketing, which includes social advertising. Additionally, 70% of businesses state that social media generates leads for them, and 58% of marketers say social media has increased their sales.
Here are some statistics that show how effective social media advertising is for businesses of all types.
Social media advertising viewing stats support its effectiveness and impressive reach. In addition, this marketing tactic allows you to nurture your leads in real time. The platform provides you with an opportunity to directly engage and build relationships with your followers and audience.
The cherry on top? Social media advertising is more cost-effective than traditional advertising. You can control your social media ad spending by setting a budget and adding or removing to that set amount within the social platform you’re using.
Now that you understand how powerful social media ads can be, let’s go over the steps involved in creating an ad for your business on social media.
How to Create a Social Media Ad
The steps to creating a social media ad are as follows:
Use data from CRM and web analytics to learn which ad campaigns are most effective in getting visitors to become customers.
Think about your budget.
One of the most difficult aspects of social media advertising is figuring out how much money to spend. The reason there are so many options for ads and campaigns on social media platforms is because they are flexible and unique.
If you’re looking to run a social campaign on Facebook with the Facebook Ad Campaign tool, start by setting a budget. For example, you might want to set a budget for how much you’re willing to spend on your ad campaign. Facebook will manage your campaign and spend your budget as evenly as possible over the selected time period, or until your budget is gone. Once you’ve finished creating your Facebook ad campaign, you can choose to leave it as is or add more money to your budget to keep it going.
When you are creating your budget for social media advertising, be sure to consider your marketing objectives so that your strategy is aligned with those goals. Think about how much money you are willing to spend on social media advertisements as a part of your overall marketing strategy.
Choose which type of social media advertisement you’ll run.
Paid social advertising is always evolving with new technologies, channels, formats, and trends.
This means that you cannot simply advertise on one social media platform and expect it to work for everyone. You need to try out different channels to figure out which one works better for your company and customers.
Here are some of the most common types of social media platforms you can advertise through and which demographic of people you’ll want to target through each:
Almost 70% of adults use Facebook, with the platform having the widest age range of active users of any other social media platform. The largest group of users on Facebook are 25-34 year olds. This means that teens and seniors are using Facebook. In particular, 62% of online seniors (those aged 65 and over) are using the site.
Facebook ads are popular because they allow advertisers to reach people who have not liked their page. They reach a much larger population of people than any other platform.
Instagram is ideal if you’re targeting younger generations. The majority of young adults use Snapchat, with 75% of 18-24-year-olds and 57% of 25-29-year-olds using the platform. Although a relatively small percentage of the elderly are using the platform, the number of young people using the platform is growing rapidly.
Twitter is a good option for targeting young to middle-aged adults with your social media ads. This is because 22% of adults in the U.S. use Twitter. 38% of users on the platform are 18 to 29 years old, while 26% of users are between 30 and 49 years old.
LinkedIn is a professional network, so it’s best to use formal, business, and career-related ads on the platform. This means that the LinkedIn demographic you will want to target includes people who are currently employed or who will soon be employed.
The platform is used by 37% of adults in the U.S. between the ages of 30-49 and there are over 660 million LinkedIn users. Around half of all American college graduates are reported to be using LinkedIn.
Snapchat
You should advertise on Snapchat if your target audience is young. The platform has approximately 210 million daily active users, with around 90% of them falling between the ages of 13 and 24.
Make your ad relevant.
Your ads should be targeted towards your target audience and customers. There are a few ways you can make sure this is the case.
- Use your buyer personas to target the interests and needs of your audience and customers
- Conduct customer feedback surveys and focus groups to fulfill the needs of your target audience even when they aren’t actively searching for solutions
- Search engine optimize (SEO) your social content so it’s more likely to organically appear when specific keywords and phrases are being searched (and use image alt text when you can)
Create a Content Strategy
Having the right content strategy is key to growing your social media presence.
Your content has to do three things:
- Nurture your audience
- Attract new followers
- Promote your products or services
If your content doesn’t stimulate, engage, and motivate your audience, you need to change your content creation and promotion approach. Each content piece should have a goal. This is especially true for content created for social media, as it needs to achieve the goals of the campaign.
Decide Whether You Will Prioritize Organic or Paid Growth
I’ve mentioned before that there are two ways to grow on social media – through paid advertising and organic growth.
If you are a small business or startup short on funds, it is best to grow your business in an organic way. This way, you can invest your resources in other areas. Paid social media is a great way for eCommerce brands and big companies to build their social media presence.
You need to decide which social media marketing strategy you are going to use.
Successful Social Media Marketing Strategy
There are five basic steps for creating a winning social media marketing strategy to grow your business online.
Let’s cover them in detail.
Research
To begin, you need to collect information on your target buyer and their habits.
The goal is to learn as much as you can about your audience. What are their needs & interests?
A toy shop aimed at children under the age of 5 would have new parents or couples with young children as their target audience. Someone who has a friend or close relative whose kid’s birthday is coming up.
After finding your target audience, look into the kind of content they like to consume.
What you need to do next is figure out what your competitors in the industry are doing.
The results of these studies will allow you to produce captivating content that your audience will be able to identify with and consume frequently.
Decide
You can’t just create content without first deciding which social media platform you’re going to use. The content you create for each platform should be unique, as each platform has a different focus, and is aimed at a different audience.
Now note that you don’t have to be omnipresent. Nobody goes on LinkedIn to buy candy or shoes unless they’re looking for a job in that company.
The key to having a successful social media presence is to decide which platform(s) work for your brand and then sticking to it. This allows you to build a strong and loyal following that will help to promote your brand and products.
Create
Now that you understand your audience, your key social media platforms, and the content your competitors are sharing, you can start creating content of your own.
It is time to be inspired by others, find out what your audience is interested in, and create content that is engaging and encourages people to react.
Organize
You need to have a plan for your social media content. Otherwise, it will be all over the place and you will not get the results you want.
To prepare content effectively, it is important to be organized. Creating a social media content calendar with the necessary date, content type, platform, and other information is essential. I have written a guide that will show you how to create a social media content calendar. You can follow this one if you need help. Just pick a template and stick to it every week or month.
The next step in organizing your content is to publish it in an organized way. After you have finished creating your content calendar, you need to establish a posting schedule on social media. There are many social media platforms that you can use to write captions, design your posts, & schedule them on different platforms.
I’d recommend using Social Champ. Although there are many social media scheduling tools available, the15 listed below are some of the best and most popular ones. Choose the tool that best suits your business needs.
whichever tool you use, make a schedule to keep your social profiles active and organized
Analyze
The most important part of any social media marketing strategy is understanding how well it is working. This means looking at metrics and understanding what they mean.
Once you’ve published the content, your job isn’t over. You can’t wait around to become a social media star. You have to take initiative and put yourself out there.
Monitor your posts’ performance and analyze the results. Analyze what type of content is performing best. Ensure that your work is advancing you toward your social media objectives. There are many tools available that can help you track your performance and generate reports for analysis to help you make adjustments as needed.
Social Media Marketing Campaigns
Having a strong marketing plan for your social media will help ensure your success.
This guide provides a simple way to create a successful social media marketing plan. This text contains a simple, step-by-step process that can help you get your campaigns started.
If you’re still unsure about how to create content for your social media campaign or how to construct one, you can take a break here. I’ve gathered some resources that can help you learn more about building a social media marketing campaign. The following guides will provide you with information on the types of content that you can use in your next marketing campaign.
Social Media Marketing Campaign Resources:
- How to Build a Social Media Marketing Campaign 101
- Social Media Marketing Tactics for Instant Results In 2022
- 5 Stages of Social Media Marketing Funnel: Everything You Need To Know
- An Easy-to-Follow Social Media Marketing Checklist for 2022
Now, I’ll give some examples of successful social media marketing campaigns.
How to Overcome Social Media Marketing Challenges
While social media marketing provides many benefits, marketers will often face a variety of challenges including:
- Deciding what social media platforms to use
- Understanding the target audience and how to reach them on various social media platforms
- Determining how specific platforms will be used within existing or new marketing funnels.
- Whether social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram should be used for e-commerce purposes
- Integrating social media marketing strategies with other digital marketing strategies
- Designing unique content for particular platforms
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