Anatomy of a successful social media advertising campaign
Words: Jessica Turner, Managing Director of Confab
There is both an art and a science to creating a successful social media advertising campaign that finds the sweet spot of reaching the right audience, getting them to take the right actions and of course ensuring all of this happens within your desired budget. We have had years of experience in creating and running successful advertising campaigns for clients across many different industries and wanted to share some of our insights in this blog post.
1. If you’re wanting a successful social media campaign, DO NOT boost your posts
Before we take another step, let us be clear on one simple thing (this is related to Facebook and Instagram advertising): Do not spend a cent of your business’s hard earned money on boosting your posts. If you have not yet set up a Facebook Business Manager and are using the Advanced Adverts Manager tools, stop what you are doing, and start your account by clicking here.
We cannot stress enough the vital importance of creating proper advert campaigns, rather than ad-hoc boosts, because at the end of the day “my boosted post really grew my company in real time” – said no business ever.
2. Tracking codes on website
The next important skeletal structure of a successful social media campaign is tracking codes. If you have not yet installed your tracking codes from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn (and of course Google) onto your website you are missing the most incredible opportunity to reach the right audience, retarget your previous customer or website visitors and gain fascinating insights into what your customers and prospects are doing once they’ve clicked on your social media advert and have found themselves on your website. If you are uncertain about how to properly install and utilise your tracking codes to their full potential, please feel free to set up a social media training session with our team here.
3. Choose the right objective
Before you can select the right advertising objective on your adverts manager account for your campaign, you need to have already defined this objective when you planned your campaign. Something important to note is that you need to select one main objective and stick to that. For example, if you are wanting sales, but also ‘likes’ on your advert, you’ll need to sacrifice one in order to maximise on the other. Choose your top objective and then build your campaign around that.
4. Carefully map your audience
Advertising is not just what you say, but who you say it to, and speaking to the right audience, whether it be broad or niche is vitally important. Once your business manager profile has been set up as well as your tracking codes, a world of new advanced audience targeting combinations opens up to your business. From custom website and email audiences to lookalike audiences, take time to carefully map out your audience, and then we recommend using A/B testing of your audience segments to discover which is working best before backing the audience with the bulk of your campaign budget.
5. Optimise your budget
A few of our budget optimisation tips for social media advertising include first, always using the campaign budget optimisation tool within Facebook to either optimise based on a daily or total campaign budget, we’ve seen our best results utilising this tactic. We also recommend allowing 4 – 7 days before scaling budgets up or stopping your campaign whilst also bearing in mind that your advert objective and audience combination is likely to affect your budget and your costs per result.
6. Craft your copywriting
Words will always matter, especially when it comes to your social media adverts. We’ve found that when copywriting is short, catchy and either solves a problem, poses a question or speaks to a need your audience has, you’re only a winning formula. Some other tips from our team include: be compelling, communicate your value proposition, speak directly to your customers using words such as you/your and if your brand allows for it, tastefully use humour to get your message across.
7. Always judge an advert by its artwork
We are at a time in the digital marketing world where most brands and businesses are using social media, and using it properly. This means the competition to reach your target audience is more rife than ever. This is where artwork and advert creative comes in to play as a key differentiating factor to make your business stand out amongst all the newsfeed noise. Some tips from our team to help you design winning artwork include: Keep your in-image copy short (20% text or less), add your value proposition in the ad image, use creatives that spark emotions, use symbols to your advantage, show your product in action, include discount offers in your ad image and use strong visuals of people.
8. Learn from your wins (and your losses)
Each business is unique and so will be the data from your advertising campaigns. Keep a close eye on your adverts throughout each month and then invest time into analysing your analytics, looking for trends, asking questions, trialing new copywriting techniques, audience combinations and artwork designs. Each campaign presents an opportunity to gain key insights into what your audience wants and what they don’t want. Learn from your wins and your losses and you’ll be heading in the direction of social media advertising success.