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Advertising is about getting your brand in front of as many people as possible in an efficient way. To do that, you need a platform with the most eyeballs on your message for as cheap as possible. Successful advertising requires testing, patience, and the right metrics, all combined leads to cross-channel content improvement.
Before putting together a social media advertising strategy, it’s important to understand the types of ads that exist and what they do. Each platform has their quirks, so bear with us!
There are a few ways you can advertise on Facebook:
Source: Facebook Ads
Instagram is owned by Facebook, so they run all the aforementioned ad types. The key to Instagram is to cater your content towards what the platform does best — visuals. With Instagram, your images and videos appear larger than on Facebook’s feed, so ensure the visual quality of your ad is high.
There are two ways to promote on Twitter:
Snapchat
There are tons of ways you can advertise using Snapchat:
TikTok
There are plenty of ways to use TikTok for marketing, and they’ve spent the past year focusing on making it a valuable platform for businesses. Check out the TikTok for Business page — it’s filled with educational content you can use to turn your brand into a powerhouse on the app.
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To maximize social media advertising effectiveness, it’s all about testing.
A/B testing involves creating two versions of a page, ad, or message, changing one variable, and running them both to see which performs better. This tests which variable resonates with your audience. Some platforms - like Facebook - allow you to do this without double the work.
Some variables you can change in A/B testing:
Here is how you put an A/B test together:
Different ad types can lead to different results, so it’s important to research how to attain the desired target. In social advertising, there are three metrics to be measured: impressions, engagements, and traffic.
Impressions measure how many people see your advertisement. You can use impressions as a baseline for other metrics to see how effective your advertisement is in getting your desired action.
The best type of content for impressions is eye-catching, visual material. Use engaging images, interesting videos, and visual content to get someone to stop their scroll.
Engagement measures your audience’s interaction with the ad. This can be a like, share, comment, or click. Engagement boosts an ad in most social media algorithms, so creating something that elicits a response is crucial.
Traffic measures how many people are visiting your website via your ad. When it comes to generating traffic, it’s all about the call to action. Whatever you’re asking the users to do, it has to be something enticing enough for them to leave the platform, so pick something strong!
An ad’s media will catch a user’s attention, but the copy is what makes them take action. That’s why it’s important to test social ad copy. When you test different messages, you’ll get a glimpse of what is compelling your audience to take a desired action.
Here are the most effective ways to test your ad copy:
There are many ways social advertising costs are calculated, the most common is click-based (or a pay-per-click (PPC) model). You can set a budget at the beginning of the month, and the social media platform will maximize your budget and show ads until your money runs out.
The best way to figure out what your costs would be is to run tests and try it out. The cost-per-click (CPC) varies based on the platform you’re using and the audience you’re trying to reach, so take some time to create a campaign and push it live.
Read more about increasing brand awareness here!
The best way to run a successful social media advertising campaign is to run as many ads and test as many things as possible. Our team specializes in helping businesses plan, develop and execute a social media strategy that will get you noticed on timelines and news feeds everywhere. Contact us today!