Dunkin Donuts had created a social media campaign for National Donut Day, where they introduced customized gifs, emojis, and filters on several social media platforms. With this campaign, Dunkin Donuts gained over 6.5 million engagements. However, creating such successful social media ad campaigns can be increasingly tricky. You need to understand various technicalities of social media marketing and leverage several paid advertisement services to increase the output of your campaign. The experts in a social media marketing agency use a systematic approach and analyze multiple social media trends for creating social media ad campaigns and strategies. Learning from the experts, you need to consider the following intricacies of running a social media ad campaign.
Social Media is like a land of several opportunities!
Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Social-media-ads.png
1. Understand your business objectives
Before creating a social media ad campaign, you need to be aware of your business goals and objectives. For this purpose, you can list down various business goals and research which ones can be addressed by social media marketing. The following goals can be achieved with the help of social media ads:
- Social media ads can help you build brand awareness, which allows you to understand how many people know about your business.
- Another goal you can achieve with social media ads and marketing is creating an engaging community. An online community will help you gather a loyal audience, who wishes to be involved with the latest developments in your company.
- Social media platforms can also help you increase lead conversions or sales.
Along with these objectives, social media presence can be used to deliver customer support, manage brand reputation, gain market insights, and identify prospective leads. You need to carefully analyze business objectives that can be fulfilled with social media marketing to help you pick the right platform, understand your target audience, and develop an effective strategy.
2. Identify your target audience
You should put a lot of thought into understanding who your target audience can be. Knowing your target audience will allow you to maximize the output of social media ad campaigns. Your target audience will depend on which type of business you have, which products or services you are selling, and which type of ads you intend to post. By identifying your target audience, you can micro-target ad campaigns towards specific demographics.
To identify your target audience, you can develop audience personas. For this purpose, conduct research about several details such as age, location, financial status, goals, behaviors, buying patterns, and pain points for different audience demographics. Collect all the researched data and group common characteristics among several audience demographics to develop unique personas. These audience personas are essential while developing your social media ad campaign strategy.
3. Discover different platforms
You can select suitable social media platforms by finding out which platforms your target audience uses the most. Also, conduct research about various social media platforms and their advertising approach. Some of the most popular social media platforms are:
Facebook is one of the most popular social networks with over 2.2 billion active monthly users. With such a large user base, you get an opportunity to reach a significant number of global audience. Facebook supports a wide variety of ads such as pictures, videos, text, slideshows, and messenger ads. With such ads, you can build brand awareness, attract traffic onto your website, generate leads, and engage with your audience. Also, Facebook offers detailed audience segmentation options for specific demographics and lookalike audiences.
Instagram is a visual platform that can post ads such as videos and images on your feed and stories. You can also use carousel ads where your audience can swipe through different images and videos. Instagram ads will help you build brand awareness and convert leads.
Twitter is a micro-blogging platform that includes services such as Twitter Promote and ad campaigns. With Twitter Promote, the platform’s algorithm promotes first ten tweets to your specified target audience on a daily basis. Twitter ad campaigns ensure that your ads will be displayed to your target audience.
Snapchat
Snapchat is one of the most popular social media platforms among teenagers. Snapchat can be used to create video and photo ad campaigns about products and services. Also, you can create custom Snapchat filters that your audience can use in specified geofenced areas near your business.
Along with these platforms, there are several other social networks that can be used for marketing and ad campaigns.
4. Test your social media ads
Testing the impact of social media ads is necessary to determine which type of ads give you the best results. For this purpose, you can implement A/B testing or split testing. In A/B testing, post the same piece of content more than once with different headlines on several platforms. With this approach, you can understand which type of ads are appreciated by your audience and which kind of headlines gather a better response. Hence, you can tailor your ad designs according to audience response.
5. Analyze success metrics
Finally, you need to evaluate how your social media ads are performing and optimize your approach accordingly. For this purpose, you can analyze various metrics that are offered by social networks. Some of these metrics are:
- Reach, engagement, and likes on Facebook and Instagram.
- Mentions, visits, and impressions on Twitter.
- Interactions, impressions, and clicks on LinkedIn.
Monitor these metrics regularly to understand the impact of your social media ads.
To run a successful social media ad campaign, you need an effective strategy and a dedicated team. However, hiring and managing a social media team can prove to be expensive, especially for small businesses. Hence, outsourcing social media ad campaigns to a social media marketing agency or a content marketing agency is the most feasible solution. Reach out to Spacebar to create successful social media ad campaigns for your business.