We’ve talked about the fact that social media is a noisy world, which is where social media ads come into play. The moment you start running advertising campaigns on social media, you slice through all the garbage and get in front of your target audience – whether they are potential clients, customers, or an avid reader of your content. Using social media ads, you can appear right at the end of their index finger as they’re looking at their mobile phone.
The first stage in any sale is awareness, so naturally, you want to be advertising in the places your target audiences are looking. It is only in the last decade or so that we have had the power to advertise on a medium which is always in someone’s hand or pocket, but many businesses still aren’t capitalising on this.
At AG, our social media team have experience promoting a wide variety of different companies and sectors in fun and exciting ways. This is down to the extensive advertising campaign and audience targeting options at our disposal, and the talent of our team.
Picking your paid social media platform
The main three platforms to run social media adverts on are Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. Our expert social media team are experienced in all three and work with all our clients to pick the right platform for them. It all comes down to target audience and business objective. Sometimes all three are recommended for a complex cross-platform social media marketing campaign. LinkedIn is a more professional platform, so if you’re looking to target lawyers, accountants, directors, etc. it may be that this social media channel works best. If you’re looking to target millennials with a very visual product, Instagram might be the best for you. We take into consideration every factor to ensure that we choose the best social media platform for your business to succeed.
Stay focused on results
We don’t just launch campaigns and hope for the best. We monitor, double check, amend, optimise and do it all over again. Social media ad performance can change drastically on a daily basis, so it is vital that our social team are up to date with the campaigns at all times.
Target your campaigns
Once our social media team has worked with you to create your target audience and decide on the platforms, it is then down to their social media expertise to specifically target all campaigns. The outstanding targeting capabilities of Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn allow us to really narrow down on the target audience. The more data the better, and that is essential with social media advertising campaigns. Optimised social media adverts can really make use of any and every bit of data that you have and turn this into effective marketing campaigns.
Clear, data-driven reporting
Whilst we are maintaining continuous communication with our clients, at the end of every month we will send a full breakdown of the month’s paid social results. This will pull in from a variety of sources, including Google Analytics, on platform analytics – e.g. Facebook analytics, and website analytics. We then interpret this data, giving you the key facts about your campaigns. With our return focused approach, ROI is at the forefront of every social media report, allowing you to see the efficacy of your campaigns in terms of your business goals. Our in depth reporting method is key to developing our ongoing strategies and optimising paid social media campaigns.
Get creative with your ad designs
Social media ads need to be three things; informative, intriguing and eye-catching. If your advert falls down in any of these three categories, your campaigns won’t perform well. The most targeted campaigns in the world will fail if they don’t stand out creatively. When you launch social media, they are judged by the platform on equal parts targeting and creative. With this in mind, our social media team ensures that every advert is as engaging as possible.
There are certain creative types that work best in social media ads. For example, Facebook prefers videos that are vertical and less than 15 seconds long with subtitles (if needed), as opposed to landscape, interview-style videos that rely on sound. LinkedIn adverts with videos work well, but again need to be subtitled if they require sound to get the full experience. Instagram stories require specifically sized videos to fit correctly, and anything less than 9:16 will undoubtedly underperform. If your business doesn’t particularly lend itself to video, carousels or engaging graphics work second best. But there are always new features becoming available and increasing in popularity, such as the LinkedIn PDF carousel. Don’t worry if you don’t have this kind of content readily available, our social and design team can work closely with you to create the perfect designs.
With paid social ads, it is all about being short and snappy, using as little text as possible. This concise but effective approach is what helps us deliver the best possible results to our clients.