Optimizing your social media ad settings helps refine your ad and gear it toward maximum exposure, niche targets, or a healthy combination of both.
Even though social media marketing dashboards are relatively user friendly, there are still several settings within a social media ad campaign that need to be properly sorted through if you want your ad to perform effectively.
The first order of business when setting up a new social media ad is selecting your creative. The image used in the ad and what it conveys will have a huge impact on the ad's performance. Even the color of your ad can impact who clicks on it and who scrolls passed it.
Your social media ad image should be eye catching without being overly salesy. It shouldn't be too wordy either, as there will be plenty of other areas in the ad settings to add impactful verbiage.
After selecting an image for your ad, you'll need to determine what your ad's headline and description will be. On some social media ads, you can even customize what your call-to-action will say. Call now, learn more, visit site, book appointment, buy now, so on and so forth.
These call-to-action statements for social media ad campaigns are pretty crucial, as they will impact how many clicks you receive relative to your ad budget, and either negatively or positively impact your cost-per-click. Make sure your CTA statement is aligned with your campaign's goals, whether it be to generate visits to your Facebook or Instagram page, visits to your website, or otherwise.
Another option you have when setting up your social media ad is to keep your user on Facebook or Instagram and have them fill out a form right then and there. This is an important element to consider because generally speaking, the fewer clicks your visitor has to make, the better. Meaning, if your goal is to generate a lead, you might have a better chance of collecting that user's pertinent contact details on the social media app in question, instead of diverting them to your website.
This is especially true if your website isn't optimized for conversions. If you or your digital marketing professional have spent a lot of time and energy optimizing your website for conversions, then that's probably a good place to send them, but if your website is lackluster in anyway, you'll probably see better results keeping your user where they're seeing your ad.
The next component of a social media ad campaign, and arguably the most important and overlooked element, are the targeting parameters. This is where you select the location your ad will target, the age range of the users, their gender, their interests, and more.
If your campaign's goal is volume or exposure, generally speaking, broader will be better. It will open up your social media ad to a larger audience, which will in turn generate maximum impressions relative to your budget.
However, there's a lot to consider before taking this approach, and you may find that your ad got a lot of impressions, without very many users taking action.
On the flip side, by narrowing your social media ad targeting parameters down to more specific users, the impressions might go down and the cost-per-click might go up, but you'll generally notice that more desirable actions were taken as a result of your ad, whether they be leads, calls, sales, or otherwise.
A few important things to bear in mind are that social media advertising in general skews more toward display advertising. This is a great form of advertising if your goal is to promote a new product, branding, generating awareness, or building up your social media profiles themselves.
If your product or service is something people search for, you may want to consider a search marketing campaign instead. Not because social media is the wrong way to go about it, as there is no right or wrong way to do marketing. What it simply boils down to at the end of the day is cost per result and stretching your digital marketing budget as far as it can go.
Another digital marketing channel may be able to provide you with more results for your money, but sometimes you simply don't know until you try. There's definitely quite a bit of trial and error involved when it comes to digital marketing as a whole, and the beautiful thing about running multiple campaigns on multiple platforms is being able to compare the results to one another, to determine what works best for your product, service, or industry.
One major strength of a professional search engine and social media marketing firm is that because we do this daily and have tons of experience with it, agencies like ours can really speed up the learning curve and incorporate tons of best practices and historical data to help your digital marketing budget start working sooner rather than later.
We specialize in several forms of internet marketing, including but not limited to pay-per-click marketing, search engine optimization, social media marketing, and website design services.
We can leverage our experience and expertise to evaluate any business, its current digital marketing efforts, its website, and its goals, to determine which online marketing avenues will probably make the most sense and deliver the greatest results.
If you're curious which type of digital marketing campaign might be the best fit for your business, please contact us with your questions. We offer complimentary consultations and proposals, and we can help you shave months and even years off of running inefficient digital marketing campaigns that result in a lot of wasteful ad spend.
Your results will come in significantly sooner, will be of that much higher quality, and working with professionals like us will help your business grow that much faster. Just imagine where your business would be today, if 12 or 24 months ago, a professional digital marketing expert helped you overhaul some or all of your online marketing efforts...
As the old saying goes, better late than never. If you're considering professional marketing help, contact us today to learn more about our social media marketing services, as well as our other forms of digital marketing, so we can help you and your business shine online.
Cheers,
-AS