Social media has changed the way that we live our daily lives. By giving us constant access to our friends, families, acquaintances, and colleagues, major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn have revolutionized the world by doing one thing: connecting people. But social media also has changed the way that businesses connect with customers; in fact, businesses spent more than $9 billion dollars on social media ads in 2015 in the United States alone!
But just because everyone is spending doesn’t mean that everyone is spending smart. Optimizing a campaign from the outset is crucial and so is using the tools at your disposal to gain valuable insight before spending the time and money on advertising. Here are 3 tips for drastically improving your social media marketing game.
#1) Define your target audience and focus on them
People spend an average of 40 minutes on Facebook a day. During this time, they are providing valuable information to advertisers that can be used to better focus ads on them. Using this information can help you increase your conversions rates drastically. You can target customers based on recent purchasing behavior to offer them similar products or focus on customers with recent life events in your related field – this is a big boon for companies offering wedding services, for example. Before you even launch, make sure you know who you’re going to target.
Social tip: you can leverage your existing customers in interesting ways on Facebook with custom audiences. Have a large list of customers already on Facebook and want to offer a free trial to new customers? Exclude your existing ones to reduce wasted clicks.
#2) Create a seamless ad experience
Have you ever seen a beautifully crafted ad with stunning imagery and flawless design, clicked on it and been brought to a website that looks like it was thrown together in 10 minutes? Most customers have, and the results aren’t pretty.
Visual continuity is just as important for your social media ads and associated landing pages as it is in the real world restaurant example, especially on Facebook, where 80% of the ad space is visual. Your landing pages need to match your ads in both design and message, so use the content on the page to send the same message and keep the same design and images to create visual continuity.
Take note: correctly targeting your landing pages can increase conversions up to 300%.
#3) Explore social media before writing content
Content is king in the SEO industry and in the online world in general. Creating in-depth, informative, and helpful content is the goal of all marketing departments, but so should be creating content that is popular and the online world wants to read. Chances are that you aren’t the only one in your industry producing content. Use the existing content ecosystem already flourishing on the web before deciding on the content that you want to produce. For example, explore the Twitter-sphere to see which kind of content is trending, most popular, or getting noticed by influential personalities in your niche. You should gain inspiration from what’s already popular, and factor this into your content strategy.
Tip: use your Twitter profile (you’ve got one, right?) to tweet interesting infographics, statistics, and images related to your industry and see which ones get the highest engagement. You’re now armed with valuable insight into what your audience is looking for. Focus on creating that content instead of just creating content on a whim.
Social media has connected people with each other like never before, but more importantly it has connected business with customers in ways we never thought possible. Ads are cost-effective, efficient, and highly customizable. Use these 3 tips to dramatically increase your ROI today.
