Advertising on social media, whatever the platform, is no longer a question of “Do I have to?” Rather, it’s a question of “Which platform is better?” There are plenty of platforms, and choosing the right one for your target audience and your marketing message is crucial.
If you look at most brands, they utilize all types of popular social media platforms to advertise various content, but not every business has the capacity or resources to put on a massive social media campaign across all platforms.
If you’re a small to medium business wanting to get the word out, but you also want to be sure that you get the results you want with the budget you have, the most important thing for you to do is to decide which social media platform will help your business meet its goals. As long as you’re able to clearly define each reason in detail, you’re off to a good start.
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The advertising goals you set will have a substantial influence on the kind of metrics you’ll use to track your efforts’ success, so that’s something you might want to keep in mind. Almost all of us know how to use social media (at the very least, to connect with people), so this basic activity itself can give you an idea of which platform suits your business the best.
If let’s say, you were using Instagram as a platform to engage with your audience as one of your advertising goals, then the metrics you’d be using to track that success would be engagement metrics. Engagement metrics involve analyzing the number of comments, likes, and shares that a post receives.
- Facebook: Great for videos and curated content, blog articles, news articles, and long-form content. Rosie’s Dessert Spot, a home-based baker, uses Facebook to showcase her quick tutorial videos.
- Instagram: Ideal for curated content with visuals, high-res photos, quotes, stories, quizzes, and GIFs. GMB Akash, an award-winning photojournalist, uses Instagram to tell the stories of child labor in Bangladesh.
- Twitter: Short-form information, news links, links to blogs, opinion pieces, GIFs, and quizzes. For example, https://www.craftsmenind.com/ uses Twitter to share industry news, award recognitions, and product updates.
- LinkedIn: Professional content on jobs, company news, and industry news. Indra Nooyi, CEO of Pepsi, often shares personal anecdotes and congratulatory messages to her staff, spreading motivation and a sense of belonging.
- Pinterest: Infographics and step-by-step photo guides. Veuve Clicquot uses Pinterest to showcase their vivid brand and to tell a story of their origins.
- Google+: Blog posts and content you want to rank on Google.
Defining Your Advertising Goals
Once you’ve sorted out your reasons (specific reasons) for choosing a platform, you’re now ready to move onto phase two of the goal-setting process. To start setting effective advertising goals, here’s what you need to do:
- Define your target audience: Different types of audiences will follow different types of content on social media. With each platform, who’s your target audience? Defining the persona of who you’re targeting and the kind of demographic you’re going after is an ideal way to start. This is where you begin your customer profiling. Customer profiling will provide you and your team with a clearer sense of what kind of content your target audience is after, the sort of hashtags they use, and even what communities they are involved in on Instagram. This step in the entire process requires due diligence and research. The more information and details you can gather to create your customer persona, the more definitive your advertising strategy will be.
- Define your objectives: The first question you should ask is, “What does your business hope to achieve by advertising on the social media platforms you’ve chosen?” How does your social media advertising goals integrate with your entire marketing strategy? When businesses use social media, one of their primary goals for advertising is to increase brand awareness among the target audience. Some other objectives include showcasing your brand and company culture, spotlighting or reviving interest in certain products and services (and why they’re different), increasing audience engagement, and inspiring brand loyalty. Social media is great for building a more engaged community, connecting your brand with audiences and influencers, increasing sales by driving traffic to your site, and more. Defining your objectives is crucial to help you navigate and decide on the next course of action.
- Have clear guidelines for your team: All teams under the marketing umbrella need to have this unified goal in mind. The business development team, creative team, events team, marketing team, and communications team need to be cohesive and involved in the process of the social media campaign, as this would help everyone to be clear on what they are responsible for. Guidelines help to ensure that everyone is working in the right direction toward achieving your advertising goals.
- Conduct a social media audit: Apart from defining the goals and creating the content for the campaign, you also want to know how well your campaigns did. Auditing your social media campaigns help the entire marketing department or the people involved in it to constructively observe the content on your profile and how users have responded to it. It’s time to take a good, hard, and critical look at it. An audit must be done to see if your profile is meeting your business needs, and if it isn’t, what can be done about it. Has the campaign achieved its objective? This step gives you a sense of where you should be focusing your advertising efforts. Your audit needs to closely tie in with your goals because every measure you take should lead you one step toward achieving the goals you set.
Examples Of Advertising Goals And Objectives
Your business goals will continue to shift and change according to your business needs – this is a fact. As you accomplish one goal, a new goal could come in its place. The key to successful advertising on social media is learning how to identify which goals will be complemented by the right kind of advertising objectives. Here are some examples to give you an idea of how to get started:
- Building brand awareness (goal): To achieve this goal, the accompanying advertising increases your reach and engagement by boosting your posts. For example, you could create a business ad aimed at the people closest to your business vicinity and try to reach as many people as possible. This is where demographics play an important role in defining advertising objectives. Creating ads that help your audience understand your brand’s value is a good way to start increasing brand awareness, especially among new customers.
- Target potential customers (goal): Having the right kind of advertising objectives to achieve this goal could include increasing lead generation and website conversion by collecting relevant information from individuals (newsletters, new signups, etc.). What are the call-to-actions you can place on your advertising content to get users to act and respond to your ad? Your objectives could also include how to raise engagement by creating the right kind of ads to help market your events and how to effectively communicate those ads to your target audience group.
- Increasing sales (goal): Advertising goals which can help you achieve this goal include creating ads with coupons, one-time offers or special discounts to increase engagement, encouraging existing users to get in touch with you through your app (to encourage more app downloads and engagement), creating ads which spark conversation, and helping your brand better communicate with your audience. You can use this goal for seasonal reasons such as Christmas sales, Black-Out Fridays, etc.
Identifying your goals and objectives will also help you define your budget, and we all know how important budgets and financing are for a company, big or small. Your objectives will help you decide:
- How long your campaigns should run?
- How wide of an audience should you target?
- How many platforms should you advertise on?
- What kind of content should you work on?
Some content requires higher budgets. For instance, creating a video would require more resources and time compared to visual content. In the same vein, high-end photoshoots for exclusive product launches and services also require more time and resources than creating a digital design using vectors and stock photography.
Bottom Line
Content is the last thing you should worry about when it comes to advertising, whether on social media or common spaces. When you know your objectives and the goals you want to achieve with them, crafting content and putting together a design that hits these objectives becomes an easier process.
Remember that crafting an entire social media campaign isn’t a job for one person. Involve your creative team in the process, get their ideas, identify goals, and brainstorm innovative solutions to reach these goals.
If you are interested in even more social media-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.
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