How To Run a Successful Social Media Ad Campaign

Social media advertising is no longer just a short-lived buzzword that marketers use to promote their brand. It’ll stay here for good because it's been proven effective in increasing traffic, leads and sales and most global brands are expected to grow their budget for social media ad spend by $540 billion. 

Just this year, Facebook earned $4.50 billion in revenues in the third quarter, driven mostly from its mobile ads while Instagram, one of Facebook’s biggest acquisition, is projected to bring in more than $250 million for the same quarter. 

If you've been successful with paid search in the past, you may have given social media advertising a thought. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are just a few of the social networks that have wide potential for customer reach. To help you maximize these valuable advertising tool, here’s a rundown of the useful and actionable tips that can fire up your brand’s social media ad strategies. 

Tips to Boost Your Social Media Ad Strategy

1. Straighten out your ad goals

Before diving right in the social ad frenzy, you need to first determine what outcome you want to achieve from it. This will help refine what metrics you need to monitor as part of your social ad campaign.

• If you want to boost traffic to your site, what metrics should you monitor to track this? You can monitor click-through rate on links shared and the number of visits to your website content referred by your social networks.

• If you’re looking to increase engagement around your brand, you might want to consider tracking comments on social updates or the visit duration to your site content.

These are just a few signals you can track to gauge your progress with your social ads. Make sure you understand what your goals are and the best way to achieve them.

2. Understand how social ads are processed and sold

Keep in mind that social networks have different ways in selling their ads. It varies depending on the goals you have set for your ad campaign.

On Twitter, advertisers can create their advertising campaign with:

• Promoted Accounts - promote your Twitter account as a suggested account to follow

• Promoted Tweets - highlight your status updates on top of other Twitter users’ newsfeed to create more exposure

• Promoted Trends - promote a hashtag or topics on top of the Trends section on Twitter

LinkedIn features one of the smartest targeting tools to reach your ideal customers. Here are different ways to showcase your ads on LinkedIn:

• Display and Text Ads - gives you the ability to showcase an image or video of your logo or products along with your ad copy

• Sponsored Updates - sponsored content posted from your LinkedIn company page will be distributed to a wider audience in the active LinkedIn network and will appear naturally on their newsfeed

• Sponsored InMail - reach high-value audience and drive more leads with personalized and actionable message right through their LinkedIn mailbox.

Facebook offers several ad types to adjust to the needs of its users. Whatever objectives you have behind your ads, there is a specific ad for that:

• Click to Website - This is the most basic of all ads on Facebook which is displayed on the right column. It simply routes the user to your website.

• Page Post - Commonly displayed on people's newsfeed,  it aims to boost engagement to your page posts by featuring rich, eye-catching images or videos and interesting post link descriptions.

• Multi-Product - It is extremely beneficial to ecommerce advertisers who want to promote multiple products in a single page post.

• Page Likes - choose this when you want to your target audience to like your page.

• App Installs (mobile and desktop) - A great choice to drive more users to install your mobile or desktop app

• Offer Claims - Once this ad is live, users who clicked on your offer will receive an email containing the details on how they can claim the offer from your brick-and-mortar store

• Event Responses - If you want to attract more visitors to attend your event, use this ad with the right target categories

3. Sharpen your targeting selection

One of the main drawback with traditional ads is that their targeting features is not as polished. But with most social media ad platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, it addresses this issue with highly intuitive and intelligent targeting capabilities.

Make sure to know your target audience and take full advantage of their targeting options to make your ads are more useful and relevant to users.

4. Go Mobile

Social media content is rapidly consumed on mobile devices so it makes sense to make your ads more accessible on mobile. Twitter revealed that 80% of its active users access Twitter through their mobile devices while Facebook is not far behind, boasting a 64% active mobile members.

So, when optimizing your social media ads for mobile, it's a must to post images or landing pages that are not only visually enticing but mobile-friendly, as well.

5. Design a Targeted Landing Page

If your goal is to increase conversion such as more registration sigups and sales, then it's critical to focus not just on the ad itself but to the destination where the user will end up once they clicked on your ad.

A successful ad campaign includes a customized landing page with an ad copy that effortlessly bring the visitor from the ad to its destination.

You might see it often with ecommerce social media ads where they did an awesome job promoting a single product by referring thier audience from the ad to the main product landing page where the visitor can view more details about the product.

A clear and relevant photo or video of the product with a description of its benefits should help convince the visitor to click on the call-to-action button and proceed to checkout.

6. Create A/B Test to Determine the Ideal Ad Version

When creating a new ad campaign, you may want to test multiple versions of your ads to know what content resonates well with your audience. Knowing the right tone and balance should help you deliver the results you want.

Running A/B testing allows you to try different approach and see what works with different audience and what drives them to act.

Generation Z (ages 20 below) and Millenials (ages 21-34) are more likely to respond to videos using their smartphone inside or outside their homes as compared to their older counterpart, the Baby Boomers (Ages 50-64).

Content creators and marketers need to adjust their approach to be able to reach the right type of consumer.

7. Rotate social media ads periodically

One of the major challenges marketers have to deal with is consumer ad fatigue. This simply means that when people see your ads frequently - they might get bored and not click, or worse, hide your ads from their newsfeed.

Here's some bad news: Facebook will penalize you once your click-through rate goes down by making comments, likes and clicks more costly. This can lead to poor engagement and acquisition with your campaign.

So, use tools like HubSpot and Hootsuite to help you schedule your ad content at least 3-7 days to keep your content fresh and less tiresome to look at.

8. Evaluate results in data analytics reports

After running some tests, you need to monitor how the numbers in the social analytics report is doing. Understand what these results are telling you so you can adjust your approach and make changes when necessary. Here are some signals you need to check out:

• Quality Traffic - Any type of traffic to your site is good but you might want to go after traffic that is actually engaged to your site and not just from come-and-go visitors. Review your bounce rates, how long they stayed on your site, etc.

• No. of clicks - If you see an increase in clicks to your site, that could only mean that what you're promoting has piqued your audience's interest.

• Engagement - If you run a promo deal and people are joining in, commenting and sharing your ad to their network, then that's working great for you. You want people to say something about your brand and not just let them silently scroll by when they're done visiting your ad.

• Conversion - A growth in sales goals is a clear indication that you have converted the right audience. Make sure to check which of your goals has been met or what what areas you still need to improve on in terms of conversion.

Social Media Ad Cheat Sheet

Below is an infographic that summarizes how you can create stunning visuals and catchy ad copy to attract interests from your intended audience. Use this as your cheat sheet when you want to create a social media ad campaign.

Our Final Thoughts

Social media advertising can give you the opportunity to create highly targeted ad that resonates to a specific audience and drives to do specific action – all at a reasonable cost and one that effectively enhances your other online marketing activities. Just follow the tips outlined above to give you an idea on how to successfully run your ads on social media platforms.

Now, back to you. What social media ads have you encountered that has captured your attention? Do you also run ad campaigns on social media, too? If you do, what type of ad worked out for you and why? Share your thoughts in the comments below.