How to Make the Most of Your Social Media Advertising Budget

Paid advertising on social media shares content with large groups of people relative to your industry, greatly increasing your reach. If you’re only posting, although it’s free, you’re basically knocking on the same doors over and over instead of contacting new prospects. 

How to Start PPC Advertising on Social Media

If you’ve never launched a ‘PPC’ (pay per click) campaign, you could be missing out on opportunities. Paid advertising on social media can get your content out there to targeted, but large groups of people relative to your industry. Paying for clicks not only helps your content get in to the hands of your target audience in greater numbers, it also benefits your social accounts too.

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Define Goals

First thing’s first, its important to figure out exactly what you want to get out of running ads on your social media accounts. It’s very easy to get caught up in what some agencies offer in terms of ‘guaranteed results’ – often if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is – especially if it’s your first venture in to the world of PPC.

Although there are many potential aims, we’ll pretend that ours is to grow a larger audience. You’ll need to outline the metrics in place in order to measure your advertising goals (e.g. measuring unique click-throughs to your blog). Once your ad has run for the agreed amount of time, you’ll want to assess the interactions, clicks, and engagement on your ad (each social network has it’s own campaign analysis tools). It’s important to take a look at this data because its how you determine if you’re achieving the right results and whether you need to adjust tactics to improve your ROI.

Choose Your Social Platform

You should always select your social media platform based on your target audience. 9 out of 10 times, this will be determined by your target audience’s demographic. Ask yourself, would my ideal customer be active on this platform? If the answer is yes, you know what to do.

Facebook

Facebook has 1.86 billion active monthly users as of December 31, 2016 – making it the most popular social network. Facebook boasts powerful advertising capabilities and offers a number of different options when it comes to using pay-per-click advertising. We will begin our efforts with Facebook advertising and focus on how to create Facebook Ads.

What are the Benefits of Social Media PPC Ads 

Facebook offers targeting options such as age range, interests, geographic location, gender, and more so that you can narrow down your ads to be shown to your specific target audience. Take advantage of Facebook’s extensive range of analytic and insight tools in order to determine how your ads and posts are performing.

Facebook advertising tools are constantly being improved in order to display your ads in the most appropriate locations to the most appropriate audience.

How To Create Sponsored Facebook Ads

1. First, create your campaign within Facebook Ads Manager.
2. Choose your campaign objective based on what you want to get out of your campaign (more traffic, more engagement, brand awareness, etc.) and give your campaign a name. From there, create your ad set.
3. Select the page you are making an ad for.
   Choose the target audience for your ad based on demographic characteristic options.
   Select your ad placements to determine where your ads will appear.
4. You can choose an automatic option which will display the ads where they are likely to perform the best.
   Determine how much you would like to spend for your advertisement to be delivered to your target audience and over what duration of time. Set your bid for the ad.

Facebook has created an extensive guide outlining how bidding works here.
The final step is creating the ad that users will see. Take the time to go through all of the options available to you and determine which layout, imagery and text will be the most engaging for your target audience.

Twitter

Much like Facebook, Twitter offers a number of different campaign options – here we will focus on the “Promoted Tweets” option.

Benefits

Promoting a tweet can help keep the momentum going on a tweet that is already doing well among your own Twitter audience. If your current followers are engaging with your tweets, chances are that there are more people out there that don’t follow you yet that would find your tweet interesting.

Twitter offers a “Quick Promote” option that makes it quick and easy to target a wider audience of users.

You can utilize automatic targeting, which gives you the option to have Twitter determine your target based on your business and followers.

Create Promoted Tweets

1. First, figure out which post(s) you are going to promote. Because you are advertising on Twitter – look for your most popular Tweet(s) (based on impressions and engagement) by visiting your Twitter Analytics page. Choosing your most popular tweets as opposed to your most popular blog posts will help you to attract users directly from Twitter.
2. Once you have chosen a Tweet to promote, click on “Get Started” to promote (all while still on your analytics page).
3. From there, select your cost per click budget and Twitter will target users that are more likely to be interested in or find the Tweet relevant.
4. Send your promoted tweet on its way and continue to track user engagement on the Twitter analytics page. Tracking your engagement and monitoring how users are interacting with your tweet will be beneficial for optimizing your strategy moving forward.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn ads are best utilized either if your industry is B2B, or if you are specifically targeting professionals. Using LinkedIn’s sponsored updates option will be beneficial for your marketing efforts in those cases. Although LinkedIn ads tend to be more expensive on a per-click basis, that’s because they are but for a reason. 

Benefits

LinkedIn offers a variety of specific targeting options which pulls from the large amount of unique information provided by users.

Your ads will appear in users feeds as less of an “in-your-face” type ad and as more of a normal looking post.

Professionals are on LinkedIn to get professional content – so users can tend to be more receptive to business messages.

1. Create Sponsored Updates
   You can either choose one of your more popular updates or post a new update to your LinkedIn page. If you opt for an update that is already doing very well on your page – that will be more indicative of whether LinkedIn users will find the post beneficial or not.
2. Choose “Sponsor Now” on the post that you would like to promote. From there, you will be taken to the Campaign Manager where you can monitor and manage all of your LinkedIn promoted posts.
3. You will be taken through a number of steps to best define your goals and target audience for the ad campaign. This is the part that will determine who your sponsored content shows up for – so take your time here to ensure you’re targeting the best audience.
4. From there you will define your timeline and budget, then send off your promoted update!

You can revisit the campaign manager at any time to see how your sponsored content is doing. For more on how to run LinkedIn ads, check out their pricing page.

Try Out Paid Social Media Advertising

The most important part of utilizing paid advertising is determining your goals and target audience. This step is what will help you best target your content to followers, ensure content is consistent and facilitate maximum engagement. Without this step – it is easy to miss the mark with your ads. With all of that in mind – don’t be afraid to try a few different advertising options and see what works best for your business and marketing efforts.

If you’re looking to get started with blog marketing and find that you need a little push in the right direction, feel free to reach out to us and we would be happy to help you get started or continue your social media and marketing efforts. Stay tuned in the future for more blog posts coming your way! Paying for clicks is a beneficial tool that will help enhance not only your blog marketing strategy but your social media accounts as well.

How to start

If you do decide to work with an agency to place your ads then there are a few different questions you should definitely ask. For example, make sure there is a system in place to follow up with the leads. Good marketing agencies tend to offer ways in which you can increase conversion rates. Instead of simply providing you with leads, they’re offering to convert them to customers with a service delivery system.

If you have any questions, why don’t you say hello to Foxdog Marketing?

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