Components of social media advertising

Social media advertising is an offshoot of digital marketing where paid ad campaigns are run on social media websites to reach target audiences. Marketers promote their brands and inspire sales through social media on channels that users frequently use. Advertising on social media is considered a must by many for a brand looking to reach a new, target audience. The use of social media for advertising ensures a wide, global reach for brands.

Consider the following statistics:

According to AdEspresso, 26% of users who click on Facebook ads end up buying the advertised product

* 7 million+ businesses use Facebook for advertising

According to the CMO survey, brands will almost double their budget allocated to advertising on social media by 2023.

Key components for advertising on social media

A successful social media ad effort consists of the following five components:

1. Campaign Overview

The campaign overview throws light on the elements of social ad campaigns:

Campaign Outline: The campaign outline provides elementary details of the ad campaign. It contains the campaign name, ideas/inspiration, details (such as purpose and goals, how it will help meet your company objectives, etc.), hashtags, and any such information.

Objectives: What are you trying to achieve through the campaign? Here are a few ideas:

1. Brand awareness
2. Increase social media following
3. Increase sales of products
4. Drive website traffic
5. Push store visits

Quantify your goals/objectives for your social media advertising as it will allow you to measure the right metrics and calculate the ROI for the campaign.

2. Target audience

Be as specific as you can when it comes to choosing the right target audience. Dig into the analytics section of your social media accounts/pages to understand your audience and the type of content they are most receptive to. Visit your buyer persona templates to identify the most relevant characteristics and traits.

It might be a good strategy to create test campaigns across different social networks to know what type of audience you can reach out to based on the filters applied to define the target audience. Most social networks give you an approximate number of people you can reach through an ad campaign. Tweak the characteristics accordingly, so your targeting doesn’t get too niche or too broad.

3. Campaign creatives

Campaign creatives are ad copies (messaging) and visuals (images, gifs, and videos). The campaign creatives should be prepared by taking into account the target audience and social media guidelines. For example, visuals with too much text don’t perform well on Facebook. The same audience visits different social networks with a different mindset. Therefore, it is advised to customize the creatives for each social media site.

4. Social media networks

The most widely used social media platforms for advertising include Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. Different social networks serve different audience segments. For example, Pinterest may not be the best choice for a B2B business or a fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) brand may not drive a successful awareness campaign on LinkedIn.

Choosing the right social network will help you determine the budget, ad format, and tailor your campaign.

5. Campaign budget and success metrics

It helps to break down the campaign budget into two brackets to track the ROI effectively:

Fees/Expenses: If you are working with an advertising agency, you need to keep their fees separate from the actual budget. You will, however, include the payments made to third-party individuals such as a copywriter, graphic designer, or video editor, and money that you spend to purchase stock images, videos, or software.

Ad Budget: This includes the money that you’ll actually pay the social site to run the ad campaign.

Deciding the ad budget can be a bit tedious, especially if you’re a beginner, so here’s how you can determine the budget to run ads. Let’s say you need to generate 20 leads through a lead generation campaign. Considering the volatility of the bidding process, you can slightly increase the ad budget. As you execute the campaign, keep tweaking the bid to optimize the ad spend.

Once your ad campaign is complete, you will be able to see how it performed in its entirety. Map the goals achieved against the goals set, in terms of reach, engagement, link clicks, likes/follows, shares, profile clicks, etc. You can then measure how well the campaign performed and the ROI from it.

Top social media networks for advertising:

The major social media networks that you can use to run ad campaigns include:

1. Facebook

Facebook offers comprehensive advertising options for brands that enable them to run ads across awareness, consideration, and conversion stages of the buyers’ journey, with each stage offering multiple ad types to reach the goal.

•     Awareness: Brand awareness, reach
•     Consideration: Traffic, engagement, app installs, video views, lead generation, and messages
•     Conversions: Conversions, sales, and store traffic

Facebook Enables Different Ads Types Depending on your Objectives

Facebook’s audience targeting allows you to target users based on criteria such as age, geography, income groups, interests, work/profession, and so on. Brands can diversify their audience base through custom and lookalike audiences.

2. Instagram

Instagram offers ads that are similar to Facebook, and you can manage ads for both of them through the same interface.

You can target people on Instagram based on their location, demographics, interests, and behavioural characteristics. Instagram also lets you create custom and lookalike audiences to find new users that share similar characteristics to your ideal buyer.

You can target users across their buyer journey through the following ad types on Instagram:

•     Awareness: Reach, frequency, brand awareness, and local awareness
•     Consideration: Website clicks, video views, reach, and frequency
•     Conversion: Website conversions, dynamic ads, mobile app installs, mobile app engagement

Instagram allows you to run ads in the news feed and the Explore tab.

3. Twitter

Twitters advertising solution is pretty straightforward. It currently offers the following types of ads:

•     Tweet engagement
•     Promoted video/GIF views
•     Brand awareness
•     Website clicks or conversions
•     In-stream video views
•     Build followers
•     App installs
•     App engagements

Besides this, brands can also promote a specific hashtag to drive brand awareness. This feature is suitable for large B2C corporations and entertainment brands as a pre-launch and awareness strategy.

Ads on Twitter appear in the news feed and the search section.

*(Source – Digiday)