Be Goal-Orientated (spending your budget in the right place)
“When you’re starting out, it’s hard to pinpoint one social platform to focus on, and a lot of the time the social platform you choose is just the tool that fits best into your overall objective. When focusing my social media advertising efforts, I always start by going back and reviewing the marketing campaign I’m running, and what its objective is. If it’s designed to increase brand awareness, it’s best to ask the question ‘how can I target my audience as effectively as possible?’. As you progress along the sales/marketing funnel, you’ll start using social media advertising to answer a very different question: ‘how can I get visitors who didn’t convert back to my site?’.”
“It’s always worth looking at where your audience spends their time before deciding where to focus your social media advertising budget. When allocating budgets, I tend to prefer a linear model across all available options and analyze it every two days. Then I have the control to shift budget across social networks once I’ve calculated the ROI and success of each channel.”
Go Where Your Audience Is (maintaining reach in a shifting landscape)
“Users these days have more choice as to where they spend their time on social media. I know very few people who have the same social media preferences/behaviours. This directly impacts brands, as the need to analyze more competing social channels is making the whole process a bit more complicated. Two years ago, it felt like most people spent their social media time on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, but as the social media user evolves, it’s only natural that advertising on social media will as well.”
“To use an example, LinkedIn groups used to be a go-to in any marketer’s social media armoury, but today the results this tactic generates are poor. The users that the brands were targeting in these groups haven’t disappeared, they’ve simply gone down different social media paths. Sure, some stick around, but with Reddit, chat apps, and Facebook groups, these quality conversations have moved. Brands will need to follow them.”
Think Like a User (anticipating audience reaction)
“As a marketer, I often look at a hyper-personalized social media ad and I think ‘that’s a clever advertising campaign’. However, I know plenty of people who find such tactics annoying and intrusive. When done right, personalized automation enables relevance; when it’s overly intrusive it can be detrimental to a brand.”
“For me, it comes down to two things:
- How do you feel about the ad you’re displaying?
If you think it’s too intrusive, it probably is. - What will your audience’s reaction be?
If you are targeting a group who respect their data privacy and are compliance-focused, the likelihood is that they won’t respond well.”
“For me what’s interesting about this is the targeting falls onto the social platform, not just the brand. I rarely hear people say ‘Mercedes used my name on a personalized number plate, how creepy is that?’. Instead, it’s ‘Facebook showed me an ad the other day…’ and that tends to work in advertisers’ favour IMHO.”