Social media marketing is a very odd thing. On one hand, social media is a medium which enables brands to dazzle and delight users, in an effort to build trust, loyalty, and evangelism. On the other, it’s the most sophisticated aggregation of data for marketing purposes in human history. The dichotomy between “warm and fuzzy” and “tactical business value” is a difficult thing for most brands to comprehend.

From our experience, the scale usually tips too far to one side or the other, and when that happens, social media marketing often disappoints in terms of business results. Since I’m a firm believer in using the ‘fun’ aspect of social media to support tactically driving business, social media advertising fascinates me.

With the right strategy, social media advertising can help support almost any business goal, for almost any industry, however a few key, fundamental elements have to be correctly put in place. And while they aren’t overly complicated, each is immensely important – here are four critical elements of a successful social media advertising campaign:

1. Targeting

Knowing who you want to reach with social media advertising is the first piece of the puzzle. Studies show that 76% of U.S. consumers have purchased a product they’ve seen in a brand’s social media content, and with the right targeting, you can make sure you hit the most valuable audience at the right time and with the right message.

There are a few key targeting parameters to be aware of when crafting a social media advertising campaign:

Unlocking the power of social media advertising begins with using the right targeting parameters. Be sure to research your target audience as much as possible when building out your targeting.

2. Creative

Once you know who you’re going after, the next step is to consider what kind of social media creative you can use to make them stop scrolling in their feeds long enough in order to absorb your ad messaging. This is critical, since the average human attention span is roughly eight seconds.

Your creative needs to be intriguing, engaging, and enticing if you want users to stop browsing other content and spend some time with yours.

Sounds easy right? Wrong Getting social media ad creative right is tricky – here are some best practices:

When you layer the right social media ad creative onto the right audience targeting, magic happens. Be sure to test different images and videos to see exactly what performs the best. 

3. Landing Page

In talking about social media advertising, the discussion about landing pages is almost always forgotten, which makes no sense, considering the landing page is the place where the users you paid good money to target will convert.

Without an effective landing page, optimized for conversion, you’re wasting time, money, and effort with your social media advertising.

Many brands think sending ad traffic to their home page is sufficient, however, doing so is not ideal. Here are a few tips to ensure your landing page complements your social advertising campaign:

4. Tracking

Now the fun part – what good is a social media advertising campaign if you don’t have proper tracking in place?

We recommend ensuring that your site, and all relevant landing pages, have Google Analytics set up, social pixels installed (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.), and as many of the lower-funnel standard events and custom conversions established as make sense.

If this sounds like a foreign language, don’t worry – while implementation of such tracking can be tricky at first, it’s fairly straight-forward once you’ve gone through it a few times. And by setting up these tracking tools, you’ll be able to register how many people have interacted with your social media ads, what they’ve done on your landing pages, and if they ended up converting on a subsequent visit.

The more data, the better – here are the recommended social media advertising key performance indicators (KPIs) you should be tracking:

Easy peasy, right? Running a social media advertising campaign the correct way does take experience, some patience, and a willingness to undertake a certain amount of risk. However, when you’re tracking the right data, you can almost always find your way to a winning campaign that drives results.

Hopefully these tips will help you in your 2019 approach.