Are you simply posting on social media every single day expecting that your social media audience will see all your posts? Gone are those days of posting content and getting attention from your audience. There are millions of people on various social media platforms, and the number is increasing day by day.
Now itÔÇÖs about targeting the right audience for your product, build engagement with your target audience and eventually convert your audience into customers.
And for this to happen, paid social media advertising strategy is the solution.
What is social media advertising?
Even though it sounds simple, many are confused as to what social media advertising really means.
To make it clear, social media advertising is a form of advertising where your content is displayed and promoted on social media in exchange for a fee. The advertising can be in the form of promoting a tweet, or promoting your product as an ad placed on social media.
What is the end goal of social media advertising?
Social media advertising focuses on targeting the right people who matter the most to your brand. This helps you to improve visibility on social media by engaging more people thereby resulting in a buzz around your product.
Challenges of Social media advertising
Social media advertising is easier said than done.
Social media advertising comes with its own set of challenges that need to be addressed smartly to conquer the social media advertising game.
Here are 5 biggest struggles of social media advertising and their potential solutions:
1. Defining The Goals
ÔÇ£People with goals succeed because they know where they are goingÔÇØ says Earl Nightingale, an American author.
Ask yourself, what are you hoping to achieve with social media advertising?
The first step of any mission is to understand the outcome of your efforts. Your mission statement should be clear enough to drive your future actions. Your brand identity should be reflected in your goal statement. Revolve around the ideal customer while you are designing the social media advertising goals.
2. Understanding Target Consumers
Social media is all about audience. When you exactly know your audience, social media marketing will be a hit for your brand.
When you focus on the right audience, there are higher chances of them converting into leads and finally customers.
So identifying your target audience on social media is the most important task of social media advertising. Start by creating your buyer personas that will define your target audience.
A buyer persona refers to the description of your ideal customer. It is prepared after considering their interests, behavior, age, gender, income, location, language, etc.
These details will come handy when you want to design your social media advertisements and campaigns.
3. Designing Engaging Content
Audience get bored very soon if the advertising content is not engaging.
Surprise and offer your social media users with different variety of content instead of serving them with the same content over and over again.
Ensure to bring variations in the type of content by changing the style of images and your messages constantly. Also keep changing the visual to add variety such as gif, graph and a video rather than adding an images always. With visuals, you can condense a whole lot of information into a beautiful image that tell a story by itself.
Establish yourself as an authority in your space, and generate greater ad conversion on social media. Generate content that is worth clicking by producing impressive ads.
The important thing to note is that you should constantly read the mind of your audience and alter your content to suit their requirements.
4. Designing Effective Call to Action
When your social media ads are coming up as short in clicks and engagement, the challenge could be problem may be in the way you format ad CTAs.
A call-to-action (CTA) is a button or link on your website that guides the users about the next action that they can take. In many cases, these lead to the landing page where the users are asked to provide email, fill a form, download newsletters, etc.
Your CTA should be good enough to grab the attention of your visitors and entice them to click. The CTA should have persuasive text that lets the user know how useful and convenient your product is for the users. Also make sure to attract the users by adding contrasting colors in your CTA so that it stands out. It is important to show relevant images behind the CTA that helps visitors to visualize themselves as using the product. This makes the CTA appealing and leads to clicking the CTA.
For example see how takes a unique approach in building their CTA. They build two competing CTAs, one that leads to Free Spotify and another towards the paid Spotify. This helps visitors to get a clear message that they can opt for a free version but they also can get more by taking up the paid version.
5. Engaging Analytical Tools
How many really know how a piece of social media advertising content performs on social media? Which kind of content is performing well and is liked by your social media audience?
The only way this can be done is by measuring social media reach with the help of right social media analytics tools.
Social media reach refers to the number of social media users who can have contact with your social media posts. In simple terms it is the total number of people who see your content. Social media reach is useful to track marketing campaigns, hashtags, social media events, social media profiles and follower pages.
For example, Sproutsocial is a data driven social media analytics tool that helps you to monitor the performance of your brand.
The tool will allow you to compare paid advertising versus organic impressions. You can calculate the impact of advertising spend on your company page growth.
With Sproutsocial you can also analyze page and post level data that includes engagements, audience growth, impressions and all other demographics on your social pages.
Social media advertising, when done properly can be a very cost effective method of getting your target audience. But it comes with its own set of challenges, which can be easily resolved if properly addressed. Make the ads that youÔÇÖre promoting into something that your audience want to interact with. Start by thinking about your target audience and choose the best social media platform for it. Finally learn to shape your ad campaigns properly by using analytical tools.
