Social Media Advertising Tips and Tricks #MyBlogU | MyBlogU

Social media advertising is an amazing way to build traffic and exposure. It works great for both new sites (those that have few other ways to improve customers) and established ones and can become a steady way to build alternative traffic sources.

This month we’ll be talking about social media advertising tips and tricks.

Facebook Advertising: 3 AWESOME Tips from 3 Case Studies

1. Start by targeting your “warm traffic”, i.e. people who are somehow familiar with your company.

They’ve consumed your content, are familiar with your branding, have heard your name mentioned positively before, or have heard of you in some other way. The important thing is, there is already a level of trust there.

When it comes to Facebook advertising, here are targeting options you are offered to reach people who are somehow familiar with you:

Read more: Facebook Ads Case Study: How To Generate $36,449 In Revenue From a $4,159 Ad Spend by @a_hubbard

2. Use Facebook ads to drive people to opt-in to your lead magnet before pushing them your product.

People are on Facebook for fun, they haven’t searched to find your ad and they do not intend to buy anything right away.

People are more willing to engage with your Facebook Ads if it’s not asking for their credit card but rather giving some value without any cost to them.

Also, make the optin process for them as easy as possible. Test your forms (ask your friends to optin to collect some feedback) before launching ads.

Further reading: What I learned spending $2 Million on Facebook Ads via @noahkagan

3. Don’t start with huge budgets: Start small, then pick a better performing ad and capitalize on that success.

It may be a lot of work at the beginning but it will get easier once you discover what works best.

Buffer found that even as little as $5 a day can drive some results. Here’s what they achieved with that budget:

Buffer was focusing on more likes which is why they excluded their current fans from the ads. If you use tip #1 (“warm traffic”) and use $5 a day, you’ll get more clicks for sure.

Remember, there’s also brand awareness involved which you cannot measure that easily but more and more people seeing your brand in their feeds will help a lot.

Further reading: What $5 per day will buy you on Facebook Ads from @Buffer by @kevanlee

Use Pinterest Ads to Grow Your Email List

Pinterest ads work amazingly well for some niches, especially when it comes to generating email subscribers.

Kristi Brown @KristiReneBrown of @SigSuccessful has a great insight:

I have had amazing success using Pinterest Ads for email list growth. The best way to do this is to advertise an amazing blog post, and inside that have a content upgrade that entices people to sign up to your email list.

Ideally, after they sign up, you want to have a captivating follow-up series of emails as well so you can cultivate a strong relationship with those that sign up to your email list.

I suggest you use both interests and keywords in targeting the ad. Interests show up in the feed and keywords show up in searches. If you know who your ideal client is and you laser target them, you can pay less than .07 per email sign up with Pinterest Ads.

Here’s also a must-read case study on getting 271 subscribers for $0.14 each in 1 week using Facebook ads via @Olivia_I_Rose.

Use StumbleUpon Ads To Build Organic Traffic

Here’s my own tip I’ve been using for ages:

The key here is to test your content first before investing in ads and @VCBuzz lets you perform that test easily. If your test proves the content looks like something SU users will enjoy, even a small advertising budget will make a huge difference.

Use Ads to Push Trending Content!

If you are covering trends, social media ads are great for getting attention.

Cormac Reynolds has a great example:

Serplogic have done very well from social media ads. We have used Facebook adverts to really push our brand and our services. Facebook has been absolutely fantastic. We tend to target adverts to people in the marketing area and use interesting, topical and sometimes controversial blog posts to gain interest from their timelines.

We used to paid adverts to get in front of people and created interesting articles to get clicks and people to read through our blog.

Serplogic has published a number of posts based around the US election, UFC fighter Conor McGregor and also the SEO industry. These have really helped.

Use Social Media Ads to Push Those Testimonials Forward

Ryan Esco of FireRock Marketing has contributed a great idea:

We used Facebook ads with an ophthalmology practice to increase overall website traffic, promote services and specials and grow audience. We targeted a 20 mile radius of the practice, targeting age and interest demographics to increase Lasik consults and sales by 61% in a year.

This was accomplished by boosting testimonials of patients and developing targeted ads. We used look alike audiences to replicate success within the population to find a very targeted audience that responded extremely well to the social media ads. We spent just over $500 a month to generate sales well in excess of $25,000. The trick is to make sure your targeting is set, you have good content, a compelling message and a clear call to action.

Work on Your Targeting

The performance of your social media advertising campaigns is directly correlated to how good or bad you target your ads.

You’d be right to say that some ads are more click-enticing and attractive than others (depending on lots of aspects such as colors, graphics, headlines, etc.) but the priority here is targeting them to the right audience. Once you know your audience you’ve won half the battle.

Don’t go thinking that targeting is just that, though. It goes way beyond picking the right people to target your ads to. Far from that, actually.

I would recommend anyone giving it a try at Facebook advertising to read @JonLoomer’s “4-step Approach to Effective Facebook Targeting” before anything else. There is a lot to learn and several different situations where you need to rethink your targeting strategies.

Use Re-Marketing Wisely

We are in B2B business and tried paid advertising on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Although LinkedIn offers the best platform for targeting the right people within any organization (perfect for account based marketing), CPC is too high and we found it’s not very effective in terms of lead generation and ROI for our product.

We’ve recently tested and launched remarketing campaigns on Twitter and Facebook. With decent website traffic, we are now capturing all visitors and adding them to remarketing lists and then we’d show them ads on social media and ask to follow our accounts. We also use those lists to build Similar Audiences to reach people with similar interests who’ve never heard about our product. Besides low cost leads and website visits we also get a good amount of new targeted followers and increased organic traffic from social media overall.

Please do send your tips here (or share the link with someone you know tried social media ads and has something to share).

Use Facebook A/B Testing

Tim Felmingham @timfel has contributed a great idea:

I use Facebook Ads a lot. They can be very successful if you get them optimised correctly, but equally they can burn money at an alarming rate if you get them wrong!

One of the keys to success with Facebook Ads is split-testing – testing two variations of an ad against each other to see which performs best, and then killing off the least successful variant.

You can (and should) split test headlines, images, copy, and targeting to optimise your ads.

The trouble is, you can only split test two things at a time, and you need quite a lot of data to be able to make reliable assessments of which is the better performer. So to fully optimise an ad can take quite a lot of time (and money), especially if you target lots of interests.

One of the most useful tools I’ve found to help with this is ConnectExplore from @connectio_io.

This will let you run a single ad targeting several interests at the same time, and it will then report click through rates etc for each interest.

Normally, to split-test interests you would have to run separate ads for each interest which is time-consuming to set up, and means you can’t be testing anything else at the same time. ConnectExplore makes this much easier and quicker.

Split tests can be more than two… You can test as many variants as you wish. #myblogu

— Don Sturgill (@DonSturgill) March 23, 2017

Peep (coversionXL) says u can test multiple variants, IF you have a lot of data – called multivarate testing #myblogu

— Phil Turner (@The5Currencies) March 23, 2017

Having received this idea, I went through some additional resources to give you some tools to start:

1. Determine your budget

@Adespresso recommends using the following scenario when you start a split testing campaign on Facebook:

Overall, the general suggestion is to not overdo. It’s pointless to create hundreds of experiments inside a single campaign unless you have thousands and thousands of dollars in budget. Start with micro experiments, testing only few elements and give them a reasonable budget.

You’ll want to start optimizing your campaign fast – it’s extremely helpful to get quick and reliable results for a few important split tests rather than running a long campaign to have results for hundreds of different tests all together.

A great resource to learn is by searching on YouTube for DIY type tutorials on how to launch a simple social media ad campaign. #myblogu

— Edwin Dearborn (@edwindearborn) March 23, 2017

2. Start out

Facebook has a quite helpful guide on A/B testing. Before you start your split-testing campaign, make sure to identify which variables you are testing:

@WishPond gives a few good examples of which exactly variables you can A/B test.

Finally, this crash course into Facebook advertising by @a_hubbard featuring experts like @kimgarst, @IMMikeMurphy, @digitalmktr is worth bookmarking and reading!

TIP: access experts – interview them re their social advertising prowess for your blog. Let their wisdom & techniques shine #myblogu