Brands spent 65% more on social media advertising in 2016 than in 2015. And social video advertising spending is expected to double in 2017. So what does that mean for you and your brand?
The outburst of social networks increasing their advertising options has left brands struggling to catch up and find what platform works best for them and how to stretch their budget to the fullest. We teamed up with Larry Kim, Founder of Wordstream and COO of MobileMonkey, in a recent webinar to bring you the top 10 social media advertising tips, to save those precious ad dollars and get the biggest bang for your buck!
Want more information on the top 10 social ad hacks? Watch this on-demand webinar to get a closer look at social ads.
1. Combine the Power of Pay Per Click (PPC) & Social Ads
Google AdWords has a feature called Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RSLA), which lets you target people who have already visited your website and tailor your ads and bids specifically for them. This is great because if people have heard of you, then they have brand affinity with you and people like to buy from brands that they know and trust. The issue with RLSA is that you aren’t targeting anyone who isn’t familiar with your brand. The solution is to target your social media ads to the people who aren’t familiar with your brand and have them click through to your site so they can then be targeted in your RLSA ads.
2. Only Promote “Unicorns” on Social Ads
Generally on a blog, 10% of the stories generate 60% of the traffic. Many companies promote social posts that only have 2-3% engagement and the problem with this is that social networks like Facebook and Instagram are going to charge you $4-5 per click because they think you are promoting garbage. If you only promote your best performing posts, you can exponentially increase your engagement and pay pennies on the dollar per click instead.
3. Use Video Ads
If you turn a piece of content into a video asset, you can increase your relevancy score by two points. People want to see videos and social networks prioritize video ads and you could be paying as low as $.02 per video view. As it continues to do well you will have high video viewership rates and very low cost per engagements (CPEs).
'Turning a piece of content into a video increases your relevancy score by 2 points!' -Larry KimCLICK TO TWEET
4. (Radically) Change Your Offer
Sometimes you will have an offer out there that is only getting a 1-2% engagement rate and you think that maybe changing the font or the button color will get you a higher engagement rate. This might help marginally, but realistically, you need to radically change your offer. For example, drones have a higher clickthrough rate and conversion rate than picnic pants. In this case, drones are the better offer.
5. Use Ads to Hack Forums (Like Reddit)
The goal of hacking forums, like Reddit, is to try to make it to the first page. You can bet that if your content is posted on the first page of Reddit, this content is trending everywhere. This is where viral content is started. The first step is to promote your content to active users. The way that forums, like Reddit or Medium, work is that they rank content based off of activity from users. If you target active users, they are more likely to see and like your posts, which will cause you to rise up in the ranking. Pretty cool, right?!
6. Use Custom Audiences
You can upload lists of email addresses or Twitter handles to create a new audience and target the exact people you want. For anyone in the public relations space, you can create a list of reporters whom you want to target and use custom audiences to target these reporters. Larry Kim has tried this and within hours he was asked to be guests on new shows and outlets wanted to syndicate his blog post. This is a great option to get your company out there and to increase your SEO with links back to your website!
7. Beat Up on Competitors
We’ve all heard the different ways to beat your competitors. Some of these tactics include being observant and seeing what your competitors post, what content resonates with their target audience, posting times and posting frequency. But you can actually beat up on your competitors. There are ways to target your competitors’ fan bases, hashtags, keywords, etc. You can make specific competitor campaigns around these target audiences or just make sure you are getting in front of their customers. This is incredibly important, especially if you are in a crowded market space. You can bet that if you aren’t already doing this, your competitors are.
Looking to steal your competitor's customers? Larry Kim has the solution.CLICK TO TWEET
8. Remarket on Google & Facebook
The more times people see your ads, the less likely they are to click on it; but if they do click on your ad, they are more likely to actually convert and be a customer. This is why Google and Facebook remarketing is so important. Google remarketing is when a visitor from your website is targeted for ads on websites through the Google Display Network. Facebook remarketing is similar, but the ads are displayed on Facebook instead of Google Display Network. What’s great about both of these is that you can overlay specifications like demographics, interests, behavioral targeting, etc. For example, of the people who visited my site, I only want to target very wealthy women, who have kids, and like to go on vacations. This is how you can get more targeted and pick exactly who you are looking for to target.
9. Incorporate Better Audience Targeting
Let’s say you have a new blog post coming out about Google and you’re looking for the best audience to target. You could choose your current fan base or a demographic group, but have you tried targeting people who are already using a hashtag like #Alphabet? All of these people are already talking about Google’s parent company, Alphabet, so joining in on the conversation makes the message relevant to those people.
10. Use Space-Age Technology
All of these tips have one thing in common. You need a social media management and social listening tool like Tracx to help you out. If you don’t know who your target audience is or how to find your social tribes and what they are talking about, you don’t know who you’re supposed to be marketing to. Understanding your audience is key to creating a social strategy and as well as accuracy of the data that you’re being provided with. Without it, you might be wasting your time and money in the wrong places.
With the decline of organic reach, it’s not just enough to simply post to your social networks anymore. Any good social strategy has social advertising built in. And as marketers, we are always looking for inspiration and new ideas to bring to our teams. Armed with these social media advertising tips from Larry Kim, you’re on the right track to take over the social jungle
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