Social Media Advertising – Tips for Your Budget and Strategy.
It’s remarkable how quickly social media advertising has become mainstream in a decade, surpassing ad spends with well-established traditional media. According to a recent report from the Direct Marketing Association, social network ad spending is expected to hit over $26 billion in 2018, continuing to outpace traditional media spends.
There’s no mystery around this marketing phenomenon, considering that 65% of American adults are now social media users, compared to only 7% in 2005. Social media ads can be cheaper than print and TV campaigns and they provide the analytics that chief marketing officers crave. And if those reasons for advertising on social media are not enough, consider the huge caches of demographic and behavioral data it delivers, as well as the flexibility to redirect your spend.
For CMOs, excitement about the effectiveness of social media advertising raises the following questions: Can there be too much of a good thing? Does the law of diminishing returns kick in at some point with social media, and if so, when? How many social media ads should we be running? The answer to all these questions is ― it depends.
Many factors come into play, such as budget, product and service relevance, time of year, competition and which social media platforms you’re using. For example, the updated Facebook algorithm prioritizes paid content over organic search, creating more competition for ad space. In the evolving world of digital technology, the biggest mistake you can make is to “Set it and forget it.”
Here are three tips to help you create the optimal social media advertising plan:
Choose your targets well
As with everything in business, the more you know about your customers and prospects, the better your outcomes will be. Making assumptions and casting a wide net to see what you can catch is sure to increase your cost per click and dilute your results. Instead of seeing what sticks, invest in market research on the front end. Once you have the research to identify your target audiences with reasonable certainty, a company such as Take 5 Media Group, which specializes in filtering its huge databases according to the demographic features and buying habits of specific target markets, can implement the plan.
Learn about what turns them on
Engage is one of the popular buzz words in digital marketing. We’re told to engage our target audiences with engaging content to create engagement with our brand. However, making assumptions about what other people find engaging can lead to costly mistakes. Rather than being penny wise and pound foolish, make the goal of your market research twofold: identify your target markets and the most effective ways to engage them. If your original assumptions turn out to be right, consider it confirmation of your marketing acumen and take a bow. If your assumptions were wrong, be happy that you didn’t make a huge mistake.
Take an omni-channel approach
Connectivity is one of social media’s attractions, so use it to attract new customers and reconnect with existing ones. Omni-channel marketing, also referred to as multi-channel or cross-channel, is about engaging with consumers across every digital channel and device in ways that track and monitor their buying habits and other relevant data. A very basic example of the cross-channel marketing tactic known as retargeting is clicking on a video ad on Facebook and then being served an ad on Google. This example also underscores the public’s preference for video, which people are understandably more likely to share than other ad formats. A recent eMarketer report predicts that spending on digital video ads will grow at double digits and surpass $22 billion in 2021. Smart TVs present another opportunity for omni-channel marketing, adding data mining capabilities to traditional TV watching. Omni-channel marketing offers many effective combinations for marketing pros who understand how it’s done.
Getting everything right the first time is tough, so begin by confirming your assumptions with research. Once you have identified your market and learned how to engage them across multiple channels, the results will tell you if your social media ad spend is too little, too much or just right.
Take 5 Media Group has been gathering consumer information and building audiences for more than 15 years. For more information, call 561-819-5555 or visit take5mg.com.