As well as investing in social media management for your business – that is, paying for an expert to post content on your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn pages to boost brand awareness and increase click-throughs to your website – you should also consider the benefits of social media advertising.
Unlike organic social media work, advertising allows you to pay the social networking giants for a prominent place on your target audiences’ timelines, messages, and other advertising avenues, in a bid to sell more products and services.
However, many small businesses enter into the field of social media advertising and waste hundreds or even thousands without truly understanding what is involved, or how to maximise their return on investment. Below, we offer some advice to those entrepreneurs…
Find free vouchers
One of the best things about Facebook ads and LinkedIn ads is that the companies often give small businesses free vouchers or incentives for trying out their advertising platform.
If you’ve never paid for ads before, then the chances are you can find a £50/$50 voucher for your first campaign, although there are some caveats, such as matching the free credit.
You can use this voucher to reduce the cost of your ad spend to experiment, and if you find an ad and audience segmentation that works, you can run with it time and time again via paid ads.
Pay an expert
Rather than spending months getting to grips with Instagram advertising or wasting lots of money on experiments, consider working with a digital marketing company that specialises in Instagram marketing to take your business to the next level.
It may seem strange to pay a company to manage your advertising spend, but they have more experience in crafting engaging ad copy and can whittle down your target audience to increase your return on investment (ROI).
Keep tweaking
Even if you’ve created an advert that’s performing at a higher than average rate and helps to drive lots of new traffic to your website, you should always tweak and experiment to improve your engagement and cost per click. A/B testing is often the most effective method – you can run multiple Facebook marketing campaigns and see which one proves to be most effective.
Go where your audience is
There’s no point in spending lots on Twitter advertising if your audience is all hanging out on Snapchat and vice versa.
Get to grips with who you’re trying to target, follow them across social media, and speak in the way that they speak.
If your advert isn’t engaging or unique then you’re not going to get anything back from it. You must innovate to achieve results.
Consider alternative paid advertising
Rather than handing over all of your money to social networking giants, consider alternative paid advertising methods, such as search engine advertising or influencer marketing, which would involve you finding high-profile users in your niche and paying them for posts.
There are so many avenues to go down – see what your competitors are doing and experiment until you can build a paid advertising portfolio that delivers new leads and business every day.
Social media advertising isn’t an art – it involves ongoing tweaking, testing and optimisation in order to succeed. Whatever you’re trying to promote, we wish you the best of luck.