How to validate social advertising to your boss

Harrie Truscott

July 10, 2015   Follow
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Acquisition

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Creating a brilliant product, which addresses your customers’ needs, is only the beginning of building your business for success. Getting your products or services in front of prospective customers requires a solid digital marketing strategy.

Traditional pay-per-click banner advertising is one suitable tool for many marketers. However, this method of advertising is becoming more expensive and inefficient for small to medium businesses. When competing for ad space, smaller competitors face costs often in excess of $18 per click and a conversion rate of less than 1 percent.

In comparison, social advertising is a cheaper and more effective advertising model. Whether you want to introduce social advertising to your marketing strategy or increase the budget, bringing your boss on board with social advertising may be an easy or difficult process. When validating a social advertising strategy to your boss, remember these key reasons why social advertising may be the best choice for your business.

Why social advertising is right for your business

More visual attention leads to higher engagement. 

Research proves consumers are increasingly accustomed to ignoring banner ads, often finding them intrusive to the website’s user experience. Native advertisements receive 25% more visual attention, which results in higher engagement.

Twitter ads are an exceptional example of a native approach to advertising. Promoted tweets don’t stand out in an individual’s feed and receive between 1-3% engagement. This might seem like a small number, however, it is exceptional compared to the <0.1% received by most banner advertisements. Furthermore, Facebook ads also receive 8 to 9 times more engagement.

Consider ideal demographics, better targeting

Successful marketing is about targeting the right customers. If your ideal customers include tech savvy twitter users, working professionals on Linkedin or everyone else on Facebook, then consider social advertising as a way to connect with them where they most spend their time. Social media is the top thing to do on the internet, with Australians spending on average 3.6 hours per day than on different platforms. Many people spend more time being “social” than reading emails, the former most common online communication method.

For the businesses targeting other businesses or working professionals, Linkedin is an invaluable platform for promotion. With over 3 billion users, Linkedin ads have a history of success for many businesses. Consider the case of German derivatives exchange company, Eurex. Within 3 months, they grew their following from 500 to over 13,000 using three simple actions. They:

  • Updated their Linkedin company page
  • Posted relevant content
  • Used targeted Linkedin display ads

Cheaper

The reality is that not every advertising channel is suited for every business. Being selective with the channels you target is an excellent way of strategic and cost-effective promotion.

In the past, entrepreneur Noah Kagan spent “$100,000+ on Google [and received] back $25,000 [in profit]. If you do the math, that’s not good”. In his article ‘What I learn from spending $2,000,000 on Facebook ads’, Kagan proves that:

  • Facebook ads can be a profitable and successful exercise for a business
  • The CTR (click through rate) of an ad doesn’t really matter as long as the campaign is successful and leads to sufficient profit.

Furthermore, the large amounts of money Kagan mentions may seem anything but cheap, yet the campaigns still proved cost-effective on such a large scale.

For the business owners thinking on a smaller scale, Buffer’s recent blog post proves that $5 per day on Facebook can still take your company far. Thanks to their company-wide policy of transparency, we can examine the specifics of their campaign below:

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Buffer breaks down their latest Facebook campaign. Here’s what they achieved with $5 per day.

In addition to explaining how to setup a Facebook ad campaign, they detailed how they narrowed the focus of their campaign according to: location, age, gender, language, interests and behaviours. Buffer chose to target American, English-speaking Facebook users who were interested in social media and hadn’t previously liked their page.

What to do before you invest

Leverage your social media channels

Before you invest in social advertising, use your current social media postings as a platform for testing what kind of imagery and copy resonates most with your customers. Which tweets create the most engagement? Which facebook posts receive the most click-throughs? Using this analysis and experimentation, you can formulate social advertisements which have the most likelihood of success.

Choose compelling and helpful over the hard sell

Overall, viewers respond better to a natural style rather than hard sales language. AppSumo’s promoted post below is a good example of how an ad can pair natural, approachable language with helpful content that viewers are compelled to check out. Adding value to the customer experience goes a long way to building trust and establishing expertise.

Creating an effective marketing strategy is a difficult process, especially if your boss is resistant to social advertising campaigns which have strong potential for success. To improve your organisations results from selling in the Social Media space, get on the same level with pointers from the Guide to Social Selling.

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