Is Your Business Ready for Social Media Advertising?

Love them or hate them, social media ads are here to stay. And social media itself has grown to the point of being part of the fabric of our daily lives.

The Pew Internet Research Center reports the following from 2018:

• Three-quarters of Facebook users log into the site more than once a day.
• Six in 10 Snapchat and Instagram users log into these sites daily.
• Pinterest remains substantially more popular with women (41% of whom say they use the site) than with men (16%).
• The average person uses three out of 8 popular platforms, with Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram the most popular.

Each social media platform offers unique ways for users to consume, post, and interact with the platforms’ content. Some are better for quick, casual video and photo posts between friends, and others encourage a more polished and produced collection of visuals. Some, like Facebook, try to offer a wide variety of uses with posts that are intended to be more conversational with a mix of text, images, and video sharing options. And others are topic-based visual curation sites where users collect and save ideas and information.

All offer an opportunity to reach the audiences that use them via social media advertising. If you’re new to social media advertising, it can seem daunting to set up and manage a campaign.

Social Media Strategy First, Tactics Second

As with all marketing, the strategy comes first. Knowing your audience is key to a successful social media advertising campaign, according to Robyn Flach, Social Media Marketing team leader at Dashboard Interactive.

“Ad strategy should be well planned with tactics that measure for specific objectives, so you know from the start what each campaign’s goal will be and optimize your advertising dollars for that,” Robyn said.

Most social media platforms provide a wealth of demographic information especially from paid advertising campaigns so that advertisers know who responds to their ads, when, and how. It’s up to an organization’s internal resources or an agency with expertise in social media advertising to leverage that information for successful campaigns.

A New World of Advertising Awaits: Social Media Ads

Social media advertising offers many opportunities for targeting. To give you some idea of the many choices that face you as a marketer, consider the following lists showing just some of the options, each with unique creative requirements and each ideal for specific circumstances and objectives:

As you can see, there are a lot of choices to make when creating your social media advertising campaign. Each option should be determined by what your campaign strategy, audience knowledge, data on past social media and advertising performance, and best practices to achieve your marketing campaign goals.

A marketing agency can work with you to create a realistic social media advertising strategy that works in tandem with other marketing and social media activities and recommend a working budget, keeping the company’s overall goals in mind.

Social Media Advertising: Best Practices and Tips

If you’re ready to jump into social media advertising, our experts have some tips for you to keep in mind.

• Understanding placement options is important. Business owners may decide they don’t want their ads to appear to be associated with certain types of content. For instance, short video ads are sometimes placed as un-skippable mid-roll ads that are positioned in the middle of a longer video belonging to another company. Some business owners may not want their video ad to appear in the middle of a politically charged video, or another video around topics not aligned with their company values. (We can help you with placement issues to avoid conflicts of interest or the appearance of endorsing topics that do not align with your company values).
• Leverage audience actions and results data to create new audiences and campaigns that build off of past successes.

Dashboard Interactive: Social Media Marketing Experts

Creating just the right tone, mood, and message to achieve your social media marketing campaign goals is essential. You need a partner who understands how social media fits into your big-picture marketing goals. Count on Dashboard Interactive to understand your business, develop a goal-focused marketing campaign, and deliver measurable results.