As a business owner living in the digital age, there are lots of different online marketing and money-making tools at your disposal.
More and more business owners are turning towards paid social media advertising as an alternative way to promote products and services.
If done correctly, this tool can make your business a lot of money. But there is much to learn before you reach this stage.
Before you decide on whether or not to try out paid social media advertising, it’s important to make sure that this will benefit your industry sector.
Paid social campaigns are tailored to reach specific audiences, based on every different demographic, likes, dislikes, curriculars and hobbies.
In order to get the most benefit out of this, you must familiarise yourself with your target audience.
Consider whether or not your target audience will habitually use social media and how beneficial using paid social media advertising will be over using other marketing techniques.
Does my business need paid social media advertising?
Paid social media success with vary depending on the industry you are in.
For example, clothing brands experience a high conversion rate on social media, as the images used are often visually striking, which essentially prompts users to click through to the website from the advert.
However, industry sectors such as the legal sector often struggle to get enough inquiries using this platform, so it’s important to know where your strengths lie.
Whichever sector you are within, whether it’s a corporate sector, a creative sector, in the fashion industry and everything in between, paid social media advertising can benefit you if you study your audience and correctly set up the campaign.
Creative and fashion sectors will always generate more revenue from users in terms of quantity, whereas other sectors (i.e. law), may receive fewer people clicking through to the advert and making an inquiry.
However, 100 purchases for a fashion brand, may amount to the same amount of revenue as 5 inquiries from a law firm.
Although the target audience may be much smaller and more niche, and the click-through rate may be lower, the value of the inquiry may be higher and the traffic to the website may be much more qualified.
How do I set up a paid social campaign?
Setting up a paid social campaign can be quite tricky for those who have never done it before.
First of all, you will need to create an ad account – you can do this by visiting business.facebook.com.
Your ad account will store a database of all of your campaigns (live and completed). It will also store all of the data, such as, your overall spend, how relevant your campaigns have been, how many people have clicked through the campaigns, as well as how many conversions it has.
Before you set up a campaign, it’s important to get a Facebook pixel added to your website.
This is a snippet of code that allows for any user data to be stored and any conversions or inquiries to be tracked. It essentially helps you to improve your campaigns and conversion rate every month (the more data you have, the more you can learn from this).
We would recommend asking your developer to add this to your website, as depending on the website host (WordPress, Joomla, Shopify, craft), it can be quite tricky to implement.
Especially if you have to add this snipped into the source code of your page, as accidentally deleting one letter or symbol could damage your website.
Once your ad account is set up and your pixel is in place, you need to think about the budget you are going to set yourself for the month. The more budget you put in, the more reach your post will get and the more clicks / conversions it may receive.
Once you have done this, set up your payment details and you are ready to begin!
Setting up a campaign is quite a simple process, all you need to do is follow all of the steps as you work through the sections.
The sections are as followed:
Marketing objective
To make paid social media advertising work for you, you have to choose whether your marketing objective is to get traffic to the website in order to increase brand awareness, or whether it is set up for conversions.
Conversions can only be tracked if the Facebook pixel has been implemented on the website.
After you have selected your marketing objective, you will be asked to choose your budget and schedule time.
We recommend selecting the “lifetime” option for your budget and inputting your maximum spend for the campaign, as opposed to the daily budget. This will ensure that you don’t over-spend.
After the budget and schedule, you have to select the placements of your advert. We recommend setting up different ad sets for Facebook and Instagram, as opposed to using them all together.
As well as selecting the placements, you can create a detailed target audience that you would like to show your advert to.
This audience can be defined by age, gender, profession, likes, dislikes and so on.
You can also select Facebook’s suggestions for your target audience if you are unsure of who to include. This audience can be changed and altered as the campaign is running if it isn’t performing as well as you have hoped.
You will see a drop-down menu entitled “edit ad placements”. We recommend using different ad sets for Facebook and Instagram so that you can see how well each platform performs, rather than having an overall score.
Once you have selected all of this, you can start creating the content of your campaign.
Be sure to use visually striking images, short, sharp and to the point content. Try and study existing campaigns your competitors are using to ensure that you are doing everything correctly.
Once you have set everything up, be sure to review it all so that you are happy with your campaign.
How do I track the success and change my campaigns?
As your campaign is running, you can see how successful it is in the ads manager.
All you need to do is click through to the campaign and it will tell you:
- how many clicks the campaign has received,
- how many people it has reached,
- it will give it a relevancy score out of ten,
- how much money has been spent
- and also how many conversions it has received.
It’s important to track the data of your social campaign, as from this data, you can see how successful your overall campaign is and can make any necessary alterations to the target audience if the campaign is not performing as well as you hoped.
Paid social media advertising takes time and effort to perfect. So it’s important to monitor your campaigns, take notice of your data and be open to change throughout the process.
Leave the campaign for a week initially, in order to collect enough data to see whether it’s a success or not.
About The Author
Alice Porter works closely with the Employment Solicitors, with the aim of better informing business owners on how to effectively market their businesses.