Gone are the days when things were easier, so as social media marketing for businesses. Nowadays everyone is chasing to know good hacks and shortcuts; basically, the secret of a successful social media campaign for them to utilise.
Frankly, there is no secret at all to this.
Here is my take.
Most likely everything or every strategy will be working or can be effective given you have the right strategy with a little bit of patience. You just need to find out what works for you among all those ideas and strategy that come across your mind. No strategy is a bad strategy. All you need is the one that will work great to your unique situation, that’s all. Therefore, my request to all digital marketers, please stop chasing secrets or shortcuts. You on the other hand, need to keep on testing the ideas to find out what works for you.
To work on those testings, you may want to consider looking at some of the already-available best practices that mirror your company, industry or campaign that you have in mind. So what are they?
Based on my years of experience in social media paid ads I am sharing here 4 key factors that can make your social media campaign more effective.
Know your target market.
Before you run any social media campaign, you obviously need to know who your target market is. Simply because by knowing them, you will know their buying behaviour. From the data, you can easily produce amazing ads or campaign your consumers can relate to. Else, your ads won’t show any good signs if you are not clear about consumers’ behaviour.
Did you know that 40% of the online ads are reaching out to the wrong target audience? This happens because those brands are using more intuition than data; whereas data should be one of the main elements they need to look at before running any social media ads. Example, if you are going to run Facebook or Instagram ads, do take advantage of the ‘Audience Insight’ analytics available. To collect some data, you may want to setup multiple ads based on a variety of parameters to get an idea about those target audience set.
Trust me, the better you know your target market, your ads will provide you amazing results and you will be able to get quality leads from your ads.
High resolution graphics or nice video thumbnail.
The first thing people see on social media is, arguably, the visuals. It can be in a form of images, graphics, GIFs or videos. If your perspective is unique and different, it will draw people’s’ attention. And in 2019, getting attention on social media is something really expensive and rare.
It is proven – nice and high-resolution visuals can easily engage larger audience. Even if you are using a video, make sure you are using an amazing and nice thumbnail for that video. Be careful, don’t over-doing it. Don’t insert too much text in your images, because Facebook and Instagram don’t like too much text in your image (not more than 20% to be exact) while you are running paid ads under their platforms.
A personalised copy will attract more attention.
Writing a great copy is essential for your Facebook and other social media ads because it complements your awesome image and tells viewers everything they need to know once they view your post. While images are integral in your ads, the copy is where you really have the opportunity to hook and connect with targets.
Why? Because people love to get connected with content. If your consumer finds something relatable based on their interest, for sure it will get their attention more and they would love to get engaged with your ads.
Include a call to action.
You can have the best-looking ads in the world but if users are not sure what to do or don’t understand what’s in it for them, your ads will be a complete disaster. That’s why adding a call to action (CTA), value proposition or incentive to your visual content is critical. Adding a call to action and/or value proposition to the images does two things for you.
- It allows the audience to know what’s in it for them.
- It allows them to understand what they need to do next.
I told you earlier, there’s no secret or shortcut that can make your social media ads awesome, but we can always follow some best practices available and try it to see how effective it is for your campaign or otherwise. Remember, digital marketing or digital ads is all about test and trial, and to make it work, you need data. Customers data that is.
