Is Your Business Ready for a Paid Ads Campaign?
It’s certainly no secret how huge Facebook is, but take a moment to consider this fact about the social media giant’s annual revenue: if Facebook were to declare independence and become a sovereign nation, it would boast a GDP higher than 120 other countries around the globe. The fact that business owners across the world dish out well over 3 billion dollars a month in Facebook ads speaks to how much value these advertisements offer — and this doesn’t even begin to take into account ads from other major platforms such as Twitter and LinkedIN.
The bottom line is that social media advertising clearly offers tons of potential, and if you’ve been networking at all you probably know a few people who have grown their businesses using a paid ads strategy. Considering on top of all this the fact that you’ve found us here at Scotch and Ramen, there’s a pretty good chance that you’re excited to launch your own social media advertising campaign.
If that’s the case, then we have two pretty un-exciting words for you: slow down! Before investing your hard earned money into paid ads, it’s important to build a foundation for long-term advertising and marketing success. Here’s how:
Build A Brand That Sells
Ads are a great way of getting a potential customer’s attention, but if you want to convert that attention into a sale, you need to establish trust, display authority, and present your organization as something unique and exciting. This is accomplished through brand building. Creating original content, performing cold email outreach, and constantly honing your core message are all important pieces of this puzzle.
As Salesforce reports, it often takes six to eight touches to generate a viable sales lead, so clearly, this a long game. Ads do not automatically translate into sales — but if you establish your brand and work hard to create awareness, ads can catalyze sales.
Precisely Define Your Target Audience
Another important building block of social media ad success is identifying the optimal audience. Facebook and its competitors allow you to target groups based on demographics, interests, and behavior with incredible precision — so make sure that you are equipped to take full advantage of every advertising dollar by pinpointing the social media audience you want to sell to.
It’s a big world out there, and if you try to appeal to everyone, you may very well end up connecting with no one. The more specific you can be when choosing audiences and crafting ads tailored to those audiences, the more conversions and leads you will get out of the process.
Establish a Plan for Assessment and Growth
It’s astounding how many businesses spend their money on social media advertising, yet don’t utilizing tracking tools such as Google Analytics to understand the results those ads are producing. Without a data-driven method to assess what works and what doesn’t, improvement will be haphazard at best and non-existent at worse.
In addition to tracking the results of social media advertisements carefully, companies should also use experimentation methods such as A/B testing in order to identify more effective ways of sharing the messages that are already converting. This is a highly effective way of building upon past success in order to create an even more successful future.
Want to discuss your brand building strategy, and whether or not you’re ready to invest in paid social media ads? We’d be happy to hop on a call; just let us know when you’re available.
Originally published at www.scotchandramen.com.
