40 tips on How to Advertise Successfully on Social Media in 2018
1) Build a long-term Social Media marketing strategy instead of relying on short-term tactics
Both have their uses, but if you want to gain results that will help your client’s business in the long run, you should think long-term. A well-thought out Social Media campaign, executed in a rightly manner is bound to yield results that include an increase in brand awareness and produce leads and traffic months and even years down the road. Attracting consumers may be difficult, but keeping them should be your true goal and that surely doesn’t happen overnight.
For starters, when planning ads create a quarterly goal and then go backward. See how many ads, content, and budget you will need. Track them daily and update the before made spreadsheet with the statistic. At the end of Q period, revise, get feedback and start the new quarter a bit smarter ;). At the end of the year, your result should be more than doubled when it comes to ads. Also remember, failure is good if you learn something from it!
2) Choose your Social Media platform carefully
Brands must accept that organic reach is steadily declining and stop relying on short-term tactics that used to work. Instead, businesses need to start building sustainable strategies. This means being more selective when it comes to the networks you post content on, and investing more in social ads as well as influencer and/or advocacy strategies.
The best approach here would be to use paid advertising on all social media your target audience and potential customers are. But in reality, most of us just don’t have enough of a budget to go all in. When choosing in which platform to invest, think of your desired outcome. Do you want to get brand recognition? Do you want to engage? Do you need new leads?
Also, research the niche. If you are a fashion business and you want to work with influencers, LinkedIn for sure isn`t the platform to place your ads. Instagram and Pinterest are dominating the fashion industry — try there.
If you are in an Automotive niche, you would want to converse with your prospects quite often- try Twitter!
3) Have a clear intent of who you want to reach
Knowing your target audience is a job half done. Buyer personas (or your ideal customers) help you define and target the right people, in the right places, at the right times with the right messages. In that sense, you need to familiarize yourself with your intended demographic based on their:
- Gender
- Age
- Social status
- Lifecycle
- Occupation
- Income
- Generation
Even though you may have heard about this one a hundred +1 times already, don’t look away! Buyer persona cannot be built in 5 min. It demands a proper research and conversation with actual humans. It may be tough on you but trust us the results will surprise you. Make a case study, pay if you need and get the right interests and insights into your potential leads.
Testing the ad on the test group before releasing it to the general public, can be an awesome idea to generate even bigger results from the campaign itself. Even Facebook now has a Split test — use it wisely and blow away your audience.
4) Build a solid Social Media follower base
Facebook is the most popular social media website by far, with 1.94 billion monthly active users. Next is Instagram, with 700 million users, followed by Twitter with 313 million monthly visitors.
Estimates vary for Google+, but according to research from June 2017, Google+ sees 111 million monthly visitors. LinkedIn comes in just below Google+, with 106 million.
The advertising algorithms on all mentioned networks are favoring content that has already had a previous organic engagement or is naturally attracting a bigger audience. So take your time, build a faithful network of followers, use those ads and slowly go over to website traffic, engagement and lead generation. Promote your posts organically and answer the topics which are in popular demand.
5) Start marketing to Generation Z
A recent study conducted by Goldman Sachs concluded that Generation Z was more valuable to most organizations than millennials. Today, the oldest Gen Zers are 22 years old. They are just beginning to enter the labor force, and will have increased buying power for some time. Brands will begin to recognize this, and will shift their social media strategies accordingly. Expect great investment in platforms loved by Gen Zers like Snapchat and Instagram.
