Smashing Out Successful Paid Social Campaigns
Our Paid Social Manager Steven is a master at building winning paid social campaigns. We picked his brains to learn the secrets of paid social success and here’s is what he had to say.
Many brands have built social into their broader marketing plans, whether that’s a large or small part of their marketing strategy. The majority of brands miss the most important part, having a clear objective of what they are using social for.
Whether your brand wants to improve brand awareness or find more customers, social media is a great resource if you have clear objectives, strategies and tactical plans in place that are aligned.
Know your objective, strategies & tactics
Before anything, the most important thing is to have a clear understanding of your objectives for any paid social campaigns. There are many brands that are guilty of not having anything in place and should certainly not be investing until they do. It’s hard to make meaningful progress when everyone is moving in different directions.
Once the top-level objective is set, the next step is to pinpoint the key strategies which will help drive you toward your objectives. Your strategy is your plan of action to achieve your top-level objective.
An example:
“In order to help accomplish the top-level objective, we’re building a lead generation strategy.”
Once you’ve translated your objectives into a set of strategies, the next step is to map out the specific tactics that support your strategies that are aligned with your objective.
Understanding your audience
Around only 55% of marketers use social data to better understand their target audience, making it a huge opportunity for both leaders and marketers. Social media marketing strategies can be highly effective if you know what to do with the information you already have about your audience. It’s just a matter of knowing where to look.
Develop a clear roadmap
The first thing we do after onboarding a new client and conducting our analysis is to lay out a roadmap for the campaigns. This helps with planning and carrying out tests whether it’s on the campaign structure, audiences or ads.
An example:
For creative testing, plan out the 4-6 weeks with different creative tests or sprints that you want to roll out within the account. There are many advertisers who do not put processes in place and most advertisers have a fragmented structure where they can’t gather and build upon their learnings and do not have a plan for growth.
Within this testing roadmap, there should be three key elements to think about:
- Hypothesis – what do we want to establish with this test and why do we want to implement it?
- KPIs – what are the key KPIs we want to increase and are there any we need to track in case they decline?
- Variables – what are the changed variables within the sprints/tests?
There will be finer grain elements to think about, but having a clear roadmap which aligns with the top-level objective is crucial.
Winning paid social ads
Winning paid social ads rely on different facets. From industry to industry, company to company, the product, and the value the brand holds.
There is one key thing with social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram where the average attention span is less than 2 seconds. You have one shot to convince your target audience to spend more time with your ad.
This is precisely where most big brands go wrong. Brands are used to the traditional storytelling where they start slow and work towards the climax slowly, but surely. This is often the conventional TV ad approach.
With paid social ads, they must hit their peak climax quickly. Within the second, you want to hook your target audience and give them a reason why they should watch another second or be in general interested in your brand or product.
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