Three Highly Effective Paid Social Media Campaigns
Did you know that over half of the world's population is active on at least one social media platform?
With 4.48 Billion active social media users, questioning if a paid social media approach is right for your business should be out of the question; it is!
Unlike traditional outbound advertising, paid social media advertising lets you get your content and message into the right audience's hands (or eyeballs) at the right time. It may seem complicated or intimidating to begin with, but this is an essential step to gathering lead generations, prospecting new audiences, and remarketing your brand in this present time.
Three Different META Advertising Strategies
There are an abundance of paid social media strategy to use, such as boosted posts, Instagram Reels, sponsored direct messages, and more, but a few we’ve seen work successfully with our clients and colleagues in the industry. So, if you feel like you’re hitting a wall within your strategy, don’t worry - It may not be the strategy itself. Instead, you may be looking at the wrong copy, paired with lousy content, and it may just be the platform that doesn't resonate with your audience.
Here are the four paid social ads we’ve seen work repeatedly.
#1 - Engaged with Social Media
“Someone's effort directly reflects their interest in you.”
Generally speaking, when we are interested in a person, we put more effort into that relationship. The same could be said about a business's social media account; When someone is interested in a product or service, they will put in effort towards that brand - In social media, that equates to engagement.
When your social media followers or other users like, comment, share, and save your social media posts, that typically implies that they are interested in what you have to say or offer. It’s highly advantageous to capitalize on that engagement and advertise to this audience actively engaging with your business.
Here’s the 3-step process for creating these ads -
Post frequently on your social networks with different content - More on organic social media here. Make sure to comment back and answer every DM sent to your profile, encouraging more engagement and building up this audience group even more.
When you have a healthy amount of engagement on your posts and are ready to start advertising to this group, head to the advertising targeting parameters of the preferred social platform. Create an audience of users who have engaged with your profile in the last 30 days (60 days if you have a smaller following) and save this audience.
In regards to your ad copy and creative, make sure to use original content because, most likely, this group has already seen your posts on social media. Then, create a few ads and use the targeting we mentioned above. Another strategy is to promote a blog on your website, or a specific landing page to add even more value and drive traffic to your site.
This audience is your most engaged users, so you want to encourage that behavior. When your customer goes on social media, they’re not looking for a one-way connection but a way to connect with other people and businesses; yours is one of them.
Capitalize on viral posts
Going viral on social media involves a combination of premium content, strategy, and often an inexplicable element of luck. It’s more likely you will have a post unexpectedly go viral than crafting a post intending to go viral. That said, if you make authentic content that is better than anything else in your category, you will eventually go viral. When that moment does come, it will bring massive awareness, lots of reach, and tons of engagement. While all three metrics are great, they don't immediately translate into followers, link clicks, or conversions.
As the post goes viral, people may need to be made aware of the company or product/service you sell because they are more captivated by the content than aware of the brand behind it. This is why you need to re-engage with these users and continue to reap the benefits of your viral posts. Advertising to the audience group “engaged with social media” will reach those who watched, liked, and commented on the video.
Follow Up With Relevant Content - You went viral for a reason, so your next post must be similar to that post. If this video went viral, see how long it was, what music you used, and the title used. Also, look at the feedback you are receiving on your video and see what your audience wants more of.
Engage With Your Audience - With a viral post, you can expect many comments, DM’s, email inquiries, and more, so it's vital to respond to them promptly. This is your company's first impression for most people, so engaging with each of these individuals is advantageous. An underused tactic is messaging the people who comment on your post. For those who don’t know, you can send a direct message to anyone who comments on your social media post - You don’t even need to be friends with them. Capitalizing on this critical moment is crucial because it will likely fade quickly, like most viral videos.
#2 - Email List
An effective email marketing strategy can generate sales, create strong brand awareness, and enhances customer engagement. A robust email list lets you send personalized messages to a targeted audience based on certain on-site behaviors. While we all wish we had 100% open rates on our campaigns, that just isn’t the case, and that often leads to missed opportunities for sales, company updates, or specific calls to action.
This is all to say that running a few photo or video ads targeting your current email list on social media platforms is beneficial. We recommend running ads to this list when you have a sale, new product announcement, giveaway, or a potential up-sell for a group of people.
Get them to follow you
We’re pretty confident that your entire email list isn’t all following you on your social media platforms. Simply run a few ads to help draw this audience to your other social platforms, which stayed primarily on email. Once they begin to follow your social media, that’s free organic marketing with your daily social posts, which isn’t possible on email. That’s the power of social media marketing; Here’s how you do this -
Upload your current email list to your preferred social media advertising platform
Target that specific audience with an advertisement that encourages the users to follow your social media account. Make sure to use multiple ad sets and ad formats to see the best creative.
Make sure to exclude users who currently follow your social media channel
#3 - Lookalike 1% Audience
A lookalike audience is just how it sounds - An audience who “looks like” your current customer list. Even though this isn’t a huge secret, it’s a powerful prospecting tool to find like-minded users similar to your target demographic. Ideally, you would create a lookalike audience based on past customers who purchased. The more customers you have, the better the audience will find similar users because it has more data to pull from – Facebook and Instagram recommend at least 100 people to create a lookalike group. If you don't have enough people for a custom audience based on a product page, you could always make a custom audience that includes visits to all product pages or all pages on your website.
Exclude Users Who Have Visited The Website
To make this campaign an actual prospecting ad, we suggest excluding users who have visited your website or purchased before. This is because someone who fits your “lookalike audience” could have already been on your website and moving through your current sales funnel instead of a brand-new user who hasn’t heard about you before.
How much to advertise on META?
We often get asked, “How much should I spend on my paid social media ads.” Before creating an advertisement budget, you should ask yourself a few questions to guide you to that answer.
What is your goal with these ads? (i.e., conversions, traffic, reach, leads, followers, views)
What metrics will you be evaluating your success on? (i.e. ROAS, CPC, ACOS, CPA, CPM, CTR)
How much ad spend are you willing to experiment with?
These three questions are important before running ads because creating an optimized ad campaign takes time and refining your overall strategy. Consider allowing yourself a 2-month grace period to adjust for the advertisements to learn and test different audiences, copy, and creative. Just because you do not see an immediate return doesn’t mean Instagram and Facebook ads don’t work; your audience or creative needs tweaking. You can spend as low as $5 a day up to thousands of dollars a day, but if you don’t know what you’re judging your performance on, you’re just wasting money.
Paid Social Media Tactics
In addition to these three campaign strategies we suggested, there are also many tactics to use. Here are a few that we recommend -
Boosted Posts - A boosted post advertisement simply puts a paid budget behind an organic post that has already been published. The benefit of boosting a social media post that has performed well is that people are likelier to click on a post/ad with tons of likes, comments, and shares than an ad with only a few likes and no comments. Here’s the method we use to assess which posts get boosted:
First, you need to create your baseline engagement rate for the past three months of posts ((Total Interactions ÷ Total Followers) x 100))
When a post exceeds your baseline engagement rate, this signifies that the specific piece of content is attractive to the audience and resonates with them; therefore, the right choice for boosting.
Boost the post to a multitude of different audiences - Current followers, lookalike audiences, email list, or a remarketing group based on your website visitors. It really depends on what type of content you are using.
Instagram Stories - On August 30th, 2021, Instagram took away the coveted “swipe-up” feature on Instagram stories for accounts with more than 10k followers. It replaced it with a link sticker for everyone to use. This change has significantly reduced the click-through rate of that creative because everyone was conditioned to swipe up. With Instagram Stories being a top feature of this platform, it’s important to run a few ads with this specific placement.
When creating an ad in the business manager, Facebook will automatically select the Instagram Ads Story placement in addition to the other placements, regardless if it’s a photo or a horizontal video. That being said, it’s advantageous to create specific videos that fit the correct Instagram Story size - 1080x1920.