Paid Advertising In Social Media – Directive’s Cassie Wiley outlines the steps you can take to ensure your social media marketing doesn’t miss a beat.
Pay-per-click advertising through social media is effective in increasing ROI; However, many B2B search marketers are not using paid social media platforms in the most effective way. This leads to wastage of money, wasted time and exhausting efforts. Not ideal, right?
Paid Advertising In Social Media
Let’s break down the top paying social media marketing mistakes you can fix starting today to transform your social campaigns from average to awesome.
Stepping Into Digital Marketing
As social media popularity continues to expand, businesses are constantly trying to take advantage of that growth to build their consumer base and stick their ads on every social media channel they can find.
Before going too far and investing in every social channel available, ask yourself which advertising channel is best for reaching your target audience. There is no one-stop shop for B2B social media marketing success and no specific channel is optimal for every business.
Marketers make claims and prepare case studies to prove that ads on certain platforms have better conversion rates and higher conversion volumes. However, most of those studies are based on customers in similar industries. Not all ads are created equal.
Find out where your audience interacts online and make sure you’re focusing your marketing efforts on those specific channels.
Globally, Social Media Ad Spend Forecast To Overtake Paid Search This Year
For example, an ad for a free demo of construction software targeting an audience with the job title ‘Construction Project Manager’ has a higher probability of generating more conversions on Linkedin than on Facebook, which is less user-oriented for lead generation.
While both Facebook and Linkedin can generate similar engagement from users when targeting similar audiences, each user’s intent varies greatly. A study shows that clicks generated from LinkedIn are 500% more likely to convert into quality leads than from Facebook.
On the other hand, a B2C ad promoting a new pair of shoes with a 10% off coupon has a better chance of converting on Facebook than on LinkedIn, where young users engage in quick buying.
Just as you shouldn’t use the same bid for every keyword, you shouldn’t use the same call-to-action (CTA) for every social platform. When deciding what your CTA should be, first analyze your users’ intent by platform. What is your audience looking for?
What To Look For In A Paid Media Campaign Management Tool
For example, active users on Linkedin are typically users with a more professional purpose, such as job hunting, keeping up with news in their field, or communicating with other professionals. CTAs such as ‘Free Download’ or ‘Read Whitepaper’ work well with this professional objective.
In contrast, active users on Facebook are typically scrolling through their feed, interacting with friends, or watching short viral videos. Ads that work well on this site don’t require a lot of time or commitment.
CTAs for B2B companies here should include text along the lines of ‘Learn more’ or give users the option to play a video directly in the ad instead. When generating high volumes of clicks and conversions, it’s important to keep user intent in mind and know what CTA users will respond to on each site.
Additionally, knowing where your audience is in the conversion funnel should relate to the purpose of your CTA. It’s not rocket science!
Paid Social Media Advertising Plan With Key Activities
Users seeing your ad for the first time will benefit from a less aggressive CTA like ‘Read More’ and are less likely to be interested in a ‘Contact A Rep’ CTA when they know nothing about your product. Put yourself in their shoes.
On the other hand, if you are using a remarketing campaign, users are familiar with your site and product and are ready for CTAs like ‘Watch Demo’. They review your content again and are ready to take the next steps with you!
The next common mistake in B2B paid social media is failing to define your audience in your campaigns. Unless you have endless cash, focus on generating MQL conversions by increasing traffic to your site.
Remember: For every click on your ad, you’re spending money. Therefore, you should only target visitors who are likely to convert on your site. Quality over quantity!
Pros And Cons Of Paid Social Media Advertising [infographic]
Every site is different and targets the audience in different ways. For example, LinkedIn can target based on job title, job title, and company name. Using the previously mentioned client, a company selling construction software can target users in the construction industry who have decision-making powers, such as those with senior or managerial job titles (see below).
Facebook also offers the ability to target by job status and allows you to overlay various aspects of a person’s demographics, such as income level, location, device or past purchasing behavior.
Using these audience profiles can be beneficial in targeting your target audience with the best chance of converting. For example, you might target a vocational nursing school that has a high enrollment rate of middle-aged women with high school degrees.
What’s even more exciting about Facebook targeting is their ‘similar audiences’ feature. Once you have a good foundational audience that converts, Facebook will gather all the information and similarities among your converting audience to create new users that mirror this audience.
Free And Paid Social Media Analytics For Marketers
This could be a similarity between user interests, demographics, job status, or purchase intent, giving you valuable insight into which types of users convert the most on your page. Pretty cool, right?
Twitter Ads is another paid social platform where you can target your audience with options like targeting based on location, language, gender and device. These targeting options tend to be more basic than other paid social ad platforms, however, they should not be overlooked as granulation is always the best option.
As with Facebook’s ‘homogeneous’ audience, it’s important to regularly monitor your Audience Insights report to determine any trends in your converting audience. However, be careful as these measurements can sometimes be inaccurate.
For example, in the Twitter campaign shown below, targeting Marketing VPs aged 25 and over, we see in the Audience Insights report that our audience’s main interest is ‘dogs’. While interesting to note, it does not help us connect any type of specific audience with generalized interest that is not specific to the Marketing Guide download offer.
Paid Social Media For B2b: Strategies That Get Results
Remember, if you’re not reaching your target audience, what’s the point of paid social media in the first place? Use your money wisely.
While paid social media campaigns have the potential to drive ROI and generate conversions, be careful not to rely on social ads alone.
Search marketing through Google AdWords and Bing Ads should be your top priority when dipping your toes into the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising pool. Search engines are where users go to find relevant solutions, information and products and get an immediate response.
The key? Make sure your ad is showing for all relevant downstream keywords that drive conversions. If you’re using social media as your only PPC, you’re missing out on all the potential consumers who live in SERPs.
Social Media Advertising, Paid Promotion, Sponsored Content On Social Network, Social Media Marketing Concept. Flat Design Banner Stock Vector
Social media has been a huge trend across the country for years, but will this forward momentum last? Research shows that social media use has already started to decline, with the number of users falling by 3% from 2017 to 2018.
What does it mean for B2B businesses to advertise on social media platforms? While social channels are useful for increasing ROI and increasing audience, with over 3.5 billion searches per day, social media advertising still pales in comparison to search advertising potential.
Plain and simple truth? Users don’t land on social media with the intent to buy like they do on search engines.
The solution? Use social ads for your remarketing campaigns to retarget visitors who have already shown interest in your business or product. This allows you to use each platform to support each other and gives you the option to import your current audience from one platform to another.
Social Media Marketing Types
Because many industries have a long conversion cycle, using multiple platforms over time can influence users to convert those who have fallen off the conversion path in the past.
With social media usage decreasing year by year, social ads should be used alongside an already well-performing search advertising platform. One of the biggest uses of paid social ads is retargeting your audience as a complement to your search ad campaigns.
From there, it’s important to choose the social ad platform and call to action that best aligns with your industry and offerings. Once you’ve decided that, you can remarket your ads to these sites as a way to push them through the conversion funnel.
However, with social advertising, it’s important to avoid common mistakes marketers make that result in low ROI and waste time and money. Be
How To Utilize Social Media’s Paid Advertising Capabilities
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