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The conventional wisdom around social media ads is that they are the key to unlocking the true value of a business. If done right, they can be used to attract new buyers and customers, build name recognition with audiences, and help to establish a brand identity in the marketplace. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.
Talk to enough small business owners, and you’ll start to hear stories about social media ad campaigns that went nowhere. In some cases, small business owners are spending thousands of dollars to land new customers, and they are walking away with nothing. Even worse, they don’t even know who’s seeing their ads, and why nobody is clicking. So to avoid becoming one of these small business owners, here are a few quick rules of the road.
Set the goals of your ad campaign
There are different reasons to launch new ad campaigns, and it’s up to you to determine in advance what your overarching strategic goal really is. If it’s to ramp up sales from existing customers, then your ad copy should reflect that and the call-to-action should involve buying products. But if your goal is simply to build name recognition, then you should change that call-to-action to include signing up for your newsletter or visiting your social media pages.
Be prepared to analyze the metrics
Once you determine the goal of your ad campaign, you will be in a much stronger position to measure the relative success of your campaign. And the way you do that is with metrics. Lots and lots of metrics. With social media ads, it’s possible to do deep dives on the demographics of who sees your ad, as well as what kind of engagement you are getting with each new ad.
That’s what makes social media ads particularly attractive to many small business owners. For just a small amount of money, you can test out new ad copy, new ad formats, and new calls to action. You can see which images work, and what type of approach is most successful. By carefully analyzing the metrics, you can come up with an iterative approach to ad buying that will work much more effectively than a “spray and pray” approach.
Prepare in advance
This iterative approach, however, does not imply that you can simply shoot from the hip from the very outset. Most digital marketers recommend that you get your social media house in order before launching a new social media campaign. If you are buying ads on Facebook, for example, make sure your company’s Facebook profile is complete, and that you’re ready to interact with new customers. At the same time, do a quick website audit to make sure everything is ready for customers when they visit your site.
At the same time, it’s worth doing a little competitor research to see what’s already working, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. For example, if you run a restaurant business, and you see that your competitors are attempting to court a particular demographic on social media, or if they are using certain social media platforms to the exclusion of others, that can dramatically improve the results of your business.
Adopt a realistic time frame
Finally, take a realistic approach to social media ads. Except in rare cases, these ad campaigns are rarely successful overnight. There’s a lot of test-and-learn that needs to go on. So, when thinking about timelines for results, be realistic.
Putting it all together, you should know a little about what you’re doing before getting started. That will go a long way in helping you avoid becoming one of those small business owners who grew disillusioned with social media ad campaigns.
