In 2020, advertising spend reduced drastically across all channels. Many marketing budgets were even mercilessly slashed. Nevertheless, meeting targets, converting leads, and reaching potential customers and prospects were still top of the agenda in the advertising industry. Social media is one of the most effective areas to focus your budget, considering cost and impact. This is because social media influences most senior B2B buyers looking to make a purchase.
This article discusses six tips for getting the best ROI from paid social advertising.
Outline Your Goals
Many marketers consider paid advertising as a box they have to tick. But this is a wrong approach. Knowing what you want to achieve through this form of advertising is essential.
Before considering the content or platform, experts at GetUpLead recommend thinking about your objective. For example, do you want to reach many new people and build brand awareness? Do you want engagement on your content or for your audience to take a specific action, like visiting your website or submitting their data?
It is essential to consider your business objectives and KPIs, and how the action you require from your audience fits into those. In addition, what metrics will you use to measure success? You can talk to your colleagues or whoever created the campaign brief to understand their reasoning. You can then make the ad’s design, copy, and message.
Learn To Say No
You should not be afraid to ignore one or more channels if your budget is small or your campaign is more targeted. In addition, stretching your budget just because you want to use all channels is not ideal. Instead, focusing on the channels you are sure your audience is from your previous campaigns is essential.
Before doing anything, consider your objectives and the desired outcome of your campaign. As a B2B company, if your objective is lead generation and most of your audience is on LinkedIn, then it is best to focus your efforts on that platform. If you use video content to generate traffic, Facebook and Instagram are the best channels for you. Summarily, consider your audience and focus your campaign on where they are.
Be Comfortable With Excluding People
It is difficult to reach and engage all your audience with a small budget if the potential audience spans millions of people. Therefore, narrowing your audience and excluding people with lower chances of engaging or converting is ideal. Your campaign manager can estimate the audience size you can reach depending on your chosen targeting method. You can also experiment with different variables to see their effects on your audience size.
Furthermore, knowing your audience is essential. You can do that by consulting personas, looking at analytics, and the peak times. For instance, if you do not operate your service on weekends or evenings, it is best not to advertise your campaigns around that time. Instead, it would be best if you focused on when you can deliver the best customer experience.
Test Continuously
You should run and deliver all your campaigns to at least two different audiences. Because the platforms and activity are constantly changing, making a few tweaks to your testing may help you reach an untapped market. This is ideal even if you already have a tested and tried targeting system.
Nevertheless, avoid being complacent or too comfortable. Even with a small budget, you can split test and turn your audiences on and off throughout your campaign.
Besides audience testing, it is ideal to have three to four variants for your copy and asset for every ad. However, predicting the creative asset that will outperform the other can be challenging. It is, therefore, best to cover all bases. Then, you can use the handy UTM parameters to measure the best one.
Forget The Bidding Hype
Automatic bidding can be pretty tempting. However, you can still win auctions without bidding up to the recommended amount.
Usually, winning bids is not about spending the highest amount of money. It is about measuring contributors like estimated reaction, ad quality, and optimization and their overall value to the targeted audience
You can try bidding below the recommended bid, then see its effects on your forecasted results in terms of leads and clicks. Your bid may be too low if your campaign doesn’t deliver. Fortunately, you can change your bid amount while the campaign is live. So you can keep adding to your bid amount incrementally to enter better auctions. You should also keep testing till you find your sweet spot.
Review Your Analytics
The last tip discussed in this post is reviewing your analytics. You should be able to view the analytics of your previously run ad campaigns in your google analytics and your campaign manager dashboard. Before deciding on the platform or placement, you want to use, monitor where your previous clicks come from. In addition, consider the kind of content that has delivered the most effective traffic.
You can set up UTM parameters to monitor your ad performance in certain placements post-by-post. This way, you can stop poor-performing ads and optimize the better-performing ones. It can also help you focus on where your audience engages with you the most when running future campaigns.
Analytics is essential if you are working with a small budget and helps you prevent waste by investing in the right places.
