Social media advertising isn’t going away any time soon, but a lot is changing – from Apple’s iOS 14 update to Facebook’s monopoly trouble with the Federal Trade Commission. Here are some of our big picture takeaways as you plan your social media advertising strategy this year.
Make the case for social media advertising
Imagine you’re driving on I-64, heading west for a quiet weekend in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, and you see a billboard. That billboard gets thousands of impressions a day, but there is no control over who those impressions belong to. But through social media advertising, you can create dozens of billboards for a fraction of the cost, and you can dictate that only people between the ages of 25-45, with a college degree and an interest in dogs can see them. This is why you advertise on social media. Better control of your dollars, serving up your message to the people most likely to need your product or service.
Please, stop boosting.
I cringe when I hear clients say that they boost posts. Unless you have Facebook Business Manager set-up, boosting posts is about as effective as throwing a fifty in the air and hoping the right person finds it. Boosting a post means you take something you published organically and you add some ad dollars behind it to get it to a narrow audience. With Business Manager, you could do the same thing – pull an organic post into a pot of money – but you could also customize and tailor that post and serve it to custom audiences – for example, people who have interacted with a video you posted last week.
Social media advertising should align with the Buyer’s Journey.
It is marketing after all. When you go to create a campaign, you set a goal at the very beginning – whether its traffic, conversions or page likes. These goals fit in the Awareness, Consideration and Decision steps of the Buyer’s Journey, and once you select a goal, everything within that campaign should reflect where an individual is in the Buyer’s Journey – from the images you use, to the copy you write, to the call-to-action you pair with it all.
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For close to two decades, Hodges has been helping clients tell their stories and enhance their reputations, and along the way, we’ve developed a reputation of our own. We’re an agency that gets results. An agency where there are no surprises. A place that cares as much about your success as you do. Our counsel is honest, transparent and insightful, at least we like to think so. It’s one of the reasons our client relationships last so long.
