Paid Social Media ads are a popular choice for those new to online marketing, but even though 90% of marketers use them, some struggle to achieve positive conversion rates. If you’re wondering why your Social Media Ads aren’t working, it comes down to the recent changes to the Apple IOS update and also the common mistakes most businesses make when running ads.
Just know that you are not alone, there are plenty of cases and studies that have found Social Media marketing isn’t an easy task, nor is it perfect every time. There comes with it a lot of trial and error and more importantly consistency. Like with most Marketing strategies.
The thing to note though to any Social Media advertising, there is always room to improve, so let’s explore these options and how you can overcome all your hurdles.
1. Determine your objectives
Remember even if you are not an expert in Marketing, you need to have a Marketing objective. This is the perfect opportunity to determine what you really want to achieve here – awareness, reach or maybe just some simple sign ups. Your objective is key when you are throwing your money into the Social Media ads beast.
2. Who are you targeting?
This is a BIG one, because as a consumer I am often getting ads that are targeting me – yes, because I like going to spas or I am a mum, but this company might be in a different state and not easily accessible.
I actually once DM’d a Beauty Therapist in Perth to let them know I was receiving their ads and I was based in Sydney. And the response I got proved that people aren’t really thinking about the right audience. Their response was, “Some of our customers have come from Sydney, so we thought that other people alike might want a voucher for the future”. Again, that is probably what most companies were thinking.
Let’s break it down – I am in SYDNEY, and their business is in PERTH, statistically the odds are about 1 in a million that I am going to go to PERTH in the next 6 months. Mmmmmmm????
So logically wouldn’t it have been better to target the 5000 people who live up the road, and not ‘some’ of your customers that live 3,297kms away?
Facebook for example allows you to create a custom audience. More than 2 billion people use Facebook every day, so it is all about finding the right people, not the fact that Facebook doesn’t have the reach. A major benefit of Facebook Ads is their feature to specifically target your ads to a highly relevant audience. This should generate interest, prompting them to click through to the designated landing pages etc.
What is the point of an impressive advertisement if it is displayed to individuals who have no interest in it? You don’t want tire kickers, you want real ROI results.
Start off by creating a buyer’s avatar. Write down their age, location, interests, hobbies and where they work. Facebook has all these features to pick from, but you need to make sure that you have it set in stone before you start the campaigns.
3. Decide on the priority platforms
When making your Social Media ads, it is easy to pick Facebook because it is the most commonly known, but at the moment with Social Media there are so many other really great platforms that might appeal to your target market.
Let’s look at your business and the platforms:
- Sales-based, heavily needing text and imagery – Facebook and Instagram
- Demo-based, relies on showing the product – Facebook, TikTok
- Inspiration-based, rely on inspiring people to see more – Instagram, Pinterest, Tiktok
- Information based, rely on people seeking more information or listening to it over and over again – Youtube
Your platform is key to the best results, you can’t be looking at Facebook if you are a podcaster or maybe you are a motivational coach and want people to see your work, no they want more information, they want the visuals, they want details.
4. You need a click-worthy ad.
I know this one is obvious, but it is still one of the biggest mistakes people make. Anything can be made into an ad, as long as it abides by the platform’s community and advertising policies, then it is fine, but in reality, it is REALLY HARD to create the best ad to grab their (your target audience’s) attention.
To effectively capture your audience’s attention on Facebook and Instagram, it’s imperative to create visually appealing ads. If you do not have a lot of experience in creating ads, you might want to study what other advertisers are doing or even check on competitors. Don’t feel like you are copying people, as most marketing ideas are not unique, they are what works.
Create swipe files, slideshows, a combination of video and text, and refresh what you have. Just make it clear, to the point, and also state the facts. You have 3 seconds to make it count.
5. Allocate a budget
I know the budget is hard to determine, when you don’t know what the magic amount is, but you need a budget every month, for at least 6 months, for any ads to work. That’s not saying that after 6 months you will get results, you might get it in 2, but what I am saying is your budget means that you will spend the time making sure that it will work. You will check the results, start looking at what others are doing and then twerk yours as well, it will be on your mind now that you have committed to advertising.
Commitment is the key and setting a budget will help with this.
6. Leveraging other areas in marketing
Relying on Social Media ads isn’t going to always work unless you are looking at other marketing strategies. Most Social Media ads are seen as a gateway to either get your information for email marketing or SMS, or it is about getting you to their website.
So A – do you have an email marketing platform that you are using, B – Do you use SMS facilities and C – do you have a website. If you answered Yes to one of those, then you need to make sure that you have the other two. If you answered No to all, then we need to talk!
Your Social Media campaign will mean nothing if you are not utilizing other areas of your marketing business. The whole idea of ads is to ensure that you are getting them to a destination to purchase or a destination to grab their information to use later on.
You have to create a sales funnel for your whole campaign. The Social Media campaign could be at the top, but what is the rest of the funnel going to hold?
The other factor to consider is whether you are selecting the right CTA or sending them to the right landing page of your website. There are of course a few factors you need to be thinking about and also consider when creating an ad.
If you get this wrong, it does promote a sense of mistrust to the consumer, and it is also a wasted impression. You need to make sure that the action that you want the consumer to take will help in creating a lasting impression in a positive light and getting the result you wanted.
7. Experimenting and Consistency
Testing and experimenting play a crucial role in rectifying your ROI in Social Media Ad campaigns. Even the best Social Media experts in paid traffic struggle to create successful ads from the start, requiring a testing phase to identify the best-performing ad for optimal results.
When it comes to your own campaigns, consider creating multiple variations of the same ad. They call these split campaigns.
Create the same ad and slightly change the copy and image and see which one works better. You may have to do this several times and you may have to do it over a 12-month period. But the results will give you a clear indication of what is going to work for your target market.
And so this is where consistency comes in, you can’t stop this, and then come back to this experimenting later. The longer you experiment the closer you get to the results you want.
To end
Social Media Ads are the easiest and quickest way to increase traffic numbers to your website or create sales conversions.
However, if you have yet to see any clear results from your investment, you are making a lot of common mistakes that can be easily fixed if you follow the steps above.
Just remember this form of Marketing still needs some effort and also consistency to achieve the results that you want.
To discuss your Social Media strategy or some advice about Social Media, email Chrissy at chrissy@creativelittlesoul.com.au.