Social Media Advertising Tips: 7 Easy Steps to Profitable Results

When used the right way, social media can be a powerful tool for increasing your revenue and building your reputation online.

Popular social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest have not only taken into account the communication and socialization needs of individuals.

But they continuously innovate their features to address the marketing needs of businesses that use social media to get more customers or drive sales.

Social media has helped leverage many digital marketing campaigns. Companies, particularly start-ups, use social media to promote their products and services while projecting a trustworthy and reliable image to attract a target client base.

These companies create their own business profiles or pages on various social media sites, where they can set up ads that can be customised, based on their preferences.

Businesses determine their target demographics by specifying the gender, age group and location they want their ads to be exposed to. Social media ads run on a schedule at a frequency of your choosing.

In 2017, revenue earned from social network advertising was a whopping 41 billion USD worldwide. That’s how lucrative and profitable social media ads are.

Unfortunately, just because you know how to set up an advertisement doesn’t mean you will already get through to your clients or get the profit you need.

While advertising helps generate revenue, it is far more important to set up an effective social media ad campaign – one that attracts the right prospects and turns them into actual clients.

Here are 7 social media advertising tips to make your social media ads more effective:

1. Define Your Advertising Goals and Objectives

Regardless of your level of expertise, you are capable of driving business growth through social media ads.

But such capability will remain just that unless you execute a workable plan. Set your own expectations straight and ask yourself why you want to run this advertising campaign.

What are your goals? What do you hope to achieve in the long run?

2. Set a Workable Budget

Since you have chosen to promote your company or your products and services through advertising, this means you are willing to pay a certain amount to get results.

How much are you willing to spend and for how long?

Social media ads adopt a pay-per-click system, so budget is crucial and the amount you’re willing to spend will affect the length and frequency of your ad campaign.

3. Social Media Advertising Tips: Know Your Target Audience

You also need to have a clear idea of your target audience. You can’t just advertise to random people, a number of which may not be interested in what you have to offer.

Which age group, gender or region is likely to respond to your ad?

For instance, if you’re selling skincare products for women manufactured in your hometown, young adult and working women in your local community are the most plausible target audience for such products.

Set your ads with this market in mind.

4. Identify the Best Social Networks for Your Ad Placements

There are hundreds of social networks out there and you need to choose the ones that will give you the kind of growth your business needs.

Below are popular social networks that are ideal for marketing any type of business. The following information will help you decide where to place your ads:

Facebook:

Date Founded:     2004

Users: 2 billion

Key Features:

• News Feed
• Like/Reaction Buttons
• Share Button
• Groups
• Events
• Pages for People and Businesses
• Trends

Demographics:

• 83% of active users are outside of the United States and Canada
• 53% of female Internet users have Facebook
• 47% of male Internet users have Facebook
• 87% of users belong to the 18-29 age group
• 74% of users are college graduates
• 84% of adults make less than $30,000
• 40 million SMEs have an active business page on Facebook
• Third quarter ad revenue was an impressive $4.7 billion
• Available in 101 languages
• Facebook’s current stock exchange valuation is $245 billion

Twitter:

Date Founded:      2006

Users:   330 million

Key Features:        

• 280-Character Posts
• Hashtags
• Trends
• Retweets
• Favorites

Demographics:

• Almost 80% of accounts are US-based
• 24 % of male Internet users have Twitter accounts
• 21 % of female Internet users have Twitter accounts
• 18-29 age group comprises 37% of Twitter users
• 30-49 age group comprises 25% of Twitter users
• 56% of users have a yearly income of $50,000 above
• 91 % year-over-year ad engagements
• $545 million year-over-year ad revenue
• Twitter is valued at $16 B

Instagram

Date Founded:    2010

Users:      800 million

Key Features:

• Image filters
• Heart button
• Videos (with editing features)
• Instagram stories
• Hashtags

Demographics:

• 80% of users are outside the U.S.
• 59% of Instagram users are aged 18-29
• More female users (38%) than males (26%)
• 32% teens consider Instagram as better than other social networking sites
• 32% users attended college or have graduated college
• 70.7 percent of businesses (SMEs and large companies) in the U.S. use Instagram
• 48% of U.S. brands actively promote on Instagram
• 3.64 billion ad revenue from global mobile advertising in 2017
• Ad recall 2.8 times higher than the norm
• Valued at $35 billion

Pinterest

Date Founded:  2010

Users:     175 million

Key Features:

• Image, video and GIF Pinning
• Boards
• Following
• Repins
• Exploring other pins/boards

Demographics:

• 80 million users are non-U.S. residents
• 84% of users open the site on multiple devices
• 67% of users are under 40 years old
• 93% of users intend to make a purchase
• 87% have made a purchase via Pinterest
• 72% use Pinterest as a guide for offline purchases
• 70% of ad sales from promoted pins were driven by new customers
• 40% of global marketers use Pinterest
• Valued at $3.8 billion

5. Understand User Engagement Metrics

A strong ad copy and quality images are certainly important factors for getting more ad clicks.

But knowing when users are active, and at what time of the day, can give your advertisement an edge over advertisers who ignore user engagement patterns.

There’s a science behind it. For instance, Pinterest pins have the most user engagement on Saturdays between 8 and 11 p.m.

While Facebook posts have a high average click-through on Weekdays from 1 to 4 p.m. This is when most young professionals are still at work.

Twitter engagement is similar to Facebook, but with a 12-hour peak (from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.) every Monday to Thursday.

Instagram activities peak over the weekends, so that’s the best time to run ads in this platform.

6. Target Multiple Devices

Where devices are concerned, your social media marketing should cover as much ground as possible. Set your campaigns to display on multiple devices – desktop, mobile and tablet.

Ad clicks from mobile users have increased drastically in the last few years. 48.9% of Google ad clicks, as per recent statistics, come from smart phones.

7. Select the Most Responsive Type of Ad

Facebook and Instagram allow for different types of ads. Some ads are purely image-based while others are in video format.

Choose which type of ad will generate maximum engagement and help market your business the most. Is an image-type ad more effective than a video ad?

You may conduct a survey to know what your target market thinks.

Conclusion

Take note of these 7 social media advertising tips and you’ll be able to effectively use ads to grow your business.

Remember that defining your goals, setting the right budget, knowing your audience is crucial. Having the right social media channels and understanding user behaviour is also extremely important.

Not to mention, being ad-friendly to any device user and having a responsive ad type can make a huge difference in your social media ad campaign.