If you feel your organic content isn’t being seen by the right audience type, it might be time to consider paid social. Paid ads allow you to be very specific with your targeting and, alongside your organic content strategy, is a great way to boost brand awareness, grow your audience and drive more sales.
However, before you start running your paid campaigns, make sure you follow these 8 must-do tips:
Decide which platform you’re going to use if you utilise multi-channels
Be very clear on your desired outcomes
Align your campaigns to a bigger business initiative i.e. a product launch
Research competitor ads and get some inspiration for what works well
Spend time getting the creatives, copy and targeting right
Test your campaigns with a small budget
Track your paid campaigns with the analytics
Learn from your results and tweak your targeting, creatives, CTA etc.
1.Decide which platform you’re going to use if you utilise multi-channels.
If you are running paid ads for the first time, we’d recommend not doing too much at once and choosing the one platform where you have the most engaged audience, and get the most audience interactions.
2. Be very clear on your desired outcomes.
In short, what goal will running paid ads help you achieve? Drive more subscriptions signups or build awareness around a new launch? It’s important to be clear from the outset, as this will determine creatives, messaging and the metrics you track.
3. Align your campaigns to a bigger business initiative i.e. a product launch.
Paid ads should be part of your overall marketing strategy and linked to a goal or business objective. Don’t use paid ads as a knee-jerk reaction to a drop in an engagement or follower numbers.
4. Research competitor ads and get some inspiration for what works well.
If you are new to paid ads, to help you get a feel for what a great ad looks like and what not to do, it’s worth spending some time getting inspiration from what other businesses are doing, but be sure to look at a broad range of brands from household names to smaller and niche brands. You can search for competitor ads, run on Meta Platforms, in the Meta Ads Library.
5. Launch multiple creative variations.
For first timers, there’s likely to be some fine tuning to ensure the creative, messaging and call to actions (CTAs) land. Ensure you know the ads’ specs, create at least 4 creative variations, and plan your CTAs and messaging. By launching different creatives at once, you can let the algorithm get to work and see what works best.
6. Test your campaigns with a small budget.
You shouldn’t just run a campaign and hope for the best. Before you hit publish on your paid ads, use a small budget to test before the big launch. This can help avoid your whole budget being eaten up by creatives or messaging that just doesn’t hit the mark with your audience. This gives you the opportunity to refine the creatives, messaging and CTAs and fine tune the targeting; the bonus being you can still generate new signups or gain new followers (or whatever your goal is) during this process.
7. Track your paid campaigns with the analytics.
It’s important to track and measure your paid campaigns so you understand how successful they were and what you can do to improve future campaigns and the return on investment (ROI), but also compare results with organic social media content. You can utilise the analytics tools from the platform you used to run your campaign, but you can layer this with more insightful analytics from social media management platforms such as Sprout Social or Hootsuite.
8. Learn from your results.
Running ads is not a set and forget process, at least it shouldn’t be. It’s unlikely you’ll get it spot-on first time, and most brands optimise their ad creatives and messaging through multiple iterations. This is where your analytics are important. Doing a deep-dive into your analytics will help you identify further opportunities to optimise future campaigns and improve on performance. Be prepared to experiment with your creatives, but do so with patience and intent.