Social advertising is a great way to meet your audience where they are: online. Sophisticated social campaigns can help get your message in front of the right people and help expand your brand’s impact.
But what exactly goes into creating a successful paid social media campaign? Below, Elizabeth Pavlica, vice president of social media strategy, and Andrea Schwartz, managing editor, suggest four important factors to consider when analyzing your current marketing and building out future social campaigns.
What do you want your campaign to do?
This may seem like a no brainer but it’s alarming how many advertisers set up campaigns that don’t actually support their business goals. The first step is to identify the goal of your campaign as it will result in relevant data that helps measure direct success.
If you want to drive traffic to your website, optimizing your campaign for landing page views allows you to track how many people visited your website. From there, you can look as broadly as how many people clicked on your ad, down to when, from where, and on what device. An effective communications audit will identify if your campaigns are set up to meet your goals.
Who is your campaign reaching?
Once your campaign is complete, analyze the demographic and behavioral information about the people who saw it. On Facebook, demographic information includes age, gender, and location – does this match up with your desired target audience? As for behaviors, was your audience more likely to view your ad on mobile or desktop, or what kind of device was used most often?
Deducing this information will help fine-tune the way you communicate moving forward. For example, if your audience is engaging with your ad most often on mobile, create images and videos that work best for a mobile screen so you’re meeting your audience where they are and in a format they expect to see.
Are you taking advantage of tracking tools?
Is your Facebook pixel installed on your website? This is a necessity. It will make tracking behavior on your website as a result of social advertising a breeze.
Is your audience engaged with your content?
Paying attention to key engagement metrics can help determine the type of content your audience is most responsive to. Auditing actions like click-through rates (CTR), reactions, comments and shares can help paint a picture of how your audience responds to the ads in your campaign. More important, however, is whether they completed the goal you set up, whether it’s RSVPing, booking an appointment, making a purchase or submitting an application.
Your social media should be following best practices, especially when you’re spending money on it. Auditing these four factors is just the start of building a strong strategy around social media campaigns, but it’s a good way to find areas for improvement or applause.
Interested in the next step of this audit? Stay tuned for next week’s write-up on why your content is an essential part of a communications audit. If you’d like to be notified when each part of the series is released, contact us with “Communications Audit” as your message and we’ll drop in your inbox with an alert.