Social media is a great way to advertise your brand and its products and/or services, but being effective can sometimes feel like an impossible challenge.
People use social media platforms for different reasons, and your job is to figure out how to get them to see your ads while they’re on the platform.
Targeting your desired customer can be a bit of an art form, but if you appeal and provide them with a reason to engage, you’ll find that your sales increase. The following strategies are designed to help you become an effective social media advertiser by using solid strategies that help you impress the viewers and make them customers.
Use demographics for better ad targeting
If your product or service is aimed at a specific audience, such as tweens or thirty-somethings, you need to appeal directly to them. Most social media platforms’ advertising division has readily available demographic information, making it easy for you to deliver ads to your ideal customer. In turn, your advertising dollar goes further because it’s reaching the people you want to reach while reducing the number of misses.
Getting your ads in front of the right audience results in increased sales along with social media buzz that boosts your product. Taking the time to define your ideal customer before you start your advertising campaign can pay off nicely.
Know where your intended audience likes to hang out
People like to spend most of their time on one or two social media platforms. Their reasons for their preferences are varied, but the core reasons come down to time and favoritism. For example, TikTok users like how the platform delivers short media bites that they can quickly digest before moving on to the next one. In contrast, Facebook users spend more time on the platform to catch up with friends and family or learn from like-minded people.
Understanding why your audience likes a certain platform over another serves to inform you of where to place your ads. It also gets your product in front of your audience with the least amount of effort because the customer is already there. You don’t have to chase them down across multiple platforms, and you can get more conversions while spending less money.
Publish regularly
One of the reasons why social media has been so successful is the fact it rapidly delivers fresh content. Users get to read about something new, engage in active discussions, and can explore topics in depth during their time on the platform. You don’t necessarily have to publish an ad or deliver content at a fast pace, but you do want to stick to a regular publishing schedule.
Posting regularly helps to inform your audience that you put up several posts on certain days of the week. They’ll be more likely to intentionally look for your posts on those days to check out what’s new. You can also use this pattern to your advantage by teasing a special sale on a day that you don’t post, something that builds excitement and expectation of good things from the customer base.
Create great content
Great content has been the most successful way of making readers into customers since the beginning of advertising. In that vein, the best content is content that’s written with a heartfelt and nuanced tone. The reader is far more likely to make a decision that’s centered on their emotions as opposed to using logic, and compelling writing is key to convincing the reader.
Using AI for creating your content is one way to speed up the process, but you can’t blindly trust it to be factual or exaggerate claims. However, it can help you with writer’s block and help you generate ideas that you can build upon. AI also helps you keep your content fresh and minimize repetition. Always make sure to go over the content with a fine-tooth comb lest your customer base give you a hard time using AI.
Audit your strategy on a regular cycle
The world is always changing, and your advertising and management strategies need to change along with it. There are indeed core concepts to advertising that don’t change much, but people’s tastes and attitudes evolve throughout their lives. This means that a strategy that once worked well and was successful may not work going forward.
Perform regular audits and market research of your campaigns to see how they’re performing. Look for soft spots and analyze them to determine if they’re underperforming due to seasonality, or if tastes are changing. Once you’ve identified the reasons why a particular campaign isn’t working, look into the ways that it can be changed to draw people in again, or decide to give it a complete overhaul.
This can be done on a quarterly or annual basis, depending on your expectations of the ad campaign. However you do it, make sure to check in occasionally to make sure everything is working as intended.
Use tools to help automate routines
Manually posting and monitoring your advertising accounts is a tedious task that eats up your time. Automating these and other processes with a social media scheduling tool watches your brand and helps you save time and effort. The software does all the tracking and monitoring in the background, so you don’t have to pay attention all the time.
The software is trained to detect problems, alert you to negative and positive comments, and let you know how your campaign is performing. This lets you step back from the monitor and focus on other tasks instead. The software sends you an alert when it catches something you want to be aware of, enabling you to respond promptly. Automating your social media advertising and engagement means you don’t have to sit at your computer or stare at your phone to catch a hot post when you least expect it.
Conclusion
Advertising on social media can feel like a lot of work, especially if you want to get the most out of your efforts to sell your products and services. Using the above strategies helps save you time and money while reducing the amount of time you spend on your campaigns. They’ll also help you find your ideal customer, and what works best in terms of getting their attention and stimulating them to buy.
The advertising world is full of useful tools and apps that make it easier for you to stay on top of things. They’ll monitor conversations for certain words, alert you when a campaign is doing well or poorly, and remind you to review your campaigns to see if they need adjustment. Combining your marketing instincts with tools and solid strategies can serve you well and deliver the success you’re after through social media.
About the author
Megan Isola holds a Bachelor of Science in Hospitality and a minor in Business Marketing from Cal State University Chico. She enjoys going to concerts, trying new restaurants, and hanging out with friends.
