Drive More Traffic And Leads Using Social Ads

With billions of active users across all social media platforms, business owners can leverage their online presence to drive more traffic and leads using social ad campaigns. Since each business’s target audience drives the delivery of these ads, conversion rates tend to increase as well with smart use of social media advertisements. Each social media platform offers new opportunities to drive brand loyalty and increase your business revenues across the board. The way you choose to utilize social ads will determine your success in this realm. Allow this guide to help prepare you for your successful social media marketing journey.

Identify Your Goals And Objectives

Your marketing goals and objectives will help direct your efforts in creating effective social ad campaigns. You can start with an overarching goal of increasing revenues steadily each month, but identifying key metrics to improve will help you to better track your social ad marketing success.

Looking to increase your total monthly social media referrals is a great place to start. You may look at improving the total number of new and repeat visitors to your site, for example, to measurably increase traffic.

Other key performance indicators you may choose to improve include:

• Number of leads
• Bounce rate
• Conversion rate
• Time on site
• Sessions per user
• Pages viewed per session

Always measure as many performance indicators as you can for your website and social media presence in case you want to track them later on. In the beginning, simply focus on two or three at a time to see if you can create social ads that have a measurable effect on their performance.

Research And Pinpoint Your Target Audience

Without knowing who your target audience actually is, you cannot drive effective ads their way. By identifying your target audience, you can inform them about products and services they are most likely to enjoy and use in their everyday lives.

If you have been tracking your sales data, you can easily pinpoint your target audience. Simply look at the demographic information you have access to and create your customer profiles. These profiles sum up your target audiences’ buyer persona with a clear picture of their pain points and purchase habits.

Once you create your buyer personas, look at their online activity and age information. Current social media platforms typically have a strong divide among generations. Younger groups tend to favor Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, while older generations can be found on Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest.

You can further push your ads toward your target audience by sending them out when your potential leads are most likely to be active online, though this varies by platform as well. Ads sent out midday during the workweek perform well on Facebook, while the sweet spot for user engagement on Twitter is before noon on Friday through Sunday. By posting your targeted ads when your audience is most active, you can improve engagement to drive traffic to your site and boost your conversion rates.

Test Multiple Creatives

As ad performance depends on a wide range of variables, including your industry, business size and customer base, you must test multiple creatives to see where your true success lies. You can run tandem or split marketing tests on your social ads to determine which ones perform the best. Once you find your perfect formula, you can use the information to create more ads along the same vein.

With each test, you may change the target audience focus, placements and creative elements within the social ads to optimize their performance. Make sure that you only change your creatives by one variable, however, to effectively analyze the success of your ads.

If you choose to run tandem social ads with a single variable change, only release two to three at a time, so you can effectively track their performance. Otherwise, you run the risk of missing key performance indicators that reveal the most successful elements in your social media advertisements.

Utilize Your Data

Once you have a few social ad campaigns to analyze, go back to your key performance indicators and look for signs of improvement. You can utilize your collected campaign data to make graphs and charts that can help reveal ad performance trends. Pay particular attention to your ad results, reach, frequency and clicks to see how to improve your future social ad campaigns.

If you notice any underperforming metrics in your results, you can use that information to improve upon your ad campaigns. A low click through rate, for example, often indicates that your ad content did not resonate with those who viewed it. You either need to adjust your target audience or ad content to improve upon this metric.

A high frequency rate, on the other hand, indicates that your ads show up in front of the same users far too often. To fix this metric, you may need to expand your target audience or decrease your ad frequency. When you utilize your data to tell the story of your social ad campaign success, you can easily optimize your ads to reach your goals and objectives.

Leverage Retargeting

By leveraging retargeting, you can continually re-engage your target audience to drive repeat visits to your social media accounts and website. With the continual engagement of your target audience, you increase your ability to convert those visits into sales. Users do not typically finalize their purchase with their first point of contact with a company. Subsequent visits are usually necessary to create trust and build up the product or service as the key solution to your client’s pain points.

To effectively leverage retargeting, you must utilize social ads to stay at the forefront of your target audience’s mind. For example, you can set your ads to appear when your target audience visits a competitor’s site or social media account. You may also send ads through when site visits fail to convert into sales to drive the user back to your website for a second try. By determining how often the ads go out, and what triggers their delivery, you can effectively encourage visitors to return to your site and complete their purchase.

In this fast-paced, modern world, your marketing success hinges on your dedication to driving traffic and leads using social ads. Start your journey toward improved social ad campaign performance by utilizing the tips above and continually honing your approach.