Perhaps you’ve reached a point where you feel you’ve reached the limit of what you can do with your existing newsletter subscribers and social media followers? Maybe it’s time to take your marketing efforts to the next level. By using paid social strategies like Facebook or Twitter ads, you can introduce your brand to a new audience and give it the boost it deserves for your latest launch.
Whether you are new to content marketing or trying to reinvent your brand for a new era, building a wide audience is crucial. Most don’t have a substantial portion of their industry subscribed to their newsletter. Paid social promotion can give your marketing efforts some traction in the beginning, to guide people to your weekly blog as well as to your latest projects. Many platforms allow you to schedule ahead so when time is available, you craft your promotions and set them up on your content calendar. When crafting your plan, consider these best practices for using social ads:
Create Eye-Catching Content
You may have noticed that you see a lot of video content these days, particularly on social media venues. By the year 2021, it’s projected that over 80% of all consumer internet traffic will be video. As an advertiser, you might want to get in on this rising trend and use a video as a teaser. If done well, it will not only look great and catch the eye, it will leave the impression that you’re a leader in your field.
The idea is to create 20 to 60-second videos with captions and auto-play. These can be animations, interview style videos, or talking head videos used to attract interest to your latest promotions. One of your first thoughts may be about cost. Paying for Facebook ads is already an expense without adding the cost of developing a video on top of it. Isn’t it costly to produce such animations and ads? The good news is that there are many wonderful tools out there to help keep costs down.
- Bigvu.tv
- Loom
- Promo by Sidely
- Soapbox by Wistia
- Shakr
Create a Lookalike Audience
One tactic that’s growing in popularity in content marketing and social media ads is the creation of a lookalike audience from your very best clients. There are a couple of ways this might be accomplished. First, you can use a pixel, Facebook pixel, or a pixel from another network on your website to track repeat visitors. The idea is to watch those who’ve been to your website a number of times or those you can identify as having purchased a minimum of products or services.
Also study your email list. Pay attention to the emails of those customers who have purchased items at your site or gather the emails of those we identify as opening your emails often, those who apparently enjoy your content.
Regardless of what criteria was used, upload those identified clients into a custom set to create the lookalike audience. Test with additional filters from the beginning with details that are important to you. Maybe it matters what their average household income is? Perhaps you want to know what academic level they reached or what additional interests they have? Filtering down to a smaller audience set will help you close in on your ideal target audience and with some.
Revisiting Non-Subscribers
One final content strategy you might consider is revisiting your non-subscribers. Revisiting those that your messaging didn’t influence is a great opportunity to refine your strategy. When targeting your non-subscribers, run some tests to guide your efforts.
Test New Types of Messages
Just because one type of traditional ad didn’t get someone’s attention, doesn’t mean a different type of ad will also fail. Are they looking for something different? Do they want information you offer as self-help? Or do they want a more educational experience? By continually testing different types of messages and presentations, you’ll eventually find a way to break through to even the toughest non-subscribers.
Does It Work On the Site?
Also remember that just because a given campaign wasn’t successful on your social media platforms doesn’t mean it won’t work on your website. Spot test campaigns on both your social media and website and keep a close eye on the results.
Conclusion
In using paid social within your search marketing, you can boost your reach and gain authority. Paid social consistently seems to provide reliable results. When you’re starting an enterprise from scratch, or trying to reinvent a business that was once successful, it can be
Check out our recent social media and PR work via our case studies.