Christopher Crawford – Copy Writer at Social Bakers
In 2018, CMOs spent more than 21% of their marketing budget on advertising with 66% of that going to paid social media digital channels. That’s a lot of capital.
Marketing budgets have been decreasing since 2016 and although CMOs are expecting a budget increase in 2019, there’s also an increased expectancy to prove ROI and justify their spend.
The benefits to your brand of having paid social media campaigns are well known: increased reach, engagement, fan growth, and lots more. But what about paid social media advertising strategy?
What about capturing the right data, getting vital insights and using them to make your paid social media more powerful and effective than ever? Done well, it can be a lead-generating machine that saves brands time and reduces wasted budget.
Unfortunately, in 2018, marketers wasted around 25% of their budget on poor strategy decisions or by using the wrong channels to communicate with their audience.
So, how should brands run a successful paid social media advertising strategy?
It’s about getting transparency into your ad data, being able to overview it all with clarity, joining up the dots, and getting the insights you need to have a truly robust and agile strategy that will serve you well into the future.
So what’s the first step?
Is it to increase brand awareness and start conversations? To drive fans to your website? To spend budget with more efficiency? To increase purchases that can be directly attributed to your social efforts?
Once you’ve set your objectives, start defining your core KPIs, the KPIs you’ll refer to when measuring how successful your efforts to achieve your objectives are.
Now, we’re talking about paid social media, so let’s say your objective is to increase ROI from your paid advertising and save budget. So a key KPI to track would then be Cost-per-Click, which you would try to lower by designing ads that are personalized to your audience’s and then targeting those ads more precisely.
Of course you’ll be A/B testing ad designs and copy, targeting, the time of day you serve the ad, etc, trying to find the sweet spot.
And how do you know when you’ve hit the sweet spot? You look at your KPIs and see them heading in the right direction. If you’re doing something right, your KPI results will signpost it for you: “Keep Going This Way”.
You’ll tweak strategy along the way, but hey, that’s what data analysis is for.
Be clear on what your data sources are going to be, and how to measure the data they provide with real transparency.
Too many businesses still struggle with connecting their ad data and seeing the bigger picture. And the bigger, connected picture is always where the brightest, most insightful insights are found.
Stop analyzing data in a silo. See your ad accounts all in one place rather than flicking between native tools and trying to make sense of their isolated data sets. That’s an annoying and unnecessary task, and it increases the potential for making errors.
One of the core challenges facing marketers is proving marketing ROI, and to do that, they need to connect their multi-channel data in one place, then track, measure, and analyze it all together.
In this way, brands can have strategy conversations based on data truths with one eye on their bottom line: ROI.
Managing analysis of ads across multiple channels, manually, and on an individual basis, is a tiring and error-prone undertaking. Some brands have hundreds of ad accounts spread over multiple channels, making it a real challenge to stay on top of them all.
Therefore, it’s vital to have a system in place that allows you to overview accounts together so you can connect the dots and see the full advertising picture before budget is unnecessarily wasted.
Paid advertising is expected to grow from 97.34 billion in 2018 to 122.61 billion dollars by 2021 which is serious capital. It shows that paid advertising is getting bigger and bigger yet some brands are still not tracking and measuring ad performance or driving ad strategy with the same seriousness.
Businesses are missing huge numbers of insights which could make all the different to their advertising strategy and spending.
Do you know how much your company spent on paid social media last year? Honestly, how much do you think was wasted?
And do you think a more streamlined approach to team collaboration would increase smoother sharing of insights, decrease mistakes, and impact your bottom line in a positive way? The short answer is: yes, it will. Read on.
It’s tough to keep local, regional, and international teams aligned on spending when ad budgets are spread across different branches, locations, departments, etc. Communication is difficult and there’s no agility or consistent insight sharing.
Hours and hours are wasted on 1-1 calls and conference calls, which can drain the life force out of anybody or any project. There are more efficient ways to spend your time.
And even worse, stakeholders in different locations are working with myriad currencies which confuses matters even more.
And if teams aren’t working from a single point there’s huge potential for error, bottlenecks, lack of clarity around meeting takeaways, and projects can be too easily put on the backburner.
What a waste of time, energy and money!
But if teams can analyze and oversee ad accounts in the same place, and have their cost-related data in one currency only, then they can also collaborate smoothly and be totally aligned on spending and the actionable insights provided by the connected ad data.
It’s easy to customize analysis too, and break the data down from a variety of perspectives and make comparisons.
Data is instantly visualized for clarity and speedy analysis, which offers lots of fresh strategic insights. For example, audience demographics can be broken down to see which gender or age group is reacting well to your ads.
This is how to get your ads teams actually working as one team – get them working together on one unified place, everyone pulling in the same direction towards having successful paid social media.
But what is success? Is success a standalone entity in business or is it relative to what other brands are achieving? Clue: it’s relative.
