With more than 2.7 billion total users, social media is an excellent medium for businesses to reach a massive audience. When used right, it can be an effective and affordable channel to drive traffic to your site. But in spite of its effectiveness, social media is a difficult thing to master. Businesses spend months creating social media content with no significant results. So they conclude that it isn't as effective as it's made out to be. However, the right social media marketing strategy can get you the results that top brands and businesses brag about.
Social media advertising is another powerful tool that allows businesses to advertise directly to their target audience easily and even remarket to people who are already familiar with their brand. That's where having the right marketing strategy comes into play. If you're a business that struggles with hitting your traffic and conversion goals, you may want to consider strategy consulting or marketing operations consulting from experts who can provide personalized advice. This guide will provide marketing tips on how to improve your social media advertising.
How to Ensure a Return on your Social Media Marketing ROI
How to Ensure a Return on your Social Media Marketing ROI
ROI is a term commonly used in business and finance and refers to return on investment. Your social media ROI looks explicitly at the return on investment generated by your social media efforts. Your social ROI looks at whether you are receiving enough value to justify your costs. It's usually calculated in dollars and cents, but the returns and costs of social media are not always expressed as a clear monetary value. Costs can include the time, effort, and resources dedicated to your end goal, while returns are expressed by increased follower counts, engagement, and reach.
If you're putting time, effort, and money into anything, you'll want to know you're getting something worthwhile out of it. Your social media ROI is a vital measurement for your business. It can help identify which social media platforms are best for your goals and help you optimize your social media strategy. For example, if your goal is to generate more leads through a social media campaign, you can track email sign-ups or contact form completions. If you find your campaign was unsuccessful at increasing email sign-ups, it's a good indicator that your investments are not resulting in the returns you want.
How to Calculate Your Social Media Marketing ROI
How to Calculate Your Social Media Marketing ROI
One of the main reasons to evaluate the ROI of social media is to understand if your costs are worth the investment. This is important for determining whether you are generating a positive or negative ROI. Common costs that go into social media marketing include:
- Man-hours
- Place a monetary value on every hour of work spent on social media
- Content creation and development
- Paying employees or hiring freelancers (i.e., writers, graphic designers)
- Social media tools
- Subscription costs for analytics tools, design tools, visual content planners, SEO optimizers, etc.
- Advertising costs
- Are you running Facebook and Instagram ads? How much did they cost per day? How about per campaign?
Once you have a numerical cost associated with each area above, you're ready to calculate your return on investment. There is a simple equation marketers use to calculate their return:
(Earnings – Investment Made) x 100/ Investment Made = Social Media ROI
(Earnings – Investment Made) x 100/ Investment Made = Social Media ROI
Here are the steps to finding out your social media ROI, so you can plug them right numbers into the formula.
Here are the steps to finding out your social media ROI, so you can plug them right numbers into the formula.
- Step One: Define your business goals of using social media
- Step Two: Monitor your metrics and measure impact with analytics
- Step Three: Track how much you're spending on social marketing
Once you've plugged those into the formula, you're left with your social media ROI. This number can be used to inform your future social marketing plans. It's incredibly helpful to have the ROI of social media on hand for stakeholders' meetings, especially for B2C companies where social media can play a vital role in gaining new customers.
The Best Social Media Channels that Boost Ad ROI
The Best Social Media Channels that Boost Ad ROI
Not all social media ads are ROI-friendly. Depending on your audience and campaign, you could waste hundreds of dollars on bad ad formats. When in doubt, stick to these ad platforms to generate more ROI.
For B2B
For B2B
If you run a B2B operation, you want to consider the following social media channels:
Linkedin
Linkedin
Despite only roughly 10% of marketers rating LinkedIn as their top channel for ROI, LinkedIn is an incredibly effective channel for lead generation and nurturing. Over 750 million professionals use LinkedIn for networking, career advancement, and more.'
The platform offers a variety of tools designed to increase your business' ROI, including Sponsored Content, Sponsored Messaging, Text or Video ads, and more. To succeed on the platform, you'll want to create valuable content that resonates with your LinkedIn audience. To ensure you're hitting the mark here, conduct research to determine which types of content perform best on LinkedIn — and which content will perform best with your target audience.
Additionally, try running experiments when you start using LinkedIn's advertising tools. For instance, Cellular IoT Connectivity company Aeris set up an ad plan and tracker to determine which targeting combinations worked best for the brand, which failed, and which generated the highest-quality leads.
Twitter
Twitter
Twitter offers one of the best ways to engage in conversations with potential buyers for B2B brands. B2B brands can use hashtags and trending topics to participate in active conversations and better understand their audience's pain points and needs. The more that your company engages in personalized interactions, the more it will be viewed as a helpful and trusted brand, which will lead to more brand loyalty and retention. Many B2B brands offer customer support accounts on Twitter and strengthen relationships with customers, which can lead to more customer advocacy.
Twitter is also a great resource for social listening and gauging brand sentiment. You can search mentions and industry terms to see what your target audience is saying about your brand and identify content opportunities. On Twitter, it is especially important to develop a distinct brand personality and show authenticity. Jargon and generic business terms are not going to cut it on a platform that thrives on more buzz-worthy content. Show off how your brand is unique and personable to stand out from competitors and generate engagement.
For B2C
For B2C
If you're in the B2C market, you want to consider the following platforms for your social media marketing:
Instagram
With over one billion Instagram users, it's unsurprising that Instagram is second on this list when it comes to ROI. Instagram offers marketers the ability to increase reach, engagement, and sales through a variety of methods, including Instagram Shoppable ads, Stories, branded content, Reels, and more. The platform has proven a viable strategy for businesses. In fact, 90% of users follow a business on Instagram, and 50% of users are more interested in a brand after seeing ads for it on Instagram.
Facebook
With roughly 2.8 billion monthly active users as of 2021, Facebook has an undeniably impressive reach. It also offers advertising opportunities to more than 200 million businesses, making it one of the most popular advertising platforms.
With Facebook, marketers can advertise on a user's News Feed, via Messenger or video, and more. Marketers can also leverage Facebook Lead Ads to encourage Facebook users to fill out a lead generation form without leaving the social platform.
One of the major benefits of Facebook's advertising tools is its segmentation abilities. You can target your ads towards certain audiences depending on interests, demographics, behaviors, or even connect to your business — like whether they've attended one of your events or have friends who've liked your Business Page. These targeting capabilities can help your business reach users who are most likely to purchase your product or service.
YouTube
Video is the future of advertising. If you've already invested in video ads, make sure you're promoting them on YouTube. But YouTube offers a handful of ad formats; which ones should you choose? While they all have merit, the most promising format from an ROI perspective is YouTube's Non-Skippable Ads. These ads can be 5-20 seconds long, and users must watch them see their content. It's a little annoying from a UX perspective, but since users can't skip this content, you can rest assured that they'll see your ad in its entirety. But remember, your ad still needs to be engaging and entertaining; these users are on YouTube to have fun, after all. Keep things light and personable, so it doesn't feel like you're holding users hostage with spammy video ads.
How to Boost Social Media Conversions
How to Boost Social Media Conversions
We've seen some reasons why social media should be part of your marketing strategy. Now, let's look at tips to improve your social media conversion rates.
Highlight and solve problems for audiences
Highlight and solve problems for audiences
People constantly struggle with uncertainties, fears, and doubts on a daily basis. The lack of information is the biggest reason why people face problems. Solving problems is the best way you can attract audiences and boost conversions. You need to find issues and present your business as a solution. This should be done with a genuine sense of providing help. More people will start following your brand on social media if you get this right on a long-term basis. And that will turn into a higher rate of conversions.
Optimize eCommerce landing pages
Optimize eCommerce landing pages
Once the readers are hooked to social media, they will naturally want to explore more about the brand's website. If the brand is into online retail, they would expect a seamless and fulfilling user experience. For this reason, it makes sense to get customized user and mobile-friendly landing web pages with the help of extensions and CMS like Magento and optimize it for user experience, searchability, images, product descriptions, navigation, site speed, security, responsiveness, shipping, and cart functionality; you can use extensions and optimize landing pages for better conversation. This way, shoppers who are attracted by the social media forums can carry on their shopping on the eCommerce website and help the brand to generate revenues via online retail.
Smartly schedule interactions on social media
Smartly schedule interactions on social media
Social media gives you worldwide exposure in terms of followers. But the same exposure presents difficulties when you want to interact with your audiences. There are different time zones, which require a smart organization of social media interactions, webinars, and live videos. You need to analyze and find a time period during which most of your followers stay online. These are known as peak hours, and they change depending on the time zones you target on social media.
Another important aspect is the consistency of interaction. You can interact only once a week, but you should skip a week or two in between. Decide regular and consistent time periods for every week. This is possible with various automated tools to post content. Plus, you can manually interact to create loyalty and strong relationship. This helps in boosting conversions.
Find a way to repurpose and re-post content
Find a way to repurpose and re-post content
There is a vast community of followers on social media. You expect all of them to see your content with a single post. That is why systematic scheduling is important. But at the same time, you don't want to present the same content to the same audience group. In that case, you can repurpose your content and make it unique before sharing. For example, you can share a blog post with a simple tagline in the beginning. But then, try adding more questions related to that post. This will attract more people.
Follow channel-based optimization
Follow channel-based optimization
All social media channels work differently. The priority based on text, images, and videos changes with respect to the platform you choose. That's why you have to become aware of the standard optimization techniques for each channel you want to target. For example, the strength of hashtags (#) is outstanding on Twitter. And, you can win a lot of impressions with images on Pinterest or Instagram. Knowing all this, you can optimize your messages according to the platform and win maximum rewards.
Become authoritative and trusted
Become authoritative and trusted
Random brands come and easily fade away on social media. This is because those brands fail to win the trust of people. You have to be authoritative with the quality of presence you acquire on social media. It all starts with high-quality content, which audiences can relate to. Plus, you need to stay away from irritating your followers with too many pitches. Consistency is more important than the frequency of posting content. Win audiences with your ability to provide quality solutions and stay available to resolve their problems. Provide two-way communication, as it is the whole point of social media. Then, you can expect more conversions with your social media efforts.
Use data analytics to modify your approach
Use data analytics to modify your approach
Social media platforms offer great insights regarding performance. You can use these insights to boost your conversions. For instance, you can track the range of your content on social media. The number of likes, shares, and comments helps find audiences' interests. Data monitoring gives you a chance to ensure a boost in terms of marketing quality gradually. This way, you can modify your approach and get more conversions.
Pros and cons of social media advertising
Pros and cons of social media advertising
Social media marketing is not just limited to enterprises. It is now extensively used by small businesses that look for cost-effective options to add to their marketing blend. Before you make social media advertising a part of your existing business marketing strategy, it is important to learn about the pros and cons of social media channels that are available today.
Pros of Using Social Media Advertising:
Pros of Using Social Media Advertising:
Best way to increase engagement
Social media marketing is a profitable and highly-utilized form of online advertising used in today's perspective. It is a surefire means to build and enhance brand awareness and engagement for the business.
Offer brand-building opportunities
From Facebook and Twitter to Snapchat and Instagram, key social media networks are getting exponentially popular day by day. This mode of advertising has opened an exciting world of brand-building opportunities. It has continuously evolved to provide exceptional value and convenient to use marketing methods for varied types of businesses.
Creates long-term business relationships
Professional and business-oriented networks like LinkedIn aims to create essential B2C, P2P, and B2B connections. It helps in introducing users to distinctive brands with less urgency and sales pressure. In this way, social media advertising fosters long-term relationships with its customers.
Cost-Effectiveness
Social media marketing follows a PPC or pay-per-click model. It implies that you need to pay only when users perform the action that you want them to take. This can either be filling out a sales lead form or clicking through a web page.
Supporting Content
Along with paid social media advertising, you can even be sharing and posting various types of content such as videos, website links, and photos through free accounts on social media websites. This will help you strengthen your messaging and effectively reach your targeted business audience.
Targeting
With this mode of advertising, you can easily put across your business message to the niche you want. Tools like distinctive landing web pages and hashtags make your promotions and messaging a lot more pertinent, lucrative, and fixated. Social media advertising allows its users to be in full control of who views your advertisements. This saves your effort, time, and money. Along with gender, age, relationship to the business, and political affiliation, with social media advertising, you can easily target interests, personality types, hobbies, homeowner status, and a lot more.
Develop Followers and Brand Loyalty
In place of sales pitching and asking to carry out a sales transaction, social media marketing strategies allow users to communicate, foster loyalty, and gain confidence. All this assists a business in generating revenue easily.
Easy to measure your business success
There are several ways in which a business can create engagement on social media. Some of them are likes, tweets, comments, downloads, retweets, posts, and shares. These ways are simpler for tracking the business progress and also effective in calculating the success of the brand's reach.
Cons of Using Social Media Advertising:
Cons of Using Social Media Advertising:
Competition
Competition
Due to the enormous potential of social media for the expansion of a business, there is seen a lot of competition over there. Looking at this intense contest among businesses requires a business to either invest more effort or time to develop compelling and distinctive content.
Constant Monitoring
Constant Monitoring
Social media advertising needs regular supervision and monitoring. For a business to successfully engage with clients, it needs to be prompt in answering their queries and feedback. It should consistently post enriching digital content that will get it noticed on the web. It is needed that a business dedicates a good portion of time to the upkeep of social media advertisements.
Education
Education
Everything that one sees on social media is not true. There is a possibility that the details you find on these channels are not right. This results in misinformation. There are also chances of your posts getting misinterpreted, a drastic rise in cost per click, or failing to read your audience's mind correctly.
Level Up Your Social Media Advertising
Level Up Your Social Media Advertising
Now that you know what social media is doing for you, you're primed to become a social media marketing genius. With the tips and tricks above, you're sure to increase traffic and conversions and send those sales numbers soaring. Universal Creative Solutions offers strategy consulting and marketing operations consulting to help you develop and optimize your social media advertising strategy. Whether you're a business that hasn't yet taken advantage of social media advertising or you aren't getting the results you're looking for, we're here to help. Schedule a free consultation with us today!
