Social media advertising is now a must-do for brands who need to compete in our new pay-to-play digital marketing environment. It can help increase brand awareness, engagement with new and existing customers, increase sales and more.
However, even with great research and strategy, results don’t always meet the set goals to deliver ROI. High competition, off-mark targeting, frequent algorithm changes, disengaging copy or creative and more can wreak havoc on a once-winning social campaign. Don’t worry – we can fix it!
Here are four ways to optimize your social media advertising to help reduce overall ad costs and decrease your cost per conversion.
Choose the Right Audience
“Everyone” is not an audience. Proper targeting dramatically reduces your cost per click and leads to overall stronger engagement.
Establish some audience demographics. Where do they live? Try starting in a smaller geographic market and duplicating and expanding strong results into other markets. How old are they? Are you targeting mostly men or women? You can also use interests, job titles, retargeting recent customers and web visitors and more. Look at the data you have in sales or other departments and work to narrow your audience down.
Facebook also provides a barometer to let you know whether your audience might be too broad or specific based on your entered criteria.
Check Your Placements
First, are you on the right platforms. If your audience primarily uses one platform, you should be on it and owning it.
If you’re sure you’re on the right platforms, check out the different areas that your ad is being served. We recommend starting with automatic placements or all placements to test which might bring the best results for you. It also increases ad real estate and helps you stay competitive.
If you find one placement is really driving down your cost, consider investing more time and money into expanding that placement and making it the best it can be.
Increase Your Budget
When it comes to budgeting for social media, there is a “sweet spot.” Meaning, you can be spending too much or too little, and this drives up your ad costs. Your budget can also vary depending on your industry, number of audience touch points needed for results and the size of your audience.
If you’re not getting the results you want but feel your ads are effective, try increasing your budget. More than likely, an increase in budget will increase your strong results.
Test Your Creative
Testing different ads can help you determine what resonates with your audience and prompts them to take an action. Experiment with different ad types, including carousel ads, video, lead ads, boosting posts, etc. to determine what could bring you the most ROI. You can also consider user generated content and testimonials to differentiate yourself from the competition.
There are so many variables at play in an ad, and it can be hard to pinpoint which might be driving up your cost. However, elements you can test include:
- Ad types
- Images/Video
- Ad Copy
- Headlines
- Calls-to-action
- Audience Targeting
- Offers and discounts
- Tone of Voice
Always use more of what works best and discard the things that don’t. Over time, your social media advertising costs should down and your ROI up.
Need help getting your social media advertising costs down? Tribu’s got your back.
