How To Successfully Advertise On Social Media With A Small Budget
If you think social media is only good for updating the world on how your adorable puppy is doing or constantly sharing your utter contempt for the final season of Game of Thrones, you’re truly missing out! For businesses of all services and sizes, social media is an opportunity to find, connect, and provide for customers you wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do business with. Plus, you don’t have the marketing budget of a corporate tycoon like Amazon or Coca-Cola to relish the power of social media advertising.
There are plenty of small budget social media campaigns that can be utilized through Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and other platforms that will allow your business to learn more about your target audience while producing successful and measurable results. No matter what the size of your marketing budget is, odds are you can reap the ROI benefits through a custom, focused, and accommodating social media marketing plan.
Let’s take a look at some simple steps you can follow to create a successful social media advertising campaign with virtually any budget!
Step 1: Establish Your Goals
Facebook is the world’s most used social media platform, with over 2.6 billion active users.
Facebook is certainly the dominating social media platform of choice for people all around the world. While the potential to tap into a seemingly infinite number of target audiences is extremely high, at the end of the day, a social media ad campaign on Facebook is only as strong as the strategy behind it.
That being said, it’s important to know what you wish to achieve with your social media ad campaign. Identifying specific goals will allow you to select the right audience, connect with that audience, and measure the performance of your campaigns. Facebook offers a variety of objectives to advertisers, which fall into the following categories of awareness, leads, and conversions.
- Awareness | To begin generating interest and increasing brand awareness of your business, Facebook offers Brand Awareness objectives intended to help your company reach new and relevant audiences and enlighten them to what makes your product or service unique and applicable to them.
- Consideration (Leads) | This approach is intended to create more intrigue about your brand, encouraging consumers to seek out more information regarding your business. This goal seeks to drive traffic to your website, encourage engagement with your posts, collect leads using a contact form, and more.
- Conversions | When you want to convert those leads into concrete sales, this is the objective to pursue. This objective will work toward going straight to the source of your target audience, converting their intrigue into buying your product or utilizing your services.
Once you’ve identified your goals, it’ll be easier to assess the best course of action in regard to social media ad campaigning and will also help you better measure and evaluate the success of your marketing efforts.
Step 2: Know Your Audience
Targeting Facebook ads using custom audiences can result in a lower cost-per-click.
Once you’ve specified which objectives align the best with your company’s goals, it’s time to implement your social media marketing strategy to find your target audience. To seek out the most relevant and appropriate target audience for your business, start zeroing in on a more specific audience that will relate more to your product or service.
Facebook offers a variety of different targeting options to help you create audiences for your ad campaigns. The more distinct and defined your desired audience is, the better your social media ad campaign can be at:
- Connecting with the people who are most likely to take action.
- Tailoring your content to connect with that audience.
- Determining whether your campaign is performing well and making adjustments
Step 3: Promote Only Your Best Content
Images account for 75-90% of Facebook advertising performance.
Just because you’ve established a definitive objective and clear path toward engaging your target audience doesn’t mean consumers will merely flock to your ad campaign and website. As with all forms of advertising, relevant and high-quality content is essential to making consumers feel compelled to engage with your business, especially if that content is specifically tailored to their interests and needs.
Through sleek design and original, compelling copy, you can create content that will make your social media ad campaign stand out without having to break the bank on your marketing budget.
- For graphic design, avoid using stale or predictable stock images in favor of artistic, unique, and authentic images.
- As for written content, be as distinctive as possible, writing the same way you would talk to a customer in-person. Speaking directly to your audience in their language is the best way to identify what problems your target audience has and how your product or service can provide solutions.
Once consumers feel compelled to visit your website as a result of your effective social media ad campaign, you need to make sure the website they’re visiting is just as engaging, compelling, and creative as the advertisement that got them there. Make sure your site is mobile-friendly and incorporates strong calls-to-action.
Worried your website isn’t up to the task? Try using creative tools like Canva, Collection, or Lead Generation to connect with your Facebook customers.
Step 4: Monitor, Measure, and Adjust
On Facebook, desktop ads have 8.1 times higher click-through-rates, and mobile ads have 9.1 times higher click-through rates than normal web ads.
When you’re able to experiment with a few smaller budget social media ad campaigns through Facebook, you’ll be rewarded with detailed reporting and valuable insight about your customers. To decide the best course of action moving forward, use Facebook’s measurement tools to accurately analyze the results of your social media ad campaign and establish what works and what doesn’t.
While an excess of metrics and data at your fingertips can easily distract you from the specific results that are more applicable to your company’s needs and goals, be sure to focus primarily on the data that’s relevant to the initial objectives your social media ad campaign set out to achieve.
For example: If one of your immediate goals was to increase your website’s leads, then don’t dwell over how many likes or shares your social media posts are getting. Instead, be sure to analyze whether the campaign was successful in increasing your overall generated leads by measuring how many clicks your site received (compared to how many it received prior to your social media ad campaign), as well as how many of those clicks converted into sales.
Need Help With Social Media Advertising?
If you’re not feeling satisfied with your social media ad campaign’s performance, it’s important not to get discouraged and react immediately. This is where efficient data analysis will help you determine why your advertising campaign fell short, showcasing which areas of improvement are necessary, as well as establishing what other objectives and marketing tools will yield better results.
If you’re still concerned that your current digital marketing efforts are missing the mark, contact Triton Commerce for a free Digital Marketing Plan! We’ll take an unbiased look at what you and your competitors are currently doing online and outline what social media advertising strategies will work best to help reach your company’s goals.