Social media is no longer just a place for connecting with friends. It’s now a high-performing channel for scalable, data-driven advertising. So it’s no wonder that brands want to leverage the power of social media. Enter, social media marketing. But why is it important to incorporate social media marketing to your advertising campaigns?
How Social Media Marketing Fuels Scalable Campaigns
You want your ad campaign to be able to grow in reach, budget, and complexity efficiently, without a downturn on ROI. In other words, you need it to be scalable. And this is where social media marketing comes to your aid. When using paid social media ads, you can leverage social media platform features to create custom audiences. You can then use those custom audiences for retargeting campaigns. But you can also create lookalike audiences to scale your ad campaign. Social media platforms also leverage the power of creative automation, creating more ad variations for you to use, and making ad scaling easier.
But it’s not just the paid aspect of social media marketing that helps you: there’s also the organic side. Some of your best, high-performing organic content, can give you valuable insights into how to create better ad campaigns in general. Take advantage of that data to improve ad efficiency - at the same time improving your ROI. This will make your budget stretch further as you scale your ad campaign.
Making Engaging Ads with Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is engaging - that’s something everyone can agree on. Content feels more natural, ads can be personalized, and social media platforms give you deep insights into your audience, which you can then use to create better-performing ads. So, what tools and features can you take advantage of to make your ads even more engaging?
- Take advantage of social media storytelling formats. Reels, stories, and carousels have a more organic feel. This helps you create ads that don’t feel like ads - which means less ad fatigue and more engagement.
- Create interactive content. Posts such as voting polls, prompts for reactions, and mini quizzes invite your audience to a dialogue. Create content that’s not a one-way street and get multiple wins for your campaigns: your audience will feel included, so the brand loyalty will increase. Your audience will want to participate in the dialogue you’ve created, so engagement increases, too. And the answers you get from them will give you valuable insights into their preferences and behavior: which means even more refined and personalized future campaigns.
- Use a variety of creatives and formats. Monotonous content gets boring fast, especially on social media. Don’t rely on just one type of content. Make sure to interchange the formats, and be creative in your ‘dialogue’ with your audience.
- Partner up with social media influencers. The right influencers can help elevate your social media marketing. But you need to be careful with your strategy, here. You need to pick the ones that are in your niche, fitting your brand and audience as closely as possible. This way, the ads they create will feel organic, resembling more of a recommendation from an ‘authority source’ to your target audience, rather than a forced ad.
Quick Tips for Successful Social Media Marketing
So you know social media marketing is an extremely valuable asset, and what to leverage to make it engaging and take advantage of its scalability power. Here are some things to remember while creating your social media marketing strategy, so you can make the best out of it:Adjust creatives per platform
Social media platforms might often look very similar. But in reality, they have different audiences - which means different communication preferences, interests, and, for you, ways of promoting your brand. Make sure to adjust your creatives according to the social platform you deploy them on.
Track both reach and engagement
Reach is a good surface-level metric, but it’s not enough. Keep track of engagement, too. This will give you an idea of how successful your campaign is: the higher the engagement, the better your creatives are. If engagement is low, your team will need to revisit the messaging and creatives and adjust accordingly.
Refresh creatives regularly
We’ve already touched on this, but creative variation is very important - especially so on social media platforms. Audiences are more demanding, and attention spans lower. So, be proactive and prevent ad fatigue from becoming a problem for your social media marketing efforts by refreshing your creatives often.
Personalize your messaging
Personalization is very important in all forms of marketing campaigns. But more so in social media marketing, where having content that feels organic is paramount. Make sure you know your audience per social media platform really well, and personalize your messaging to create the feel of personal conversations and tailored recommendations.
Optimize based on real-time results
When it comes to adjusting your campaign, you know you need to be fast. Use real-time results from social media platforms to optimize your social media marketing campaigns, so you can stay on top of your audience’s needs and the shifts in potential preferences and trends.
Social Media Marketing: a Necessary Tool for your Ad Campaigns
Social Media Marketing is not just a valuable tool for your ad campaigns. It’s absolutely necessary. It will help make your ad campaign more scalable. And it will help your brand engage with your audience more, and connect your brand to them on a deeper level.
Remember to adjust your campaign according to every social media platform you deploy it on, personalize your messaging, and use influencers if possible. Don’t stick to one form of creative. And remember that changes in the social media world come fast - so be agile, and track your social media campaigns carefully.