Social Media Advertising is Not All about Boosting Posts
Creating Awareness is Good, but Getting Results is Better!
What is it that you want your social media advertising plan to deliver? Are you looking to improve visibility, grow website traffic, or increase lead generation? Do your key success factors involve measurement in terms of ‘followers’, ‘contacts’, ‘likes’, ‘referrals’, ‘reviews’, ‘rankings’, or some other aspect? While investing in a feature-rich CRM, automating your marketing efforts, and building a powerful website will contribute to each of these goals, organic and paid search tools will cover the last mile for generating leads and increasing conversions.
Effective Social Media Advertising Campaigns that Go Beyond “Boosts”
With an ever-increasing buzz of businesses thriving with their use of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Instagram, social advertising may seem like a quick and easy solution for everything. Simply sign up and create a business account on any or all platforms and click on Boost Post for your selected target audience. Unfortunately, that’s about the only easy part in a social media advertising plan. ‘Boosts’ are not really aligned to goals, such as conversions or revenue growth. While they may help in creating awareness or engaging with customers, prospects, or influencers, they may not really influence referrals, leads, or purchases.
A solid social media advertising strategy will help you reach out to potential buyers, build trust, and capture their interest before they are ready to contact your sales teams. Here are a few options to leverage these powerful social platforms to cut through the noise, be heard and seen, and build credible relationships with your prospects.
- Increase brand awareness: Reach the highest number of people through powerful messaging at the start of your sales funnel. Facebook and Instagram combined promise over 5 billion monthly active users, while WhatsApp, Messenger and The Audience Network can further enhance reach. However, the rapid growth and increasing popularity of social media has led to an overcrowding of every platform. Hundreds of thousands of brands and companies post hordes of articles, photos, videos, and other types of content on them every single day. This information overload is translating into an attention deficit, making connecting, interacting, and engaging with your audience more difficult than ever before. Hence, it is important to customize your content to each platform with the objective of optimizing your ad recall rate.
- Direct traffic to your website: Focus on this aspect as a mid-sales funnel activity with the objective of optimizing for landing page view. This is not about directing traffic to your site through clickable ads, but actually getting people to spend time on your site through an enhanced user experience. The content and site functionalities should be able to direct the users to the product or service pages, downloadable forms, blogs, or other educational aspects of your website.
- Activate lead generation: Platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram offer structured lead generation campaigns that allow you to collect valuable information from the users, without directing them off-network. Customize your lead forms and ensure that the information flows directly into your CRM or email in real time.
- Use conversion ad campaigns: Conversion ads allow you to optimize for specific actions, such as ‘add to cart’, call for information, quote requests, or actual sales. As a rule of thumb, remember that your key messaging needs to reach your prospects at least 7 times in the buying journey in order to induce an actual purchase. Since it is far too rare and costly to convert someone during a first impression, choose your target audience carefully.
- Focus on remarketing/ retargeting: An end-of-the-sales-funnel activity, this robust branding and conversion optimization tool offers a higher ROI than most other digital efforts. Direct your ad spends towards those who are familiar with your brand, have visited your site, and have expressed interest in your offerings, but not stayed on your site long enough to make a purchase. Use lookalike engines or other tracking measures, such as Facebook Pixel to track user journeys and identify those that are most likely to convert. Bring your brand in front of the bounced traffic by retargeting them through Facebook, Twitter, Google remarketing ads, email, and other such tools.
Leap Digital’s Comprehensive Social Media Marketing Approach
The buying process has gone through a significant transformation over the years. Today’s buyers do their own research and are more than half way through their buying journey, before they reach a potential vendor. In fact, 92% of consumers who visit your website for the first time leave without making any purchases. While 45% of them are there to research your product or service, 25% are comparing prices or other variables, and the remaining are looking for store locations or other such details. What this means is that you need to establish multiple touchpoints to meet your audience early on in this journey and influence their buying decisions.
At Leap Digital, we look at marketing in a social space through a three-pronged approach. Our thoughtful, well-rounded strategies involve:
- Connecting: Increasing brand awareness through structured programs that let your customers discover your offerings.
- Interacting: Garnering traffic to your website and gathering leads through initiatives that build on brand awareness.
- Engaging: Nurturing connections and filling your pipeline through targeted relationship building, followed by revenue growth through actual conversions.
We can help you step out of the dark ages and embrace the dynamics of modern digital marketing. Our coordinated efforts on brand awareness and lead generation, combined with solid tactical plans will help you break through the noise, get in front of your customers, and meet your desired marketing outcomes.
Let’s chat about a comprehensive social media advertising strategy that delivers measurable results at every stage of the sales funnel. Call us at 416-458-4876 or contact us through email to book your live consultation.
