For a small business, investing in paid social media advertising can seem risky. But when expectations are clear, budget is set aside, and you’re reaching the right audience, paid advertising can lead to brand awareness or sales much faster than organic alone.
In this guide, we’ll cover what paid opportunities are available, how much you can expect to spend, how to activate your first campaign, and how to measure your results. Let’s get to it!
Opportunities for paid social media campaigns
Opportunities for paid social media are on every platform and have become more integrated into the user experience. If you’re just getting started with paid ads, Facebook and Instagram are a great place to start since they’re a two-for-one deal. But other platforms, like LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Twitter also offer great paid avenues to connect with potential clients.
There’s a lot of data about why each platform is good for advertising, but don’t be convinced just by big numbers. Choosing where to run ads should be driven by your audience, not the latest and greatest platform.
If you know your audience spends the most time on YouTube, the number of users on another platform is irrelevant. Run ads where your audience will see them! And while big brands seem to be advertising on every platform, there’s no need to get caught up being everywhere. Their budgets are a lot bigger, but everyone starts somewhere. Invest where you think you’ll see the most growth up front.
Budget and setting expectations
Knowing your sales numbers up to this point can help you set some parameters around your budget. A common percentage of ad spend is between 5%-12% of your revenue. The faster you want to grow, the higher the percentage.
But, before diving into a paid campaign, be sure to ask yourself a few guiding questions:
- Are your goals to increase brand awareness or get direct sales?
- Is your target audience clearly defined?
- Have you done enough organic content to see what’s working?
If you’re not sure what your goals are, it will be difficult to measure your success. Paid ads are a bit of an educated guess the first time, so be sure to have clear answers to the guiding questions before you launch your campaign. That being said, once you’ve run a campaign or two, you’ll be more informed about what your audience reacts to and can adjust your budget and expectations accordingly.
Activating your first campaign
So, you’ve determined your budget and are ready to set up your first ad campaign. This is an exciting time!
Since most small businesses start with Facebook and Instagram ads, we’ll show you how to set up your first campaign with Meta. If your audience is on another platform, start there instead.
1. Consider your organic content.
If there are certain types of posts or best-selling products that are doing well organically, create an ad similar to those posts or featuring that product.
2. Take advantage of the Meta Ad Library to get ideas.
The Meta Ad Library provides transparency by showing a searchable library of ads running on Meta’s platforms. You can easily find the Meta Ad Library by searching “ad library” in Facebook’s search bar. Other than providing transparency in advertising, this library is helpful to gather ideas if you’ve never created an ad before. Look at what ads catch your eye and analyze why you like them. Don’t copy someone else’s ad – that’s plagiarism. But you can get some inspiration from ads that are already out there.
3. Decide your most “sell-able” offer and call to action.
Successful ads usually offer something special like a discount code, free trial, or lead magnet to entice new customers. Have a clear action you want them to take. On Facebook and Instagram specifically you can set up campaigns for viewers to go to your website, send you a message, etc. A best practice is to specifically ask them to take that action in the last line of your copy.
4. Write compelling copy.
Highlight the features of the offer or product rather than stating specifications. You want them to be excited about it, but still take the next action to visit your website or other call to action. Include information about when the offer ends or how many products or spots you have left in the offer. You’re not trying to scare people into taking action – that’s unethical. But you do want to capture their attention quickly, so make good use of that time.
5. Create quality visuals.
Whether you’re doing a video or photo ad, be sure to use original, high resolution visuals and your brand colors. Be careful not to squish a bunch of text on top of your visuals, although a short, bold phrase can be okay. Remember you want to capture attention and intrigue the reader to take the next step. Not overwhelm them with poor design and too much information.
Create the campaign in the Ad Centre.
- The Ad Centre can be accessed through your Facebook Business Page or through the Meta Business Suite. It cannot be accessed through your personal profile, so if you haven’t set up a Facebook Business Page, do that first.
- Ad Centre walks you through each step of setting up your ad, but first you will choose your objective. You’ll choose if you want people to go to your website, get more calls, get more page likes, or send you a message.
- Ad Centre will give you an option to turn on “shuffle creative” which means they will promote different variations of your ad and see which one performs the best. When you test multiple ads, you can see which performs the best, and run more like it. You will supply more content for a shuffle create ad, but Facebook will do the heavy lifting of putting together different options for your audience. It also creates ads for Stories, Messenger, Marketplace, desktop feed, and mobile. If you do not select shuffle creative, you will manually upload your copy and visuals for each ad.
- Now it’s time to actually build your ad. Insert your copy and upload the visuals you want to use for your ad campaign. Here you can also write multiple headline options and button selections to compare what combinations work best. You’ll see a preview to the side and can select “See All Previews” to get an idea of how “shuffle creative” works.
- Next, you can select a special ad category if it’s relevant to your business. Special categories include credit, employment, housing or social issues, elections and politics. Keep in mind some ads in these categories may have limitations in ad reach.
- Then, choose your audience. You can either choose “Smart Audience” and leave it up to Meta, or determine a specified audience.
- Choose your budget per day and define the schedule. You’ll select a start date and end date, or leave your ad running indefinitely.
- Set the ad placement. You can choose for ads to be placed on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger.
- Now, you’re ready to hit publish! But it doesn ’t go live right away. Your ad will be under review to ensure it’s within Meta’s advertising guidelines. Ads are often approved within 24 hours and immediately start running if nothing is wrong. If something doesn’t meet their guidelines, you will receive feedback and the ad will need to be updated and approved again.
Congratulations, your first ad campaign is underway!
How to track and measure your results
The only way to know if your campaign is successful is by tracking your progress and measuring your results. Depending on your goals, success is a bit subjective so keep your original goal in mind. If your goal is brand awareness, you’ll look more closely at overall impressions than sales to determine success.
Just like there’s no magic budget number with ads, the same can be said for choosing what metrics to decipher. Meta gives several options to consider such as reach, impressions, engagement, cost per result, cost per click, cost per link click, and several more.
These numbers can be overwhelming, but for most ad campaigns you will want to consider cost per result to start with. The ad with the lowest cost per result is usually the one you want to create more of because the data is showing the greatest bang for your buck.
In turn, ads that show high cost per result are taking up a lot of your ad budget. From here you can continue to track the campaign until the end date, or stop the campaign, remove poorly performing ads, and restart the campaign with optimized ads. Keep in mind it will take 24 hours for Meta to reapprove the changes, and the data doesn’t carry over from the first campaign.
As you continue running ads or eventually outsourcing them, you will begin to understand the best variables to interpret for your business.
With this crash course in paid social media advertising, we trust you’ll enjoy the benefits of faster business growth and making informed marketing decisions. Remember to set reasonable expectations, a comfortable budget, know your audience, and optimize your ad campaign for the best results.
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What paid campaigns have you run on social media and what results have you received? Do you feel that the return is worth the investment? Sound off in the comments below!