Let every visual that you put in front of your audience count – whether it be paid ads or organic marketing channels.
According to Nielsen, digital marketing is responsible for almost 60% of brand sales. How is this possible? The increased usage of visual platforms in social media, like Pinterest and Instagram, has paved social advertising to become an essential channel to the advertising of any brand. Paid ads increase brand exposure and generate a real return on investment (ROI) from social media.
Do you think using visuals is a new concept in brand marketing? I bet not! Look at the commercials, traditional printouts, and billboards– they all use visuals. That’s why making effective visuals are best at empowering marketing campaigns and boosting engagements.
What do digital marketers have in common? Before, they put a massive effort into organic content. Unluckily, organic marketing does not have the same reach on social media as before. Now, they strongly believe in the effectiveness of the “Rule of 7”. Are you familiar with this? The Rule of 7 tells that consumers have to see or hear the ad 7 times before they will take into action. That’s why several businesses have dived into social media advertising and paid ads.
That’s why you have to be quick-witted and tactical on the best practices of paid ads. We’re here to help you go through the best actions to get your paid ad strategy effective.
Table of Contents
- Understand the Wonders of Keywords
- Choose the Best Campaign Objective
- Choose the Best Social Platform
- Blend Ads Naturally with Organic Content
- Create a Specific Funnel for Users from Ads
- Regularly Review Results
Understand the Wonders of Keywords
Before we proceed to an in-depth talk about paid ads and how it works, I have ot make sure you have understood how keywords work. Ahrefs and Ubersuggests are great sources to identify and discover important keywords in your industry.
In paid advertising, it is not necessary to look for the highest-traffic keyword. You only have to look for the words that you think the customers will use to look for you. We suggest searching for long-tail keywords. These keywords are longer yet more specific, it produces the majority of search-driven traffic.
When you find a long-tail keyword that catches your interest, do further research about it. This way, you will have a better idea of your competitors in the organic search and paid ads.
A common mistake for first-time marketers in SEO and paid advertising is they choose the wrong keywords. If you use the main keywords, chances are you will reduce your ROI and waste money on it. So, what do you have to do to make sure you will get more of your investment?
Targeting a large number of lower-traffic terms leads to better results than targeting a small number of higher-traffic terms.
Choose the Best Campaign Objective
Let’s start by asking ourselves, “what is the goal of your paid ads?” Going blindly on paid ads and social media marketing will only waste your money and time. But, nobody is telling you to become an overnight expert advertiser to have better results.
Instead, it is all about knowing your goals and choosing the best one to handle first. Remember, your brand has a different goal than the others. You have your own objectives. So, what are the most common goals for paid ads?
Increase Traffic
Web traffic greatly helps for those businesses who need more viewers on their homepage, blog, or landing pages. Having this goal will boost your total unique visitors and page views. When you are promoting a product, sale, brand, or new website, having an increased traffic goal is the best choice.
Increase Visibility
When you built higher brand awareness, it leads to more purchases, gains recognition, and convert target audiences to loyal customers. If your goal is to build online visibility, it is best to increase impressions and reach to help your brand awareness campaigns.
Increase Engagement
How can digital marketers know that readers like their posts? It is important to know the post engagement to know which points need improvement. You can measure it through shares, likes, retweets, and comments to help you understand and identify the effective posts and those that need editing. Increased engagement will help your brand to build an important connection with the readers.
Increase Lead Generation
It is common for digital marketers to use paid social ads to generate more leads. It is ideal for those who want to provide gated content and resources that are related to their brands to make users become more invested in the product or services they offer.
Some marketers consider this as a multi-step campaign. As it makes the target audience invested in the next ad, making them a prospect to the funnel.
Increase in Sales
Most online businesses use several social advertising options to sell their products and services. You can run a test on paid ads to determine whether your product or service interests or help convert deals to get more sales.
Rise above the noise
As social media has become a saturated platform, users are not happy seeing the same visuals seven times. Your target audience expects personalization. What does this mean? You need to apply a constant flow of visuals to optimize and keep your target audience engaged.
To drive paid ad performance, you have to equip your advertising team with important data. These data will help deliver the visuals that will best resonate with your audience and maximize your ROI in every channel.
Choose the Best Social Platform
By now, you should decide on the goal of your paid advertisements. So, what’s the next decision? It is time to choose which social media platform you will use for your campaign ads.
The benefits of one network over another varies. But, you have to remind yourself that each business has its own reason to promote on certain social media platforms. How would you know you are choosing the right platform? Ask yourself these questions:
- Does the user demographics of the channel match my brand?
- Do our competitors create post and target audiences on this channel?
- Does the channel have an impressive organic performance for my brand?
- How much of my target audience consistently engage in this network?
- Will the ad format of my brand fit the platform?
For example, Street Apparels PH has an excellent paid social ad on Instagram. Aside from posting a highly-visual content to entice the target audience, the owner knows the target audience is most accessible in this platform.
What are the Benefits of Advertising on Each Social Network?
- Facebook: The mechanics of Facebook ad formats are ideal for business-to-consumer campaigns. But, its capability to gain more audience and uncover more target audiences through social reach and awareness makes it perfect for B2B
- Instagram: Ads that aims to boost web traffic sales and increase their brand awareness are perfect for Instagram. You will use highly-visual content that engages with the audience while showing off your products.
- LinkedIn: To be specific, LinkedIn is more ideal for B2B interactions. Most people who are on LinkedIn are professionals. It is a great help to gain visibility, generate leads, and boost traffic through thought-leadership content.
- Pinterest: Ads on Pinterest are commonly used to generate immediate sales of products and services. Your ads will naturally blend with other pins which makes another avenue for your website.
- Snapchat: In contrary to the audiences on LinkedIn, Snapchat has younger audiences. The B2C platforms work on sponsored filters and lenses that give the audience engage and have fun promoting the products. Statistics have shown that Snapchat has a higher mark on brand awareness and visibility.
- Twitter: Finally, Twitter offers various add advertising options that allow the brand to have more followers for a product launch or when starting a new social channel. It helps ad grow awareness and drive traffic to your website.
Bridge the Gap Between Organic and Paid Ads
More than ever, it is a need to bridge the gap between organic and paid content strategies. The top-performing organic media will translate into high-performing paid ads. Your high visuals will resonate naturally with the audience.
Blend Ads Naturally with Organic Content
You have chosen the ad goals and the platform where you will promote, and target audience. Now, what do you need to do? It’s time to decide the content you will advertise. Before we will talk about that, you remember that there are various types of paid ads, right?
Now, we have to understand that not all will work for your brand. But, there is a trick to maximize your paid content. Create content that will naturally blend with organic content. Your target audiences are humans, too. They get annoyed with content that is too promotional.
Create a Specific Funnel for Users from Ads
It is common for digital marketers that use paid ads to forget about creating a marketing funnel that is specifically designed for prospective consumers. The perfect funnel for this is a simple three-layered funnel that leads the users from ads to purchasing a product. The funnel contains:
- Awareness: Attract the target audience, whether they are highly interested in your products or they are not familiar with your brand.
- Consideration: This part of the funnel determines the relevance of the ad to the consumer’s behavior. Is the consumer a repeating customer? Or is it a potential sale? You have to determine and categorize them to avoid being repetitive with your ads.
- Transaction: There is a need to be cautious in this phase, you have to provide an effective ad that will make the audience purchase your product.
You have to create effective steps for your funnel that will invite them to a specific landing page that matches their interest in the product. You do not want to send a sales-driven content to your consumers, right? Instead, you would want to give them content that caters to their needs related to the product.
Content Conversion
If you created high-performing visuals for your campaign ads, it will surely stop your audience mid-scroll and entice them to click-through. The more you create personalized contents the more you will compel your unique audience. Your efforts for your paid ads will convert into an impressive ROI.
Regularly Review Results
Last but not the least strategy for best practices in paid ads is the regular reviewing and constant monitoring of the results. Do you think this step is the easiest? I bet not, you still have to be cautious and restrain yourself from looking at the results every day.
Yes, you read it right. Do not check the results daily. It might convince you to make hasty decisions and changes. It is best to buy some time and allow the analytics to gather enough trends and data. You can check on the results weekly or monthly. Doing it monthly is perfect for those wanting to have broad results.
When you find an underperforming keyword, do not hesitate to eliminate it from the list. Always remember that conversation rates are more important than clicks. Clicks will only put your money into waste if the ads are not beneficial on your part.
Continuously test, monitor, and modify your paid ad campaigns to keep your target audience engaged.
Have Your Own Best Practice
We can’t have it all, right? But, we know that there are a few among this paid ads strategy that would go well with your brand. After you’ve learned the best practices, pick one to hone to make future campaigns easier.
Several marketers set up and work with design, content, development, and social media teams to successfully launch their ads. You can monitor your own best practices by constantly reviewing the results. Remember, every brand’s strategy is unique from each other. It is up to you how you will plan your campaigns and gauge its way to success.
