Making Sure You Have Return On Investment
In our previous post, we discussed the basics of setting a social media advertising budget, and the importance of identifying your target market for each campaign you launch. Creating an online brand, social media presence and a compelling stream of content marketing isn’t optional, even if you are fully committed to advertising. The reason is simply because online advertising is not a substitute for those components of your overall online presence. Online advertising is a separate way to quickly create an audience consisting of members of your target market, which can give your online presence and content a huge boost and funnel more potential clients and customers to your website, but it’s not necessarily if you have the time and patience to organically build an audience.
However, if you do have the resources available to create a series of social media advertising campaigns, launching them is not as simple as spending five minutes navigating through the admin panel of a social media platform, spending a few dollars and then crossing your fingers and hoping for positive results. In order to maximize the effectiveness of each campaign and your overall advertising and marketing budget, you’ll need to set reasonable goals and benchmarks for your Return On Investment (ROI), ensuring that each campaign lives up to your expectations.
Setting Reasonable Goals For Your Social Media Advertising
Early in the process, in fact immediately after you’ve established your target audience for your advertising campaign, it’s important to set reasonable, attainable but at the same time challenging goals for said campaign. While your ultimate goal is to funnel potential clients or customers back to your website and boost your conversion rate, you may also have the short-term goal of boosting the number of likes or followers for your social media account. Some social media ad campaigns make it exceptionally easy for a user to “like” your page or become a social media follower, as they aren’t required to navigate away from the actual ad. This means that setting a goal to boost your likes or followers may be much easier to attain than actually driving traffic back to your website, which in contrast can be relatively disruptive to the user experience.
If your ultimate goal is to drive traffic back to your website, it’s important to remember that without a strong motivator or enticement to do so, it can be difficult to meet an even modest goal. For instance, a user will be more likely to click on an ad or a boosted post advertising an online coupon or contest, rather than a simple enticement to check out a particular product or service. It may therefore be unreasonable to expect a campaign for a basic piece of content marketing to perform as well as a campaign driven by a coupon, giveaway or contest. It is important to note that if your social media advertising budget is extremely limited, it would be wise to wait until you have a coupon, giveaway or promotion to boost or advertise through your social media accounts.
Measuring The ROI Of A Social Media Advertising Campaign
After you have launched a social media advertising campaign, it’s important to retroactively measure your ROI, which is a formal way of saying it’s important to measure whether you received your money’s worth out from the campaign. Luckily, it’s not necessary to purchase expensive software or to hire a third-party firm to track your campaign, as the major social media networks provide the analytical tools necessary to do so yourself. After you have crunched the numbers, determine why your campaign overperformed, underperformed or met your expectations, and apply those insights to your next advertising campaign. Keep a detailed record of the exact market you targeted and the date of your campaign, and begin compiling this data in order to set more realistic goals and create more effective campaigns in the future.