This a guest article from our #TCMA2015 Keynote Speaker Mike McGrail
Written by Mike McGrail
You cannot avoid the fact that paid social media activity is now key to success in the world of Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn et al. For many people, the thought of using it is a daunting one, but it doesn’t need to be.
In this article, I’m going to deliver four key pitfalls to avoid in the quest for social media advertising success.
Let me begin…
You need to think where social media advertising fits in your wider marketing strategy. Social ads aren’t a silver-bullet that guarantee success.
If you’re driving people to content within your site, what’s the play when they get there? Is it easy for them to consume more of your content, sign up for a newsletter, find out more about your business or make an enquiry/buy something?
If that path isn’t clear, then the money you just gave Twitter (likely to be around £1.70) has just been wasted.
Where do these ads fit with your other marketing activity? Are they pushing in the same direction as for example, your Google Adwords work? Work out their place in your mix and have a clear objective for them at all times.
It sounds crazy, but many people’s immediate approach with paid social is to throw big money at it from day one. Why? One of the beauties of paid social is that fact that you can kick the tires with small amounts of cash. Here’s an example:
This is a Facebook newsfeed ad (forget about desktop right column, waste of time) that I could use to promote this post. Please note the lack of call to action button at the bottom, Facebook was playing up and wouldn’t let me capture the full ad! Here’s how I would target it:
13,000 may not seem like a huge audience, and this ad would return reach of a maximum 6300 based on the £30 spend, but to me, that’s attractive – it’s nicely targeted by interest and it’s relevant location wise for my business. Then with a CPC (cost per click) in the region of 12p, it’s even more attractive.
That £30 will help me gauge what future return I may get from increased campaigns. I can also test what happens when someone clicks through to my site to read that article and then figure out what all click to that article returned in terms of actions and investment.
Remember, you don’t pay anything unless someone clicks! There’s a heck of a lot more the gleam from a test, however, it would require a blog post of its own!
Allocate a test budget and learn, it’s the sane route!
Within any campaign you can have multiple ads – different images, copy and CTAs (call to actions). It can be too easy just to set up one ad and let it run.
Remember when I spoke about testing? I hope so, it was the last point!
Anyway, by running numerous ads within a campaign, you’re far more likely to not only succeed, but also be able to paint the clearest picture of what the audience reacts best to. You’re not creating these ads to tick a box, so do it properly!
Social media advertising works due to its targeted nature. Facebook’s targeting goes to serious depth. Twitter needs to catch up, but they’ll get there some day. Maybe!
I spend a lot of time looking at social media ads and I’ll use an example here, a Twitter ad I was recently served:
Here’s the first targeting error – gender. Twitter allows you to target by gender. Unless the aim of this ad was to target men who may want to buy a lady in their life a gift from this woman’s only online close store, which I doubt was the case. If it was, you’d look to address that in the copy. They’ve not bothered to select gender targeting when setting up the ad. Silly billies.
Then there’s the issue with the forward path from the site. The right portion of the image above shows what I saw when I clicked through. The site is in Italian with no option of an English version. Yes, I could run it through Google Translate, but I’m not going to do that. Bounce!
They’ve decided to target English speakers with this ad, but when you click, there’s a huge roadblock. Cash burned!
They’ve also started the tweet with a hashtag which is a no-no, in fact, Twitter recommend avoiding hashtags in your ads altogether unless its related to an event.
The tools are there to be used and benefitted from, use them!
Hopefully these four key pitfalls give you some food for thought when it comes to starting to use paid social!
At #TCMA2015 I’ll be taking a deep dive into this topic! Here’s a snippet of what I’ll be talking about:
“Social media has evolved into a channel that requires a hard budget in order to see true success. The problem is spending that budget wisely and ensuring a realistic approach for small businesses.
I will be setting the scene by putting social media marketing in context and looking at its evolution. I will sum-up the old approach and cover how the new approach requires the right blend of clever organic use and a paid approach.
The talk will deliver practical advice and implementable tips to the audience, all within a realistic realm.”
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Mike has spent his whole career working with pixels. He started using social media and content marketing on behalf of brands in 2007 and has never looked back.
In 2012, he established Velocity Digital, an Edinburgh based digital marketing consultancy, working with clients from the scale of Skyscanner right through to local charities.
Mike can often be seen speaking at conferences and on the TV, with recent appearances on Sky News, Channel 5, STV allowing him to give his opinion on the trends in social media.
Mike’s conference talks are always current, practical and bullshit free. Other claims to fame include inventing milk, trees and teeth.
You can listen to Mike’s podcast, the Velocity Marketing Podcast, here.
