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How To Spend Your Social Ad Budget Wisely

  • by September 22, 2017

Social media is more than just a way to connect people; for many brands, it’s big business. Digital ad spend grew to more than $72 billion in 2016, reports TechCrunch, and there’s no evidence that spending is slowing.

There are also more social channels than ever: Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest are just a few that offer advertising. It’s enough to make a marketer’s head spin -- especially when devising how to get the most out of a social marketing budget.

It’s possible to run winning social-marketing campaigns. Marketers must invest in reaching the right audiences, taking creative risks and identifying the most effective social channels for their brands.

With the right tools and resources, experimenting with messaging, audience and creative can yield measurable results.

Finding Your Audience

Per Statista, there are nearly 2.5 billion social-media users worldwide  to entice with engaging social ad content. But which channels do social media users frequent most? That depends on audiences.

Some people love to browse their Facebook timelines, others prefer Pinterest for saving and exchanging ideas on cooking, fashion or home decor.

Take the time to identify who is in your target audiences, and tailor your ad content to connect with them. Stats on social-channel demographics can be a good place to start. Knowing channels like Pinterest and Facebook have more female than male users for example, may help help determine priorities.

Audiences can change over time and migrate from channel to channel--so monitor engagement on each channel, then adjust spending.

Changing Channels

If it feels like social media is everywhere, it is. Adults in the U.S., per Mediakix, spend more than two hours every day engaged with social media. The trick is determining which social channels best fit your target audiences’ daily habits.

An audience may frequent several social channels, but that doesn’t mean they will engage with the same content across channels. Audiences can fragment into niche groups, depending on the channel. Keeping an eye on audience engagement by channel can also show how to tweak your ads to attract smaller, more focused audiences.

Start by considering how your target audiences prefer to consume content on each channel. While video might be popular on Facebook and Instagram, it might not be the best medium for Reddit or Pinterest. It’s possible to deliver the same content in different formats—so if that’s what your audiences want, give it to them.

Taking Risks

Social advertising in itself is a risk; there’s no way to guarantee social ads will hit the mark every time. But experimenting with a variety of creative treatments can help discover which creative and messaging best attracts your potential customers.

Testing images, headlines and calls-to-action can do more than steer winning social ads in real time; it can also invite a dialogue between brands and its  audiences. After all, sometimes the best way to find out what audiences want is to ask them.

Of course, creating dozens of ad variations could get tedious. But technology is making even the most mundane of routine tasks easier, and marketers know it. A Conductor study found 70% of marketing execs are expected to spend more on marketing technology this year.

The martech landscape is full-to-bursting with solutions, and finding the right tech stack may take time. But it is a risk worth taking if the long-term payoff results in more loyal customers.

Every dollar of social advertising budget is precious, but investing wisely requires the willingness to experiment with a variety of channels, creative concepts and technologies.

1 comment about "How To Spend Your Social Ad Budget Wisely".
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  1. Tony Besasie from Cannella Media, September 22, 2017 at 11:43 a.m.

    You might want to check your digital spend number. 72 million?

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