Welcome back to Infinite Web Chat! Last time we talked organic Social Media Marketing.
On Episode 4 we are talking all things Paid Social Media Marketing. Click to listen above or you can read the transcript below. You can also subscribe on iTunes »
Here are Some of the Highlights:
- According to Neil Patel, “Social media marketing as the process of creating content that is tailored to the context of each individual social media platform, in order to drive user engagement and sharing.”
- BE SOCIAL! Connect with your followers. Follow back. Follow similar brands and be sure to like, comment and share.
- Balance is key. If you post too infrequently, people will forget you. If you post too often, you will overcrowd their feed and they will unfollow you.
- Facebook has more active users than China has people. (Approx 1.39 Billion)
- Content is collaborative. If you are working with an agency, be sure to share enough of your business expertise so they can adopt your voice and provide value-added content.
Episode Links and Resources:
Welcome and thanks for tuning in to another episode of Infinite Web Chat with your Hosts and Web Marketing Specialist, Amy DeLardi and LeeAnn Holmberg
Amy: Hi welcome to the Episode4 of our infinite chat with Amy and LeeAnn. Hi LeeAnn
LeeAnn: Hey there!
Amy: So last episode we talked about more of an organic posting and social media marketing on the different maybe Social Media platforms and we didn’t really get into too much about that paid advertising through the platform. So today, we’re going to talk about paid content on social media because we’re finding that just creating great content organically isn’t enough anymore to keep customers engaged and to keep Social Media platforms that willing to serve our content to our audience. So, paid advertising ad can range from a promoted tweet or to a smaller one-off budget to an extensive campaign with a major budget. So, what’s nice is that anyone can really take advantage and leverage promoting paid advertising on social media OK. So what do we suggest to our clients that don’t really have a full scale budget to run these campaigns?
LeeAnn: So for clients that don’t have full scale budgets, what we suggest is that they run ads consistently over time even with a smaller budget, because what we’re finding is that Social Media platforms will reward you with more views and more reach, the game you mentioned before when you’re consistently running ads rather than turning it on and turning it off, even if you have a small budget. So, I know that can be kind of a pain to stretch it out over the month but we can definitely help do that, we have clients that range from really small to several hundreds of dollars to the thousand dollar budget every month. So of course, there are exceptions to that; so what we like to ask our clients to keep something running all the time.
Amy: During this episode, we’re going to talk about attracting, targeting in particular and the major target main Social Media platforms that we work with then and we leverage their advertising tool and we’re going to talk about some tips to ensure a little towards the end. So, why don’t we just jump right in and start talking about tracking and how do we set up tracking when we’re starting to work within a platform?
LeeAnn: So this is probably the unsexy and unfun part of the program, a lot of people who run their own ad campaigns skip right over this one because they don’t understand or they don’t know how to do it but it’s really, really, important. If you want to see their return on investment or how your ads are performing whether you’re setting up a pixel or typically the each platform will give you a little snippet of code that will go on your website or on your landing page or wherever you’re driving your traffic to. So, it’s really important to take that step and do that or to have somebody you on your behalf. You can also sometimes within each Social Media platform set up goals, you can also set up specific URL so that you can track those that can be done two ways it can be done within a Social Media platform, it can also be done in Google Analytics or and another paid analytics tool and then you can kind of match those because the will not deliver 100% all the time but what that does for you is, 1. It tells you how effective your ads are. 2. It tells you what’s working, what’s not working. So, you don’t want to know that it’s running especially if you’re using all of your marketing spend right here and you’re really wanting to see something happen. You want to be able to monitor and adjust and you need. So it’s really important to do that upfront.
Amy: What I find to the client sometimes jump too much into looking like too quickly and to looking at the you know the results of a campaign that they’re running. Do you have like a base line for you know should I think it that we run it for at 30days not that they that we said in forget it for 30days but you know we’re checking on it we’re making sure that the budget didn’t get messed up when we got it making sure that it’s not you think up more money than anticipated. But what good it praying to get is a campaign to run before we start looking at the measured result.
LeeAnn: You know that will really vary where we start with your ad campaign if you’ve been running ads in the past or not; but a good rule of thumb for me when I see is that if I’m starting an ad campaign on an account that hasn’t been running ads in the past, it usually takes and social media network around a week that can be from 4-7-10days to really believe they can make you see that you’re going to pay to play and start sort of your ads in a way that you can start to look at those results. Now, just like you said, that more in there we’re making adjustments now in the time period I really don’t suggest making any kind of sweeping change to your account, specially if you know if you make a change that will impact the entire campaign. So, we look at it we monitor like you said all of those things but then I think 30days is a good rule of thumb Let’s see how it’s performing you know where we approach running if we have at budget to run more than one ad let’s see how that’s doing how is your audience performing? Which is the next thing you know we’re going to jump right into, targeting. How is your audience responding? How can we narrow that down and really focus? So it does depend on where you are and what you’re spending is that I start to see that traction in the first week and a half and then start honing in and making adjustments. Then we look at that and decide how we want to move forward with your ad campaign after about the first 30days.
Amy: One of the things that I love about being able to run ads on these different platforms is you get to set your target audience, you can really hone in on that you know that the demographic, that they look at you know the city or they the type of people that you’re looking that you want to see your ad. So let’s talk a little bit more about targeting that’s my one of my favorite things is sometimes organically you know it’s like your page that’s really going to see your post or how you hashtag them maybe sometimes depending on the platform. But when you’re picking a way you can really set that a little bit more and be more specific. So, let’s talk a little bit more about that.
LeeAnn: Sure and if you heard me giggle into my breath because I completely agree with you too this is probably the biggest area I see clients who are trying to run their own ads make mistakes so like Amy mentioned, each platform does have its own guidelines but if you’re running an ad to an undefined audience, you’re going to most likely be upset with your result. Pretty intuitive on most of these platforms how does that set up and how to target, but if you don’t know how or you don’t take the time to do that and then double check your targeting, you know you’re missing the whole point of your ad campaign and basically throwing away marketing dollars. So, just to give a couple quick examples we had somebody who said hey we come in and do not want to have the ads that I’ve run tell me why it didn’t work and what I can do better they had spent several hundred dollars trying to grow their reach and their audience on Facebook and when I looked at the ad there was a picture of a roof. Now, if you knew the business that was their roof but Facebook it automatically grabbed their header image and cropped it for the ads they didn’t pay attention to that, they didn’t pay attention to their target audience. So, they ended up running an ad for I think to spend with several hundred dollars over 60days and it was just a random picture of a roof they were a Health and wellness industry. And they didn’t have it you know any kind of targeting done whatsoever. So, clearly you know making changes on that was an easy and quick fix and we could redirect them and show them and another example I had as the lady who does both online events and in-person events and she had this huge online event that she was trying to promote and she couldn’t figure out why she couldn’t get any traction on it and she you know we talked to the cell over the phone with her and talked through like did you do this? Did you do this? And you know she yes I did the checked the box, checked the box, checked the box and I said OK Would you mind if I just go in and look I won’t make any changes just let me take a peep behind the curtain. So, I got access to your account I looked and it turned out she’s running this online event to a 50mile radius of a city where she had done her life event. So, she was dumping all of this money thinking it’s going out across the Internet and it’s just going to this one particular group that had just seen her live and in person. So, it used almost her entire marketing campaign budget; I mean the spend was almost gone. It was really it was such a simple thing that we are in there you move quickly sometimes and it can really get just missed.
Amy: So let’s jump right into talking about the specific platform that that we’re going to talk about today and recently. I’ve read a poll that from Hoot suit they pull a bunch of advertisers last year and they said that they’ve been ROI from networks in the order for at least the most and so that would be Pinterest being the least, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and then Facebook being the boldest with actually 95.8% of the whole entire Pie. So, we’re going to chat but the networks that we’re going to talk about today in that same order so we’re going to jump right into Pinterest and start there. What are the paid advertising options within Pinterest?
LeeAnn: Sure, so when you’re using paid ads and Pinterest, they’re called promoted pins and you can run basically three separate ad types. There’s an ad type for awareness one for engagement and one for traffic when it comes to targeting. So, each channel does a little bit differently Pinterest can target through their they have 420 pre-built interests that includes keywords and business data which allows you to target your existing customers, so you can look at them that pre-built and pick you can also choose pinners who have visited your website so if you have that tracking code in place, then nothing really great way to target people who have already raised their hand and shown some interest in you. And you can also create a look like audience that looks and acts similar to your existing audience so it can be done with your email list for example, you can go out there and see what pinners are out there that match your email list and target those people. Now, you can also choose location, language, what type of device and gender and as you know Pinterest is very visual, so when you’re posting ads to Pinterest, you want to make sure that you’re posting organic content that matches your promotion because even though the goal is to take the action that on you were promoted and a lot of smart social media users will go and check out your profile and a look to see what other content on your page. So, if it isn’t clear that you’re just running an ad on that platform for ad purposes then they’re going to want to see content that matches organically.
Amy: Well thanks that was thought up at the information you left me with no question that. you could cover that would really well and it just a reminder we could talk way more about that just in these other programs but we are trying to keep that in precise information that’s helpful for people so that you know this Podcast are about 30minutes long. So let’s just jump right into it and then talk about how to run ads on LinkedIn.
LeeAnn: Sure! traditionally, LinkedIn has been good for B2B and job-related ads but I’m really starting to see a trend towards more lead generation, promoted content, and business growth in the B2C market as well. It is becoming more social not just casual that people are definitely becoming more social there. So, that and they have a few different types of display ads which is you know you can share your content with a targeted audience, you have sponsored and Mail which is you know LinkedIn version of email our messaging within their platform. You can also do sponsored content so you can have your content appear in the LinkedIn timelines of your target audience you know and their text and tabs and dynamic ads. So, the text ads can appear in the right-hand column and dynamic ads will appear in that column as well but they’ll and incorporate display ads you know graphic as well. The first targeting it’s really good for Employees and Company specific targeting, it’s pretty extensive. So, you have to know what you’re doing there as well. LinkedIn is great because if you show an interest in writing out there they’re very good about sending you a promotional credit that you can apply to your account and not to one time think so each time it’s in that you can apply that to your account. Now with that said, we’ve been in there a minimum bit so it can be quite a bit more expensive than the other app platform, so it’s very important to be clear on your objective and your plan when you’re running a campaign and I would suggest LinkedIn is more of a long term campaign you want to let it run for quite a while, it’s not something that I would suggest just hopping in and running an ad and then shutting it off.
Amy: Well because if anyone like myself maybe I go on Facebook every day or Instagram every day but I don’t go on LinkedIn every day. So, you know you want to make sure you’re running your campaign long enough and I’ve heard that for the duration that people go into those accounts.
LeeAnn: Absolutely!
Amy: So let’s jump right into Twitter where breathing through you’re really giving us a lot of information, Thank you.
LeeAnn: Twitter has three different out types that got promoted tweets you can have a promoted account, or you can promote a trend and so, they have a set up where you choose what your goal is and that goal can be you know to get website clicks or conversion, that can be engagement so people are liking or retweeting commenting on a tweet it can be to build your followers it’s pretty self-explanatory can be for lead generation so if you want to grow your list you can be something that I’m seeing a lot of right now which is app installs and you’ll see this is your scrolling to your Twitter feed, it will have suggested apps for you to install those are paid promotions. There are other goals there as well. So with Twitter, your audience really can be targeted at a high level for locations and that code and then once you choose that you can drill down more specifically into keywords that you know like interests and behaviors. Now, that’s a lot of information, so if I were going to suggest something, I would suggest promoting a Twitter card rather than a single tweet, a Twitter card doesn’t age as much and generally you know get more attention and engagement, if they’re asking what’s a Twitter card? Basically in a tweet that will be in your timeline but it has an image that’s attached to it and it will say you know have bold there and it stands out in your timeline not to say that it’s sponsored. But when I say tweet age I mean people are tweeting constantly So you’re getting pushed down and down and down further and if we need a Twitter card that kind of hangs around at the top.
Amy: That’s cool but I don’t use Twitter that all that much personally I know you that manage clients but if you’re not on Twitter a lot, you just have to get lost in the conversation and that’s but I like that they are to have a Twitter card so that your conversation doesn’t get lost or your ad doesn’t get lost.
LeeAnn: Well and we had a client that we worked with that is a Politician and we were able to use promoted you know we promoted Twitter card on his behalf, we were also able to can double down and use trend that was trending in the same time and match what we were doing to really get some big movement, a momentum on his account; that was really fun advertising campaign to be a part of. And I will say one little tip likely can if you show an interest and Twitter ad and advertising on that platform sometimes they’ll send you promotions as well I don’t recall if they will let you continue if it’s a one-time deal or if you can continue to add credit to your account as they provide them but I know that they send those out so if that’s something you’re interested in either let your advertiser know or watch for that you know.
Amy: That’s good information. Let’s talk about the big monsters Facebook and Instagram.
LeeAnn: It’s easy to kind of go through that though and quickly because like Amy mentioned, from the Hoot Suite poll that they did you know 95% of that pie was taken by Facebook and Instagram. Initially Facebook and Instagram ads were only can that and we’re starting to see that Instagram will now allow you to run ads independent of Facebook which I think is really cool and people should definitely take advantage of. But the reason that I think Facebook and Instagram have such a huge part of the pie is 1 in 5 of all mobile minutes are spent on Instagram or Facebook. Yet that’s like I’m not positive I think that’s like 50% of your mobile time so listen if you if you add an audience that work that adds an additional 6% of time an Audience Network is that little an interest in the issue and you looked at them on Amazon and now you see them all over the internet. So Instagram and Facebook allows you to do that and that the reverse sort of the sort of the ad to you but then you start to see it everywhere there’s lots and lots of different types Facebook is similar to Google in that they are always evolving and changing and trying to serve the best users there and possible. So, there is their campaign to build their audience so that can be a like campaign there can be campaigns to get as many as possible on a post or an ad they know that would be impression using that same poster and you can go for engagement if you want somebody to like it share it heard it on Instagram comment, there’s a lead generation that doesn’t even require for you to have a leaning peach set up. You can do it all right within Facebook and I will say Facebook really encourages you to keep that user experience in a lot of their types within face but because they see people trust Facebook, they’re not certain if they’re scrolling in their feed if they want to be taken off somewhere else so if you can make this all happen right within Facebook and then get back to their scrolling, they’re going to do that and they’re going to trust you even more. They’re definitely you know sales than other ad types where we do want to take them offline a bit mean we can do sales we done that we’ve integrated sales right within Facebook as well so ad type you can do text you can do photos, videos, several photos there’s a new or at type it’s called Canvas it’s a full screen I’m not sure if anybody has seen those but those are really cool that can be a photo or video as well. And so, on Facebook you can target your audience by demographics, location, interest to me. And you choose who you think your audience will be and it auto populate and one of the really cool features is once you start to type in a few of the interest behaviors that you’ve identified then Facebook will start to suggest similar audiences so they’ll be a little dropdown that says suggested audiences and it will give you similar groups or people that match what you’ve already identified and it also tells you how many on reach so you get to see all of that right up front. Another cool feature that I see that not used enough and we really try to encourage all of our clients to use, if you can actually target your e-mail audience you can import your e-mail into your Ad Manager and then you can run ads to your existing lists so you’re now marketing to your warm audience which I think is a huge miss if you’re not doing and that’s an easy thing to do when you’re setting up to do that so you know he’s encouraged that. Like I mentioned before and Instagram initially was only integrated with the ad now obviously there’s a magic I don’t work with Instagram like the like can be and but now you can separately by advertising on Instagram if you make your profile a business profile. So, you can still promote together, but you can also go over and promote independently on Instagram. The cool thing about that is Instagram will suggest to you which post they’re performing best Like which ones are trending and what tell you an estimated reach so you can do that right there. There’s a whole other type of advertising on Instagram that includes paid brand representatives, who will promote your product or service on your behalf and that we could spend an entire Podcast talking about that maybe that will be one of our upcoming discussions. But you know at a high level if they have a huge following then they can reach out to more people quicker than if you run a paid ad sometimes so this is called Key influencer marketing and it takes a lot of legwork and requires building good relationships with your influencers that can range from just paying them, to sending them swag, giving and discounts and all kinds of things.
Amy: And so let’s quickly jump in to talking a little bit about some of the tools maybe that we use to monitor and maximize our campaigns and then we’ll just wrap it up maybe give a tip or two because they think we’re approaching our 30minute mark.
LeeAnn: Sure! There are all kinds of tools to help monitor and maximize your reach and achieve your goals some of those are free some of them are paid, I don’t know that we particularly have one that I would just say stand about all the rest but if you look into and do your research your marketing professional they can definitely guide you to what you need based on what your objectives are. Like us, there are people and businesses who can run ads on your behalf; I would say it’s really very important that organic content strategy matches your promotion it’s really find it very challenging when you’re running a really great ad and then you’re seeing content on the profile that doesn’t match or no content on the profile we talked about that a little bit with Pinterest. But I think working hand in hand is really important that doesn’t mean that if you’re not ready to turn it all over that sign to somebody but I do think that you have to work with your people who are running your ad or your organic efforts so that they match up and really like we said with the organic it’s important to keep it simple and keep it social one of the things we didn’t touch on was some of the rules Facebook saw on how much copy can be on an ad and they really, really, don’t like you to put a lot of copy on your image they want to be very simple, they wanted to be visual and that would give you a big red flags every time you try to run an ad how to act on it as your ad not going to perform as well because there’s tags on it so it really is important to keep it very simple and social and try to stay on top of what those best practices are.
Amy: And I have kept that to wrap this up and it is that we are finding that video is actually a really good way to run ads not only do you there’s such a media platform love video, but that your viewers you are your target audience like that to fill you know if you can run a professional video or get a professional video recorded great but it’s not going live and then maybe boosting a live video, you know I’m talking to interested in specific to Facebook but I know Instagram lets you go live. Do some of these other platforms but I don’t believe they do. Any of the other ones that we talked about you can’t really go life, right?
LeeAnn: I don’t believe so.
Amy: I don’t believe so either. But you can always cross promote Social media platform but that you’re on Pinterest and you want to post that you went live and you want people to look at your video on Facebook and there is no nothing wrong with cross promoting that as well so but video, video, video that you know we’re seeing that as a trend for a while now and it’s just increasing more and more and it doesn’t have to be so polished and professional. You have to be professional but you know the video can be phone quality video and still allow you to boost it and reach your target audience. So, and keeping it simple and social. So following your rule I think that’s wrap it up we could share more but we’re trying to keep it short and sweet and helpful to you know if it’s any of our listeners need our help or advice please reach out to us 2033075107. Visit us on our social media platform and LeeAnn thank you for your time today theirs and your knowledge that’s very helpful and do we have a topic yet picked for our next episode?
LeeAnn: I don’t think that we have one yet but I know we have some really great information.
Thanks again for listening to enter the Web chat you can find us on social media or by visiting our website www.infinitewebdesigns.com. So stay tuned for a future power casting discussion.
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