SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PRO TIPS FOR 2020

Social media marketing is no easy task and it can become more and more confusing for business owners and entrepreneurs. But it’s an un-ignorable necessity as social becomes the primary form of marketing, outranking all other forms of digital and tarnishing traditional media. So here are some helpful tips for creating successful ad campaigns and meaningful content for your business! If you still find yourself lost at sea, holler and we’ll gladly float you to shore with a free consult.

CAMPAIGNING TO A COLD AUDIENCE:

This is sort of a guessing game but a necessary one. Running ads to people who have never heard of your business, visited your website, and don’t even follow your social media means you have to CAPTURE their attention. The days of stacking multiple interests into one audience ad set are over. In 2020, that’s no longer recommended. Instead, we suggest something called the “rainfall” method where you target single interests to see which ones garner the best results. THEN you can take the top 10 interests and stack them into one winning ad set to grab a cold audience’s eyeballs.

Targeting an ad to a cold audience means running a simple engagement campaign or cold traffic campaign. Content is king in this phase. You must entertain, inform, or inspire your new audience with content that makes them STOP scrolling and ask themselves “What’s this”? Try to evoke emotion and don’t focus too much on selling something. Ads that appear like ads simply get ignored. Tell a story to your cold audience. Make them want to share it.

Do you have a unique ingredient? Do you have a compelling story that made you invent the product you are selling? Are you positively impacting people’s lives, the environment, the hearts and minds of your employees? These are story points your content should focus on during your cold campaigning phase. Offering discounts or shopping codes is NOT recommended. People do not know who you are or why they should trust you. Cold campaigning is a trust-building exercise.

CONTENT IDEAS FOR RETARGETING

In this phase, you are no longer running ads to “random people”. Now your audience consists of specific lists of people who have visited your site, follow your social channels, made a recent purchase, or abandoned their shopping cart. Retargeting is wonderful but it’s also ultra-complicated. Most businesses and brands fail in their retargeting efforts because they forget to morph their content into something fresh and exciting and think only about re-doing what worked before in their retargeting techniques. Let’s be clear here. Anybody can use ads manager. But not everyone understands the creative psychology behind a purchasing journey.

Think about it this way. If you see a sponsored post by a beauty brand you’ve never heard of before, that is a simple makeup demo followed by a 25% off discount code, are you going to shop? Probably not. You might click, browse their IG page, visit the website, but almost 99.9% of the time, you will bounce. Why? Because you don’t trust this brand YET.

Now you have seen multiple video and photo ads by this new beauty brand promoting the fact that it’s a brand owned by a woman who wanted to treat a serious skin condition. She traveled all over the globe to search for the most natural ingredients, hired the best chemists and scientists to ensure her brand is cruelty free with the brightest colors, oh and her business partner is her beloved rescue dog…. Maybe NOW you’re more compelled to give it a shot?

BAM! You see another ad offering you, the first time customer, a 50% off discount code. A no brainer incentive retargeted to you since you’ve recently engaged with previous promos but didn’t convert yet. You’ve shown interest, just needed an extra push. We’ve seen tremendous success with this method.

CONTENT THAT BUILDS SOCIAL PROOF AND GENERATES SALES:

Once you have campaigned to a cold audience and retargeted using incentives and offers, it’s time to get aggressive and start building your “social proof”. People love supporting brands that other people support! It’s that simple. This is by far the most effective campaign method to use but you MUST have user-generated content to boast!

User-generated content consists of positive reviews from previous customers as well as positive content created by your brand ambassadors or influencer partnerships! You could use a series of customer-generated images and videos where your product is visibly used / tagged in a photo carousel or repurposed IG story video content from your customers championing your product with testimonials in the captions! We personally LOVE IG story video ads.

On average, Facebook ads with UGC (user-generated content) have:

300% higher click-through rate (CTR)
50% lower cost per click (CPC)

50% lower cost per acquisition (CPA)

One cheeky trick: run an engagement campaign using customer and influencer generated content to run likes, comments, and high shares. Once that campaign ends you can run it again in a new campaign starting with those high metrics to show even more social proof. Then you can re-target those who’ve recently engaged with more no brainer incentives and shopping codes.

You’ll never learn unless you try! Give social advertising a go. If you feel lost or all of this sounded like Martian to you, that’s where Social Exposure comes in. Call us for a free consultation!