Social Media Advertising
When designing an ad campaign there are many factors to watch for other than just simply ROI. A few factors to keep in mind are brand engagement, content reach, and content engagement. In order to be relevant in this new advertising sphere, we have to offer more than just a product. Users are constantly bombarded by advertisers trying to sell them something, which makes direct advertising to consumers much more difficult because most consumers simply do not care.
Why Social Media?
Brand Engagement = Likes+tweets+comments+mentions
Content Reach= Brand reach +Σ (Shares) x (Reach of each sharer)
Content Engagement = (Shares + Replies)/Total pieces of social content
Although it is difficult to measure direct ROI from social media advertising, there are several key indicators that will show up if a targeted campaign is effective. When running a social media campaign, the key indicators are cost per 1000 views (CPM), click through rate (CTR), impressions, clicks, unique clicks, cost per click(CPC), social impressions, and actions. These indicators show who is engaging in the ad and how it is being shared across his or her network. When looking at these indicators, there are many different types of value that need to be considered other than simple increase in revenue. For instance, the main goal of any advertising campaign whether social media or not is to increase sales, but there are other types of value such as research, advertising, and content that traditional types of advertising are not able to address. Social media advertising gives companies the ability to do market research very cheaply and much more effectively than the traditional mail in surveys. Social media advertising also gives companies the ability to push out content and interact with consumers in meaningful ways that are reflective of the company culture. Never before has this level of personalization and company to customer interaction existed before.
How Do I Determine A Budget?
Determining a budget for social media advertising can be a little difficult. Unlike traditional media that is normally very easy to track and monitor, social media can be a little more difficult to rate it’s effectiveness. First and foremost, determine which social media channel your company wants to focus on such as: Are you trying to target average consumers? Are you going after business professionals? Are you selling a product or service? All of these questions are very important because they define exactly where you should spend the majority of your money and what type of customers you are looking to attract. For example; if you are selling a food related product, you should probably focus on Pinterest and Facebook. If you are selling a product or service such as fire certification or website design, then you should probably focus more on LinkedIn and using Twitter to get the attention of those big clients. After you determine the target channels of your advertising efforts, it’s time to set the budget.
When determining a budget for these specific ad campaigns to maximize ROI, there are a few different routes that can be taken. A rather statistical route is taking a small sample size of companies in a specific industry, determining how much each company has spent on social media marketing, and dividing the revenue increase that was created after the social media marketing campaigns started by that total. Another but less effective method of determining ROI for a social media campaign, is by analyzing the amount of money successful social media marketing companies have spent on various channels and follow their example.
In essence, the only way to truly know what works or not is to just go out and do it. Allocate a certain percentage of the marketing that you are comfortable spending and go out and launch the campaign. Once the campaign has been running for some time, you can then make adjustments to the campaign by taking money from what isn’t getting attention and put that into what is. Remember that social media advertising is much more than throwing content into consumers faces. In order to be successful in this new advertising environment, companies have to be new, interesting, fun, and engaging. Keep your content interesting and provide the customer with content that you personally would want to engage with. Most importantly have fun because your audience can tell when you are being yourself or just another salesman. Good luck out there.
