Published on: 21/10/2019 | Updated on: October 21, 2019
There’s no doubt that businesses need to learn how to advertise on social media if they want to be competitive in the market. Nowadays, it isn’t newspaper ads and TV ads that drive the most amount of sales in our economy, but it is targetted and interactive ads on social media. It is cheap, effective, and customizable, and you can use ads whether you’re a multinational corporation or a small local business. The only downside is the difficulty of getting the ads right. You need to be tech-literate and math-literate for success. Due to the number of options you have, you’ll also need to do a lot of research to effectively use social media for marketing. This article will help you get some basics down to create a good strategy to tackle social media marketing and increase your sales with below 3 tips to market your business on social media.
Three Effective Tips to Market Your Business on Social Media
#1 Choose Key Performance Indicators
How do you know if your marketing campaign was successful if you don’t know by which metrics you should measure success? Before even starting to create ads, you need to decide what makes a good champaign and what makes a bad champaign.
Key performance indicators are pieces of data you meticulously measure and document over the course of your marketing campaign, and you decide how it went by looking at these KPIs. Although, deciding how to measure success isn’t easy. There are a few valid ways to go about it:
- The number of sales from the ads: this is perhaps the most straightforward way to measure the performance of your ads. How much money did the ads directly bring back to your business in terms of increased sales? This is something you definitely need to keep track of, but it isn’t the only thing that matters.
- The amount of organic traffic to your business: the number of people who click on your ad is also important. It tells you how many people found your ad interesting enough to take the time to take a look at your website. If the amount of people who’ve seen your ad but not clicked on the website, this signals a potential weakness in how you go about creating ads. They are not interesting enough. Also, if you see a lot of people click on your website, but they don’t buy any products, this potentially could mean there’s something wrong with your website.
- New likes, follows, and newspaper signups: social media followers are important. If you have a page for your business with ten thousand likes, this means you can constantly advertise to these many people for absolutely zero cost. That’s why most businesses care about the size of their presence on various social media websites.
These are a few examples of KPIs you can use, but at the end of the day, you should use KPIs that make sense for your business model. If you are having trouble deciding how effective are your ad campaigns and you feel like you’re wasting your money, you can hire a digital marketing agency in Belgium to take care of your marketing campaign for you.
#2 Not All Social Media Platforms are Created Equal
Not all social media platforms are equal when you want to plan a successful marketing campaign. Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube all have their own advantages and disadvantages, and you need to ask yourself some questions before deciding which platform you should use:
- What type of products are you selling and what demographics are you targetting? Each platform has a core demographic that uses each social media. For example, if you want to target political activists, you’ll have much more success on Twitter. If you want to target gamers, Twitch is the way to go. Platforms like Facebook allows you to create very targetted ads. You need to consider these things and then decide which social media platform fits it best.
- What kind of ads do you want to create? Do you think you’ll have success using video ads? Do you want to use beautiful images to sell your services? Video ads aren’t the best on Facebook, but it is the main ad type on Facebook. Images have more success on Instagram. You should consider the type of your ads and decide the platform that’s most suitable.
#3 Engagement is KeyÂ
Engagement is key to success on social media, and this goes for ads too. The more likes, comments, shares, and clicks your ad gets, the better. You need to measure engagement as a KPI and you should strive to increase engagement:
- Do A/B testing: the best way to know what kind of ads produce the best engagement is to test different ads and measure their performance. One of the most popular ways of measuring ad performance is by doing A/B testing. Let’s assume you want to test how effective two of your product images are in your ads. You can create two completely identical ads in all things but the image you use. Use the first image for the first ad and the second image for the second ad, and now, create two ad campaigns for both ads and see how they perform. After a day or two, you should have enough data to know which image generated more engagement. Now, redo A/B testing for other aspects of the ad until you can craft the most effective ad.
- Call to action: telling users to comment, like, or click your website are effective ways to make them do it, and this is largely due to how our brains work. That’s why it is a good idea to put a call to action at the end of each ad.
- Ask for feedback: asking for feedback in your ads will not only give you valuable feedback to improve on things, but it also increases engagement by making the ad viewers post comments and interact with you. It is a smart way to increase engagement without any cost to you.
Belayet Hossain is a Senior Tech Expert and Certified AI Marketing Strategist. Holding an MSc in CSE (Russia) and over a decade of experience since 2011, he combines traditional systems engineering with modern AI insights. Specializing in Vibe Coding and Intelligent Marketing, Belayet provides forward-thinking analysis on software, digital trends, and SEO, helping readers navigate the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Connect with Belayet Hossain on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin or read my complete biography.