Five Tips to Supercharge Your Social Media Ads

Whether you want to use paid social media advertising to increase the visibility of your brand online, reach new audiences, or drive traffic and sales, these ads can often be an invaluable tool for your brand. However, with so many businesses vying for a space on the newsfeed, it can be challenging to create engaging paid social campaigns that deliver. With that in mind, here are five of our top tips to get you started!

1)     Know your target audience.

To create engaging paid social campaigns, you’ll need to have a thorough understanding of your target audience. You should know their interests, pain-points, and behaviour patterns. By understanding your audience, you can tailor your ads to meet their specific needs and preferences. This will help you create ads that resonate with them, delivering the right message at the right time, and to the right people.

You probably already have a buyer persona in mind for your ideal customer and will have conducted market research to help gain insight into the type of person most likely to convert – use that information for your social ads! If not, then tools such as Google Analytics and Facebook Audience Insights can also provide valuable additional information about your intended audience. According to a study by AdEspresso, using Facebook's Audience Insights tool can even result in a 64% higher click-through rate for advertisers willing to do their homework before launching their campaigns.

For driving sales, pixels are your best friend. This is a small snippet of code installed on your website and used to pass information back to the social media platforms, enabling you to track events as well as build valuable retargeting audiences. Retarget those warm audiences with an offer or a direct response ad to help nudge them over the line. These audiences can also be used to build useful lookalikes and supercharge your prospecting campaigns. Remember to exclude your retargeting audiences from your prospecting activity to avoid unnecessary overlap.

2)     Craft compelling ad copy

The ad copy is the written content that accompanies the ad's visual elements. The copy is the backbone of your ad, and it should be compelling enough to entice your audience to take action. To create compelling ad copy, focus on your unique selling points and tailor them to your target audience. You can also highlight any offers, user testimonials or reviews. The end-goal is to craft a compelling “hook” to catch attention and pique their interest.

Here are a few example copy frameworks which leverage hooks:

It’s important that your copy is eye-catching so consider how you format your copy to make it standout and maximise readability. For example, using emojis in place of regular bullets can make your list of benefits more noticeable. Be sure to avoid “walls of text” that might put users off.

Since ad copy is so critical to the success of paid social campaigns, it’s vital to always be testing different variations to gather data on which frameworks and hooks are delivering for your brand. You can use platform tools such as A/B and lift testing to help here; whilst Meta also includes “multiple text options” functionality, allowing for optimisation between up to five different text variants at a time.

A study by Meta found that Facebook ads with compelling copy had a 28% higher engagement rate than those with generic headlines, so ensure you capture the user’s attention early to maximise results!

3)  Use eye-catching visuals.

There is nothing more important to the success of a social media ad than the creative. In fact, a Neilson study found that this accounts for up to 80% of performance of an ad! Your ad creative should be eye-catching and relevant to your target audience to ensure that it stands out and stops those thumbs scrolling. Make sure that you use high quality images and videos that are consistent with your brand's messaging and style. Ensure you are using a mix of static and video creative to allow your campaigns to take advantage of more placements and to maximise relevancy – there are no formats that work for every brand and every customer, since different users respond to different types of visual cues.

It’s important to create your visual assets in a variety of sizes so that you can deploy the correct aspect ratio for different social media placements. For example, artwork sized for a Facebook feed can look unappealing when used in an Instagram story. Where your chosen social platform has the option to use placement customisation, it’s often an easy win to ensure that the creative is displayed at the most optimal size for each placement your ad could show.

Along with strong creative, your ad should have a clear and concise call-to-action (CTA) that tells your audience what you want them to do. Your CTA should be relevant to your ad and align with your main KPI. You’ll also need to think about how different audiences might respond here too! As an example, introducing a new prospecting audience to a brand, you might opt for CTA such as “Learn More”, whereas if you’re pushing for direct response then “Shop Now” is likely to be more effective (but always test to be sure!)

At TMN, our Creative Shop team are experts in understanding the imagery, formats and copy that deliver scalable results.  We follow strict best practice to allow us to create striking ad creatives which are fully optimised to convert. Here are some examples:        

4)     Choose the right platform.

Choosing the right social media platform for a paid social campaign is crucial because different platforms have different core user demographics, behaviours, and interests. Understanding each platform can help you choose which is right for your brand or campaign. For example, if you’re targeting younger audiences with a strong video creative, Instagram and TikTok may work best for you.

Additionally, different platforms have different ad formats, targeting options, and pricing structures. For instance, LinkedIn is more expensive compared to other social media platforms, but it allows for precise targeting based on job titles, industries, and company size.

By selecting the right social media platform, you can ensure that your paid social campaign is reaching the right audience and is optimised for the specific features and benefits of that platform, ultimately increasing the chances of achieving your business goals.

5)     Measure what matters

Before you jump into launching your paid social campaign, you should have a clear objective in mind for what you’d like the campaign to achieve. How can you best match your campaign objective to your wider business goals? What would success look like to you and which metrics are key to demonstrating it? For example, there’s little point in creating a campaign designed to drive a low cost per video view, if your ultimate objective is sales and ROI. Conversely, if your goals are brand awareness and exposure, then reach, video views and lift metrics will be key.

A well-crafted paid social strategy will include multiple campaigns designed to target each stage of the funnel; with the key measurement metric dependent on each campaign’s role in the user journey. Using a typical e-commerce client as an example, in the upper funnel, you might be relatively unconcerned with driving immediate attributed revenue from these cold audiences, instead focusing on reach and product views. Whereas you’ll certainly want your retargeting campaigns to be delivering a strong ROAS. Think about how these metrics relate – the more product views you drive, the more users you’ll be able to retarget (for example with Dynamic Product Ads campaigns) and the more revenue you’ll be able to drive from those campaigns. It’s about getting the balance right!

To that end, you’ll also want to explore Lift Studies which allow you to split your audience into randomly-assigned exposed and control groups. Most social platforms have functionality to set up lift tests to measure both brand and conversion metrics. Get in touch with an expert at TMN if you’re unsure.

…and one bonus tip!

Test and Learn

We’ve mentioned it multiple times throughout this piece, but continuous testing is absolutely essential for optimising paid social performance. By testing different elements of your ad campaigns, brands can identify the most effective strategies to deliver results. Whether it’s audiences, copy, creative or formats; be sure to test a variety of options, monitor performance and record the results. But avoid testing too much at once! Consider devising a “testing matrix” to identify which tests you’d like to run and prioritise them accordingly. This way you can better ensure that you get robust statistically significant results.

Ultimately, testing is an ongoing process that can help you continuously improve your paid social performance over time. By regularly testing and optimising your ads, you can stay ahead of changing audience behaviours and preferences to ensure that your ad campaigns are always delivering the best possible results.

For many businesses, paid social advertising can be a daunting and potentially confusing endeavour. With so many options available, it can be challenging to know where to start or how to optimise your campaigns for the best results.

Following the above steps will help give you the best chance of success with paid social; but if you’d like more support, then please reach out to us here at TMN. Our expert team have many years of experience in paid social advertising, including for some of the world’s largest brands. We’re always on hand to supercharge your paid social activity and get you the results you need for your business.

Get in touch with us via LinkedIn, our website or [email protected].