Level-Up your Strategy with Targeted Advertising
The right place and time are becoming more than just luck with capabilities for advertising. Marketers are taking their user experience to the next level by delivering content that is the most relevant to customers.
Finding your ideal audience
Customized content translates differently for each social media platform. Here are some standards across platforms:
- Interests: Targeting people based on their interests looks different across platforms, but can include relationships, entertainment preferences, hobbies, companies they interact with, and more.
- Demographics: These are similar across the board, but commonly include age, gender, location, education, job, ethnicity, income, and more.
- Behaviors: Varying across platforms, this can be travel, job role, donations, online activity, purchase behaviors, etcetera.
Reaching your precise audience with a list
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter can reach specific people. By importing a list from a CRM system or email database, the platforms can target specified people using their data.
You can use this tool to reach prospects your sales team is trying to reach or to reach existing customers for your retention marketing tactics. We use this tool to promote sales events for our clients. They provide us with a list of typically around 100 people that they would like to attend, and we upload it into LinkedIn and target those prospects.
The balancing act of narrowing your audience
While this varies depending on your end game, it can be tricky to find the sweet spot between too narrow and too broad of parameters. The platforms each have meters inside their advertising tools indicating how many people your ad will potentially reach with the set parameters—you’ll want to keep an eye on this tool to make sure you’re heading in the right direction.
While you may have a particular group of people you’re trying to reach, platforms will stop your ad from being shown if your target is too narrow. While it can be beneficial to test out a small audience, be sure to keep checking in to make sure that your ad is still running and performing.
On the other hand, it often isn’t profitable to cast too wide of a net with a broad audience. Your potential audience could be in the hundreds of thousands, how many of these people will see the relevance of your ad? Is your market actually this big? Be sure not to spread your money too thin here by trying to touch thousands of people instead of focusing on those who could actually be interested in your messaging.
How can you enhance your Facebook ads?
Check out our blog on 7 budget-killing errors that are hindering your results.
Example
We recently ran a campaign for a client who wanted to target an interested prospective client. This client is a large, national pharmacy retailer. LinkedIn can target people who work for specific companies, so for this project, we decided to focus on people in executive positions at this organization.
While checking back on the ads a couple of times each day, we found that since our audiences were very narrow, they were not performing to our expectations. By optimizing our content strategy for all platforms, we were able to drive traffic to our CTA. Some ways we adjusted included:
- Eliminating the “click more” that pops up after a certain amount of characters in a post by shortening the overall ad copy. By removing those additional steps for the end consumer to take to get to the CTA, it increases the chances of getting that click.
- Looking at which posts in our campaign are outperforming others. How can you adjust the spending to go towards the ones that are gaining more engagement? By paying close attention to your individual campaign posts and targeting, it will increase the overall performance.
By integrating paid social media advertising into your strategy, you can make sure your content gets into the right news feeds. And with these tools, you can maximize your budget and get results that will leave your leadership in awe. Read more blogs here on learning how to turn your social media profile into profit.
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