Did you know the predicted social media ad spend in the U.S. alone is just under $63 billion this year? It’s safe to say that businesses are pouring a lot of money into advertising on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. However, it also communicates the value of social media advertising. Companies wouldn’t dedicate large portions of their marketing budget toward it if it weren’t effective.

Source: Oberlo

In this article, you’ll learn the benefits of advertising on social media. Plus, you’ll learn how to set goals effectively, choose the right tools, and efficiently measure the performance of your ads.

Key Takeaways:

• Social media ads can effectively generate brand awareness and increase sales.
• Setting goals before creating an ad will ensure content that will deliver your desired result, whether it’s traffic, conversions, or another metric.
• It’s important to measure the success of your social media ads so you can tweak them to improve performance, ultimately getting the most bang for your buck.

Why You Should Invest in Social Media Advertising

If you aren’t already on board with advertising on social media, it’s time to make a change. Setting aside some money in your monthly marketing budget to run ad campaigns can make a tremendous difference when it comes to your ultimate success. However, it’s understandable if you’re on the fence about investing the money. You don’t want to waste it!

Here are a couple of reasons why social media advertising is worth adding to your marketing budget:

• Ads Place Your Brand in Front of a Wider Audience: While organic traffic is great, sometimes you need the added boost that only a powerful ad campaign can provide. Running an ad can help you increase brand awareness and get discovered by a ton of new people in a short period.

Source: Statista

• It Can Help Generate More Sales: Ads are fantastic for promoting your company’s offerings and can be especially effective when targeting younger crowds. Data shows that 35% of respondents who participated in a U.S.-based survey said social media ads influence their purchasing decisions. Gen Z and Millennials are more influenced than Gen X or Baby Boomers. 

Social Media Advertising: Goals, Tools, and Measurement

Now that you understand just how powerful social media advertising can be, let’s dive into some tips that will help you efficiently set goals, build a powerful arsenal of tools, and easily measure success.

How to Set Goals for Advertising on Social Media 

It’s always important to set goals for your company. When you know what you’re working toward, you can design an action plan to get you from where you are now to where you want to be. And it’s especially important to choose your goals right off the bat when advertising on social media. You can develop an effective ad campaign that generates the desired results.

What are you hoping to achieve with the social media ads you’re running? Are you just looking to generate more brand awareness? Do you want to direct traffic back to your website? Or is your goal to see your conversion rate skyrocket? It helps to follow the SMART goals system, which encourages you to set specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound goals.

For example, you might want more subscribers on your email list. In this case, your end goal will be conversions. Determine how many new subscribers you’d like to gain during the time frame that your ad will be live. This will give you specific data to measure against to ensure success.

Tools to Set Yourself Up for Success 

Another crucial element of social media advertising is choosing the right tools to aid you. Here are a few things you’ll want to make sure you have before you jump head-first into advertising:

• Content Creation Tools: The content of your ad needs to be amazing if you want to grab attention and inspire people to take action. You might consider using an AI writing tool to assist if writing isn’t your strong suit. Canva is also a great option for creating eye-catching graphics.
• Link Shortening Tool: This is one you might not have thought of, but it’s smart to use! Tools like Bitly allow you to shorten any links in your ads. Doing this is more aesthetically pleasing than using a link that’s a mile long. Bitly offers tracking, which means you can collect more data on your link clicks.
• Measurement Tools: The right tools will help you efficiently track the success of your ads. Luckily, each social media platform has its own built-in analytics that will provide tremendous insights. However, you’ll also want to make sure you have Google Analytics up and running, especially if your ad is directing traffic back to your website. 

Source: Shopify

Although this isn’t a tangible tool, influencer marketing can also be valuable in social media advertising. Working with an influencer who has an established audience you want to target can skyrocket your results. That’s because 61% of consumers say they trust recommendations from influencers. If you can partner with someone, it can yield great success.

How to Measure the ROI of Your Social Media Ads

You need to make sure you’re analyzing data to measure the return on investment (ROI) of your ads. It’s important to get your money’s worth when advertising on social media! That’s why you always want to pay the closest attention to the metrics directly tied to your goals.

To generate website traffic, you’ll want to measure how many people are clicking on the link within your ad. Then, you may decide to check Google Analytics to see how much time people spend on that page and the bounce rate. If your bounce rate is high, you’ll want to make some changes to get people to stick around longer.

Should you find you’re not getting the desired results from your ad campaigns, you’ll know something needs to change. It could be the copy, the imagery, the target audience, or something else standing in your way. The data you collect should help you narrow it down to improve performance.

Take Control of Your Marketing

Here at MXTR, we have a team of marketing automation specialists ready to help you skyrocket your marketing results. We can help you align your sales and marketing efforts, shorten the sales cycle, and more.

Interested? Schedule a demo to test out our marketing automation platform.

Featured Image: istockphoto