You’ve been doing a great job at social so far: you’re posting meaningful content daily, you’re interacting and engaging with followers, and you’ve branded all your profiles with your logo, tag-lines, company descriptions and attention grabbing imagery. But what about taking the next step into advertising? Luckily for you, advertising on social media actually compliments your existing social media activity quite nicely. While your current strategy may be educating your market and increasing awareness, social ads are meant to capture those leads that are ready to convert today.
Social media advertising is set to explode in the next 3 years,
Here’s a lineup of the most popular channels, their benefits, and why you should be incorporating them into your 2016 budget.
Facebook Advertising
Did you know that Facebook makes up 50% of all social referrals to ecommerce sites? (DMR)
That’s a lot, and that’s just one statistic. Not an ecommerce business? How about this fun fact: Facebook now drives 25 percent of all Internet traffic (Shareaholic), and Facebook posts earn 340 percent more shares than each of the other four major social networks (Buffer).
Are you a niche business? Then you should familiarize yourself with Facebook’s advanced targeting options: you can literally target people based on their interests, behaviors and connections. Want to reach new, similar users? Lookalike Targeting can be a fantastic acquisition tool, while CUSTOM AUDIENCES lets you reach customers you already know with your ads.
Not enough to convince YOU to put in the budget? Check out these quick stats:
Twitter Advertising
Twitter advertising is 6x more expensive compared to Facebook advertising, but the click-through rate (CTR) of Twitter ads is to 8 to 24x higher. (Smart Insights)
A decent portion of this statistic could be because of Twitter Card’s, which allows you to capture a lead’s contact information within the tweet itself, and in result allowing you to capture those customers that are ready to convert.
Similar to Facebook ads, Twitter also allows you to set a budget, place a bid, and run your campaigns. Twitter’s targeting system is also similar, but their pricing system is different: you only pay when users take an action aligned to your campaign objective.
In the B2B space? B2B marketers who use Twitter generate twice as many leads as those who don’t. (Social Media Today)
Looking to get more engagement with your tweets? Here’s a quick Twitter tip to implement moving forward:
Instagram Advertising
At 4.21%, brand engagement rates highest on Instagram. (Forrester)
Now that Instagram is open to businesses of all sizes, everywhere, you have no reason not test Instagram ads in 2016 (if not now)!
If you are a B2C company, Instagram is a great platform to increase engagement (try out a Hashtag Contest), reward followers with promo codes (50% of comments are posted in the first six hours of making a post) or feature your customers to boost brand loyalty(@mentions in captions receive 56% more engagement).
Instagram leverages Facebook’s ads infrastructure technology, so you are able to customize your message and target to the right people in your market, whether it’s sports, fashion or food.
And for all you community-minded companies: Instagram Photo Maps lets you showcase where you’ve taken your photos, and adding a location results in79% higher engagement!
LinkedIn Advertising
80% of B2B social networking leads come from LinkedIn. (LinkedIn)
If you’re a B2B company and not on LinkedIn already, then you need to get on there…like yesterday. LinkedIn is a lead generation power tool, and it’s also the #1 social network for driving traffic to corporate websites.
Advertising on LinkedIn is similar to Facebook and Twitter, allowing you create custom campaigns and being able to laser-target ads to very specific audiences. LinkedIn advertising is great if you’re trying to target people based on their job titles: think of advertising marketing services (like us here at 451!) directly to CMO’s or other key decision makers within organizations. In terms of cost, LinkedIn allows you to set daily budgets with two bidding options: pay-per-click (CPC) or pay-per-impression (CPM).
LinkedIn is also incredible for recruiting top level talent – with 94% of recruitersleveraging LinkedIn to vet candidates. With an average of 44,000 people submitting job applications on mobile daily, if you’re company is hiring, I suggest checking out LinkedIn Recruiter.
Pinterest Advertising
93% of pinners shopped online in the past six months. (SproutSocial)
If you’re in the food, fashion, or home décor industries – then Pinterest is something you simply can’t ignore. While Pinterest has benefits for companies in all industries, the popularity around these is astronomical:
People have created more than 130 million boards categorized as Home Decor that represent rooms people have or want to someday redecorate.People have created more than 180 million boards related to Food/Drink. Some of these are dinners that people will cook next week. Some are next year’s holiday dinner.There are nearly 300 million boards about fashion, created by Pinners looking to discover their sense of style. (MarketingLand)
Those are some high numbers! And Pinterest users like to spend, to: 47% of online consumers from the US have bought stuff online based on Pinterest recommendations.
It’s no doubt that Pinterest clearly drives purchasing behavior. Already have a business Pinterest account and want to get your product in front of more people? Check out Promoted Pins to increase awareness, engagement and traffic.
YouTube Advertising
There is an average of 1 billion YouTube mobile video views per day. (DMR)
If you’re company already has a YouTube Channel, then you’re ahead of the game! Video is taking the world by storm, with YouTube having over a billion users – that’s almost one-third of all people on the Internet! I know what you’re thinking, “but how many of those people actually useYouTube?” Well, I’ll tell you. YouTube reports that even on mobile alone, YouTube reaches more 18-34 and 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S. (YouTube).
Now that I made a believer out of you, let’s talk video ads. With YouTube ads, you can upload any video you want to promote (try a “how to” video or a customer testimonial, for example) and customize your ad settings by setting a daily budget and targeting your demographic.
Video is arguably the future of content marketing, so if you’re company is not currently involved in this medium, I suggest taking some time to explore. Are you a small business and worried about production costs? Don’t be. With endless amounts of video apps and the quality of smartphone cameras, even you can become an expert. If you’re a bakery, for example, try filming your technique on frosting cupcakes and post to your social channels (make sure you start a YouTube channel!) and I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised with the engagement the post creates.
Credit :451
No comments:
Post a Comment