When it comes to advertising on Google and social media, it’s best to proceed with caution and with a very specific budget in mind. Never forget that spending more money doesn’t necessarily equate to greater success. This is often a rookie mistake. 

Calculating the Return on Investment for Social Media Advertising

It’s easier than you might think for a business to spend a lot of time and money on social media without getting the results they want. If your company isn’t happy with the current Return on Investment (ROI) from advertising on social media networks, it might be time to reassess the budget and clearly define your goals.

How Will You Measure Success in Social Media Advertising?

Every business is going to approach this question differently. Many businesses measure success by the number of sold products, leads generated, or potential customers engaged. Paid advertising on social platforms as a branding play can be more challenging to track. But it could be the right move if the strategy aligns with the company’s overall digital marketing goals. Social media is an excellent place for businesses to connect with large numbers of people.

How Much Should Your Business Spend on Social Media?

Step one in budgeting for social advertising is to determine how much you’re planning to spend on all your digital marketing efforts.

Next, you’ll need to decide what % of that budget is going to be devoted to social media.

• Most companies spend about 5% to 15% of annual revenue on marketing
• Of the total marketing budget, approximately 35% to 45% should be spent on digital marketing activities

Your overall digital marketing goals should play a factor in determining how much gets allocated to social media spending.

Be careful not to cannibalize the budget for content marketing, the SEO budget, paid search advertising, display advertising, and other high priority digital marketing activities.

Never Forget Your Audience When Advertising on Social Platforms

There’s a lot of front end work that needs to be completed before purchasing ad spend on social media, regardless of whether you’re purchasing advertising space or paying to boost relevant content to audiences.

We recommend figuring out who you want to reach and how you want to reach those people before deciding how to spend a social media advertising budget.

Once you know the answer to those questions, it’s time to figure out which social media channel your specific audience is using (or if they’re using social media at all).

Can Creativity Impact the Cost of Social Ad Spend?

While it takes more time, energy, and money to add creativity to advertising on social media channels, many businesses find these efforts are worth the investment in the long run.

Typically, creative and engaging advertising efforts connect with audiences better, gain organic momentum, and are more likely to get comments, likes, and shares. Try to align your content with the sort of content people have come to expect from that particular social media channel. This also applies to organic marketing content like in-feed posts or email blasts. 

Creativity Pays Off in the Long Run 

Over time, social media channels, like Facebook, are likely to pick up on which advertisers produce quality content and which advertisers miss the mark.

While most of the social networks want to make money, most refuse to do so at the expense of user enjoyment. Creative, high-quality content in advertising efforts on social media is a win-win for everyone involved.

Facebook, for instance, will even help an ad perform better at auction if people appear to be enjoying the content. Enjoyment is primarily measured by likes and shares.

In other words, high quality content has potential of reaching more customers at a lower cost per interaction.

Social Advertising with Video Vs. Static Images

There are a few different ways to go about advertising on social media. Most businesses are familiar with advertising through static image ads, but there is a growing segment of advertisers that are utilizing video ads.

Video content is typically more challenging and expensive to produce than a static image, but a business is likely to make a bigger impact and drive more engagement with a video advertisement, something all the social media channels seem to want.

The great thing about video is that a piece of video content can often be used across multiple platforms and tends to have a longer “shelf life” than images. You can even break video content up into different length clips to use in various capacities.

Let us know what aspects of paid advertising online appeals most to you. We will continue a segment on how to best ‘hack’ your budgets and the platforms you share on. 

If you would like bespoke advice on how to boost your ad-strategy, drop us a line at neil@mysocialbiz.net!