Over 63% of the total world population uses social channels. This makes it a great means to create brand awareness and connect with your customers. There’s no wonder why many businesses are exceedingly investing in social media marketing. While it’s good and all for organic reach, paid ads on such platforms can also be very effective. Read this article to find out how you can generate sales through social media ads.
Smart businesses make it a point to have a strong social media presence. It helps you improve brand recognition, loyalty, SEO, and reduce marketing costs. Moreover, it has helped many businesses improve their conversion rates.
Organic reach is important but let’s be realistic. If your business is new on social media, you can’t expect to expand your reach with organic methods only. Hence, sorting to paid advertising is crucial.
In fact, social media is the best means for paid advertisement. Along with all other benefits, it is cost effective and helps prevent click fraud.
That being said, let’s find out…
Ways to drive sales through social media ads
# Set a goal
Setting a goal should be the first and foremost concern before beginning with any sort of digital marketing or advertising. Your goal is what will define your approach throughout the campaign. Not having a clear objective or goal is likely to lead to a confused and messy advertising campaign.
Since we are talking about sales in this article, you may say that your goal is so. However, vaguely defining your goal like that can’t really get you anywhere. Consider the following possible sales goals:
- Getting new conversions
- Reconverting existing customers
- Upselling
- Cross-selling
- Improving overall sales
So, identify what you’re exactly looking for and set your goal accordingly.
# Create a buyer persona
A buyer persona is basically a document that contains details of a fictional customer. The characteristics of this fictional customer are based upon your best potential customers.
Creating a buyer persona is crucial to define and understand your audience. It consists of your potential customers’ demographic details, interests, preferences, behavioural traits, and so on.
Apparently, to come up with advertisement strategies that appeal best to your target customers, it is important to understand them. A buyer persona not only helps you know who your target customers should be, but it also helps you empathize with them. This is all thanks to the research that is needed for creating a buyer persona.
Hence, to ensure that your social media ads positively impact your sales, create a detailed buyer persona.
# Select the right platform
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so on—there are many social media platforms available. People use all these different platforms for different purposes. For example, Instagram is mostly used by Gen Z and millennials for entertainment purposes. Whereas, LinkedIn is used for creating professional links and networks.
Whether you’re a B2C or B2B business also plays a role in the choice of social platform for advertising. For another example, businesses with highly visual products could use YouTube or Pinterest advertising.
And there can be many other examples. So, identify your advertising requirements and select the right social media platform accordingly.
# Properly target your ads
Once you are done creating the buyer persona, the next is to follow it and target your audience accordingly. Social media platforms have ad manager features that let you manage whom your ads would reach.
Such ad managers generally allow you to target people based on their region, age, gender, marital status, income, education, employment, and so on. So, make sure to use all these features and refine your ad targeting. This way, you will be able to generate quality leads that will have higher chances of going through conversion.
# Use social media ads for retargeting
Hardly ever a person buys from an ecommerce store the first time he/she visits it. But by doing so, they have displayed interest in your business. Therefore, it is possible to drive conversion out of such visits through retargeting.
Social media advertisements are best suitable for retargeting. Retargeting ads generally appear when a person leaves a site without buying anything from it. This way, you can remind people of your products and services. The same further influences people to finally make a buying decision.
Therefore, while looking for new prospects, don’t forget the old ones. To maximize your sales through social media ads, retargeting is another important thing to do.
# Follow A/B testing
For every digital marketing and advertising function, it is important to monitor your performance. This helps identify problems areas and those points which have scope for improvement. As a result, you are able to find a way to optimize your programs. Therefore, to have an effective testing method in place is crucial.
In A/B testing method, you publish two similar advertisements with a single or a couple of differences. For some time, you run and manage both the ads. After adequately optimizing both the ads, you monitor their performance for some time. Eventually, the one that is getting the most clicked on is kept and the other one is dropped.
You can use this method to monitor your social media ad performance and run the ad that derives most sales.
Conclusion
For all the benefits it has to offer, social media is now an indispensable part of digital marketing program of online businesses. Along with its inbound marketing features, social media is also a great platform for paid advertising. To derive sales from social media ads, start with defining a goal and create buyer persona. Moreover, selecting the right platform for advertising is also a crucial. Further, proper targeting and retargeting of ads is important to improve sales. And lastly, one needs a proper testing method to measure their ads effectiveness. Therefore, you should use the A/B testing method to monitor your ads performance to settle for a most effective one.
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