There’s a saying in marketing: “If something is free, you are the product.”
It’s derived from a mid-1970s interview with artist Richard Serra. Serra said that the advertiser was the consumer of TV, and everyone who was watching was the product. The advertiser was buying attention.
Social media is the same today.
When the big social platforms first started, organic reach was high. There were more new eyeballs being added to the platforms than there was content to serve up — and platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn made it as easy as possible for people to get attention so they would keep using the service.
Now, the low-hanging fruit is gone. As in Richard Serra’s day, the advertiser is the consumer, and the users are the product. Organic social isn’t useless, but it’s tough.
For most brands, this means that paid reach — advertising — is the only way to generate access to new audiences. Advertising on social media can be intimidating if you haven’t done it before. We’re here to make it simple. Here are the basics you need to know.
Building Your First Campaign
Here’s the process you should go through when you build a campaign.
Decide on Your Goals
Every campaign needs a clearly defined goal. These include the following:
- Clicks: If the goal is traffic or awareness, build campaigns that drive clicks.
- Leads: Many advertisers know that their sales process is too complex for a click-and-buy strategy. With a leads campaign, you generate data and audience access — access you can then use to build a relationship with the lead for a future sale.
- Conversions: In situations where it’s all about the sale, look to a conversion campaign. Unit costs will be higher and volumes will be lower, but they will be easily measurable and directly tied to results.
- Awareness: While sales are critical to a business’ success, advertisers are often seeking to let an audience know about the brand, generate goodwill or simply establish a presence in a geography or target market. These goals include a low cost per action, high reach and a potential for significant ongoing benefits.
Understand what your campaign is trying to accomplish. Then you can start figuring out the “who” you’re trying to reach.
Define an Audience
Your audience is defined by both platforms and demographics.
Audiences segment themselves to specific platforms by interest and functionality — think about fields like finance, crypto or journalism, which mostly show up on Twitter. Fashion, in contrast, is mostly on Instagram. Fortunately, all platforms will have data and research tools that you can use to see if the platform has a useful audience for you. Make sure you’re targeting the right audience on the right platform.
Understand Your Platform Options
All major social media platforms allow you to buy access to their user base in some form or fashion.
Meta’s Ad Manager includes a number of options for Facebook and Instagram, including video ads on the main timeline, Stories ads and Messenger ads. Meta also has the biggest audience of all social media platforms (over 3 billion people at last count on Facebook) and some of the best format options.
LinkedIn has some small banner and text ads that display in searches and on the sidebar, and it also has the unique feature of sponsored messages which you can blast out to a list of accounts. LinkedIn allows sponsored posts in the feed too.
YouTube allows pre-roll and mid-roll ads on relevant videos; these come in a variety of lengths.
TikTok allows for sponsored posts that show up in the feed, but it also has the unique benefit of a built-in influencer marketing tool. You can reach out through the platform to people who might be interested in advertising for you.
Twitter allows for basic in-feed ads like most other platforms and has some unique targeting options. Given its position as a sort of “town square” of the Internet, its ability to advertise around events makes Twitter a great option for anyone running a live event.
There are other platforms you can use as well; which you choose will depend on your audience. Figure out where your audience is and what advertising options are most important before you start advertising.
Narrow Your Audience
Once you’ve defined the goal and the platform, you need to narrow the audience by demographics, interest and geography.
Each platform will have slightly different parameters, but you have a general list you can use to define the target audience.
- Geography: Where are they? Critical for local businesses. You can get creative with this; for example, a concert hall I know targeted the other major concert hall in town with Facebook ads, figuring they shared similar audiences. Interest skyrocketed.
- Demographics: Age, gender, etc. You can pre-qualify your advertising leads with this.
- Interests: What do they care about? This is a very useful one. Interests are both public and less likely to be included in privacy legislation; they’re also good indicators of what people will engage with.
With GDPR and other privacy laws, some of the old narrowing options have gone away; keep an eye on the dashboard of your chosen platform to know what still works (and we’ll try to keep you up to date with the Dispatch as well).
Knowing your audience and targeting them will significantly improve chances for success, regardless of the campaign goal.
Figure Out Your Format
Your creative will depend on the goal, platform and audience you’re targeting — and your format will be informed by those things too.
You will find these formats on most platforms.
- Promoted content: These follow the format of your regular posts on the platform — the only difference is the reach. Your investment pushes this content beyond your organic audience and to people the platform thinks will be interested.
- Display content: These ads are shown outside of the regular feed and can take any format that’s available on the platform — text, image, image carousels, Reels, Stories or other video. There is a lot of room for creativity with display advertising.
- Targeted outreach: Many platforms today have laser-focused advertising to reach specific prospects. Two of the most well-known are Messenger content on Meta and LinkedIn’s InMail engagements. This is a growing area of interest, as these campaigns target very narrow audiences, can be combined with other data for customized messaging and provide a unique foundation for evolving machine learning and artificial intelligence technology.
These are the basic types of ads you can run — and given those formats, you’ll need to design your creative around them.
Build Great Creative
Great creative isn’t necessarily cute or compelling — it serves the purpose of the campaign. As David Ogilvy was fond of saying, “if it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.”
Your goal is to get people to take action. It might take an award-winning, genius bit of creative like Apple’s “Think Different” campaign. It almost certainly doesn’t, though.
Great campaigns run off a basic principle: show people the benefit of taking action in the simplest, clearest, most eye-catching way. That could be Doyle Dane Bernbach positioning the Beetle as an anti-materialist counter to the gas-guzzling road boats of the 60s. It could be Billy Mays showing the before and after of a dirty shirt being washed in Oxi-Clean. What makes people want to take action?
There’s an incredible amount of detail that goes into answering this question, far more than we can cover here; if you want to learn more about great creative, you can reference our article archive.
Once you know what you want your creative to look like and what types of ads you’re going to run, you need to figure out the right engagement model.
Choosing the Right Engagement Model
Each social network is a little different, but there are a few things that hold true across platforms.
When you buy advertising on a platform, you’re buying access to a segment of that platform’s audience. This is the social media platforms’ business; they’re in it to make money but they recognize that you need enough return on your investment to come back for more. This mutual benefit creates an equilibrium in pricing even for highly competitive audiences.
Most models revolve around clicks, leads or conversions. Here’s a run-through of the most common pricing models:
- CPM (cost per 1,000): This is the traditional advertising model and still very common for video advertising. It charges a fee per thousand viewers. Many advertisers try to avoid CPM advertising as it lacks any result component; it’s very friendly for the platform, less so for the advertiser.
- CPC (cost per click): CPC engagements charge the advertiser when people click on a link, image or ad. Often, CPC is auction-based — you’re “bidding” on a keyword against everyone else who wants exposure for that keyword to a specific audience. Some keywords are significantly more expensive than others. Finding the right keywords to target matters a lot with CPC when seeking quantitative ROI.
- CPL (cost per lead): This model is the most advertiser-friendly. It only charges when you actually get a lead. CPL engagements are complex and require a closer relationship between the platform and the advertiser. If the goal of the advertising is strictly sales, CPL is the way to go.
There’s no “one size fits all” pricing model; what you use will depend on the platform, the type of ad and the goal of the campaign. Understand your pricing model before you go on to anything else.
Decide Budget
Advertising results come from a combination of platform, audience targeting, creative messaging, and most often, budget. Advertising is always an investment. The return on investment (ROI) can take many forms. Starting out, consider this simple formula:
(Value achieved – investment made) / investment made X 100 = social media ROI
Quantifying value can be a challenge. Many advertisers have negative ROI at the beginning of a campaign. Can those losses be used to refine and improve the campaign? If not, decide how long you can afford to wait for results before making adjustments.
Set the Duration
Most social media campaigns only run for a few days at a time — usually three to five. I’ve never had a campaign run longer than 30 days. If you start pushing past those limits, the messaging and the targeting can fatigue.
Actively monitor the campaign and plan to make adjustments as you define trends. For most advertisers, a social media campaign is a constantly evolving effort that changes based on the capricious nature of the audience. When you find successes, determine if they’re reproducible. If so, double down on those successes. Use each campaign you run to refine the next.
Be the Consumer, Not the Audience
Social media is still a great channel to get access to your audience. Organic reach isn’t what it was, but you can create an advertising campaign to generate results, grow your organic audience and further your business goals. Consider these basics as you plan.
Social media can be complicated. We want to make it simple. We deal with social media on a regular basis, and we’re here to help if you need it; just drop us a line, anytime.
Best Regards,
David Brandon
Copywriter
Rainmaker Digital Services