Managing Your Social Media Ads: What You Need to Know

We could not oversell the mightiness of social media ads. In many fields, it remains one of the most effective and quickest ways to connect to your target audience for your brand and reach your goals.

So how can you manage your social media ads quickly, efficiently, and increasingly better with Slingshot?

What Are Social Media Ads

Social media ads are digital ads that are run on social media platforms, as part of social media advertising campaigns. They can be used to promote specific content or products and reach a specific audience. These ads are design to reach only the right people with the right interest and therefore, data essential when creating and adjusting your marketing campaigns.

For social media ads to be successful, marketers consider:

• Demographics of their target audience (age, gender, location, etc.)
• Preferences and interests of the target audience
• Behaviors of the target audience

By analyzing and using this information, marketers make it possible for brands to draw the attention of the right audience and optimize their investment in social ads. 

Why Use Social Media Ads

Social media ads are a great way for businesses to expand their reach and complete the set goals through:

• Reaching new customers
• Gain insights about audience behavior and needs
• Utilize a wide range of formats
• Create meaningful impact with content

To understand better why any company, regardless of its size, needs to use social media ads, let’s look at some of the main reasons you should advertise on social media.

That’s Where Your Customers Are

According to a recent study by Statista, 70% of the US population uses at least one social media profile. That kind of access is an undeniable opportunity when it comes to wanting to reach an audience that will make a difference for your organization simply by acting.

Opportunities for Engagement

Customers are more receptive when your marketing is done through social media – according to MarketingSherpa, 95% of online adults ages 18 to 34 are likely to follow a brand on social media. This engagement, however, happens only when the targeted content via ads is interesting to them, a.k.a. the social media ads are following the correct data in their creativity.

You Get to the Right People

Your ad on social media uses the demographic data that shows exactly who is most likely to give you the deserved attention and ultimately become your customer.

Low Entry Cost

With social media ads, the cost is relatively lower especially compared to traditional advertising. Ads cost varies on different platforms, of course, but still, you can create and run some very useful low-cost campaigns, and then use that data for more adjustment of your overall marketing strategy. 

More Visibility and Goal Achievement

Regardless of whether you want to drive more traffic to your website or make people engage with your brand, use your products, etc. – your power here lies with visibility. Making your social media ads more visible means achieving your objectives with the smart approach of just being there, at the right place, right time, and most importantly – for the right people.

Benefits of Social Media Ads

With around 4.2 billion active social media users across the globe, as of 2021, social media ads are indisputably something to take advantage of for the sake of your reach goals. However, it doesn’t hurt to look at the main benefits of the usage of social media ads – just in case you need a bit more convincing.

Improved Brand Recognition

As brands go, the ones that call themselves successful are those who can say their name is recognizable by people online. Even advertising through paid ads drives brand awareness by people you hope to become your customers. This is usually one of many touchpoints in your customer sales cycle.

Humanizing Businesses

People are not robots and sometimes, the corporate side of businesses can push them away. Through good analysis, social media ads can be creatively built in such a way that humanizes the brand and creates a real connection with people. It’s not enough to show them what you have to offer – it’s about being real and evoking that emotion that grabs attention and stimulates response.

Quality Traffic 

When you make sure people learn about your brand, you can expect some quality traffic your website’s way. The best part is, that the flow of visitors will not be random, but they will be a part of a specific, targeted audience, raising the possibility of converting more customers through the social media ads campaign.

Be Where They See You

According to a study by Pew Research Center, around 49% of people say they check their social media multiple times per day. Through social media ads, you can stay on top of the mind of those, who are your target audience, who will find your posts engaging and ultimately become converted customers to your brand – or at least know about you and spread the word when necessary.

Raise Customer Satisfaction

Your social media ads are the voice of your brand, which is designed by analyzing your current and potential customers’ voice. Sounds complex? Not really. Basically, by learning about your customers before you speak to them, you then can talk in their language. Customer appreciation is immediately raised, along with satisfaction.

How to Create Social Media Ads

You want to make sure that the social media ads you create will be impactful on your audiences. Marketers often turn to the following steps when they want to create a meaningful and effective result.

Research Your Audience & Platforms

A good idea is also to analyze and plan your ad posting on the platform in which your specific audience spends their time in since targeted groups vary in their choice.

Experiment with Formats & Creative

We already mentioned ad campaigns in social media are one of the lower-cost mediums for reaching your customers. This gives you the chance to experiment more than through other mediums – and then follow the data results to see which approach was more successful overall.

Boost Your Top-Performing Content

If you already have the data on what your followers respond to the most, why not use that analysis to amplify content to bring even more engagement? The ability to take a successful organic post and boost it to your target audience is a great wat to promote content and messaging.

Use the Power of Analytics Excessively

Goes without saying, that to be successful, social media ads stand on data as a main pillar. Use metrics smartly and constantly, to determine each decision, test or change you make in your overall social media strategy. Experimenting through your intuition is futile when you have the power of data at your fingertips. Use it before, during, and after each campaign and you can be sure your ads will be optimized for success.

Tracking the Performance of Your Ads

Like we said, evaluation of the right data brings better and smarter decisions along the way. So which metrics should you look at, keeping the purpose of your campaign in mind? Here are some of the most important ones.

Impressions

This metric shows how many times your ad was on screen, the number of people who could have seen it. Impressions may vary based on your audience size and you can set a goal depending on your goals, but of course, high impressions are preferred for brand awareness.

Engagement

This reveals how many times a person has engaged/interacted with your social media ad, including actions such as: like, share, comment, and click. Depending on the type of campaign and its goal, some of these can be the priority more than others, so you can analyze your results according to that.

Click-Through Rate

The click-through rate is the percentage of people who decided to click on your ad after seeing it . Тhis metric is important since it gives you insight on what works for your customers, and make sure you’ve targeted the right people for your campaign.

Cost Per Click

Looking at this metric is important since you need to make sure the amount you pay for each click on your ad is adequate and corresponds to the efficiency of the campaign. Companies are usually setting their cost per click rate at the max in order to get leads, but things like cost of your product and the efficiency of the channel you are advertising on should also be taken into account.

Conversions and Conversion Rate

Conversions are calculated by the number of people who have taken the action you indicated as a success. The conversion rate is similar to the click-through rate since it’s calculates the rate at which people who click on your ads convert.

Quality Score

This is the sum of three important metrics: the expected click-through rate, the landing page experience, and the ad relevance.

ROI

The return of investment is a necessary metric to look at, especially when you want to keep your budget straight while achieving the set goals by your team.

How to Easily Track Your Social Media Ads

So how can you make sure you both create and track your social media ads adequately and effectively? You might want to consider a tool like Slingshot that encompasses all you need regarding data analytics, dashboards, and data visualization, for tracking everything important in your ads campaign.

One of the most efficient ways is through data visualization, using dashboards to capture your social media metrics and the website data you get. With marketing performance data visualization, you can check out the ROI and effectiveness of a campaign, social media performance, and goal accomplishment. In marketing, dashboards are mostly used to check out things like interactions and conversions, visits, landing page performance, website traffic, and others. Usage of charts, graphs, pie charts, and tables is most frequent here. Slingshot lets you connect directly to your Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram ad accounts.

Slingshot is an all-in-one digital workspace and a tool that can aggregate data analytics, project and information management, chat, and goals-based strategy benchmarking – all in one, intuitive app.

Furthermore:

• You can create and assign tasks around your social ads in Slingshot in just a few clicks, based on the data insights
• Project management is made easy and quick through access to your creative and content pinned directly in the app
• Planning your next steps in collaboration around the data you are seeing in your social media happens in one place and everyone on the team has visibility
• You can quickly connect to your different data sources and create dashboards within minutes. 
• Slingshot is fully integrated with Azure Machine Learning Studio in Analytics so you can choose your data source, and build visualization
• Slingshot supports Google BigQuery, adding significant speed in processing big data with Analytics, allowing for usage of huge datasets in seconds

With Slingshot, you can quickly bring together the data from your social media ads performance, the Google Analytics for your website traffic and turn it into lead and opportunity data using Salesforce.

Don’t forget to check out our blog on the types of data analysis that can help your business thrive.