According to recent trends, most marketers’ top-performing channel is social media marketing. Although a few platforms are available, Facebook and LinkedIn have outperformed their competitors in conversion rate. If you’re wondering where to place your ads in this thriving digital marketing world, LinkedIn with 800 million members and Facebook with 2.9 billion active monthly users are unquestionably your best bets. Both these platforms are widely regarded as the most sought-after content recommendation engines globally.
Are you new to Paid social media marketing? Does it feel overwhelming? Don’t be concerned. We’ve got you covered with a comprehensive guide to creating ads that are guaranteed to perform. Are you already a marketer? Check out the ad optimization section if you weren’t satisfied with your previous experiences.
A Guide to Advertising on Facebook
Facebook is the oldest and still one of the top 2 performing platforms with a colossus user base and powerful targeted ads. The comparatively high average conversion rate for Facebook ads of 9 -10% demonstrates the platform’s enormous influence.
Define your Campaign Objective
The process of creating a perfect advertisement begins with determining the desired outcome. Clearly defining your campaign objective increases your chances of reaching a better-funneled audience and provides clarity regarding the type of content that will resonate.
However, the best it can do is provide you with a high conversion rate. Indicate whether your goal is to increase brand awareness or to promote purchases on Facebook. Your target volume is entirely dependent on this goal.
Identify your Target
Following are the major categories according to which you can find your target audience on Facebook:
- Location: Do you need to reach out to people in a specific region? Use location as a filter to find your target audience.
- Demographics: Got a product for ladies? Send across your ads to target users specific to their personal attributes like age, gender, or professional information like education, job title, etc.
- Behavior: Target your ads based on consumer behaviors such as prior purchases and device usage.
- Connections: Users can be targeted based on their associations with specific groups, Facebook pages, and events.
- Interests: Find out what interests your target audience, and their daily indulgence in activities, from animation and action films to cooking, to make your targeted ads more relevant.
If you know exactly who your target audience is, you can enter the information right away. You can put together a list of custom audiences to target your existing customers. The Retargeting Audience could be your catch if you want to reach out to customers who have visited you physically or if you have their contact information in any other way.
Facebook Pixels could be really helpful for keeping tabs on how people are engaging with your business. Also recorded are the user’s actions on your website, such as the pages they’ve visited and the products they’ve added to their shopping carts, as well as the Facebook advertising they viewed before arriving at your site.
When you aren’t too sure of what kind of people you want to reach out further, Audience Insight is your go-to feature. This feature gives aggregated information about all the audiences who have interacted with your content earlier. It gives you a breakdown of the demographics like age and gender while also giving you insights into their interest areas.
A feature like Audience Insights helps you build a Lookalike Audience to reach a new audience that best matches your existing audience. A source audience of 1,000 – 5,000 best enables you to formulate a suitable Lookalike Audience.
Once you’ve figured out your perfect audience, Facebook gives you the option to save that setting for repeated use. A reasonably sized audience helps in the best delivery. Your campaign objective directs your optimum audience volume.
Facebook Ad formats
- Image Ads: A single-picture ad that is suitable for most funnels but may not be best for demonstrating a product
- Video Ads: Single video ads are ideal for companies that rely on eye-catching visuals.
- Carousel ads: It is an ad format with a set of pictures or videos that one can be swiped to view on a single post. They serve best for putting forth a set or variety of products.
- Collection Ads: They are not too different from carousel ads but give your viewers a full-screen experience and are more customizable
- Instant Experience and Facebook Stories ads: These are full-screen ads that may be images or videos displayed between the stories.
Placement of your Ads
When you advertise on Facebook, the system determines the best placements based on your goal. By selecting these placements, your ads will receive efficient, incremental reach. You can either automate this process or choose which platforms to target with your ads from Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network. Because your targeting criteria apply to all platforms, you can reach your ideal audience across the Facebook family of apps.
Optimal pricing strategy
While the cost of a Facebook ad is directly related to the configuration of the audience you choose, it is also heavily influenced by the campaign objective you select. The new Facebook Outcome-Based Motivated Advertisement Experience interface directs advertisers to the best campaign setup for realizing the desired results.
Measure and Optimise your Facebook Ads
The Measuring tools of Facebook help you optimize your ads by analyzing how your ads and campaigns have been performing. To examine the output of your campaigns, you can go to the up-to-date performance data and get your ad reports.
The account overview page displays key metrics for active or recently completed campaigns. Account overview groups information and guidance to assist you in addressing campaign health, understanding performance, and optimizing campaigns. This dashboard shows:
- Alerts
- Recommendations
- Campaign trends
- Access to a Facebook Marketing Expert
- Ad limits
- Tasks
Target Optimisation Tips
- Segment your audience into specific categories. The better the segmentation, the better would be the target delivery. Keeping the audience volume sizable is the key.
- While building the Lookalike Audience, make sure to target the people who resemble your loyal and top-spending customers.
- To understand your top customers, break down the user demographics like age, gender, income brackets, etc.
- Avoid overlapping audiences. Refining your targeting may be a great practice.
Creatives and Design
When you’re unsure about the automated analysis reports generated by Facebook’s tools, you create and compare multiple ad variations for the same audience. A True A/B test can help you test and compare the performance of two ad designs against each other or find the best-performing placement for the amount of money you’re investing.
A Guide to Advertising on LinkedIn
While LinkedIn claims that 4 out of 5 of its users are decision makers, it also confidently projects the buying power of its users as twice that of the average web audience. Linked is the best operating organic social media marketing platform, and even better for paid campaigns.
Campaign Objective
Much like Facebook and any other digital marketing channel, clarity of the campaign objective drives crucial decisions regarding the budget, target audience, and the delivery of the right message to the right audience.
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Conversion or Lead Generation
Targeting Categories available on LinkedIn
LinkedIn has a setup that encourages people to keep their professional profiles up-to-date. This allows you to find an audience based on professional backgrounds. It works equally well with B2B and B2C. The following are the targeting options on LinkedIn:
- Work experience: Job role, Seniority, Titles, Member Skills, and years of experience
- Education: Degrees, Fields of Study, and Member Schools
- Company: Company Name, Company Industry, Company Followers, Company Growth Rate, Company Category, and Company Size
- Interests and Traits: Member Interests, Member Groups, and Member Traits
- Demographics: Age and Gender
Additional Features like Audience Template can help you target key audiences based on your preferences and campaign objective without having to manually select the right mix. Audience Expansion broadens your relevant reach based on the algorithms of the current target customers. This is similar to building a Lookalike audience on Facebook.
Utilize Matched Audiences to tailor LinkedIn targeting based on your business data. With Website Retargeting, you can re-engage website visitors, nurture prospects with Contact Targeting, and run account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns with Account Targeting.
Hyper-targeting? Nah! That’s one thing you want to avoid. Forecasted Results can help you learn more about your audiences as you set up targeting for your campaigns. The Target Audience Size shows the estimated total number of LinkedIn members who match your targeting criteria. The Segment breakdown dropdown displays professional attributes such as job function, years of experience, company size, industries, and interests.
LinkedIn Ad formats
- Sponsored Content: Single Image, Video, Carousel Ads
- Sponsored Messaging: Message, Conversation Ads
- Right-rail: Text, Spotlight, Follower Ads
- Lead Gen Forms
Test, Measure, and Optimise your Linkedin Ads
- Running an A/B test is always a great practice to compare your multiple creative ad sets and find out what content performs best for a particular segment of the audience. The same ad sets can be run for two different sets of an audience to figure out which audience responds the best.
- While conducting these tests, focusing on business identifiers helps better than demographics
- Based on the number of clicks, comments, and shares, you can figure out the kind of engagement each ad has been garnering to gauge the Ad quality. Lower-performing content should be replaced every 1 – 2 weeks.
- Direct Sponsored Content helps you test different ad creatives and targeting combinations. It is displayed only to the target audience and not on your LinkedIn page.
- To Analyse your ad campaigns,
- Reiterate your campaign goal
- Identify your critical metrics
– Clicks
– Impressions
– Cost per Conversion
– Leads
– Cost Per Lead
– Impressions Analyzed
– Valid and Viewable rate
– Click-through rate (CTR)
– Average engagement
– Conversions
– Conversion rates
- Measure your conversions through conversion tracking
- Lead Gen forms will help you measure the leads and costs per lead
- Finally use Campaign Manager individually maps the important metric for each of your ads
- Installing LinkedIn Insight Tags on your website tracks conversions and enables demographic reporting on visitors.
- The Campaign Manager is developed to provide excellent reporting capabilities that will assist you in identifying critical metrics like your campaign’s overall impressions, clicks, budget, and social actions for testing the quality of your ads.
- Making your landing pages an easy place to view, navigate, and submit information from a smartphone helps optimize for phones.