8 Tips to Improve Your Sponsored Social Ads

In recent past, the advertising scope of social media has grown continuously.

Marketers are willing to spend their budget on social media marketing and as data says it has doubled from $ 16 billion in 2014 to $ 31 billion in 2016.

Hopefully, the graph will go up in 2018 and beyond, but what important here to know is that how would you ensure the success of your campaigns.

For sponsored social ads conversion, a marketer should know how to create, target and format those adverts.

Here are 8 tips that will help you optimize your sponsored social ads for the success-

1) Focused Audience Targeting

While targeting your audiences through social media you need to segment your consumers on a certain basis, like their interests, their demographic constraints, and requirements.

If you precisely focus on targeting your audiences knowing their real demands, it would be more helpful in achieving results. Facebook’s ad platform brings some features that would help you in targeting your core audience.

See these features now-

• Interest Targeting– As the name suggests, the Interest Targeting works on the brand preferences of users and their timeline content choices.
• Audience Behavior– Every customer has own requirements & necessities while browsing social media platform. This feature helps marketers in recognizing the requirements or better says the behavior of the audience.
• Demographic & Psychographic Makeup– Understanding the demographic and psychographic behavior of audiences is also important in order to serve the right content to each individual consumer.

When you perform above-mentioned actions, save your custom audiences to optimize settings and further, to be used for future campaigning.

Custom audience will help you later while going for A/B testing.

Take a wide audience base and refine it later. Let us understand it in this way-

“Suppose you targeted your audience demographic location wise and saved them based on the parameters. Now, you can segment the audience group more precisely after doing A/B testing of the ad.”

2) Two-Cent Video Ads

Video ads not only work better than the static images but also improve your relevancy score.

1) Focus on the story, not the sale. Ensure you are appealing to needs of your audiences to drive their emotional response.

Also, make sure you are including tracked URLs in the description and at the end of the video as per your marketing strategies.

2) Make your video fun; add something interesting to attract the attention of your audiences. You have to attract your audience in just 10 seconds or less, so entertain them with a video that includes punches and laughing moments.

3) Add all the substances which help users get engaged in the video. Whether it is entertaining or educational, ensure the information included is as per the nature and subject of the video. You can also add subtitles to make the video more understandable.

4) Showcase your best video on social media platforms. For instance, whether long or small, whichever video is doing well on Facebook, upload it to YouTube video to gather more attention.

3) Promote on Other Social Platforms Too

Do not restrict yourself to advertisements on limited social media platforms. If you are promoting on LinkedIn and Twitter, make sure your next step would be Facebook, Reddit, Quora, Outbrain and even all of them.

Consider below-mentioned points whether you have to or not advertise on a platform-

• Have you seen your competitors advertising there?
• Is your content as per the format of the platform?
• Are your audiences there? What are their demographic positions?
• Are you already seeing organic success on this platform?

When you repurpose your content from one social media to others, it expands its outreach with little efforts.

4) Assess Quality Score

Quality score is a term that is taken differently for each channel. For instance, on Facebook, it is called “Relevancy Score” while on Twitter, it is called “Quality Adjusted Bid.”

Although the “quality score” ensures the success or failure of your campaign. If the quality score is more, it will get more impressions at a lower cost-per-engagement and vice-versa.

This is why you should promote the content that is best and proven to perform well on all platforms. While doing this you can run tests that can be successful.

A/B testing will help you in letting you know which your best performing campaign is.

Share content organically and configure which part of the content brings most shares, retweets, and likes.

5) Do Remarketing with Customer Segmentation

Social media remarketing is a procedure that helps marketers reach website visitors who haven’t performed any activity on the platforms though spending their maximum time there.

With remarketing on social media, you can enhance your conversion rate at 2X level while minimizing your overall costs.

There would be users who are already associated with you. Promote messages which offer demo, consultation or purchase to them.

Here are three social retargeting techniques you can use immediately:

1. Retarget your blog readers/audiences– Retarget your blog readers on social media and try to re-attract their attention and draw them back to your marketing funnel.
2. Reach your past buyers– Divide your customers by purchase history where you can find frequency and the transactions data. For instance, make a retargeting campaign mentioning and focusing on those who haven’t done any purchasing in the recent past. Using offers and discounts will be an added advantage.
3. Recycle from other channels– You would have visitors who may already be connected with you through paid campaign activities. You have to retarget those visitors towards a particular landing page with the best offer.

Your content and landing pages already have grabbed a good investment to bring visitors, so why not make a little more investment to get lost opportunities through remarketing.

6) Pay for Essential Things

Pay only for those activities on your Facebook or other social media channels which bring returns or matters to your page. For instance, if you are promoting your content and want more readers, then pay for clicks.

You need to understand your requirements and investment limit simultaneously. These below-mentioned metrics will help you in deciding the flexibility of your budget.

1. Impressions– If your strategy is to get your content seen by maximum users, pay per CPM i.e. impressions per 1000 people.
2. Engagement– Engagement means retweets, shares, comments, and likes. It contributes little to your revenue but helps you in identifying that how well your content matches the expectation of your audience.
3. Traffic– Plan to bring more traffic to your landing page or blog and then, ensure you’re working on a CPC bidding model. Doing this will help you pay only for the clicks made on the ad.
4. Lead and Conversions– If you are looking for information from your audience or offering exclusively to get a lead, this metric is going to help you. If you are looking for conversions, ensure your investment on a CPA basis.
5. Sales-This metric aims to the bottom of the funnel and looks for ROI only.

A CPC Model-

7) Make Content as Per Social Media Channel

Make your stories as per the algorithm guidelines of the social media platform. Your Facebook’s video content may not be viable for other social media platforms, say Pinterest.

So, create customized content after analyzing the guidelines. For instance, Instagram stories tend to be organic and impromptu in nature. So, try to shoot your message directly with the app camera, keeping dimensions of videos in mind.

Optimize your organic content for appropriateness with the context of matching the requirements. See, which of your posts is getting most engagements and analyze them in a way to get best results when you are setting up new campaigns.

8) Different A/B Testing Formats

Testing helps you in identifying the bugs of your content and enables you simultaneously to improve that.

A/B tests are certainly the procedure which would be helping you in the best possible way. You can experiment with different variants of the same ad and explore new ways to reach your targeted and existing audiences, both.

Here are three A/B testing methods with which you can test your ads.

A/B Testing 1- Multiple Adverts Formats

You may know your audience but knowing their content choices will be the best. Once you have saved your audiences, apply testing of different ad formats on them.

For instance, Facebook provides more than 10 ad types and whichever format you use will depend on your requirements.

Suppose, you’re promoting a product, test static images versus carousels. Carousels are the advertisements serving several images to the users, each having CTA. Carousels are popular in e-commerce as they promote multiple products to customers at one time.

Carousels- 

A/B Testing 2– Illustrations versus Photography

Testing ad formats may deliver better results, but also keep in mind the image illustrations in the formats.

This could be significant to test illustrations versus photography.

The rules remain the same for video content. Test the animations versus videos that include people, landscapes or similar things. Now, compare them to find which has more engagement and ROI.

Illustration– 

Photography-

A/B Testing 3: Copy Length and Emojis

When you have eye-catching visual content, it may be possible that users may forget the text that runs with it.

The best example of the visual content would be Emojis which can bring more attention to your ads. Try to place them in the ad body as well as the headline.

Emojipedia will help you in finding relevant emojis and their application on your ads.

Now you have to check the effectiveness of long ad copy over the short one.  You can add 500 characters in your ads, but writing that much long copy isn’t always necessary.

Short copy allows easy reading and also catches more attention and thus gives more engagement.

But, you should also test both ad copies to see their effectiveness.  You may find that long copy isn’t as effective as short ones in generating engagement and leads.

So, test your ads before final launch. Ensure you have added all features that would give you desired results.

Conclusion- 

Optimizing sponsored social ads increase their potential and make them strong enough to achieve best results.

But, in the process, you need to follow above-mentioned things which will make your ads perfect.