Ready to start investing in Social Media Ads? Fantastic! But before jumping in it’s crucial to do a bit of groundwork to ensure that you’re giving your investment the best chance of success. Here’s a handy checklist to get you started…

1. WHAT IS MY BRAND TONE OF VOICE?

The first question to ask before running ads is what is the tone of voice of your business? Friendly and relaxed, formal and professional, entertaining, quirky, passionate, irreverent…the tone of voice expresses the personality of your business and it’s values, and the tone of voice that you use in your Ads should be consistent with how you communicate with customers in real life. 

2. WHAT IS THE OBJECTIVE?

It’s crucial to know what you want to achieve in order to choose the right advertising objective. What do you want people to do when they see your Ads? Do you want to increase awareness of your brand, send traffic to your website or generate sales leads? Or is it a straight e-commerce objective whereby you want sales conversions directly from Ads. Choosing the right objective will help serve your Ads to the people who are most likely to take your chosen action.

3. WHO ARE MY TARGET AUDIENCE?

You can’t be everything to everyone! Really understanding your ideal client and what makes them tick may be the most important part of all of this, and it will help you target them more effectively. Think of where they live, what they do, their hobbies, where they shop, what they read etc.

Answering this question before running social media ads will build up a picture that can be used to create super targeted audiences for your Ads, and the better you get to know your customer the easier it’ll be to speak directly to them in your marketing comms and Ads.

4. WHAT PLATFORM SHOULD I ADVERTISE ON?

Now this isn’t just a case of ‘which platform do you like the most’ it’s looking back to your answers on the questions above and ascertaining which platform will be best to reach YOUR AUDIENCE and achieve YOUR OBJECTIVE.

For example if you want to maximise Brand Awareness or generate e-comm sales – Facebook still has the biggest audience and twinned with Instagram will provide a win for most on these objectives (at a more attractive price also!)

It also depends on the style of content that will fit with your brand (remember Tone of Voice above?) e.g. if you are more likely to be sharing white papers, company news, PR wins etc. then LinkedIn may be the channel for you, whilst if you were a B2C brand with an engaging product to sell and striking imagery you might look to Pinterest and Instagram.

Also there’s always great strides to be made with a multi-platform approach – for instance compliment your Facebook Ads Funnel with Google Ads for increased discovery!

5. IS MY WEBSITE UP TO SCRATCH?

It’s not essential to have a website, certain Ad formats will generate lead forms or even a mini site within the platform that you can brand and bring people to, BUT if you do have a website giving it a quick health check before running Ads is always a good thing. What’s the page load speed like? Are pop ups going to slow things down? Is it mobile optimised? Have you got a compliant privacy policy and cookies statement? Is the language and imagery consistent with your social channels? Is the customer journey as simple as it can be?

6. WHAT TARGETING OPTIONS CAN I USE?

Again this harks back to knowing your target audience (we said it was the important one didn’t we?!) building out a profile, or persona, of your ideal client will help to build layered interest based audiences for your targeting. Depending on the platform you are using you’ll want to think about the customer profile, keywords and topics, the device you want to target (mobile, desktop, tablet, gamers) and the demographics. Email lists, subscription lists, past purchasers, website visitors, social media followers can all also be used as seed data to target or to generate new audiences (with similar attributes and buying patterns) to then target.

7. HOW MUCH SHOULD I SPEND ON ADS?

It’s an investment and you need to understand how much you need to spend to realistically achieve your objective. Reality check – if you want to achieve £50K worth of sales of a product with a £60 unit cost… a few £20 boosts aren’t going to cut it! (and hitting the boost button is a whole other topic).

Social media Ads are amazing and impactful but they are not an overnight fix, they need budget and time, it may take 3 months before you start seeing that golden ROAS so you need to get a realistic budget in mind.

In short, frustratingly, there’s no one size fits all answer to this, you need a strategy based on your objective and your own stats and the platform that you want to advertise on. For example for an e-comm product you will want to look at the revenue you want to generate, the average order value and your conversion rate, then working that through with the cost per click on the platform you want to work with. We always work on a data driven approach and have ad spend calculators to ensure that we can advise our clients accordingly.

SO THAT’S 7 POINTERS TO GET YOU STARTED ON THE RIGHT TRACK TO HIGH PERFORMING ADS.

In a Nutshell…we love taking clients through this process and helping them understand the who, how, where and how much of Ads, if reading this has whetted your appetite for Ads even more then get in touch and we’ll help fill in the blanks and get you set up with the right strategy.