How to combat suffering social media ads
No matter what your objectives are as a business, if you're advertising on Facebook — or any platform for that matter — you always want to make sure you are tracking the performance of your ads. As long as you’re tracking the performance of your ads, you will be able to identify any ads that aren’t performing as they should be — and take steps to fix it. (Full disclosure: My company is a Facebook marketing partner.)
As a business, you likely have some sort of goal that you’re driving toward when you post an ad on social media, whether it’s seeing a higher return on ad spend or increased traffic, and you’ll quickly be able to tell if the numbers are heading in your favor. This is how you will know if your performance is either beginning to suffer or reaching a threshold of profitability.
But if you see that your ads aren't performing as you hoped, it's not always easy to understand why or how to turn your campaign around. As the CEO of an omnichannel digital marketing agency that specializes in marketing on Facebook, I've learned a few best practices to help turn things around:
1. Make sure you know your audience.
One of the biggest mistakes brands can make when launching a Facebook ad is not understanding who their target customers are. In my experience, this is often why a campaign gets derailed. As a brand, you have to go through an exercise of identifying who you want your ads to reach. Otherwise, your ads aren't going to have the impact you're looking for.
If you're in the early stages of a brand, try to imagine what your ideal customer looks like and create an avatar that represents your target audience. Once you understand who your audience is, you can develop a series of brand personas, and you can build your ad campaigns to really speak to those personas that you’re targeting.
2. Refresh your creative strategy.
If after targeting your ideal prospects your ads still aren't having the results you want, it might be time to refresh your creative strategy. One way you might do this is through leveraging innovative technologies. I believe creative strategies regarding social platforms are moving toward automation and machine learning. These systems can process seemingly endless data points and detect things like audience engagement, which, in turn, helps inform your creative strategy and enables you to make decisions that could improve your ad campaigns.
With this in mind, you can consider leveraging solutions like campaign budget optimization, automatic placements or dynamic creative testing to find the permutations will work best.
3. Communicate with customers in their preferred style.
There's so much opportunity to engage with consumers beyond a traditional ad. By leveraging social platforms you might not have considered before, such as Facebook Messenger or other similar solutions, you can converse with customers in the way that they prefer. In my experience, consumers prefer to chat and engage with brands personally. Communicating with your target market in their preferred style of communicating gives a business a much better chance of winning as a brand.
To summarize, keep an eye on the emerging opportunities in social media, and take advantage of them whenever you can.
