Social Media Advertising - Making Your Ad Spend Count

Social Media has brought in a paradigm shift in the way brands promote themselves and reach out to their target audience. Social media advertising has broken the walls that existed between large businesses and start-ups in the way they advertised their products and services.Traditional form of advertising in print, electronic and even Internet was factored around the financial spending power of the business. More the merrier was the concept and this allowed undue advantage to the giants in business. In social media news online creativity rules and even with a meager budget small start-ups are able to create the most powerful campaigns and earn maximum mileage for their brands.

Social media sharing sites allow you to take your message to the larger audience in the most cost effective manner. You can retain prospects, discover and develop new leads and offer your loyal customers and users valuable pre-sale and after sale services. The beauty of social media advertising lies in the fact that it can be used to complement other forms of advertising campaign or go solo. When you are undertaking a marketing campaign using the social media you need to make each penny spend count. This calls for the perfect synergy between market research, creativity and timing. Let us take a look at some of the strategies that you need to adopt to make your entire ad spend count.

• Know Where To Target – Just because you can afford toplace your ad everywhere doesn’t mean you would be able to generate tons of leads. You need to know where your customers are, how they respond to ads and the best way to reach them. Before you spend a single penny on your social media ads, you need to carry out a detailed market research.This would help you in increasing your reach and also earning high share of leads for every dollar spent.

• Control The Content - You need to have full control of the content being published. The message needs to inform the audience about your products and services and also engage them actively. Even if you are outsourcing content creation to a firm review it. Quality content catches attention easily and hence offers you better conversion rate.

• Two-Way Communication Model – If you are using social media just to disseminate information to your customers you are missing out on the core philosophy of this media. You are not likely to see high yield from your advertising campaign as you are forcing your customers to listen to you and turning a deaf ear to them. Social media is a two-way communication medium and hence you need to allow your users to be heard. Post questions and surveys related to your products and services as this allows you to gather quality feedback. Listen to their queries and reply them in the same thread as this allows you to build your brand image.

• Measure Performance – You need to measure your performance periodically and these should be in facts and figures such as addition in the number of followers, number of leads generated, number of sales etc. This would help you set goals for the future and achieve them.