Unpaid appearances on social media are no longer an effective option in attracting your target audience after Facebook prioritized friends and family posts on public Facebook pages. Social media ads tend to become the most effective way to get a new audience quickly but with intense commercial competition. The question now is how do you get the best benefit from it?
Facebook ads
Facebook hosts more than a quarter of the world’s population, providing advertisers with an unparalleled opportunity to reach any audience. It offers precise targeting options based on location, job, interests, past activities, and other criteria, making it more accurate targeting than any other advertising platform.
The most popular advertising model on Facebook is to create an ad and link it to a powerful landing page that provides attractive offers to potential customers and then continues communication with these customers through an automated response service. Here is a set of tips for an effective Facebook ad campaign:
- Design an advertisement for each audience that reflects the interest and personality of this segment.
- First, create ads to attract potential customers to prospecting ads build brand awareness, following by re-targeting ads with strong offers to persuade customers to complete the purchase.
- Use emoji as an effective tool for encouraging clicking whenever possible.
- Don’t go overboard with the “Similar audiences” feature, as you don’t risk losing your ad to important customers.
Instagram ads
Instagram marketing outperforms Facebook marketing in terms of audience participation rates for content, as its users tend to like a large and varied amount of visual content, which is what made its ads superior to other social media ads. Especially those businesses that trade in products with visual appeal, or those that are able to produce visual content relevant to their products.
Instagram is witnessing a remarkable turnout of young people between the ages of 18 to 34 years, who make up 65% of the total number of users with a noticeable increase in the number of females and minorities, which makes it an ideal choice if the previous characteristics match the personality of your target audience. Here is a set of tips for an effective Instagram advertising campaign:
- Focus first on real audiences of followers, email listings, etc., and in the next stage, target similar audiences.
- Move away from stock photos that are free to use in your ad design and replace them with real, exclusive photos.
- The visual nature of Instagram fuels the audience’s appetite to buy, so you have to grab that with irresistible compelling offers.
- Add the appropriate Instagram hashtags to your ads, as they are an essential way on Instagram to communicate with audiences interested in the quality of your product or service.
Twitter Ads
As one of the most popular social media platforms, Twitter enables fast and seamless interaction between brands and followers. Twitter marketing is still an important tool for promotion, especially since 53% of its users are the first to try new products.
Companies use Twitter primarily to spread brand awareness and promote specific products, and the most popular advertising model is Twitter Cards with text accompanied by marketing images or videos. Here is a set of tips for an effective Twitter ad campaign:
- Create a relevant and attractive image that fits your brand and attracts attention. Do not use interactive images or videos, as they are not appropriate for the Twitter platform.
- Be more focused on the products you’re promoting and your target audience, and avoid generality in your marketing.
- Direct customers to the specifically advertised product page or promotion provided using the CTA.
- Twitter is the platform for feeds; So, keep this in mind when marketing through Twitter, whether in the tweet or the landing page that the advertisement directs.
Snapchat ads
The number of Snapchat users is still relatively less than their counterparts on Facebook and Instagram, but its users are the most active and interacting with the content that is published, which is what defines Snapchat marketing. Snapchat attracts younger users – under the age of 24 – who make up 60% of the user base, as nearly half of them have not completed their secondary education yet. Here is a set of tips for an effective Snapchat ad campaign:
- Snapchat is the platform for fun and innovation, so adopt a fun mindset when thinking about designing social media ads on Snapchat.
- Keep the ad as short as 6 seconds, using just one ad message and a strong CTA.
- When creating an ad for Snapchat stories, make sure to write a strong headline that encourages the user to click on the ad and watch the rest of the snaps.
YouTube ads
If there is a real competitor who can remove Facebook from the top of the users of social platforms, it will be YouTube, as the proportions of female and male YouTube users are equal, and the majority of its users have a higher education with good prevalence in all age groups from 15 years to 65 years old.
YouTube marketing is done by using different video ad formats that meet the needs of commercial activities with different goals and budgets. There are many tools that could make youtube short video ads and one of the most often used by me is FlexClip. This tool really deserves a spot on the top list of short video making.
The most popular YouTube ad formats among advertisers are:
- TrueView ads: These ads appear in conjunction with the broadcast with the option to skip the ad after five seconds, and since most users click the “skip” button, it is important that the first five seconds include the most important elements of the ad.
- YouTube ads are non-skippable: with a maximum time limit of 20 seconds, these ads appear at the beginning or middle of the video and cannot be skipped, and this does not mean that customers will necessarily see it. Therefore, it is important to broadcast a convincing audio message that will attract them to watch in case they are busy with something else while the advertisement is running.
- Bumper ads: They are non-skippable ads also with a maximum of 6 seconds, and due to the ad’s shortness it should start with strong visual content, one advertising message, and sufficient time for the call to action.
