Successful Social Ads Strategies come in all shapes and sizes. Audiences, objectives and routes to market can influence and shape strategies and create unique requirements for any business. If you are unsure where to start or how to go about structuring your strategy, follow these simple steps with helpful examples to showcase how to go about creating social marketing campaigns for your business.
Data Before Theory
Before putting pen to paper and starting your strategic planning, we recommend identifying the key factors of your business’s growth requirements. Ensure you’ve made detailed notes on these points, the more rich and detailed the better:
- Target Audience
- Habits – What sort of repeatable actions do your ideal audience take? (e.g. habitual jewellery window shopping)
- Platforms – What platforms and services do they tend to use?
- Interests – What niche and specific interests do your ideal audiences take part in? (e.g active members at the national trust)
- Fears – What are your clients and audiences looking to avoid at all costs?
- Hopes – What do your audiences REALLY want?
- Market Landscape
- Competitors Offers – Make sure to detail all offers currently available from your competitors, how do you differentiate yourself compared to these?
- Market Saturation – How competitive are high volume keywords in your industry?
- Brand Awareness – Are your client’s able to recognize your brand at a glance?
- Business
- USPs – What are your unique benefits and features?
- Profitability Matrix – What ROAS would your business need to start growing through Paid Ads?
- Other goals – What other goals happen on the path to final sale, are these properly tracked and analysed?
By understanding your audience, the marketplace and your own business to a greater degree, your understanding of your marketing strategy will also develop. If you find yourself in a highly saturated marketplace like plumbing for example, you may find your competitors offer an abundance of free quotations – your strategy must be able to punch through the noise with a unique and distinct offer. Possibly a guaranteed fit date with minimal disruption.
Different Strategies For Different Objectives
There are countless strategies and plans currently available to Marketing Executives looking to achieve success in the market. Often these strategies are slight variations and adaptations of each other. If formulating a strategy is a new concept to yourself, it can be daunting to get started. We’ve outlined 3 types of strategy you could use to customise for your own purposes.
The Hunter/Gatherer (Beginner)
The Hunter/Gatherer Strategy archetype is perhaps the most prolific and straight forward structure used in Ad accounts across the globe. Utilising Meta’s detailed interest and demographic targeting, you can craft a specific and highly targeted audience type. This strategy works best in large audience pools with little to no competition, giving you the ability to cherry pick the best audience types for growing your business.
To make best use of your campaign strategy, your ad messaging and offers should be tailored to audience types. While ongoing testing for best performing audience groups should be a priority.
Ideal for: Pharmaceutical Providers, Luxury Clothing Brands, Seasonal Food & Drink Retailers.
The Re-Market (Intermediate)
Unlike the hunter/gatherer structure of campaign strategy, the Re-Market aims to capture a smaller subset of pre-existing audiences to then maximise value through re-engagement and AI population.
This strategy is a great way to strengthen brand awareness in marketplaces where competition is fierce and it’s a constant race to the bottom. This style of advertising is ideal for showcasing your key benefits to highly engaged audiences, giving you the best chance to secure the deal.
Utilising meta’s dynamic creative, you can split test a huge range of Ad creatives to audiences at once, giving the machine the assets it needs to make intelligent decisions faster.
Ideal for: Smaller eCommerce Retailers, Gift Shops, Software Providers
The 3 Step Funnel (Advanced)
Possibly the most advanced marketing strategy, the 3 step funnel aims to attract audiences at the lowest possible intent point with the intention of capturing engagement and driving conversions at lower levels of the funnel. This strategy best fits businesses with a high average order value and consistent profit margins.
This funnel utilises the key terms, TOF MOF and BOF – to denote the top, middle and bottom of the funnel. The top campaigns would traditionally be focused on capturing interest with stunning visuals and interesting offers, whereas bottom campaigns would show discounted products and services.
Ideal for: Accountants, Holiday Providers, Bespoke Jewellers
Effective Implementation
Getting the right strategy to suit your needs is only half the battle, installing the strategy into your Ad account and your site can be another obstacle to achieving marketing success. Ensuring your strategy is properly implemented from the outset will give you the ability to capture and review data for a fuller picture of your successes and failures. Waiting till month 3 before implementing conversion tracking is a sure way to waste a huge amount of learning.
Defining Objectives
To best evaluate the success of your marketing strategy, it’s important to fully understand the milestones of your user’s journey. If you are retailing products on site, it’s absolutely critical that conversion value and checkout conversion rates are properly tracked within the ad account.
Establishing and setting up custom micro conversions can also help to paint a much richer picture of how your campaigns are currently performing. For example, an outdoor adventure clothing brand may want to track how many times someone has used their boot size calculator on site, setting up custom conversion events can help to establish which audiences and campaigns are more likely to complete this action.
Implementation Roadmaps
Setting up a shared timeline of implementation can help to keep teams on track and simplify communication. In recent years, new and innovative workflow applications have revolutionised how we work together. Applications like Asana and Monday help to create a single point of shared truth, allowing any team member to update the progress of a task and raise potential roadblocks before they become an issue.
When implementing roadmaps, we recommend establishing buy-in from the whole team, do this by sharing projects prior to deadline setting to gauge team capacity and discuss any potentially overlooked tasks. Utilising time tracking and accountability meetings can also help to keep projects moving forward in a timely manner.
Keeping Up Momentum
No matter how well you plan, issues will certainly arise. Disapproved Ads, underperforming campaigns and broken image links. It’s vital for continued success that momentum is retained as you continue to implement and build a better strategy for your business. Weekly troubleshooting meetings should be kept on track, avoiding derailing technical issues and ‘quick fixes’. Save this for scheduled deep work sessions and make notes on any improvements you come up with in your working day.
Growing With Your Strategy
As your strategy begins to generate desired results and your business thrives. It’s inevitable that your starting strategy will grow and evolve, new challenges and opportunities will become apparent through testing and improvements. It’s important to set aside time to actively reflect and review how your strategy has adapted to changes in the market, this time can help uncover new ways in which your strategy can improve, and new audiences for your business to capture. Once you’ve taken the time to deep dive into account performance. It’s time to start planning for the future.
Establishing Next Steps
When planning the continued growth of your strategy, it’s important to consider both historical and forecasted results, ensuring you can account for seasonal trends and market fluctuations. We suggest planning up to 3 months in advance, focusing on 2-3 key improvements across the account with smaller sub-tasks for new campaigns and seasonal offers.
It’s also important at this stage to consider how you’d like these improvements to impact your campaign performance, these goals can help to inform the review period further down the line, did your changes have the impact you expected? Or perhaps did they have the opposite effect?
Throughout the process, take diligent notes on improvements made to the campaign structure, this will act as your log book for what’s worked and what hasn’t.
If you want to make an impact with you Social Ads, book a call with us.
