A simple guide to planning a paid social campaign

According to recent research, 93% of internet users have at least one social media account. That means there’s huge opportunity in social media marketing. And with audience targeting improving all the time, paid advertising on these platforms is more effective than ever.

Here are some key things to think about when you’re planning a paid social campaign.

What do you want to achieve?

As with any other marketing campaign, knowing what you want to achieve from your social marketing is imperative. Whether your efforts are for brand awareness or aiming to drive a response will affect your creative, campaign structure, targeting methodology and key metric measurement.

Who are you targeting?

Once you have defined your goals, you’ll need to understand who you want to target. How old are they? What are their interests? Which platforms are they using? These questions will help you define which platforms to use in your campaign, the message, and what the creative will look like. Bear in mind that your audience will need to be able to relate to the language and imagery you use.

You may even want to split your targeting into known and unknown. Features such as custom audiences enable you to use your customer database to target existing consumers on their preferred social channel. You can then tailor your message accordingly. A separate audience could be a lookalike audience, where you choose certain attributes to match a similar but unknown set of people to your existing customers, and target them with a slightly different message.

How are you timing your campaign?

An important part of a social media marketing strategy is timing. When you consider the timing of your campaign, you’ll need to take into account not just the seasonality of your own business, but the timing of external events too. Get the context wrong and an advert could be perceived as distasteful and damage your brand. Look at the current news stories over the course of the campaign and be sensitive to how your ad may appear next to them – you can always pause your ads or delay the campaign should an event occur that would make it seem offensive.

What’s your bidding strategy?

Finally, you’ll need to know how you’ll bid. Again, the purpose of your campaign has an impact on your bid strategy, so return to the goals and key metrics to inform your decision. Ads are often shown based on their quality and relevancy, but the bid also counts. Allow yourself some trial and error time at the beginning of the campaign to ensure you’re not over or under-spending.

If you simply want eyeballs on your ads, you may want to adopt a strategy that increases impressions, while if you want your audience to perform an action, you’ll need to consider perhaps bidding higher to achieve the required clicks.

For help with planning your social marketing campaign, contact Digital Carrera today. We offer a selection of social media marketing services to help you improve your sales.