I recently saw a study that says Americans between the ages of 18 and 64 spend over three hours a day browsing Facebook and other social sites. But what if you’re trying to use social media for B2B? Well, the same study says that senior decision-makers spend 40% more time browsing social sites than those in lower level positions.
When you combine that captive audience with today’s sophisticated targeting capabilities, taking your business – no matter how small – into paid social media advertising is too good to resist. There’s a ton of material on how best to take that step (with some of the best material coming from each social networking site), but here is a brief overview:
Define Your Goals
Before you begin, you need to know what you want to achieve. Do you want to add followers to your Facebook page? Generate leads from a landing page? Or simply raise brand awareness? Social advertising is a great way to educate prospects – and your customers are looking to be educated – so place ads that lead them to relevant content such as a white paper. Of course, make them fill out a form to get it (so you can capture their information).
Define Your Audience
Since so many kinds of people visit Facebook and the rest, you need to be highly targeted in your approach. Target company types, specific job titles and industries, then narrow that by location. Since LinkedIn is a business-focused site, targeting by job function and seniority is easy. For finding business targets on Facebook, use the Facebook Exchange (FBX), a real-time bidding system, which lets you leverage third-party data to reach your target audiences.
Create Something Smart
Advertising on social media has its limitations, mostly due to the small display ad sizes available. The good news is, changing out creative – whether a word, an image or the entire banner ad – is easy. And testing different creative is imperative to make sure you are making the most of your marketing dollar. We suggest testing 5 – 10 variations of your creative, paying special attention to the call-to-action, to determine what works best with your target group. Remember, clicks are always exciting, but conversions are what you really want.
Optimize, Optimize, Optimize
Tracking tools make it simple to see – on a day-to-day basis – what’s working and what’s not. Don’t be shy about reallocating dollars and creative to achieve the most optimal results. And if something’s not working, shut it down completely.
Name Your Price
In order to make sure your ads are seen by the right people, you need to set a competitive bid price. Everything I read suggests you bid higher than a site’s recommended bid. The thinking is this: you will only pay one penny more than the next highest bid, so be aggressive if you want to deliver impressions efficiently.