Social Media Advertising Mistakes Businesses Must Avoid
In as much as many steps exist to achieve success when it comes to social media advertising, there are just as many ways to fail. If you are investing money into marketing then, you ultimately want to see positive results. Are you making any of these common mistakes with your social media ad campaign?
It is no doubt a cost-effective and powerful way for businesses to reach its target audiences. Considering the large number of businesses using Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to place adverts every month, it is no news that competition is high when it comes to social media advertising. What this means is optimizing advertising campaigns is key to success for small businesses.
In this post, you will find out some of the mistakes you should never make when carrying out a social media ad campaign.
- Poor Planning
The saying ‘he who fails to plan, plans to fail’ readily comes to mind. Good success starts with good planning. It is vital to have a clear sense of direction before starting any social media advertising campaign. There are a lot of considerations that need to be clearly mapped out such as the objective, creative, ad placement, targeting, ad format, pixel installation and media spend amongst others.
One of the setup points for planning a social media advertising campaigns is in knowing the objective; it is usually the first thing you need to do. When in a hurry to get targeting and visuals right for your campaign, we often forget the main objective.
Test the different objectives by considering its relevance to your audience and how much each interaction costs.
- The Tone Of Voice Matters A Lot
This is very important as a picture may paint a thousand words, but it will never excuse a terrible writing. In as much as visuals in ads are important, it is equally important to pay a closer look at your copy. It should be just as tight as the visual in order to sell to your target audience.
Ask if your copy is compelling enough to encourage people to take action? Will it sound too dull and bland? You may be tempted to overuse the exclamation mark but please, do not attempt it because it may pass off as aggressive.
- Image Theft
To stand out on a social media platform can be quite tasking and sometimes in the haste of scrolling and consuming lots of content within a split second, imagery becomes the key to being noticed. If you have the best target set and your imagery is not appealing, relevant or super eye-catchy then, you stand a chance of not been seen. That said, Images are so important but if you think any image goes on the internet, think again because, copyright applies to most images you will find online.
If you happen to not have pictures that best convey your campaign and you try to use an image in your ad that you do not have the legal rights to use, you may find yourself stung with some very expensive legal implications. Therefore, it is advised that you pay for the rights to use such images. In an event where you find it expensive, there are ample free resources online with thousands of images.
- Writing Content That Does Not Match The Particular Social Platform
Spend time in properly drafting your content before launching your ad campaign. Attention should not only be paid to imagery, the content has to be good too. Care should be taken in order to tailor the content to the social platform or the objective of the campaign. For instance, on twitter, one is permitted to use shorter, sharper messages than a lengthy paragraph. But that is not the case with Facebook. On Facebook, you can get away with writing a lengthy copy. The copy should also encourage the audience to do what you want them to do.
- Sell, Not Spam
One benefit of social media advertising is the ability to target very specific demographics and then remarket to the right people within those groups. You should also bear in mind that if you keep trying to push your product in someone’s face over and over again, chances are that they are not going to buy. This may result in them having to hide your ad. Social media advertising is somewhat of an art that must be mastered.
- Avoid Counter-Attacking Negative Comments
Comments that are negative give you a chance to improve the quality of you service and gain trust within your brand community or audience. If a customer is unhappy with your service and he posts deriding, harsh or negative comments, some brands choose to ignore it and some may try to delete it or reply in a more harsh tone or statements.
Look at it from a different angle, it is a chance to turn the comments into a loyal customer and sometimes a fan. This customer or audience may as well tell others about your great customer service.
Use the negative comments to your advantage and also resolve the issue the customer is facing. You can engage with them on the post and then try to move the conversation to a back-channel for privacy sake.
- Not Engaging with Followers
Increase in the engagement of followers’ means that at some point, these followers will have to engage on your post. However, some brands do not engage on followers’ comments on their feed, which gives the impression that the brand is not interested in having conversation with their community. This does not speak well of the brand. The right thing to do is, if someone replies to your post, ensure your social media team responds too and as quickly as possible. As you respond by liking back and commenting, the more your customers will want to engage. Every comment on your business page is an opportunity to increase the engagement and invite more users to participate.
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