April 13, 2023
As a retailer, you hopefully know the importance of having a strong social media presence, but with so many platforms available, it can be difficult to know which ones to prioritise and how to allocate your budget effectively for advertising. Our Senior Paid Social Manager, Danielle, has pulled together her top tips for devising a successful paid social strategy no matter what level you’re at…
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Identify Your Target Audience
Before you begin creating social media ads, it's super important to understand who your target audience actually is. Who are your customers, what are their interests and behaviours? Once you have a clear understanding of what your audience looks like, you’ll be able to create more targeted and in turn, effective ads.
Top tip for targeting💡
Make sure you have tracking implemented for each social platform you want to advertise on - in doing so you’re able to retarget to those who have engaged with your social channels or online store effectively, hitting a pool of consumers more likely to purchase.
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Set Clear Goals
Before launching your paid social campaigns, it's important to set clear goals. What do you actually want to achieve with your campaigns? Do you want to drive traffic to your website, increase sales, or maybe improve brand awareness? Once you've identified your goals, you can select the platforms to create campaigns and ads that will help you achieve those goals.
Goals come before platform selection - not the other way round!
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Consider Your Budget
A big factor… your budget! It's important to consider what budget you have to spend on social ads pretty early on in your planning. If you have never advertised before it can be difficult to determine the type of results you can expect, and whether or not you will actually see a return.
At first be prepared to test and play about with targeting, ad formats and creatives in order to understand what works. You will need to consider costs for prospecting and retargeting. Remember, spending too little can mean you don’t gather enough data to learn, yet spending too much could result in wasted money and inefficiencies - it all depends on what you want to achieve.
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Have a Flow of New Content
Your creative assets are an essential part of any social media ad campaign - at the end of the day your goal is to ‘beat the scroll’. Your ads need to be visually appealing and engaging enough to catch the attention of your audience, halt them in their tracks and encourage them to take an action. Using high-quality images and videos is a must but also consider incorporating UGC (user-generated content) to showcase your products in a more authentic and relatable way. Content really is KING. Having little to no content, or even worse, poor quality content, will mean you’ll likely struggle to compete with your competitors.
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Use Meta (Facebook and Instagram)
Meta (or Facebook and Instagram if you like), is a popular social platform for retailers to advertise on, we like to think of it as ‘the OG’. With Meta’s advanced targeting capabilities, you can reach specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and behaviours. You can also edit placements to be more specific to Facebook or Instagram, for example if the better results are coming from Instagram month after month, you may decide to remove all Facebook placements and focus only on Instagram. Remember though, always utilise the reporting tools so you can make data-driven decisions (this goes for any platform!).
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Consider TikTok
TikTok has fast become a force to be reckoned with, for many retailers it’s an absolute must when it comes to social media advertising. Focusing on short-form videos and viral trends, TikTok can be a fun and engaging way to bring your products to life.
TikTok is no longer solely used to watch videos, it’s becoming a powerful search engine in its own right, too - some say it’s set to rival the likes of Google! TikTok Search ads are currently in beta, which is very exciting, they could help attract qualified traffic and source valuable keyword data. Winner!
Top tip for TikTok💡
Partner with influencers/creators to reach a wider audience! TikTok ads featuring creators see an 83% higher engagement rate vs non-creator ads.
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Don't Overlook Pinterest
While Pinterest may not be as popular as Meta or TikTok, it can still be a very valuable platform for retailers. With its visual focus and highly engaged user base, Pinterest can be a great way to showcase your products and drive high intent traffic to your website.
Remember, Pinterest users are directly browsing the platform to source inspiration, be that for fashion looks for an upcoming trip, decor themes for a new DIY project in the home or beauty trends - place your products on the platform and capture users during this stage of the buyer journey. You won’t regret it!
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Coordinate with Other Marketing Channels
Paid social is just one part of your overall marketing strategy. Consider how you can coordinate your paid social efforts with other marketing channels, such as PPC. This can help you reach a wider audience and improve your overall ROI.
At Ortus we’ve achieved impressive performance results when implementing a holistic approach to paid marketing. Our joined up method of working together has enabled us to not only meet but also surpass client targets, share valuable insights across channels and increase our overall knowledge of paid marketing.
Having a strategy in place for any of your marketing efforts is crucial to your success, it’s as simple as that. Take our top tips into consideration and you’re already on the right track to devising a paid social strategy that performs!
If you need any additional help check out our resources below:
- An Introduction to Social Media Marketing: A Retailer’s Guide
- Selling on Social in 2022: Getting set up for success
- Selling on Social in 2022: Making the most of creatives & formats