Paid Social Strategy Tips

You know that paid social advertising is a powerful tool to help you grow your business. But what's the best way to approach paid social? What Paid Social strategy should you start with? We'll share our top tips for developing a successful Paid Social strategy based on 10+ years of experience managing over £50,000,000 in Paid Social spend!

Any marketing strategy worth its salt should start with these 5 questions:

What do we want to achieve?
- Awareness, traffic or sales are good starting points.
What does success look like?
- 10,000 new customers, increased purchase frequency from existing customers or an increased average order value.
Who is the target audience?
- Customer data, website data or social listening can help you to identify the target audience.
Where is our target audience?
- Meta, Instagram, Pinterest or Tik Tok.
How do we measure success?
- Pixels, CAPI or Offline Conversions.

Team strategy meeting, with post it notes on white board

Awareness Objectives

If the goal of your Paid Social strategy is to increase brand awareness, or reach we have a number of tips to share.

Marketers first should determine the most effective type of ad for their target audience and the message. Facebook ads are great for reach and frequent touchpoints to gradually build brand awareness or to keep your business ‘front of mind’. Meta Ads also provide an excellent metric to measure the impact of awareness activity called ‘Ad Recall’. For advertisers with CAPI implemented you can also access Brand Lift reports to measure the long term effects of your awareness campaigns. Instagram ads is also a great platform to communicate brand stories with visually compelling campaigns.

Pinterest Ads provide a great opportunity to place your products in front of users as they browse for similar products, trends or styles.

Typically the key metrics for success here are: CPM, Reach and Frequency. These can all be measured within the specific platforms, often without additional tracking. A test and learn approach that includes optimising ads, images, copy and audiences will help you to improve all of these metrics.

Traffic Objectives

Traffic, Clicks or Landing Page Views are common objectives for Paid Social campaigns. These objectives or campaigns tend to funnel users from the awareness stage towards the action, or conversion stage. Sometimes referred to as the middle stage of a full funnel Paid Social strategy.

Ad creative and copy is likely to be very different to those used at the Awareness stage. It is important to include strong calls to action, product or service benefits and of course, a landing page environment is required to direct users to.

Every major social media platform offers traffic optimised campaigns but the best ads to use for this objective depend on your audience. We have seen great success from ‘Carousel’ or ‘Collection’ ad formats as these allow us to communicate multiple USPs in a sequential manner. Remember that this creative has to be compelling enough to pull users from the platform onto your site!

Conversion Objectives

Conversion or action campaigns can be optimised towards a variety of events: leads, purchases, adds to cart, webinar sign ups and more. They typically follow on from Awareness and Traffic campaigns to complete a Social Media Strategy. These campaigns are called the ‘Bottom Of Funnel’ campaigns and complete a full funnel approach.

These campaigns when used as part of the funnel approach can be very effective as potential customers have already been educated around the benefits of your brand.

A stand alone conversion campaign or ad may struggle to communicate the full list of USPs, your brand history or the product benefits in a single paid social ad. Performance often improves when benefits have been highlighted to a user at previous stages throughout the path to purchase. We call this process ‘Seeding’ and that’s because we continually ‘seed’ a user with product benefits or USPs as they progress through our funnel from: awareness, to traffic and finally to conversion.

Meta Ads, Pinterest Ads and Instagram all have conversion focussed ad formats, often with e-commerce in mind. Collection Ads, Catalogue Ads and Dynamic Product Ads are just a few examples. Delivery of these can be controlled by a platform's algorithm to deliver ads to the right user at the right time. DABA or dynamic ad broad audience conversion campaigns leverage Metas internal data to personalise the product set highlighted to users. These users are selected by Meta based on 1200+ different signals collected by Facebook Ads that align with previous users that converted for your business.

Graph on piece of paper, with a ruler pen and pencil on laying next to it

Paid Social strategies vary from business to business depending on industry, goals and timelines. The full funnel approach outlined above can help you to address a number of business challenges by delivering: