Have you added social media platforms to your advertising efforts? Your customers and prospects are on these channels scrolling through content, interacting, and shopping. Why not take the opportunity to get your offer in front of them while they are active on these platforms? Not only can you choose your audience, but you can also target a specific list of households through social media direct marketing.
Social media ads can create brand recognition as well as give consumers the opportunity to act immediately. Encourage viewers to respond to a limited time offer, learn more, sign up for a webinar, or purchase a product. Building campaign momentum, these impressions have a greater impact on recipients than display or search engine ads.
When advertising on these platforms, you can take the traditional approach and use the channel’s advertising platform, or you can take a more targeted approach and use social media direct marketing.
Social Media Traditional Marketing
Select an Audience
While broadcast media shows your advertisement to the entire audience of a program, social media ads allow you to narrow down the audience. Each platform offers a few categories to help you select audience such as age, education, job titles, geographical area, etc. These selections will focus your marketing efforts on a more specific group, but you will not know which households are being targeted.
Activity Report
Throughout the campaign, you can see live numbers for how many impressions of your ad have been served and how many people have clicked on it. You can also adjust your budget during the campaign if one design or call to action is performing better than the others. At the end of the campaign, you can pull a report seeing how well the campaign did and what responses it generated. This report is limited to the interactions people had with your ad on the platform. It will not take into consideration who saw the ad and entered your URL in a separate browser or purchased the item through another channel.
Determining Success
Social media campaigns can drive traffic to your website and encourage people to respond, but keep in mind the traditional social media advertising method sends your offer out to an anonymous audience. You can have great impressions and click-through-rates, but sale attributions will be based on estimates. Since you do not have the list of people targeted, you won’t be able to identify who saw your ad and made a purchase. Was it the ad that drove up sales or was there another factor bringing them in?
Since you cannot directly attribute sales, many marketers will use the campaign activity report as the measurement of campaign success. How well did your campaign perform next to industry standard numbers?
Social Media Direct Marketing
Choose Your Audience
Social media direct marketing while very similar to traditional social media has one distinct difference: you choose who to target. You can strategically select the best households for your brand just like you would for a direct mail campaign.
Social media direct marketing lets you trim unlikely responders from the list and know exactly who is being targeted. This process allows you to fully maximize your marketing budget and get the most out of your campaign.
Monitor Activity
Just like with traditional social media, you can watch your live campaign numbers. The big difference here is you are not basing the success of your campaign off of your impressions and click-through-rates. You’re using these numbers to get a pulse on what’s going on and how people are reacting to the campaign. As you monitor the activity, make adjustments to optimize the campaign’s performance.
Measuring Success
The real power of social media direct marketing is knowing who you are targeting. Since you are advertising to selected households, you can take your marketing list and match it up to your transaction file to see who filled out a form or made a purchase. Success is measured by looking at who was targeted and made a purchase.
Even prospects who see the ad, don’t click on it, but enter the URL in their browser and make a purchase can be attributed to your social media efforts because they were on your marketing list. You are looking at true return on investment figures and which sales are attributed to this marketing campaign.
Next Steps
Social media is an amazing tool to promote your products and services. While you can use the platform’s audiences, don’t be afraid to execute your campaign on a direct marketing level. Not only will you increase your response rates with more precise targeting, but you can see accurate campaign responses.
If you want to know more about social media direct marketing, ask our team. We are passionate about helping businesses connect with their top prospects and increasing their marketing results.