How to Market your Business: Learn How to Use Paid Social Media Effectively

Written By James Hards – Head of Client Accounts at WorkWith Studios

Part two of How to Market your Business: Navigating Digital Marketing in the Cycling Industry

[divider style=”solid” top=”20″ bottom=”20″]

Last week, we touched on Organic Social and why it is so important and a powerful channel for brands. To maintain the theme, we wanted to cover paid social media, why brands use it, how to use it best and address some common misconceptions.

For ease, we’re going to concentrate on Meta advertising, but it’s worth noting that LinkedIn, X, YouTube and TikTok have interesting advertising options as well.

Useful Initialisms and Terminology

You will find these terms and initialisms pop up when talking about Meta ads. Here’s a handy guide for reference.

TOF/MOF/BOF

Top of Funnel, Middle of Funnel and Bottom of Funnel. Predominantly used when referencing audiences.

Reach

The number of users who saw adverts.

Impressions

How many times adverts were viewed (one user can view an advert multiple times).

Frequency

How many times, on average, a user has viewed an advert.

CPC / CPR / CPA

Cost per click/result/acquisition. How much you pay each time a user takes action.

CTR

Click-through rate. The percentage of users who saw an ad and clicked on it.

ROAS

Return on Ad Spend. Calculated by dividing the revenue from ads by the cost of the ads and typically shown as a ratio or percentage.

Let’s start with the basics… what is Paid Social?

Promoted posts, sponsored content, and display ads – any paid adverts (including boosted content) on social media platforms that target specific audiences based on demographics, interests, and even behaviour.

Although this shares the same channel, space and placements as organic social media, the two require very different approaches as you are effectively bypassing the algorithm that delivers feed content and showing up in front of many different audiences, not just your own.

When you first jump into Meta Ads Manager, you’ll see it’s separated into three sections

• Campaigns – Setting your objective and delivery
• Ad Sets – Audiences, timing, budgets and placements
• Ads – the actual creative bit that a user will see!

What is Paid Social good for?

For D2C brands in the bike industry, Paid Social media can be used to cover your entire funnel – from acquisition to purchase and retention. 

Historically, there has been a leaning towards ‘Top of Funnel’ audiences for new user acquisition. Every interaction a user has on Meta platforms can compile a digital fingerprint that advertisers can then use in interest-based targeting or using the Meta AI/machine learning options.

The ability to retarget custom audiences (ones that you build based on behaviour from external sources) does allow you to separate considered traffic (MOF & BOF) into your ad sets, though. 

More recently, lead generation and data capture have also entered the mix and can be a fantastic opportunity to move users from Social Media to Email Marketing channels, more on that another time…

Should I be using Paid Social?

If you have an advertising budget and are not using paid social platforms, then you’re missing a trick. With structure around your campaigns and some monitoring and testing, the cost per result can be significantly cheaper than other traditional advertising methods.

Meta Advertising Tips

Reporting Columns & Key Metrics

A ‘housekeeping’ rule, really, but create and save a custom set of reporting columns that, with a quick glance, will give you a complete overview of performance. 

Typically, I will start with: Delivery, Budget, Amount Spent, Ends, Results, Cost per result, Reach, Impressions, Frequency, Link Clicks, CPC, CTR, Add to Cart, Website Purchase, Purchase Conversion Value, Purchase ROAS  

Account Structure

Keep things separated within the account, and you will keep options open. By this, I mean don’t combine audiences in the same ad sets or continually update the creative in one ad. If you maintain separation, then you can compare performance and adjust budgets accordingly to scale up or down.

Audience Exclusions

An overlooked feature is Audience Exclusions. This is a powerful way to create very targeted campaigns or to at least block out users that don’t need to see your adverts (for example, removing recent purchasers from a retargeting campaign)

Budgets

Your retargeting campaign budget should be led by your ad frequency number (how many times a user saw the ad). Yes, you may want to scale up your BOF campaign because it has a fantastic ROAS, but if you add budget to a small, finite audience, you will just show your ad to the same people more times, which may not be effective.

Boosting Posts

Allocate a small spend to your organic social content. If you have a post that is important to you or you think is of excellent quality, then adding even just £5-£10 behind it can help circumnavigate the algorithms that determine content success and therefore guarantee you reach more of your followers.

Test and Scale

A cornerstone of a successful Paid Social approach. What you think may happen with your adverts is not guaranteed. Treat every campaign as an experiment, and if you find success, slowly increase the budget (15% – 30% every few days). If an ad does not deliver the results you want, then make changes or start afresh. 

Common Pitfalls

Wrong Objective & Optimisation

The guidance when creating adverts in Meta Ads Manager is fairly comprehensive, but make sure you go into any new campaign thinking about what you want and if it is achievable. Make sure the objective you set and the subsequent optimisation metric are aligned. 

AI & Advantage+ Reliance

The AI / Machine Learning feature that is baked into Meta Ads Manager is called Advantage+ and is designed to automate a lot of the process of advert creation. It can be worth experimenting with, however, more often than not, building a campaign ‘manually’ has yielded better results – especially in a hobby-based industry like cycling.

Audience Sizes

When creating audiences, you are looking for the ‘goldilocks size’! This will change depending on your budget and campaign duration, but if you aim too big, then it will be hard for Meta to optimise your adverts, too small will miss opportunities or ramp advert frequency. 

Tracking Methods

As a bare minimum, you should have the Facebook Pixel installed on your website, but ideally also the Conversions API. A good Event Match Quality is anything above 7 out of 10. Find this information in the Events Manager section of Meta Ads Manager.

Creative Fatigue

If ads are performing well then it can be hard to justify changing the advert creative, but there is always a saturation point. Keep an eye on how long each ad creative has been active for and plan to update accordingly. Meta will give you warnings around ads with Creative Fatigue.

Summary

Hopefully, this has provided some insight into what Paid Social for brands looks like and how it can be done right. The Meta Ads Manager platform can look quite daunting at first glance, but once you break it down and try a campaign for yourself, it will make sense. 

Still not sure if it’s worthwhile or concerned that the audience isn’t there? Take a look at the Meta Ad Library, where you can search and see exactly what adverts your competitors and everyone else are running… 

For more information or if you have a specific question, you can reach the WorkWith Studios team on info@workwithstudios.com or visit us at www.workwithstudios.com

[divider style=”dashed” top=”20″ bottom=”20″]

Article Three: Email Marketing – The Most Underused and Valuable Tool You Have is going live on 24th September, and will talk about how to build an engaged email list and what to do.