5 Proven Social Media Advertising Strategies

Whether you have been advertising on social media for a while, or you are just getting started, there are proven social media advertising strategies that every marketer should apply.

It’s more difficult than ever to achieve organic reach across social media. Advertising can can more than make up for this deficit. The fact that you can target your desired social media audience, test a variety of creatives and messages, and control your budget means it’s a no-brainer. If it’s not already, then advertising should absolutely be part of your social media strategy.

Here are our top 5 social media advertising strategies.

1. Be clear on your objectives

It’s important to be clear on what you want to achieve from your social media advertising before you get started. At what point in your customer funnel are you using advertising? Are you trying to generate initial awareness? Or perhaps re-targeting people who are already familiar with you?

Consider why you are running your Facebook, Instagram or TikTok ad, and what your primary objective is. This could be website clicks, purchases, downloads, engagement, video views, leads or something else. Without a clear objective you cannot accurately measure success and fairly evaluate results.

Each native social media advertising dashboard asks you for an objective as a first step in campaign setup.

2. Go broad with your audience

Choosing an audience for your social media advertising can be overwhelming as there are so many options to choose from. Whether it’s interests, lifestyle choices and demographics on Facebook, or keywords and hashtags on Twitter – the opportunities can be vast.

We regularly consult businesses who are being far too niche with their audience targeting, selecting audiences which are far too small. We also see campaigns targeting an audience in the tens of millions, with very little budget. This extreme will under deliver without higher investment.

Test a number of audiences of 1m to 10m users to find your sweet spot. The larger your budget, the better value you will get from a larger audience.

If you are finding your audience is too small, try selecting the audience expansion option that most social media platforms now offer. This is a selection that automatically expands your audience based on who is already responding to your adverts. The example below is from LinkedIn Advertising.

3. What is your hook?

Every advertising campaign needs a hook to make it current, relevant, and fresh. What is going on right now in your business, industry, or the wider world to make your campaign relevant? This could be a sale, a key marketing event such as a launch or popup, or a calendar event such as The World Cup, Halloween, or Mother’s Day. Making your ads relevant to the current season and news events will make them more eye-catching.

Including a special offer in your creative will also grab attention. Offers can be used to create urgency where possible, for example, “Limited time only” or “Bank Holiday special!”.

4. Test your creatives

One of the advantages that social media advertising can offer your business is the ability to test a variety of creatives. This enables you to see what resonates best with your audience.

Try ads featuring single images, multiple images (carousels), video, graphics, or slideshows. This will offer you some key learnings about how to approach your organic posting strategy too.

Also, consider testing the copy in your adverts. Don’t concentrate all of your efforts on one advert doing all of the work. If the creative or copy isn’t quite right then you won’t generate the desired results.

5. Analyse your results

One of the key elements of social media advertising is analysing the results. This is your opportunity to understand which audiences engaged with your adverts the most, which creatives performed best, and which placements (where your adverts showed in the platforms) have generated the most traction.

You can also review which activities delivered the best return on investment. For example, is there an age group that cost more to target than another? Or was it cheaper to run video adverts like in the example below?

Make sure you give yourself time to properly review your social media advertising campaigns, as this is how you will reduce your costs and increase your learnings for the future.

This blog was written following our 5 Proven Social Media Advertising Strategies session on 28 April 2022. Avocado Social members can (re)watch the entire broadcast in The Avocado Social Clubhouse.