7 ways to improve your social ad campaigns.

Social media. Every business uses it, but few use it well. Here are seven tips for making the most out of your social advertising channels—things to try (and to avoid) in your next campaign, and a few ways you can maximise your marketing resources and stand out from the crowd.

1. Always encourage audience participation.

You can use platforms’ built-in engagement features to do this really easily. Polls on LinkedIn and Facebook, and quizzes, emoji sliders and countdown stickers on Instagram all allow your audience to engage with your brand with one click. As a bonus, you can also use these features to obtain valuable audience insights; ask your audience about their likes and dislikes, products they’d like to see, products they’d like to never see again…

2. Capitalise on (relevant, appropriate) trends.

Every social media marketer knows to monitor hashtags for opportunities to relate their brand to trending topics, but not everyone knows when to not. So take this point as a caution, triple check that funny tweet before you press send, consider any potential backlash you may get from firing out a post to capitalise on a trend. Avoid the mistakes made by baked good manufacturer Entenmann’s back in 2011…

3.Promote your ads.

Though a big draw of social channels is the fact they’re free, a small amount invested in promoting your ads can yield huge ROI. Especially if you get clever about your targeting. You can create bespoke audiences using a tonne of different fields; from job titles to interests to age to education. Your audience personas aren’t just for traditional campaigns, bring them into your social strategy and you’ll be amazed at what specific targeting can achieve on platforms where, arguably, your audience are at their most relaxed and authentic.

4. Protect your channels from fraud.

Ad fraud and invalid traffic (IVT) are bad news for all advertising campaigns. Whether it’s accidental clicks on your ads or the malicious behaviour of botnets, IVT drains your ad budget on clicks that won’t convert and skew marketing metrics— a social media manager's nightmare! By protecting your social campaigns with ad fraud prevention software you’ll ensure only genuine users can click on your paid ads, increasing conversions and helping your ad budget go further.
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5. Go live.

Find your most confident colleague and try out a platform’s live feature! Used most frequently on Facebook and Instagram, live streaming via your company’s page is a cost-effective way to increase real-time engagement and brand awareness. You could do a behind-the-scenes of your office or store, a live Q&A with the leadership team, or even explore doing your next product launch on air.

6. Promote employee advocacy internally.

Encouraging employee advocacy is one of the most effective ways to increase brand awareness. They know and believe in your product/service, and have hundreds of their own followers across their social channels—who better to show off your business than your employees? You can incentivise employees to share and interact with posts, or try a ‘meet the team’ campaign where everyone shares a bit about themselves and why they love working at your company.

7. Leverage multichannel marketing.

Don’t limit yourself to one platform when spreading the word about the amazing things you do. Utilise a number of channels for each campaign and ensure content remains consistent, even if in a different format; a video on YouTube, a story highlight saved to your Instagram profile, a Q&A on LinkedIn. By having a presence on every channel where your audience is, you’ll increase brand awareness and the likelihood of new customers.
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Well would you look at that, TrafficGuard has just launched ad fraud protection for Facebook and Instagram. If you’d like to know more, you can find out extra info here, or reach out to our team.

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