Today’s post is written by Guest Author, Cassie Oumedian – digital marketing veteran and active consultant. We’re excited to share insights and guidance from additional industry voices here on the Clix blog, so make sure you stay tuned to the Guest Post category!
Social platforms such as Meta (a.k.a. Facebook & Instagram), TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn, do not have a magic button for driving long-term growth. Creating a successful social advertising program takes time and strategic planning. Below are 5 crucial tips to create a paid social strategy that will help yield bountiful results and set your social program up for long-term success.
With GivingTuesday right around the corner, I thought it would be helpful to focus on how non-profits could use these 5 tips for their GivingTuesday paid social strategies to crush their donation goals. However, these same strategies can also be used across lead gen, eCommerce, or any other industry that is looking to create a sustainable growth-driven social strategy.
1 – Build Trust
To have a successful social strategy it’s important to nurture your audience with engaging content that builds trust. Three key ways to do this are:
- Create an ecosystem of social content across various social platforms
- Content strategy – focus on brand and mission
- Evergreen campaigns – run all year long
Creating an ecosystem of consistent clear messaging across social platforms will help users understand your brand and mission. This will also allow you to test social platforms and ad formats to see where you are getting the most quality engagement at the lowest cost (i.e. video ads, static ads). From my experience, video ads tend to be favored by the social platform algorithms and are a great way to tell the story of your brand and mission that helps connect to a user.
Having evergreen campaigns that run all the time will help you be more efficient with ad spend and increase donations or sales all year round compared to more expensive and competitive times of the year (i.e. GivingTuesday or Black Friday). Once the trust is built and the user is engaged, you now have a warm audience that you can retarget to and move them down the funnel to take action.
2 – Know Your Audience
Below is a breakdown of users across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn by demographics in a study conducted by Pew Research in April 2021. If you know that most of your donors or clients are Women ages 30 – 49, Facebook and Instagram are most likely your best social platform to reach your audience. Where, if your audience is the 18- 29 bracket, TikTok would be a better place to reach your audience. Do your research to make sure you are testing the right social platforms for your key audience demographic as they do vary significantly and so will costs.
3 – Most Important Social Conversion Metric – Email
With data-privacy issues and the death of the cookie looming, the value of an engaged email list is more important than ever for all businesses. Good News! Social platforms are a great place to optimize for emails AND revenue all in one place.
Getting someone’s email can be more challenging than you think. Email is personal. The users is now giving you first-party data and a direct way to reach them outside of these social platforms, so it’s important that they are getting something from it. We already covered the importance of building trust so now you can go in for the ask. In order to do this there needs to be something in it for the user.
A few examples could be –
- “Learn more about upcoming events to help your community”
- “Join our email list and save with special promo codes”
- “Sign up and receive this exclusive eBook offer”
Make sure you are clear with the user on how you intend to use their information. Once you have the email address, you can target these users via custom audiences directly on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin, and even create lookalike audiences to engage new users.
4 – Make It Easy To Take Action
Now that we understand the importance of email, the next tip is to make it as easy as possible for users to take action. Using social ad formats that allow you to take action directly in the interface without leaving the page work great for this. Some of these ad formats include: Facebook Lead Form Ads and Instagram Live Donate.
Once the emails have been collected, you can have them automatically linked up to your CRM system or download them directly from Facebook or the other social platforms.
5 – Budget For Success
We mentioned above creating an ecosystem of content across social platforms. To do this, you will need to budget accordingly. A general method that I typically use is the 70/20/10 rule. This allows you to put 70% of your budget toward what you know performs well. 20% toward social platforms that are likely to perform well. 10% toward more experimental social platforms that will allow you to have a diverse social portfolio that will allow continued growth for years to come.
The next question that always comes up is what should your goal be? Start with what you are willing to pay for a new donor, client, or conversion.
For example, if you know that the average customer or donor has an LTV of $100 and you want to include some wiggle room for other expenses, you could have a CPA goal of $80. You should know how much you are willing to spend to receive a new customer. From there you can check estimated CPCs, CPMs or test various social platforms to see what makes the most sense for your business budget and goals.
Three important things to remember when it comes to budgeting for a successful social campaign include:
- Always have ads running (evergreen campaigns) – even if budget is small.
- Know your customer LTV to allow for proper goals and growth.
- Diversify your budget across social platforms – 70/20/10.
Conclusion & Key Takeaways
Whether you are a non-profit, eCommerce, lead gen, or any other type of business, these 5 tips will help set you up for a successful growth-driven paid social strategy.
- Be prepared to invest in social all year long to build trust.
- Have a content plan – don’t wing it.
- Emails are the most important conversion metric you should be tracking.
- Make sure you are making it as easy as possible for users to take action.
- Budget for social platform diversification – 70/20/10. Always be testing.
- Non-profit Facebook and Instagram Social Impact Resources
