Social Advertising Strategy 101
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The document outlines a comprehensive strategy session focused on paid social media advertising, including key components like media planning, campaign goal setting, audience targeting, creative optimization, and budget management. It emphasizes the importance of aligning goals with audience and creative, utilizing proper placements across platforms, and monitoring performance metrics for continuous optimization. The content provides practical tips and examples to help marketers effectively develop and execute successful paid social campaigns.
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Social Advertising Strategy 101
- 1. Let’s have a nice little strategy session. PaidSocialStrategyWorkshop
- 2. Our agenda: ● Media Planning Strategy Overview ● Building Your Plan a. Identifying Goals b. Setting Benchmarks c. Audiences d. Platform Mix e. Creative f. Budget ● Performance Monitoring ● Making Optimizations ● Case Studies ● Test & Learn Campaign Blueprint
- 3. But first, an overview of media planning strategy. ● If you’ve worked mostly on organic social/digital, paid social will likely be a breath of very rational, fresh air. ● If you’ve worked on other paid digital campaigns, but just not social, this will sound very familiar… you’ll just need to learn the channel-specific nuances. ● At its core, successful media planning requires you to pair three things accurately: ○ Goal ○ Audience ○ Creative
- 4. You can only have one goal. ● There are hundreds of metrics you can look at to measure the success of a campaign, but you can only have one goal…. because you can only optimize toward one metric. ● Additionally, metrics like Post Engagements and Post Clicks are often at odds with one another. ● Say it with me: “We’ll keep an eye on that, too, but just to clarify, X will be our primary goal.”
- 5. The funnel is your friend. ● Focus on the bottom of the funnel first - it’s the easiest (and the most valuable). ● Layer on middle-funnel activity when you’re ready to scale your budget and your results. ● Invest in upper funnel activity if you have the budget or have specific business needs tied to awareness, but the middle and bottom are all that most businesses need to sustain a revenue-generating social advertising presence.
- 6. A simple, but profitable plan. Campaign Goal Budget Audiences Creative Site Traffic / Lead Generation 60% of total budget Email Subscriber Lookalikes, Site Visitor Lookalikes 2x Conversions 40% of total budget Email Subscribers, Site Visitors 2x
- 7. Let’s build your plan.
- 8. Building a good plan starts by asking good questions. 1. What is the most important business goal you can impact with your campaign? 2. What historical data can you evaluate and learn from ahead of building your campaign? 3. What customer information do you have? 4. What do you know about your customer’s journey to purchase?
- 9. Examples of popular campaign goals by industry Industry Business Goal Campaign Goal Retail Drive interest for new product Video views Site visits Food / Restaurants Increase revenue Online purchase In-store purchase B2B Increase lead pool Email Leads Site Visitors
- 10. Once you’ve identified your goal(s), you’ll need to set benchmarks. ● First, look within: ○ Historical benchmarks (paid, organic, cross-channel) ● Then, look at those Google-able lists for extra context. ● Keep in mind… your campaign performance will be most directly related to your campaign setup and the strength of your audience + creative pairing.
- 11. Benchmarks, a little more context. Media Goal Performance Context CPM CPM is most directly impacted by how broad or defined your audience is. For a broad audience, a good CPM range is between $5-7. For a niche or geo-restricted audience, CPMs will be higher, likely in the $10-20 range. The smaller your audience, the higher yourCPM will be, as it’s more difficult to consistently reach the audience. Cost Per Click (CPC) If you’re sharing editorial or entertainment content, your CPC will be very low, likely in the $0.10-0.50 range. For product-focused campaigns, a good CPC is $0.50. An important note, again as you refine your audiences and move people down your funnel with higher asks (purchase), you’re going to pay more for clicks (but they’ll be more valuable). Cost Per Video View (CPV) For a 3-second view, a good CPV is anything under $0.06 per view. For 10-second views, the cost goes up a bit, and a good goal here would be closer to $0.10 per view. Cost Per Purchase (CPP) Start with the simple goal of paying less for a conversion than the cost of the product. Then, try to lower this cost over time. Cost Per Lead (CPL) Anything under $1.00 is pretty good. Of course, evaluating cost per lead requires understanding how valuable your leads end up being.
- 12. Benchmarks context, continued! Media Goal Performance Context Cost Per RSVP These are impacted by two factors: how attractive is the event? How qualified is the audience you’re reaching? For example, an event at a shop that sells printers in a small town, is not going to do well. Cost Per Engagement (CPE) CPEs are typically very cheap, ranging from $0.10 to $0.50. If you’re paying more than $0.50, I would re-evaluate your content.
- 14. Audiences: A quick overview ● Custom Audiences: Email lists, purchase data, social engagement, app usage ● Lookalikes: Built using your custom audiences ● Interests/Behavior/Demo: Personas are incredibly helpful to build out meaningful interest targeting Interests/Behavior/Demo Lookalikes Custom
- 15. Interest-based Audiences: Broad, but qualified ● Broad, but qualified: Keep an eye on the audience size as you add in interests. Depending on your product/goal, a healthy interest-based audience is typically 2m-10m, and larger for brands/products with very broad appeal (TV shows and movies, for example). ● A little goes a long way: You rarely need a list of +50 interests to build a great audience. ● Don’t overestimate what you know (let the data tell you): Your campaign will automatically optimize toward the people within your audience who are responding best to the ad, so don’t feel like you HAVE to tell the platform everything. ● Tips for reducing size: “Must Match,” reduce demo, limiting geo.
- 16. Use interests, behaviors and demos to build personas. Persona Geo Demo Interests Behaviors On-Trend Clothing Shopper US (all) 30-45 Anthropologie, Madewell, Zara Engaged Shopper On-Trend Decor Shopper US (all) 25-60 CB2, West Elm, Joybird Engaged Shopper NYC Parents New York, NY 25-60 - Parents (All)
- 17. Custom Audiences: Your most valuable asset ● Exclusive: Only you can reach these audiences, because they’re yours! ● Include/Exclude: Custom audiences are great for retargeting, but also useful when you want to exclude certain groups of consumers from certain messages. ● Cross-Channel Impact: Custom audiences allow you to further leverage audience growth across your marketing channels. ● Limited: Your ability to scale success with custom audiences will be limited by their size.
- 18. Lookalikes: Your key to scaling results ● A key advantage of social ads: Reach +1 million more people who look/act like your most valuable customers. ● Turnkey: Just select/connect your source audience and your lookalike audience will be ready to use in minutes. ● Use most qualified/valuable audiences as sources: A lookalike audience based on purchasers will most likely drive better results than a lookalike audience based on site visitors.
- 19. Audiences must be paired with a matching goal. Audience Goal Personas Awareness Lookalikes Consideration Custom Conversion
- 20. Audiences: How they work (and don’t work) together Interest: Football Interest: Baseball + = People who like Football OR Baseball (This audience grows as you add more interests) Interest: Football Custom Audience: Email List + = People who are on your email list AND like Football Lookalike: Email List Custom Audience: Site Visitors + = People who are on your email list OR have visited your site
- 21. Audiences: Key learnings ● It’s critical to know how audiences do and DON’T work with each other, before you build your plan. ● Your audiences have to be paired with objectives that match their place in the funnel. ● The best way to learn is to dive into Business Manager and play around with different audience variables, keeping an eye on how the size changes as you make additions/exclusions.
- 23. Platform & Placement Mix: An Overview ● Platform is often over-thought, while placement is often overlooked. ● Test & Learn to prove out your platform-based assumptions. ● Look beyond on-platform results to fully evaluate the role users on each platform ultimately play in your larger marketing funnel.
- 24. Mixed Placement: What is it? Mixed Placement 101 ● Your campaign runs across Facebook and Instagram, automatically optimizing toward the channel that drives results most efficiently. ● For the majority of campaigns, this is the correct placement setting. ● You won’t want to use Mixed Placement if you have a channel-specific goal.
- 25. Audience Network: What is it? Audience Network 101 ● Audience Network is a placement offering that many social platforms offer to extend your campaign reach off-platform to a network of 1,000s of sites in the form of display ads. ● Pros: ○ A simple way to test “display” without a separate buy. ○ Can be very efficient for some brands/campaign goals. ● Cons: ○ One of the most popular accidental toggles. ○ Your brand/creative may get served on an off-brand site unless you set a block list. ○ Over-delivery/under-performance
- 26. Placement: Most Common Mistakes ● Completely overlooking placements in both the campaign setup and during performance evaluation ○ Running creative that doesn’t fit with all placements ● Over-thinking and over-estimating your placement knowledge ○ Better to learn from early campaign data instead ● Only evaluating performance by ad performance (and not looking at deeper performance indicators on site, for example)
- 27. Placement: Key Learnings ● Test across as many placements as possible, unless you have a channel-specific goal or historical campaign intel. ● Preview across all placements as your copy and assets might need to be tweaked to display consistently. ● Be careful when running across Audience Network — you may want to block certain sites.
- 29. Creative is important, but it can’t save you. Let’s discuss: ● How to pair your creative assets and messaging with your audiences and goals ● How to approach creative testing ● How to evaluate creative performance
- 30. Creative must be paired with the right goal, audience and messaging. Objective Creative Format Messaging Awareness Video, Carousel Focus on brand messaging vs. product messaging, or more informational product messaging Consideration Carousel, Image/Video Link, Lead Gen Form, Story Shift focus to product messaging, showing usage or variety Conversion Carousel, Image/Video Link, Story Add conversion incentives (% off, free shipping, BOGO, etc)
- 31. Creative testing, where to start. ● Start by testing formats first (video vs. photo, or a single image vs. a carousel). ● Your number of total ad creative adds up quickly, as each ad creative will run with each audience. ● Creative testing in your social ad campaigns can also help inform your larger brand creative strategy. ● Keep an eye on your Quality Rating within Ads Manager to see how your creative is performing compared to all other ads running at the same time. aRe WE a/B TEsTiNG?
- 32. Sequential messaging: a fancy way to say…. Sequential messaging is one of the few jargon-y phrases I really like. It means: you’re tailoring your creative and your message as consumers move through your funnel. Let’s take a look at how this works.
- 33. Sequential Messaging: an example Consumer Creative Format Messaging Has never seen an ad from us Video Brand-level messaging, introducing yourself/your more broad offering Watched our video ad Carousel Carousel shows variety of products Engaged with our carousel ad Image Link Image is product you clicked through on from carousel, with a limited-time % off offer
- 34. Creative variations add up quickly... Audience 1 Audience 2 Audience 3 Objective Ad 1a Ad 1b Ad 2a Ad 2b Ad 1a Ad 1b Ad 2a Ad 2b Ad 1a Ad 1b Ad 2a Ad 2b
- 35. Creative: Key takeaways ● Tailoring creative for your objective is critical. ● Even if your creative resources are limited, you can still test a lot by leaning into copy and CTA variations. ● Follow a structured testing approach to get clear, actionable learnings. ● +100 ad variations with a $50 spend? Don’t do it. Limit your testing so you won’t overwhelm the algorithm and so you can get clear, actionable learnings.
- 37. Budget: An Overview ● Think of your campaign budget as a math problem… plug in as many variables as you can to get to your answer. ● After you establish initial success, you’ll likely want to scale your results (increase your spend to get more results). We’ll discuss a few tips/best practices for how to do this.
- 38. Budget: Solving for x What We Know Performance Benchmarks Goal Some Things Nope 1. Research industry benchmarks 2. Budget will be Estimated Cost x Desired Number of Results All The Things Yes Hurrah, this is just a math problem! Budget will be Historical Benchmark Cost x Desired Number of Results.
- 39. Example of Pairing Goals & Benchmark Costs Campaign Goal Estimated Cost Per Result Estimated Results Budget 1 Budget 2 Budget 3 Holiday Sale Site Traffic Link Clicks $0.50 Per Click Spend $500.00 $1,000.00 $2,000.00 Link Clicks 1,000 2,000 4,000
- 40. Budgets: Scaling Your Results with Spend Campaign Goal Budget Goal Return Net Revenue Initial Campaign Sales $1,000.00 4x media spend / $4,000.00 $3,000.00 Larger Budget Campaign Traffic $500.00 4x media spend / $6,000.00 $4,000.00 Sales $1,500.00
- 41. Budget: Key takeaways ● Scaling your spend often means building out your funnel — otherwise we’d all be on Shark Tank. ● Don’t increase a campaign budget by more than 50% at a time — if you do, you may see costs increase quite dramatically. ● Split budget 40/60 (lower funnel / mid-funnel) as a starting point and optimize this breakdown as you go.
- 43. Performance Monitoring 101 ● Align on tracking/attribution ahead of launch and ensure that everyone is keeping score by the same methods (use link tracking for all campaign activations, including influencer organic posts, if possible) ● A 24-48 hour check-in will allow you to get a quick, first read and also gives you one more opportunity to double-check your setup early in the spend. ● There are ~350 metrics you can look at, but you can only have one campaign KPI (and you should focus on it!)
- 44. Proxy Metrics: What are they and how can they help? ● A proxy metric is any metric outside of your primary campaign KPI. ● Proxy metrics are most useful when they’re used in an additive manner and still tied back to better understanding how you can improve your primary goal results. ● Example 1: Your primary goal isn’t getting traction. Proxy metrics can help you see which actions users ARE taking. ● Example 2: You’re having trouble getting your Site Traffic budget to spend. Your audiences may be too limited. Looking at a metric like CPM can help you see how much you’re paying to reach your audience, which can inform whether or not it’s too qualified.
- 45. Optimization: Everyone’s favorite word ● A big strength of paid social is that you can make updates (optimizations) to your campaign to improve results mid-flight. ● Main levers you can pull: ○ Audiences ○ Placements ○ Creative ○ Budgets
- 46. Optimization: Tips for success ● Resist the urge to react immediately to initial data. The results you see over the first 24-48 hours will likely shift a bit (or even completely) given a few more days of spend. ● Make one update at a time. ● Let the platform decide for you (as much as possible): The Facebook ad algorithm is very good at what it does. Let it do the heavy lifting, optimizing your spend across your budgets and creative (vs. manually pulling levers daily). ● Don’t drown in A/B testing. Yes, it’s useful, but don’t obsess over it. ● Let the platform have some variance (everything doesn’t have to be a winner).
- 47. Putting it all together: let’s build a Test & Learn campaign.
- 48. Test & Learn Campaign Parameters Plan Components Sample Plan Input Suggested Parameters Budget $200 For lower cost goals, you can go lower, but for a purchase goal, recommended to run a budget of at least 3x the cost of your product Goal Drive purchases on site Pick only 1 Campaign Duration 2 weeks Give more time (at least 1 week) for a purchase/lower funnel goal Platforms Instagram and Facebook Run across both, unless your goal is channel-specific Placements Feed, Stories Pick at least 2 Audiences Site Visitors, Site Visitor Lookalikes Pick at least 2 and use a mix of qualified and prospecting audiences Creative 1x image link, 1x carousel Have at least 2x creative per audience and limit testing so you get actionable results
- 49. Test & Learn Campaign Sample Learnings Plan Component Learnings Overall Performance/Benchmark Intel CPMs range from $2-5, Costs per click range from $0.34 to $0.75 Platform Performance 95% of the spend delivered on Instagram (where we were most active organically) Placement Feed out-performed Stories Audiences - Interest targeting performed as well as lookalikes - Males drove slightly more link clicks than females - Majority of clicks came from the 18-34 age demo Creative - Carousel out-performed single-images - “Learn More” out-performed “Get Offer” CTA