With as many different platforms and audiences as there are, social media advertising can be a difficult concept to get the hang of, especially if you’ve never used the medium in this way before. This can be frustrating for newcomers who might not understand what to look for or how to track their progress. As we’ve talked about before in “How do you outsource social media”, a lot of it has to do with your unique marketing plan and what goals you’re trying to accomplish.
Let’s look at it like this: you’ve signed up for a race and know that you have to train for it, so you walk a mile each day. Then when you actually get to the race and find out that it’s a 10k, you can see how you’d be wildly under-prepared. Social media is the same way, you need to know your goal so you can build a proper plan to get you there. So, let’s dive into ways to tell if your social media advertising skills are being put to good use.
Making Sure You Know What You’re Posting
Whether you’re working with an agency or tackling social media marketing strategy with your own team, you should always establish the goals of a post before you post it. Maybe you’re trying to direct people to your website, getting them to engage with the post, or maybe you’re just trying to accrue more followers. Whatever they may be, these checkpoints are going to help you determine what’s working and what isn’t.
If a certain type of post is receiving more engagement, click through, or likes than usual, that can be a sign as to what your audience enjoys, and now you can format your content to be more like that in the future. Data analytic services can help you track the progress of posts and see which ones perform better than others in whatever categories you’re measuring them in.
Analyzing Your Results
What you should also keep in mind when it comes to social media advertising is that sometimes, what looks to be a ‘failure’, can lead to future success down the line. When your posts aren’t hitting the goals you planned for them, instead of just scrapping and forgetting it, focus on why they aren’t working. What about them isn’t connecting with your audience, and how can you bridge that gap? We know it’s not a lot of fun to go over a project that didn’t work, but instead of looking at it like a failure, consider it as a step forward to what will eventually be a win.
To better illustrate this, let’s go over a time when our team faced a challenge like this.
We were working with a client and helping them to develop a website for their business. This included posting more on their social media and taking advantage of other social media marketing services, like paid ads to help direct people back to their website and products. However, we noticed that there was no increase in sales. We tweaked the ads in several ways but each time they came back with the same results. We could have looked at this as a total loss, but instead, we used that information to inform us on what needed to change. It gave us the opportunity for the client to make a data driven decision on what to do next. The data showed exactly what the problem was since a very clear defined goal had been set. Turning any situation like this into a win is all about the mindset that you approach it from, and how you choose to respond.
Social media advertising is a skill that requires time and effort to understand, and even more to keep up with. Seeing progress can be an excellent motivator to keep putting in the work, but we need to set ourselves up in order to see it. Setting goals and not letting failure bog you down are your first steps to making sure your social media marketing strategy is getting your business where it needs to be.
