Benefit from your paid social spend

24.2% of Facebook pages are investing in Facebook Ads, and with 60 million active business pages this means that nearly 15 million small businesses are advertising through Facebook. With an ever-growing amount of dollars being pumped into the Facebook engine, is your business seeing results?

To help you and your brand benefit most from your paid social spend, we’ve broken down some of our favorite tips into a simple 9 step strategy below.

Tip 1: Define success early

Before spending a cent on any form of paid media, it’s important to understand what success looks like for your business - build your social media advertising strategy. Is success a new customer every month? Perhaps a certain number of unique website visitors to your blog? Or a particular quantity of new leads you can call?

A popular way for businesses to define a successful campaign is by basing their performance off a metric called ROAS, or Return On Ad Spend. This is calculated using: Revenue/Ad Spend = ROAS. Taking the money you’ve earned through a channel and dividing it by the money you’ve spent on the channel. Your result will tell you how much money you make, per how much you put in.

Learn more about this increasingly popular attribution metric.

Tip 2: Choose the right objective for your company and you as the business owner

Selecting the right advertising objective is going to be the first step in your campaign - but why is it so important? Getting this step right in the beginning means you can easily measure your success throughout the campaign. Simply, you’ll know if your ads are working or not.

But more than even tracking your success, you need to ensure you’re choosing the strongest strategy. If you’re looking to get more visitors to your website, you’d opt for a Traffic Campaign.

But if your website isn’t designed to convert or is slow and outdated, this won’t be the best way to achieve your goal. You may be better placed building a Facebook Messenger campaign, or a Lead generation campaign. Learn more about the different advertising objectives on Facebook.

This tip should be a given, but shouldn’t be overlooked in terms of importance. It’s vital that you understand exactly who is going to be interested in what your business has to offer.

But when thinking about your ideal client and targeting them on paid social, it’s important to get into the nitty-gritty. Where does your ideal client live? What are their main interests? What type of phone do they have? Facebook can even help you out with this. Explore their Audience Insights tool to learn more about your page followers.

Tip 4: Have a solution-focused offer

What is your business offering? Don’t invest in paid social for the sake of spending ad dollars - invest because you have something valuable to share with your audience. Whether it’s a new product you’re selling or a new service you’re putting in front of the world, use these newsworthy moments to generate excitement.

Did you know the average Facebook user clicks on 8 ads per month? If you scroll through your newsfeed on any platform, you’ll spot 8 different ads within minutes. If you’re not putting something valuable in front of your target audience, not only will you not receive traction on your campaign, but your relevancy score will also suffer.

Tip 5: Adopt an experience mindset on social media advertising

Paid social adverts have come a long way - they’re no longer just a static image on a user's newsfeed. And they can’t be. Today’s audiences have been seeing that style of content for years. There’s a range of new creative formats, from Videos and Carousels to Instant Articles and Stories. Show your creativity off.

There’s so much more to an ad than the beautiful creations you’ve spent hours designing. Think copy, headlines, call-to-action. All of this is seen before any post-click experience.

The post-click experience includes landing pages, Facebook Lead Forms, or your website. This whole experience has to embody a consistent message. You hooked that user for a reason, you need to fulfill their expectations to hold onto them.

Tip 6: Build your toolkit for social media for (small) business

There’s a range of tools out there that can be used to make paid social a little easier in your business. The Text Overlay tool by Facebook helps make sure your adverts can be delivered effectively, and don’t breach the 20% text rule on Facebook. To visualize your creatives before loading them into Facebook Ads Manager, AdMocks by Ads Parlour. There’s also a range of reporting tools on the market to help suit your needs. Although, Facebook has quite a robust report builder itself.

Tip 7: Leverage your own data

You’ve worked hard to collect data from your customers and contacts over time. In the world of paid social advertising, this data is worth its weight in gold.

“Lookalike” or “Matched” audiences are an audience creation tool offered by most major advertising platforms. And help your ads deliver great results. We’ll explain.

There’s a growing number of social advertising platforms available to small businesses, most commonly Facebook (which also includes Instagram), Twitter, LinkedIn, and Snapchat. Facebook is by far the most utilized and one of the easiest to start out with.

But it’s still worth considering which platform would be best for your business. If you’re advertising a new pair of jeans you’ve added to your range, you won’t be reaching many potential buyers on LinkedIn, because your audience simply isn’t there is a purchasing mindset. Think beautiful Instagram Stories placements, alongside Facebook Mobile Newsfeed placements for fashion retail-based offerings.

All industries have their own heavyweight social advertisers. Many brands invest hundreds of thousands into paid social media on a monthly basis, and lucky for you, Facebook make public ads that are currently running in their very own Ads Library. This is a great playground for browsing ads that are delivering results for some of the biggest businesses (and yes, even your competitors).

These tips barely scratch the surface of the world that is paid social advertising, but they should help you kick-start your paid acquisition journey. So we'll leave you with one extra top tip: It’s easy to get caught up in investing in increased lead flow, but it’s important to understand how you can budget effectively to account for the hidden costs associated with paid social campaigns. Whether it’s ad spend, a creative resource or web development, make sure you’ve built your budget to accommodate for these fees.