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10 Reasons Why Your Social Media Ads Aren’t Working
With the rise of affordable internet access and global networking, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (among others) have become ripe for advertisement. Whether you are new to social networks or have extensive experience in digital marketing advertisement, it can be difficult to determine the right content strategy for an upcoming ad campaign.
According to Social Media Today, 42% of the world’s population is using social media platforms in 2019, with average daily use of 2 hours and 22 minutes, while 73% of marketing experts express that social media marketing has been highly lucrative for their businesses. The question that remains in the wake of those numbers is – how?
How can you effectively take advantage of social media platforms, raise awareness of your brand and recuperate your invested resources successfully? How can you efficiently manage and measure your brand’s social media activity and eliminate potential bottlenecks before they rear their heads?
Let’s take a closer look at some of the most prevalent and problematic reasons for social media advertisement’s underperformance so that you can avoid these pitfalls in the future.
The Importance and Role of Social Media Advertisement
Let’s tackle the question of “why” before we delve deeper into several advertisement mistakes related to social media. Social media platforms have become a staple of our society in the past decade, with billions of users flocking to these services in order to network with their friends and families. According to Small Biz Genius, 2.1 billion users check into their social media accounts on a daily basis, with 11 new people setting up their accounts every second.
Given the scale and market opportunity which these numbers represent for businesses and enterprises across the globe, it’s no wonder that so many try to capitalize on it and push advertisements through these platforms. With that said, successful social media ad management, with or without an external tool to analyze its efficiency, can bring numerous benefits to your brand as a whole, including the following:
- Increase of brand awareness and industry authority across all internet channels
- Increase in customer engagement and conversion rates
- Increase in brand loyalty, customer satisfaction and positive word of mouth
- Improvement in competitive market positioning and networking opportunities
Reasons Why Your Social Media Ads Aren’t Working
Lack of a Content Strategy
In order to make the most out of social networks and digital marketing, you should always approach content production with a social media ad plan in mind. Do you want to increase your business’ sales, generate new leads or increase your subscriber numbers?
Each piece of content you publish on social media needs a clear goal and purpose. You can set Key Performance Indicators (KPI), use a tool to analyze industry trends or simply create internal goals to pursue in the coming campaign. This will help your creators and social media managers to better position each piece of content to fulfill its goals.
No Clear Target Audience
As with content goals, your social media ads need to have a clear demographic in mind. Millennials, stay-at-home parents and elderly customers won’t react the same way to the same piece of advertisement.
Trying to target everyone with the same ad will attract no one and leave your content to underperform as a result. Settle on the target audience early on and create your ads so that they are appealing to different sets of potential customers.
To ensure cultural appropriateness and relevance of content, you should consider consulting with native speakers. You can easily use TheWordPoint to find expert translators for your website!
Improper Content Formatting
Every social media platform on the market comes with its set of rules and regulations in terms of advertisement. A piece of content that works perfectly on Facebook will likely underperform on Twitter or LinkedIn for obvious reasons.
This means that every advertisement material you intend to publish on multiple social networks has to be optimized accordingly. To amend this, create a style guide for your digital marketing activities early on and stick to a comfortable format of the content without deviations to avoid misalignment.
Poor Combination of Platforms
Depending on your target audience and the market you want to attract with your social media ads, you should choose a strict number of platforms to pursue. Even if you have an abundance of resources and manpower to manage half-a-dozen social media accounts, this approach may not be as successful as you might think.
Settle for a set number of platforms that are likely to be used by your target audience and focus your efforts on those pages. Given that each of the social networks requires a slightly different approach to content formatting, keeping things simple and focused on your brand is the safe way to manage and measure your social media activity successfully.
Lack of Reader Urgency
Social media users rarely stop to read any piece of content on their feeds without a good reason to do so. Once you decide on the platforms to pursue, your social media content should include calls to action and multimedia which will ensure user engagement.
This approach to reader urgency will allow you to preemptively communicate with your audience before they even click on your ad. Failing to add some form of a call to action or an invitation to engage with your content will result in poor digital marketing campaign’s performance.
No Content Diversity or Creativity
Speaking of social media feeds, new pieces of content are created and published every second of each day. You will need to stand out from the crowd and be original if you want to attract an audience and convert them into customers.
This is where technical optimization takes a backseat and creativity comes to the forefront, since no amount of SEO or analysis will make up for it. Take time to create original, witty and creative messages for your audience in a variety of content formats, including writing and video to diversify your strategy as much as possible.
Complicated Conversion Processes
The goal of your social media ads should always focus on specific goals such as conversions, sales or subscriptions. However, it’s important to make these processes as simple and quick as possible for your audience’s convenience.
If it takes too many clicks to complete a purchase or to subscribe to your services, people will simply leave and add to your cart abandonment rates. Make your conversion straightforward and mobile friendly which will, in turn, allow you to manage and measure your social media activity more easily.
Lack of Performance Tracking
Having a reliable tool to analyze your social media ad performance and audience engagement is of utmost importance. It will allow you to quickly assess whether or not your content is performing adequately in addition to a plethora of audience behavior data to boot.
Make sure to opt for a reliable social media analysis tool in your digital marketing activities to avoid a loss of valuable data. This approach to content analysis will also allow you to easily modify or change your approach to social media ads mid-campaign if the content underperforms despite your best efforts.
Lack of Audience Engagement
Social media advertisement is not a one-way street. If you want to succeed on social networks, your representatives should engage the readers at any chance they get. Once your content is published, readers are likely to comment, share and interact with your ads in some form.
Engagement which involves comments, likes and discussion is highly recommended for brands which opt for social media advertisement. This will create a pro-consumer reputation for your brand and make your digital marketing efforts easier as a result.
Lack of Content Testing
Lastly, every piece of social media advertising should be tested before its publishing. This will allow you to assess its performance and viability in advance and in order to avoid poor audience reception.
Methodologies such as A/B testing are a great way for content intended for social networks to be analyzed and for potential bottlenecks to be eliminated on time. Don’t rush your content into publishing in hopes of quick ROI and positive social media engagement –test your content with a tool to analyze its market viability beforehand.
In Summation
Once you’ve successfully eliminated the above-mentioned pitfalls of social media advertisement, you will be able to manage and measure your social media activity more easily going forward.
Keep a close eye on your competition, market trends and industry developments to stay relevant to your audience on a day-to-day basis. Before you know it, you will have a solid digital marketing strategy for your social media ads which will make it easy to maintain your brand reputation and industry authority for the indefinite future.