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Week 5

You will focus on the fifth core pillar of social media marketing: paid social media. You’ll learn about the benefits of paid advertising on social media and how to choose the best platforms for your ads. You’ll also explore ad formats and content types for different social media platforms and measure the impact of an ad campaign on a social media platform. You’ll end the course by describing common types of social testing and how to run a social test.

Dedication to study

  • Videos: 36 min

  • Leitura: 2 h 10 min

  • Teste: 1 Teste com avaliação

Learning Objectives

Let’s outline our objectives for this segment:

  1. Achieve specific marketing goals through the use of paid social media.
  2. Discuss the benefits of paid social media.
  3. Explore strategies for choosing the ideal social media networks for ads.
  4. Learn how to develop a comprehensive strategy for a paid social media campaign.
  5. Dive into different ad formats for various social media platforms.
  6. Understand the art of remarketing to an advertising audience.
  7. Get a grasp on setting a paid social media budget.
  8. Identify the most common types of paid social media bidding strategies.

Content

  1. The Value of Paid Ads on Social Media
  2. Target Your Social Advertising
  3. Managing a Social Advertising Budget
  4. Review: Paid Social Media
  5. Course Review: From Likes to Leads - Interact with Customers Online

1. The Value of Paid Ads on Social Media

Welcome to week 5 of your journey

Throughout your social media marketing campaigns, you will likely utilize a combination of organic and paid media. As we’ve discussed, social media is one of the best marketing channels for generating organic media. However, organic media alone might not be enough to accomplish all of your social media marketing goals. For some campaigns, you may want to implement the fifth pillar of social media marketing: paid social media. In this section, we’ll discuss the benefits of paid social media. We’ll look at how both organic and paid social media can benefit your campaigns, depending on your goals and we’ll discuss how to implement both into your strategy. We’ll also explore different ad formats on social media and how to choose formats based on your goals. You’ll learn how to reach people who’ve already shown interest in your business or products through remarketing techniques, and we’ll also discuss how to set a paid social media budget and what different types of social media ads cost. Ready to go? Let’s discuss how to fit paid social media into your social media marketing puzzle.

Benefits of Paid Social Media

To run successful marketing campaigns on social media, it’s essential to leverage a combination of organic and paid strategies. Organic media doesn’t involve paid promotion, whereas paid media encompasses all advertising that a brand pays for. In this video, we’ll delve deeper into the concept of paid social media and explore its potential advantages for your marketing efforts.

Paid social media primarily revolves around the deployment of paid advertisements or sponsored marketing messages on various social media platforms with the intention of targeting specific audience segments. In essence, paid social media is any form of marketing for which you pay on social media platforms, either to promote your content or develop highly relevant advertisements. The overarching goal is to reach both new and returning customers more effectively.

Examples of paid social media include pay-per-click advertising, where you pay each time someone clicks on your ad, branded content created by third-party entities to endorse a product or brand, and influencer-generated content, which features posts created by influencers to promote a brand’s products and services. These paid promotions are typically distinguishable by the “sponsored” or “promoted” tags appended to the posts.

Paid social media shares the same core objective as organic social media, which is to target audiences and drive sales. However, it offers additional benefits that can significantly boost your marketing campaigns.

One significant advantage of paid social media is its capacity to enhance brand awareness. By placing your ads in prominent positions within your audience’s social media feeds, you can capture their attention, even if they weren’t actively seeking your content or following your brand. This visibility can be a game-changer for your marketing initiatives.

Furthermore, paid social media allows you to reach your audience swiftly. Organic posts may take days to reach your audience due to platform algorithms, which can be detrimental, especially for time-sensitive campaigns. Paid social media permits you to elevate your post’s visibility in users’ feeds, reducing the time it takes for people to see your content.

Another compelling feature of paid social media is the ability to precisely target your most relevant customers. You can configure campaigns to serve ads exclusively to individuals within specific age ranges or geographic regions. You can also tailor campaigns to reach your followers, previous customers, or individuals who have visited your website. Utilizing the ad preferences set by users, you can ensure that your ads are displayed to those most likely to engage with them.

Paid social media extends your remarketing capabilities as well. Remarketing involves displaying paid ads to individuals who have previously visited your website, app, or social media profiles. By strategically employing paid social media, you can send remarketing ads to these potential customers multiple times and in various formats. This increases the likelihood that your product will be chosen over competitors when these users decide to make a purchase.

In conclusion, paid social media has the potential to significantly enhance the success of your marketing campaigns. It can elevate brand awareness, expedite message delivery to your target audience, and empower you to precisely target and remarket to specific customers. Throughout this section, we will explore how to effectively leverage paid social media to achieve your marketing goals.

Integrating Paid Social Media into Your Strategy

Up to this point, our focus has primarily been on understanding and optimizing organic social media strategies. However, it’s important to note that for comprehensive marketing success, a combination of organic and paid social media is often the most effective approach. In this video, we’ll delve into how paid social media can be harnessed to accomplish specific marketing objectives, underlining the idea that these two elements work in tandem to create a robust social media strategy.

Organic and paid social media are integral components of a well-rounded social media strategy. You’ve already learned that organic social media can be used to acquire new customers and followers, boost brand visibility, and gather valuable audience insights. These same goals can also be achieved through paid social media, but it has additional capabilities that make it invaluable for other objectives.

While organic social media excels in nurturing connections and relationships with your audience through communication, paid social media takes the lead when it comes to elevating brand awareness, pinpointing specific target audiences, and driving conversions. Let’s explore how you can leverage paid social media to attain these objectives.

As previously discussed, you can analyze the performance of your content using analytics tools to determine what resonates most with your target audience. Armed with this data, you can allocate funds from your paid media budget to amplify your top-performing organic content, expanding its reach to a wider audience. Tools like the “promote” feature in Hootsuite or automated triggers based on predefined criteria can help you boost successful posts. For instance, promoting a video on the importance of a human-centric approach to marketing can substantially increase its reach and impact.

Paid social media is a powerful tool for precise audience targeting. Utilizing data on your existing customers, you can create lookalike audiences, composed of individuals who share similar demographics and behaviors but haven’t yet encountered your brand. For example, you could craft ads tailored to an audience resembling those who have made purchases in the last six months. This allows you to create highly relevant content that resonates with this new audience segment.

Before launching an ad, A/B testing can play a crucial role in optimizing its performance. Just as we’ve previously discussed A/B testing for webpages, for social media, it involves comparing two versions of an ad to determine which one yields a higher conversion rate. Given that social ads require an investment, it’s essential to ensure your budget is allocated wisely. Conducting A/B tests with a small audience allows you to evaluate the effectiveness of your ad’s messaging, calls to action, copywriting, visuals, placement, and formats. You can also test your ad among different demographic groups and use the results to refine and improve your ad’s performance.

A/B testing is not limited to paid ads; it can also provide valuable insights into the performance of your organic posts. These insights can help inform decisions about which content is worth promoting and which elements should be incorporated into your paid ad campaigns.

Finally, remarketing is a potent strategy to drive more conversions through social media. By reaching individuals who are already familiar with your business, you can encourage them to take the next step in their customer journey. For instance, if a shopper adds a pair of jeans to their cart but doesn’t complete the purchase, a remarketing ad for that specific item or similar products in their social media feed can potentially nudge them towards conversion.

In summary, paid social media, when strategically employed, can be a highly effective tool for moving your customers through the marketing funnel. In the upcoming discussions, we’ll delve deeper into the development of your paid social media strategy, providing you with a comprehensive understanding of how to harness its potential for your specific marketing goals.

Test Your Knowledge: Paid Ads on Social Media

  • Practice Quiz: 5 questions
Match the marketing strategy to the appropriate goal
  • Raise brand awareness
  • Reaching specific audiences
  • Optimize ad performance
  • Drive conversions
  1. Nathan remarkets ads on social media to visitors who have abandoned their shopping carts on the company’s website.

The correct answer is: “Drive conversions.”

In this scenario, Nathan is using social media ads to target and re-engage visitors who abandoned their shopping carts on the company’s website. The primary goal of this remarketing strategy is to encourage these visitors to complete their purchases, which falls under the “Drive conversions” objective.

  1. After a post about a local, company-sponsored Earth Day event receives a lot of engagement, Nathan pays to boost it to a wider audience.

The correct answer is: “Raise brand awareness.”

In this scenario, Nathan is paying to boost a post about a local Earth Day event that has already received significant engagement. By doing so, he aims to increase the post’s visibility to a broader audience, which aligns with the objective of raising brand awareness.

  1. When setting up a new ad campaign on one of Great Grounds’ social media accounts, Nathan sets the parameters of the campaign to reach followers and previous customers.

The correct answer is: “Reaching specific audiences.”

In this case, Nathan is configuring the ad campaign to target a specific audience, which includes the company’s existing followers and previous customers. This aligns with the objective of reaching specific audiences.

  1. Nathan identifies Great Grounds’ returning website visitors. Then, he remarkets ads to those people through their social media profiles.

The correct answer is: “Drive conversions.”

Nathan is using a remarketing strategy to target returning website visitors with ads on their social media profiles. The primary goal of this strategy is to encourage these visitors to take action, such as making a purchase or completing another conversion-related action. Therefore, the objective is to “drive conversions.”

  1. Nathan runs A/B tests on an ad before launching it to a broader audience. After reviewing the results, he implements the visual and formatting elements that performed best with testers.

The correct answer is: “Optimize ad performance.”

Nathan is conducting A/B tests to analyze the ad’s performance and identify which visual and formatting elements work best. The goal here is to optimize the ad’s performance by using the elements that resonate most with the audience, leading to better results when the ad is launched to a broader audience.

  1. Nathan creates a lookalike audience and develops ads tailored to their location, age range, and interests.

The correct answer is: “Reaching specific audiences.”

Nathan is creating a lookalike audience and tailoring ads based on location, age range, and interests. This approach is focused on reaching a specific audience that closely resembles the characteristics and interests of the original audience.

  1. After Great Grounds releases a new holiday flavor, Nathan partners with an influencer to promote the product.

The correct answer is: “Raise brand awareness.”

In this scenario, Nathan is partnering with an influencer to promote a new holiday flavor product. The primary goal here is to raise brand awareness by leveraging the influencer’s reach and influence to introduce the new product to a wider audience.

  1. Nathan tests an ad with two different demographic groups. It performs better with group one than group two, so he adjusts the call-to-action for the second group

The correct answer is: “Optimize ad performance.”

In this situation, Nathan is testing the ad with two different demographic groups and making adjustments based on the performance. Specifically, he is fine-tuning the call-to-action for the second group to improve the ad’s effectiveness, which falls under the objective of optimizing ad performance.

2. Target Your Social Advertising

Let’s refine your approach to social advertising.

Now that you’ve grasped the significance of incorporating paid social media into your overall social media marketing strategy, it’s time to delve into the planning and execution of a successful paid campaign. While this video demonstrates how to set up a campaign for Twitter, the process is similar across most social media platforms. The first crucial step in setting up your campaign is to define your objective. Clearly articulating the purpose of your paid campaign is vital to achieving your desired results. Are you aiming to grow your follower count, increase engagement with your posts, boost brand awareness, drive sign-ups or purchases based on a particular offer? Establishing a concrete objective not only provides direction but also ensures you are tracking the right metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that are relevant to your campaign. When initiating the ad setup on a platform, selecting your objective will serve as the foundation upon which your campaign is built.

Following the definition of your campaign objective, it’s essential to identify your target audience. Your paid social media campaign should revolve around reaching one of your customer personas, representing a segment of your ideal audience. Unlike organic social media, which has a broader reach, paid advertising can be costly, so narrowing down your target audience is a strategic move to allocate your budget effectively. During the ad setup, you can employ filters and criteria to refine your audience selection, including factors like gender, age, and geographical location.

Further, you can leverage targeting options based on keywords, interests, and events to pinpoint the audience that aligns with your campaign goals.

Once you’ve determined your objective and defined your audience, the next consideration is selecting the most suitable social media platforms to execute your campaign. It’s advisable to invest in platforms that you are familiar with and where you already have an established presence. For newcomers to paid social media campaigns, focusing on the platform that currently generates the most leads for your business can be a prudent starting point. We’ll explore how to make platform choices for your ads later in this section.

To ensure that your campaign remains well-organized and adheres to a specific timeline, establish the duration of your campaign by setting clear start and end dates. This temporal framework provides structure and helps you manage your campaign effectively.

Budgeting plays a critical role in your campaign’s success. You can begin by researching the average advertising costs on the chosen platform. Some platforms may necessitate a minimum ad budget for each ad group, and surpassing specific spending thresholds can grant you access to special features and the expertise of platform managers to optimize your campaign, refine your creative content, and messaging. Social media advertising operates on an auction-style format, where you bid for an optimal advertising position. Winning the auction requires you to pay the agreed-upon amount for actions like clicks, views, likes, or impressions on the platform for your ad. We’ll explore budgeting and bidding for social media ads in more detail later in this section.

Content development is a pivotal stage in the campaign setup. Creatives, which encompass various content formats such as text, images, GIFs, or videos, form the heart of your campaign. To create compelling creatives, familiarize yourself with the specific ad specifications, including dimensions, sizes, and formats, for different platforms. Craft persuasive call-to-action phrases and marketing messages to ensure your ads resonate with the target audience. As discussed earlier, performing organic testing can also help optimize your assets. Once your creatives are ready, you can upload them to the selected social media platform.

After gaining approval from the platform for your ad, you are ready to launch your campaign. Once launched, your ads will automatically post as scheduled, based on the start date and time you’ve configured. Just as with organic content, you can use a social media calendar to plan and publish your ads. As your campaign progresses through its initial stages, you may need to make adjustments to fine-tune your ads for optimized performance. We will delve deeper into refining your paid social media targeting in the next section.

Ad Formats on Social Media

  • Reading Duration: 20 minutes

In this course, the video about paid social media strategy recommends that you familiarize yourself with the requirements and specifications for ads on different social media platforms. This reading explores the formats for social media ads in more detail.

Advertising goals, then formats

An advertising best practice is to select ad formats based on your advertising goals. For each goal below, the ad format that is known to work best for that goal is identified.

Goal: Maximize awareness

  • Best format: Video

  • Advantage: Transfer maximum amount of information in a short amount of time

Goal: Maximize clicks

  • Best format: Static image

  • Advantage: Combine with a compelling call to action

Goal: Maximize conversions

  • Best format: Static image

  • Advantage: Combine with a click-to-purchase call to action

Goal: Maximize app downloads

  • Best format: Video

  • Advantage: Provide instruction on how to use the app

Goal: Maximize app downloads

  • Best format (if available): Custom, platform-specific formats

  • Advantage: Drive app installations higher with a format dedicated for that purpose

Goal: Maximize engagement

  • Best format: Video

  • Advantage: Tell stories that draw people in

Ad formats, then specifications

After you have identified the ad format(s) you want to use, choose the social media platforms and look up specific requirements for each. Search for the specifications for the ad formats you have chosen on those platforms.

For example, if you’re going to run a static image ad on LinkedIn, consult the ads guide first and then refer to the specification.

  1. Consult the ads guide

  2. Locate the specifications for a static image ad

Key Takeaways

In general, the type of ads you select will depend on your advertising budget and goals. Some ads are more expensive to run than others, so if budget is a concern, you might not choose the most expensive types of ads. Certain ads are better suited for particular advertising goals than others. It’s always helpful to identify your advertising goals first and then choose the ad formats that best support your goals. After you have selected the ad formats, consult and follow the specifications for the ad formats on the social media platforms you will use.

Resources for more information

Use the following resources to locate the ad formats on other popular social media platforms.

Choosing the Right Social Media Platforms for Your Ads

  • Reading Duration: 20 minutes

As you begin to build out your paid social media strategy, you will want to place certain social media ads on certain platforms. To properly choose where to place your ads, you will want to know where your target audience lies. In this reading, you will learn how to choose which platform you should place ads on.

Know your audience

People use social media platforms for specific purposes. Not every platform is alike—one might be for socializing with friends and family, while another is meant to help users network and grow their careers. Because each social media platform has its intended use, it’s important to choose your ad platform wisely. It is even possible to damage your relationship with your target audience if you don’t. But, as is the case with all kinds of social media marketing, you can rely on testing to see which platforms your audience engages with ads on the most.

Facebook

With over 1.4 billion average daily users, it’s no secret that Facebook is one of the most popular. So, if your brand has a Facebook presence, use it to your advantage. By posting GIFs, videos, static images, and carousels, you can leverage those ads to drive website traffic, grow brand awareness, increase your conversion rate, and more.

Instagram

There are a lot of different ways to create an Instagram ad, but regardless of the route you go, your content will need to be image based. Whether you are leveraging influencer marketing by paying influencers to post Reels using the hashtag “#ad” or creating Instagram Stories ads, it has become an effective place to get conversions.

Twitter

If your brand targets a more niche audience, consider placing ads on Twitter. Twitter offers a community based connection that not every platform offers—it offers timely interactions and updates. Since conversation and engagement are encouraged so heavily on the app, Twitter helps users feel connected to brands.

YouTube

YouTube is an effective space to advertise video content if your audience is between the ages of 18-49. YouTube now reaches more 18-49-year-olds than every cable TV network. YouTube prides itself on being community based, and they do this by prioritizing original video content, and fostering engagement in the comments section.

LinkedIn

If your brand caters to other businesses, rather than consumers, Linkedin might be the place for your ads—it’s widely considered the place for professionals and business leaders to interact.

Key takeaways

As always, testing out various platforms is the best way to learn what works for your audience, but keep these tips in mind when you’re thinking about which platforms to test. And remember that social media is an ever-changing industry—what worked for your brand last year may not work for your brand this year, so don’t be afraid to pivot your social strategy if necessary.

The most important thing to remember is that your social media ad strategy should be based on your audience’s preferences. This means you should prioritize gathering data and cultivating relationships with them in order to know how to best serve them. Once you’ve figured that out, you can begin to prioritize placing ads on various platforms.

Remarketing on Social Media

Picture a scenario when you visited a company’s website, examined a product, but left without making a purchase. Perhaps you were still contemplating your decision or got distracted by other matters. Later, while scrolling through your social media profiles, you noticed an ad for the exact same product. This is the practical application of remarketing. In essence, remarketing, also known as retargeting, involves displaying paid ads to potential customers who have previously visited your website, app, or social media profiles. It offers a second opportunity to connect with potential leads or customers. By increasing the frequency of interactions between customers and your brand through ad exposure, you ensure that your brand remains at the forefront of their minds when they consider their purchase options. Remarketing is also a powerful tool for personalizing marketing efforts. Instead of showing ads to random users, remarketing tailors ads to previous visitors, creating a personalized and more engaging experience. This personalization can lead to higher conversion rates.

Let’s delve into how remarketing operates. As discussed earlier, remarketing can be implemented across various digital marketing channels, including paid search, display advertising, email, and social media. There are primarily two types of remarketing: pixel-based and list-based. Pixel-based remarketing functions by placing a cookie in the user’s web browser that tracks the pages and products they viewed on your website. A cookie is a small file that’s stored on devices, enabling the tracking of user behavior and traffic analysis. When users leave your website and continue to browse the internet, ad networks like Google Ads or Facebook Ad Manager receive notifications to display specific ads to those users based on their previous browsing behavior.

If you possess the email addresses of potential customers, list-based remarketing allows you to personalize the ads you show them. This approach employs lists of existing customers or visitors who have provided their email addresses and delivers tailored ads to this audience. It’s crucial to handle all user data with care to protect their privacy. Major platforms like Google and Facebook employ hashing to secure data uploaded for this purpose. Hashing is a security technique that transforms personal information into randomized code. To initiate list-based remarketing, you upload your list of email contacts to your chosen platform, and your audience starts seeing your ads as they navigate through that platform.

Here are some best practices for effective remarketing on social media:

  1. Personalize Your Ads: Rather than displaying the same ads to every user who visited your profile previously, segment your audiences into interest-based groups. This enables you to create personalized ads that cater to the specific interests of each group. Custom audiences can be created within the platform of your choice to reach highly-specific groups based on your email lists of existing customers and followers.

  2. Remarket to Past Customers: You can also use remarketing to target people who have made previous purchases from your business. Almost half of the overall revenue from U.S. online retailers comes from repeat customers. For instance, if someone has previously bought a toy from your company, you can remarket to them with additional offers related to children’s products.

  3. Limit Ad Frequency: It’s advisable to control the frequency with which specific users see your ads to avoid overwhelming potential customers. Additionally, it’s good practice to exclude visitors who have already made a purchase, ensuring they don’t continue seeing your ads after conversion.

Remarketing on social media can be a valuable allocation of your campaign’s ad budget. When customized to fit your organization, target audience, and marketing objectives, remarketing can expand your reach and enhance your conversion rates. In the following sections, we’ll explore further how to craft effective social media ads to complement your remarketing efforts.

Creating an Effective Call to Action in Your Social Ad

  • Reading Duration: 10 minutes

A call to action, or a CTA, is an instruction provided to the customer that tells them what to do next. Calls to action can be found in every kind of marketing, and they can be very persuasive and effective strategies to get customers to take the action you want. Typically, CTAs are buttons, clickable images, or links that you are instructing users to click on. In this reading, you will learn all about how to write an effective call-to-action.

Writing a call to action

The first and most important thing to consider when writing your call to action is your brand goals. What are you hoping to achieve with each social media post, and how will your CTA help you get there? For example, if your goal is to generate more website traffic, maybe you hope people will click on a link that you’ve posted that sends them to your homepage.

After you’ve considered that, make sure you give them a reason to click. Ask yourself, why should they click? What will they get out of it?

Use clarity

It’s important to prioritize clarity in your call to action because you want users to clearly understand how clicking on it will benefit them. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be enthusiastic, witty, or animated in your language—because you should be that too—but it does mean the first priority is for users to understand what they are being asked to do.

Use action words

The goal in using a call to action is to get users to act in some way. Be clear and direct in your phrasing, so they know they are being instructed to do something. Action words (or verbs) like: sign up, visit, click, download, shop, and follow are effective ways to communicate the action you’d like people to take.

Use urgency

Using urgency can be effective to compel users to feel like they need to act now. Your goal is not to trick or exploit customers by forcing them to do something, but if you are offering something in return, the deal may not last forever—you should be clear about that in your CTA. Using words like “today only” communicates to them that the offer has an expiration date and could encourage them to act on it.

Use your brand voice

The tone you’ve opted to use in your captions and copy should be reflected in your CTAs. Your brand’s voice should be consistent across all marketing channels. Is your brand warm and inviting? Cool and succinct? Casual and silly? Make sure your CTA feels that way too.

Activity: Develop a Social Media Ad Campaign

  • Practice Quiz: 1 question. Grade: 100%
Activity Overview

In this activity, you will develop a social media ad campaign. Based on a given scenario, you will plan the campaign’s objective, platform, audience, ad format, creatives, and call to action.

Posting highly-relevant paid content on social media can help you reach new and returning customers more effectively than organic content alone.

Be sure to complete this activity before moving on. The next course item will provide you with a completed exemplar to compare to your own work. You will not be able to access the exemplar until you have completed this activity.

Scenario

Review the scenario below. Then complete the step-by-step instructions.

You are a digital marketer for Brown’s Bedding and More, an online bedding and home goods store. The company recently upgraded their website by adding a customer service chat feature and an improved filtering tool for selecting types of bedding. To share these improvements and drive more people to their website, the company is offering a 20% off discount on all orders placed online. You are developing a paid social media ad campaign to promote this offer. In order to prepare to set up your ad campaign on a social media platform, you will organize the information you’ll need in a spreadsheet.

Step-By-Step Instructions

Step 1: Access the template

To use the template for this course item, click the link below and select “Use Template.”

Link to template: Social media ad campaign planner

Step 2: Choose an objective

To get the results you want from a paid social media campaign, it’s important to clearly define the campaign’s objective. You will also need to select an objective when you set up a campaign on a social media platform.

Refer back to the scenario and determine the objective that best describes the purpose of this campaign. Then, select that objective from the dropdown menu in the Objective column of the campaign planner. (Note that the language used to describe objectives varies somewhat from platform to platform.)

Step 3: Describe the audience

Next, describe the target audience for the campaign. Your target audience for this ad campaign will be based on the customer persona shown below. A customer persona represents a group of similar people in a desirable audience.

The customer persona for Malena

Review the customer persona above. Then, in the Audience column of the campaign planner, add notes to describe your target audience, their goal, and their barriers.

Step 4: Select a social media platform

Once you’ve defined your objective and audience, consider what social media platform would best serve your campaign and reach your audience. Different social media platforms are used for different purposes—one might be ideal for socializing with friends and family, while another be best for helping users network and grow their careers.

Refer back to the Choose social media platforms for your ads reading to determine the platform that you think would work best for this ad campaign. Then, select that platform from the dropdown menu in the Platform column of the campaign planner.

Step 5: Select an ad format

The ad format you choose for your campaign will depend not only on the platform you’ve chosen but on the objective for your campaign. If your objective is to maximize clicks to drive website traffic or to boost conversions, a static image that helps your audience visualize using your product and includes a call to action button might be the best option. However, if your goal is awareness or engagement, a video might be a better choice since it can tell a story and show your brand’s personality.

Refer back to the Ad formats on social media reading to determine the format that you think would help you achieve the objective of this ad campaign. Then, select that format from the dropdown menu in the Format column of the campaign planner.

Step 6: Plan the creatives

Next, you’ll need to plan your campaign content, or creatives. Creatives are any content that can be promoted in a campaign, such as text, images, GIFs, or videos.

Refer back to the customer persona described in Step 4, and consider how your creatives can address that customer’s demographics, goal, and barriers.

Then, in the Creatives column of the campaign planner, write some notes describing the creatives you’d like to include in your ad. Briefly describe your visual assets—such as an image or video—and any text.

Step 7: Write a call to action

Finally, write a call to action for your ad. A call to action, or a CTA, is an instruction provided to the customer that tells them what to do next. Review the objective of your campaign, then craft a CTA that can help accomplish that objective by giving the user a reason to click the button. Be sure your call to action is clear, uses action words, and is brief—no more than 5–7 words.

Write your call to action in the Call to Action column of the campaign planner.

Pro Tip: Save your work

Finally, be sure to save the work you did to complete this activity. This can help you work through your thought processes and demonstrate your experience to potential employers.

What to Include in Your Response

Be sure to address the following components in your completed social media ad campaign planner:

  • An objective that describes the purpose of the campaign

  • A description of the campaign’s target audience, based on the customer persona

  • A social media platform that reaches your audience

  • An ad format that helps achieve the objective of your campaign

  • A description of the ad’s creatives that addresses the audience’s demographics, goal, and barriers

  • A call to action that relates to the campaign objective and encourages the user to click the button

Activity Exemplar: Develop a Social Media Ad Campaign

  • Reading Duration: 10 minutes

    Here is a completed exemplar along with an explanation of how the exemplar fulfills the expectations for the activity.

Completed Exemplar

To review the exemplar for this course item, click the link below and select “Use Template.”

Link to exemplar: Social media ad campaign planner

Assessment of Exemplar

Compare the exemplar to your completed social media ad campaign planner. Review your work using each of the criteria in the exemplar. What did you do well? Where can you improve? Use your answers to these questions to guide you as you continue to progress through the course.

Your campaign planner should include the following components:

  • An objective that describes the purpose of the campaign: driving traffic to the company’s website

  • A description of the campaign’s target audience, based on the customer persona, that includes demographic information (such as gender, age range, and location) and any other important information (such as keywords, education, and interests)

  • A social media platform that serves the objective your campaign and reaches your audience, such as Facebook, since it is ideal for driving website traffic

  • An ad format that helps achieve the objective of your campaign, like a static image, since it can help the audience visualize using the product and include a call to action button

  • A description of the ad’s creatives, including visual assets and text, that addresses the audience’s demographics, goal, and barriers

  • A call to action that relates to the campaign’s objective and is clear, uses action words, and is brief—no more than five to seven words

Test Your Knowledge: Target Your Social Advertising

3. Managing a Social Advertising Budget

Components of a paid social budget

The goals you set in your paid social media strategy, such as building brand awareness or gaining more followers, will help guide your budget. Once you know what you want to achieve, you can figure out what funding you need to help you get there.

When you’re new to digital marketing, you may not be the one making decisions about the funding devoted to your social media budget. Still, it’s good to get a sense of which components are generally included in a budget for paid social media. This can help you consider how to best allocate resources when working on your campaigns.

The social media ad budget for different companies will vary. In general, though, companies’ paid social budgets are determined by their annual revenue. According to a survey conducted by Gartner, businesses on average spend around 10 to 13% of their annual revenue on marketing, with about 25% of the budget allocated to paid media, like search and social media. Your company may invest more or less on social media, depending on your past return on investment from social media and other marketing channels.

Let’s talk about what a paid social media budget generally includes. First, there’s your ad spend. Your ad spend is how much your company spends directly on advertisements. It’s what you pay on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn to serve your ads. It also includes what you pay to influencers to promote your content.

However, your ad spend is only part of your entire paid social media budget. There’s also the expenses associated with the tools and technologies you’ll need to launch, manage, and optimize your social media advertising campaign. Tools you might invest in include social media management software, social listening and analytics software, photo and video editing programs, stock photography and video subscriptions, and influencer marketing platforms. An influencer marketing platform is software that provides influencer discovery tools such as large searchable databases of potential influencers. It’s helpful to experiment with free tools before investing in paid ones. Even if you don’t plan to spend money on tools, it’s a good idea to set aside some of your budget for unexpected costs.

When considering your company’s paid social media costs, you’ll also need to think about how you’ll create content. Even if you’re handling some of the content development internally, you may still need to pay for things like photography, graphic design, video development—including talent and production costs—and copywriting.

Next, there’s the cost of management. Management tasks include things like strategy, content planning and publishing, social listening, engagement, and analytics and reporting. In some cases, a company may partner with a digital marketing agency to help manage these types of tasks. Keep in mind, even if many of these tasks are completed by your internal team, there may still be associated costs that apply to your social advertising budget.

Paid social media budgets generally include not just ad spend, but also the cost of tools, content creation, and any management-related expenses. When you understand what needs to be accounted for in a paid social media budget, you can make decisions that will allow you to stretch that budget further. Coming up, we’ll talk about how bidding on social media ads works.

The Cost of Advertising on Social Media

Once you’ve established a budget for a given social media ad campaign, you can determine how much to bid on your ad in that campaign. As we discussed earlier, most social media ads are sold in an auction format. You set a maximum bid for a target result—such as a click or a number of impressions—or a maximum budget per day. The outcome of the auction tells the platform how much you will pay for your ad to be served to your target audience.

When you set up an ad campaign on a given platform, you will select a bidding strategy. A bidding strategy determines how much you will pay for each user action related to an ad. Your bidding strategy will depend on the goal of your ad campaign, your advertising budget, and other factors, such as market research. There are dozens of bidding strategies for ads on social media, and these vary from platform to platform. However, here are some of the most common ones, how they work, and their advantages.

CPC (Cost Per Click): CPC is the amount you pay when someone clicks on your ad. You only pay when someone clicks on your ad to learn more, making it cost-effective. CPC is a great strategy for driving traffic to your website.

CPA (Cost Per Action): CPA is the amount you pay when someone completes a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter or making a purchase. With CPA, you only pay when the specified action is completed, making it ideal for increasing conversions and generating revenue.

CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions): CPM charges you for every thousand impressions an ad receives. It is suitable for campaigns focused on raising brand awareness, delivering specific messages, and increasing engagement.

Your choice of a bidding strategy will depend on your campaign goals. Most platforms provide recommended bids based on your stated goals when you create your ad. Additionally, by analyzing data related to a specific ad’s performance, you can adjust your bidding strategies for future campaigns.

You’re approaching the end of this section. Soon, we’ll recap what you’ve learned about paid social media campaigns.

Social Media Ad Bidding

  • Reading Duration: 20 minutes

In this course, the video about social media advertising costs introduced bidding strategies. This reading further describes the ad auction process, auction terms, and bidding strategies.

How ad auctions work on social media platforms

When you post an ad on a social platform, you should have a budget, target market, and bid strategy set. Social media platforms determine which ads to run based on a behind-the-scenes ad auction which is the bidding process advertisers use to purchase ads. Your bid strategy dictates how much you are willing to pay for the outcomes you want from your ads. Before you bid, search for social media advertising benchmarks and average costs. Paying attention to the data for the business category you’re in and the platforms you want to use is important. This can help you position your bids in an appropriate range to start out being competitive. You might think that the highest bid in an ad auction always wins, but social media platforms also have algorithms that consider an ad’s relevance, quality, and potential for user engagement when picking a “winner” of an auction. Bidding for ad placement is competitive when the potential performance of an ad is factored in during selection. Bids are matched to audience signals that help predict the interaction rate for each ad.

Ad auction terms

Here is a list of terms you may encounter and their definitions:

  • Spend-based automated bidding: Set a daily budget to maximize your advertising goal.

  • Goal-based automated bidding: Set a return on ad spend (ROAS) or cost per action target to maximize your advertising goal at a certain efficiency.

  • Manual bidding: Manage bids based on the criteria you select to use.

  • Demographic targeting: Deliver an ad based on user information, like age.

  • Location targeting: Deliver an ad based on user location.

  • Interest targeting: Deliver an ad based on user preferences.

  • Maximum bid: Set the highest amount you’re willing to pay, also known as the ceiling.

  • Minimum bid: The lowest amount you’re allowed to bid on a platform, also known as the floor.

  • Suggested bidding: For manual bidding, this is a recommended bid range.

  • Bid modification: Bid a percentage more or less than your starting bid.

Common bidding strategies

Refer to the definitions for four common bidding strategies.

Cost per click (CPC)

With cost per click, you are charged when someone clicks on your ad. Usually, CPC bids have a maximum CPC which puts an upper limit on the amount that can be charged per click.

Cost per action (CPA)

With cost per action, you are charged when someone performs an action because of the ad. As examples, someone could take an action to request a quote, join as a member, provide contact information, or make a purchase. To make this bid strategy work, you must also have conversion tracking implemented on the website where the actions take place.

Note: Cost per action and cost per acquisition (both abbreviated as CPA) are used interchangeably but aren’t the same. Cost per acquisition is the cost based on conversions only, and excludes all other actions that haven’t been defined as a conversion. A conversion isn’t limited to a purchase, but can be any action an advertiser has defined as a conversion. Cost per acquisition is also different from Customer acquisition cost (CAC) which is the overall cost of acquiring a paying customer.

Cost per mille (CPM) or cost per 1000 impressions

With cost per mille, cost is based on how frequently an ad is viewed by a target audience. The unit of cost is per one thousand impressions (views) of an ad.

Cost per view (CPV)

With CPV, the cost is charged only if a viewer watches a video ad for a minimum amount of time, or interacts with it, such as when they click a link embedded in the video.

Bidding on various platforms

Availability of bidding strategies will differ by platform.

  • Facebook offers automated, minimum ROAS, cost cap, and bid cap bidding.

  • Twitter offers automatic, maximum bid, and target bid options.

  • LinkedIn offers maximum delivery, target cost, and manual bidding.

  • YouTube offers maximize conversions, target CPA, maximum CPV, and target CPM bidding.

Key Takeaways

Understand and control your budget, target audience, and bid strategy when advertising on social media platforms. Your target audience will enable you to reach the right users. Your bid strategy will allow you to use your entire budget to pay for the most desirable outcomes from your ads.

Sabrina - Conflict Resolution and Responding to Criticism

Hello Sabrina, it’s great to meet you, and thank you for sharing your insights on conflict and communication in the workplace. Your role as the VP and Country Manager of Google Canada sounds both challenging and exciting, and it’s clear that you have a passion for what you do.

Your perspective on conflict is valuable, especially in a dynamic field like digital marketing. Conflict, as you mentioned, can arise from various sources, and it’s how we approach and manage these conflicts that can make a significant difference. Open and honest dialogue, based on trust, is key to resolving misunderstandings and improving collaboration. Your reference to the book “Difficult Conversations” and its formula for addressing conflicts is a practical approach that many can benefit from.

Your willingness to initiate one-on-one conversations to address conflicts and understand different perspectives is a proactive and constructive approach. It’s indeed an opportunity to build stronger relationships and find common ground.

Your message serves as a reminder that conflict is a part of professional life, and handling it with empathy, understanding, and a willingness to resolve issues can lead to personal growth and improved working relationships. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and experiences with us.

Test Your Knowledge: Manage a Social Advertising Budget

4. Review: Paid Social Media

In this section, we discussed the fifth pillar of social media marketing: paid social media. You learned that when used strategically, paid social media can increase the success of your social media campaigns. Let’s review what we discussed about paid social media.

Paying for ads on social media is beneficial because it allows you to share your content with specific audiences. By developing highly-relevant advertisements or paying to boost your organic content, you can more effectively reach both new customers and returning ones. Paid and organic social media work together, and both may play a part in your campaigns. However, ads are especially helpful when you want to achieve goals like raising brand awareness and driving conversions.

Developing a paid social media strategy can help you achieve these goals. To develop your strategy, you’ll need to define your ad campaign’s objective, audience, platform, length, and budget, and create and upload your content. Remarketing can also help you accomplish your goals by giving you another opportunity to reach your potential leads or customers. You can implement pixel- or list-based remarketing to personalize your remarketing efforts for your audience.

The goals you set in your paid social media strategy will help guide your budget. Most paid social media budgets generally include ad spend, tools, content creation, and management. And finally, you pay for ads on social media through auction-style bidding strategies. These bidding strategies should be tied to goals such as driving website traffic or generating revenue. Some of the most common bidding strategies include Cost Per Click, Cost Per Action, and Cost Per Thousand Impressions.

Understanding how to advertise effectively on social media can help you achieve results while maximizing your budget. And demonstrating that you’re able to make the most out of your advertising budget can make you very desirable to employers.

We’re just about done with this course. To wrap up, we’ll review everything you’ve learned about social media marketing so far.

Glossary Terms from Module 5

Module 5 Challenge

5. Course Review: From Likes to Leads - Interact with Customers Online

Course Wrap-Up

In this course, we discussed one of the fastest-growing and changing digital marketing channels: social media marketing. When implemented effectively, social media marketing can help you accomplish goals like increasing brand awareness, gaining new customers, and generating leads.

As we bring this course to a close, let’s recap what you’ve learned about social media marketing so far. There are five core pillars that guide social media marketing campaigns: strategy, planning and publishing, listening and engagement, analytics and reporting, and paid social media. These pillars can guide your tactics through every stage of the marketing funnel.

To get your campaigns started, you’ll develop a strategy. This is when you’ll define your campaign goals, target audience, and the platforms you’ll post on. You’ll also identify the types of content you want to develop. Then you’ll move on to planning and publishing. You’ll determine the frequency and timing of your posts and set up a social media calendar to help you organize them.

Once your campaign has launched, you’ll gain insights about your customers, potential customers, and competition through social listening. Then you’ll use these insights to inform your content development and strategy. Social listening tools can help you gather and analyze this information.

You’ll also explore ways to boost people’s engagement with your brand, such as responding to their comments quickly, developing an authentic brand voice, creating valuable content, and repurposing your best content.

Using analytics, you’ll analyze data from your campaigns. You’ll look at how your campaigns performed against specific metrics and use the data you gathered to inform your future social media strategy. You’ll also create social media reports to share your findings with stakeholders.

And you’ll also use paid social media to complement and boost your organic social media content and to target specific audiences. You’ll create a paid social media strategy based on your goals, audience, and budget. And you’ll implement tactics like remarketing.

Based on your social media advertising budget, you’ll use different bidding strategies tied to campaign goals to pay for your ads. As you’ve been learning, all of an organization’s digital marketing efforts work together to support the company’s overall marketing goals and business goals. For example, search marketing might lead someone to your social media profile. And your social media profile might lead someone to fill out a form with their email address.

Once you have their email address, you can reach out to them through email. And that brings us to the topic of our next course: email marketing. In this course, you’ll learn all about how to share information, drive sales, and create community through an email marketing campaign.

Course 3 Glossary

Your Learning Journey

  • Discussion Prompt Duration: 10 minutes

I’ve found the social media marketing course incredibly insightful. While I grasped the fundamental concepts of the five core pillars, I am eager to delve deeper into social listening techniques. Understanding how to effectively tap into online conversations and extract meaningful insights seems like a valuable skill that I want to explore further.

Additionally, the strategic nuances of developing a campaign strategy intrigue me. I’d like to explore advanced strategies for targeting specific demographics and crafting compelling content tailored to different social media platforms.

One unexpected revelation was the sheer power of analytics in social media marketing. Learning how data-driven insights can shape marketing strategies and enhance engagement was eye-opening. The ability to measure the impact of campaigns and adjust strategies in real-time based on these metrics was a revelation.

Regarding the responsibilities associated with roles like e-commerce specialist or digital marketer, I am particularly drawn to the creative aspect. Crafting engaging content, whether it’s visual posts, videos, or interactive campaigns, appeals to my creative instincts. I find the idea of building a brand narrative and conveying it effectively to the audience through various digital mediums incredibly exciting.

Additionally, the challenge of staying updated with the ever-changing digital landscape and adopting innovative technologies is something I find stimulating. The dynamic nature of the digital marketing field aligns perfectly with my enthusiasm for continuous learning and adaptability.

END! - Week 5 - Course 3

Final Grade of this course: 95.50 %