4 things you should do before running your first social media Ad

4 things you should do before running your first social media Ad

The social media world is brimming with chances for your brand, but you probably already know that. The actual question is how to best use the numerous platforms, ad formats, and technologies to help your business gain a competitive advantage.

Fortunately, we’re here to assist with our checklist of four actions to do before launching your first ad campaign on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, or TikTok. Let’s get started!

1. Develop thorough brand guidelines.

Brand standards are dynamic documents that may assist you – and your team! – in creating consistent content across all of your social media platforms.

When developing brand guidelines, strive to address the following questions:

• What colors will we use?
• What typefaces should we use?
• How should our logo be displayed? Should it be used all of the time or only occasionally? If yes, can you give an example of when our logo might not be appropriate?
• Are we amusing, kind, daring, professional, or helpful?
• What kinds of photos should we employ? Original or stock photography? Lifestyle or product photography?

2. Understand Your Audience.

One of the most crucial tasks before running your first social media ad is determining who your target audience is, where they hang out online, and what type of material they connect with. Check out this step-by-step guide to creating audience personas to get started — going through this process is the best way to ensure that each post you publish is relevant and interesting. From there, you’ll be able to use better each platform’s targeting features to filter your audience based on age, gender, geography, and other variables. (After all, you don’t want to just shout into the void and cross your fingers that someone would hear it!)

3. Improve Your Profile Pages.

You’ve most likely already set up your profile pages on the sites where your advertising will be launched, but are they optimized?

When deciding what information to add to your profiles, evaluate what information will motivate shoppers to take action. This entails asking questions like:

• Is it best to direct traffic to our home page, a collection page, or a landing page?
• Should we use the same cover photo or various ones across platforms to construct a narrative?
• What are the best ways to modify our logo for multiple platforms?
• Should we include any hashtags in our profile?

4. Investigate Your Competitors.

It is rare in marketing to need to reinvent the wheel. Indeed, it is frequently preferable to observe what others are doing and utilize their accomplishments to find your own.

Take the time, though, to perform competitive research. It’s never been easier to observe what other brands are doing and how they’re doing it, thanks to services like Facebook’s Ad Library. Pay special attention to the following factors:

• Their advertisement formats (e.g., video vs. carousel).
• Their CTAs (for example, “learn more” vs. “buy now”).
• Their advertising content (e.g., influencer-driven content vs. brand story content vs. product-led promotions).
• Their visual styles (e.g., flat-lays vs. lifestyle shots).

The Social Media World Awaits

In addition to these four suggestions, we have one more: Make use of an ad management platform. Instead of managing your advertisements across Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok, where you have to continually switch between dashboards and try to piece together fragmented data, an all-in-one platform can save you numerous hours and, ultimately, money. We will not only offer you insights into how well your campaigns are functioning, but you will also gain access to additional tools such as enhanced audience targeting and real-time optimization advice. Find out more about our Connected Social Ads right now!