Social advertising is here to stay, but with all the options available many brands don’t feel comfortable with the many options, formats, and platforms available. For travel, tourism and lifestyle brands, social advertising is the pre-eminent form of advertising because it so brilliantly works with your customer funnel, your PR and your branding.
If this sounds like you, please keep reading. If you’re feeling 100% in control of such questions such as how much you should spend, how exactly to target your audience and what format makes the most sense for you then I’ll save you some time, you don’t need this blog post.
How much should I spend on social advertising?
Without a doubt, this is the most common question we encounter.
Every business starts with answering this question with a clear understanding of the Lifetime Value (LTV) of customers. A good rule of thumb is your ad buy should be a 3:1 LTV: Cost to Aquire over a 12 month period. For luxury brands or boutique brands that ratio may vary, slightly, but that’s a good rule of thumb.
The next question is “what will I get for this spend?” Again, an absolutely fair question and we have a process for determining this and ways to maximize your spend.
In social advertising, especially Facebook advertising, it’s exceptionally important that you’re clear on your objectives. Is your objective awareness of recent PR? Perhaps you’re announcing a new luxury service and want to increase reservations. We can help you identify the most effective objectives for your budget and optimize your ad spend. It’s also very important that your social ads match the customer journey, that’s one of the advantages of social advertising.
How to target your social advertising audience?
All digital advertising includes remarketing tactics, but social advertising also includes very sophisticated other ways to target and this data gets incredibly insightful when using Google Analytics to identify existing web traffic. That’s one small tactic that saves time.
Using all the existing digital data at our disposal is important. Social advertising audiences can even target competitors’ potential customers. There’s an endless number of ways to target audiences, and this is the rub, because frankly, from junk audiences come junk results. Your audiences should also match the ad’s destination for customer phase. For example, there’s no use sending a cold audience direct to a sell page, people unfamiliar with your brand will rarely purchase immediately. Spending time allowing your audiences to get to know you and your place in their lives will save you thousands in acquisition costs, but selecting the right audience for this message is paramount and then how to follow up those ads as the customer moves through the funnel is equally important.
Where should you place your ads?
Even once you narrow it down to a platform or two, in the case of Facebook, there is an overwhelming number of ad placement choices. Understanding the pros and cons of each is important, but even more important is understanding how each of those placements matches your objectives. There are no inherently bad ad placements, only bad ad strategies.
What do I do with all this brand content?
It wasn’t too long ago that obtaining organic reach on social media wasn’t that difficult. Today, the algorithms of (at least two) social media platforms throttle organic reach. Much has been written about that, but the real issue is what to do with your social posts? Are Page Like ads useful? When do I boost a post? Can Instagram drive traffic to my website? All these questions are absolutely relevant and your answer will be based on your strategies and KPIs. There are times where we make recommendations about KPIs that are more current to today’s ad choices and social media atmosphere, then there are times where we can help you match your existing KPIs to perfectly great ad strategies. Don’t forget that there are ways to supercharge your organic content by including user-generated content and well-earned PR. Today it’s more important than ever to integrate all your efforts into your social advertising spend.
Besides social media advertising, what are my options?
Look, with very few exceptions, social media advertising is part of a modern, healthy advertising strategy. Are there other organic options? Absolutely, and they’re probably important to evaluate as part of your marketing strategy. Creating branded content, on your platforms and on existing social media platforms, isn’t “out,” it’s simply changed.
If you’re interested in an evaluation of your expected social media advertising results, email us for a free social media audit.
