How To Run A Successful Social Ad Campaign: Part 1 - Selecting Platform & Goals
Welcome to the first instalment of our ‘How to Run a Successful Social Ad Campaign’ blog series where we provide a whistle stop tour of the most crucial information you need to know before you can start advertising on social media.
Social ad campaigns aren’t an exact science. What will work amazingly for some schools will provide few results for others, so it’s hugely important to base your initial decisions off of detailed data analysis, and ensure you are constantly optimising your campaign through ongoing results analysis. The first part of this blog series focuses on selecting which platform to run your activity on and what your campaign objectives should be.
Which platform should you advertise on?
The social media landscape in 2021 is very different from how it originally began, with almost all channels being heavily commercialised. Whilst you may find it slightly annoying how many ads appear on your feeds, this presents a vast range of opportunities for marketers to target users. This blog post will focus on the main channels our clients advertise on, but if you want to know about advertising on any other platforms please drop us an email!
Facebook & Instagram
The reason these two platforms are grouped is because they are both owned by Facebook and activity on both channels is run via Facebook Ads Manager, which has a very comprehensive offering of ad types/placements and targeting. Facebook is the most popular social channel for the older demographics so there is a good chance that if you are targeting prospective parents they will be active on this platform. The interface can be a bit daunting if you are a beginner so if you need any help understanding the Facebook Ads Manager jargon, have a read of our glossary blog post.
LinkedIn is a great platform for reaching business professionals, and therefore results are usually more expensive. You’ll need to think about whether your target audience is active on this platform for it to be worth running activity on. We see particular success on Instagram for international schools, as often prospective families feature business professionals relocating for work. Another beneficial use of LinkedIn for schools is for recruitment campaigns as the majority of teaching staff/academics will be active on the platform.
Twitter is increasingly becoming used as a professional network and is a great platform for raising awareness of your school as impressions are generally very cost effective to achieve. They also have a broad range of ad types for you to choose from, and their targeting methods can be extremely specific, even down to uploading a list of contacts you want to your ads to be displayed to.
When selecting which platform to run your ads on the above information should be considered, however it is more important to complete research into what channels your target audience are using, as this varies greatly based on demographic and location. If your prospective families aren’t on Twitter, why waste marketing budget running ads there? Once you have chosen your platform(s) you can progress to the next stage of choosing your campaign objective.
Goal Setting & Campaign Objectives
The first decision you have to make is what your goal is by running the campaign, as this affects which campaign objective you need to choose. Be careful here as when you have set this for a campaign you can’t go back and change it. This is a screenshot from Facebook Ads Manager, but almost all social channels have the same general objective that you can choose for the ads to optimise towards.
Awareness
‘Brand Awareness’ or ‘Reach’ selections will mean your ad is shown to as many people as possible for your budget. These people will be within your targeting, but may not be the people within that group most likely to proceed to visit your school website or fill out a form. You can expect high impressions with these optimisations, but potentially lower clicks.
Consideration
The objectives in this category optimise towards getting an interaction from the user that sees your ad, but this won’t necessarily be a full ‘conversion’ (see below). As you can see from the list, these actions can be a click to your website, watching the full video ad, or sending you a message. As users here are expressing higher intent, these ads will usually be more expensive to see results.
Conversion
Optimising your ads towards a conversion event means that your ad will be displayed to people most likely to undertake that action, for example someone signing up to visit an open day. These ads will be the most expensive per result as they are having to find users who are very high intent.
What you want to achieve from your campaign needs to factor into this decision. For example, if you want to simply reach as many people within your target demographic as possible to raise the awareness of your school then brand awareness or reach will be your best option. If you want to run a campaign to increase sign ups for an open day, then you will want to select a higher intent option such as lead generation or conversions. If you need help aligning your goals to your campaigns then please reach out to us!
Once you have decided on your platform and objectives then it’s time to decide how much you want to spend on your campaign and who you need to get your message to.
Join us for Part 2 of the ‘How to run a successful Social Ad Campaign’ to learn more about budgets and targeting.