Class 03: Paid Social Media Marketing

Paid Social Media Marketing

Paid social advertising is a highly cost-effective way to expand your reach. If you play your cards right, you can get your content and offers in front of a huge audience at a very low cost. Most social media platforms offer incredibly granular targeting capabilities, allowing you to focus your budget on exactly the types of people that are most likely to be interested in your business. Below are some tips and resources for getting started with paid social media marketing?

# Facebook Ads

If you’re like a vast number of marketers out there, you could be under the impression that advertising on Facebook (or any other type of social media) is limited to branding and customer engagement.

You have access to hundreds of millions of users, their locations, interests, behaviors, countless other targeting capabilities, not to mention the ability to reach them at any given hour of the day, for a whole lot less than any other available advertising medium of equal scale.

If you know how to use it properly, Facebook can be one of the most powerful advertising platforms for driving your business forward.

# Twitter Ads

Many businesses aren’t quite sure how to tackle marketing on Twitter from a paid perspective. It’s certainly not a one-size-fits-all endeavor, and if you don’t quite know what you’re doing, you could wind up waste.

It may seem like common sense, but when you’re outlining the strategy for your Twitter ads, you should always have your goals in mind. It’s tempting to think that your Twitter presence has to be comparable to that of a needy teenager, desperately asking strangers to ―Retweet this!‖ or ―Follow us!‖ or ―Please for the love of god give me attention so that this seems like a worthwhile investment!‖ You’re probably just wondering, ―Where’s the ROI?‖

Why Advertising on Facebook is better than Advertise on Twitter?

#1: Your Audience Is On Facebook

Facebook has a user base larger than the population of China! With 1.49 billion members worldwide, and 22 billion ad clicks per year, Facebook is providing businesses with the largest advertising opportunity since search. So yes, your audience is on there somewhere – it’s just a matter of finding them (which I’ll get into in reason #3), but if you have doubts just re-read those stats because they are quite telling, my friend.

#2: Facebook Ads Are Cheap

Seriously, they’re practically free! Well, not quite. In fact, the reason you need to advertise is because getting traction from organic activity on your business page won’t yield results.

On the bright side, Facebook ads tend to cost a fraction of what other online marketing channels cost.

If you’re strapped for cash, just ensure that you set reasonable daily Facebook budgets so you don’t exceed what you’re able to spend.

#3: The Targeting Capabilities of Facebook Are Exceptional

Along with tons of different ad types, like video ads, the level of granularity you can get with Facebook targeting capabilities. You can literally target President Obama or the Prime Minister of France. Whether it be by behaviors, interests, demographics, connections, age ranges, languages, or locations, you can dig pretty deep with these targeting capabilities and layer them upon each other to ensure you’re getting rid of any questionable, out-of-market clickers.

#4: Facebook Is Effective to Push On-the-Fence Leads Down the Funnel

Still nervous? Try out remarketing on Facebook through custom audiences. This strategy works wonders for marketers because remarketing works by targeting an audience that has already visited your site, and therefore is more likely to be interested in your products or offerings at some level.

#5: Facebook Allows You to Find New Qualified Leads Easily

Once you’ve found an audience that converts like crazy, you can clone them. The feature is called

―lookalike audiences‖ where you can take a custom audience and Facebook will reach NEW people who are similar to that audience and therefore likely to be interested in your business.

Lookalike audiences can also be built with conversion pixels (for instance, the conversion pixels from your paid search ads!), install data from mobile apps, or simply from fans of your Facebook page. You can also further define the size and targeting options to ensure your lookalike audience is an accurate reflection of your target buyers.

FB Audience Insight

The more customer insights you have, the better you’re equipped to deliver meaningful messages to people. That’s the thinking behind Facebook Audience Insights, a new tool designed to help marketers learn more about their target audiences, including aggregate information about geography, demographics, purchase behavior and more.

Say you want to raise awareness for your women’s luxury fashion brand, and you sell your products in-store. You’d want to know how many people on Facebook live near your stores, as well as their interests, their past purchase behavior and how they tend to shop (online vs. in-store). Using Audience Insights, you can get aggregate and anonymous information such as:

· Demographics — Age and gender, lifestyle, education, relationship status, job role and household size

· Page likes — The top Pages people like in different categories, like women’s apparel or sports

· Location and language — Where do people live, and what languages do they speak

· Facebook usage — How frequently are people in your target audience logging onto Facebook and what device(s) they are using when they log on

· Purchases activity — Past purchase behavior (i.e. heavy buyers of women’s apparel) and purchase methods (i.e., in-store, online)

And you can view this information for three different groups of people:

· People on Facebook (the general Facebook audience)

· People connected to your Page or event

· People in Custom Audiences you’ve already created (an audience made up of your current customers)

Audience Insights is different from Page Insights because it looks at trends about your current or potential customers across Facebook, whereas Page Insights looks at the interactions with your Page (i.e., likes, comments and shares).

We built Audience Insights with privacy in mind. It surfaces aggregated information people already express on Facebook, along with information from trusted third-party partners — like Acxiom — through our partner categories targeting. Like Page Insights, Audience Insights shows information about groups of people without the need to share which individual people are in those groups. This allows marketers to view aggregate and anonymous insights while keeping people’s personal information private.

SEO Tools and Resources

SEO is a multi-million dollar industry. The good news is that you don’t need to invest thousands in SEO services. In fact, learning the basics of SEO and executing a well-thought strategy in many cases is enough to get results you’re looking for.

Below are a few tools and resources to help you with the SEO on your site or your client’s -

# Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner is a tool that provides keyword ideas and traffic estimates to help you build a Search Network campaign. Below are the features of Keyword Planner tool -

· Search for keyword and ad groups ideas based on terms that describe your product or service, your website, or a product category related to what you're advertising. You can also enter or upload a list of keywords. And you can multiply two or more lists of keywords to create a new list that combines your keywords.

· Get historical statistics, like the number of times people have searched for a keyword or how competitive that keyword is.

· You can also get traffic estimates, like how many clicks and impressions your keywords might get for given bid and budget amounts.

# Google Analytics

Google Analytics is one of the best analytic trackers available. GA will show you exactly who visited your website, their location, what device they were using, on which web browser, and so forth.

Even better, GA is absolutely free – all you have to do is install the tracking code on your website. And, of course, sign up for a Google account (if you don’t already have one).

# Google Webmaster Tools

This is another fantastic and free service from the Google team.

Webmaster Tools has various features, including monitoring your site’s ranking in the SERPs. Oftentimes it can be used along with Google Analytics. (They have information sharing features.)

# Open Site Explorer (Ose)

OSE is a popular premium backlink checker that allows you to analyze the backlinks of any given website.

OSE is comparable to majesticSEO, but what I really like about OSE is that you can see all the domains that are linking to a website without having to upgrade to the premium version.