Assignment 12: Social Media Advertising.

 Assignment 12 

Social Media Advertising

Cristina Falces

British Academy Of Digital Marketing 

Task 1

Social media is a valuable tool for digital marketing strategies. "Over 4.89 billion people utilise social media worldwide" (Statista, 2023). These platforms are for people to interact through creating, sharing, or exchanging information and ideas online. Businesses took advantage of the benefits of social media by advertising their content through targeting ads based on their online behaviour, interests, and demographics (Semrush blog, 2023). 

There are different platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Linked In, Twitter, Snapchat, and TikTok where to create digital marketing strategies for social media advertising according to the audience or interest features. 

Social media advertising presents highly effective results as its conversion rate (1.08%) is higher than display advertising (0.77%) and email marketing (0.22%), having higher engagement rates (0.58%) than display ads (0.05%). The fact that advertising allows you to target your audience by demographics, interests and behaviours results in higher conversion rates and return on investment (ROI) (Tufan Gok Pick, 2023). 

Investing in social media advertising brings many benefits to businesses. It enhanced brand awareness by reinforcing brand identity to drive consumer engagement, as it is the lower cost alternative to targeting audiences, being a cost-effective campaign by reaching wider audiences and optimising cost. It engages users as they can interact with social media ads by liking, sharing and commenting. It also presents different format options and media types to support good advertising promotions above the platforms (Kristen McCormick, 2023). 

The social media cost depends on many factors, according to the campaign objective or optimisation, bidding strategy, budget or others. There are different pay-per-click (PPC) metrics on social media advertising costs. The business will decide through cost per click (CPC), cost per 1000 impressions (CPM), cost per conversion/action/lead, cost per video view, cost per engagement, cost per app install, and cost per follower (Kristen McCormick, 2023). 

To create a social media advertising strategy is essential to do market research to know your audience, invest in ads to collect data and insights to understand who is engaged by your ads by choosing the right channel for your audience. Creating SMART goals will help to measure the metrics of the campaign's objective, related to increased brand awareness, achieving leads and sales, improved public perception, and building a community or research into the target audience. 

Reference List

Statista, 2023. Number of social media users worldwide from 2017 to 2027. [Online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/278414/number-of-worldwide-social-network-users/ [Accessed 9th January 2023]

Semrush Blog, 2023. 6 Key Advantages of Social Media Advertising for Brands. [Online] Available at: https://www.semrush.com/blog/advantages-of-social-media-advertising/?kw=&cmp=ES_SRCH_DSA_Blog_EN&label=dsa_pagefeed&Network=g&Device=c&utm_content=676270860370&kwid=dsa-2185834087656&cmpid=18347529021&agpid=153587536279&BU=Core&extid=113298495870&adpos=&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA1-6sBhAoEiwArqlGPml95JpTXiVxb4PoeARomjMEd7zw0sW5jG1BXDxg2ufRC7yv0Fg98xoCsDoQAvD_BwE [Accessed 9th January 2023]

Tufan Gok, 2023. Adcreative: The Rise of Social Media Advertising [Online] Available at: https://es.adcreative.ai/post/the-impact-of-social-media-on-advertising?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=20475517560&utm_term=&campaignid=20475517560&adgroupid=&keyword=&device=c&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA1-6sBhAoEiwArqlGPr-lYT_IFcAcwn4cdu8F-CJZtceYQO4xJA32WLQG83Swf4-D0O_u7xoCPskQAvD_BwE [Accessed 9th January 2023]

Kristen McCormick, 2023. WordStream: Social Media Advertising in 2023: Costs, Types, Tips & Top Channels. [Online] Available at: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2022/07/18/social-media-advertising [Accessed 9th January 2023]

Task 2

What key objectives can be satisfied with Facebook Advertising?

Facebook advertising allows you to promote your business through social media and lets you decide between their six objective campaigns according to the goal that fits your business the most (Reggie Paquete, 2023). 

The first objective is awareness, which will help to introduce the brand to Facebook and Instagram new audiences who are likely to pay attention to increase people's awareness. 

Traffic is the second objective, related to sending people from Facebook to any URL to get more people to visit your website's pages. This ad shows people interested in your products from their past behaviour on the platform. 

Facebook can help with the engagement campaign objective by sending ads to engage in the form of likes, reactions, comments and shares to people likely to participate. The conversions can be in ads, messaging apps, websites or Facebook pages. 

Lead is an objective designed for people previously interested in the brand. It will help collect leads for your business by users submitting their information as email addresses and contact numbers in exchange for something valuable. The goal is to encourage them to purchase. 

App promotion campaigns will target an audience who previously downloaded apps and are likely to install your app by taking them to the App Store or Google Play. 

The sales objective targets people previously interested in the products. Their social feeds present a personalised shopping experience by showing relevant products as a reminder to buy through catalogue sales.  

What are the main Facebook advertising formats available?

Ad formats refer to the different ways advertisements are displayed on Facebook. The selection of them depends on your business goals (Lauren Breen, 2023).

• Image ads are a great format to increase brand awareness. It allows you to combine photos, engaging copy and an optional CTA. 

Screenshot of Drizzly image ad on Facebook.

• Video ads allow you to promote your content creatively and engagingly by using video carrousel and a CTA to drive the audience to your website's page. This type of content generates more views and conversions than just image ads.

Screenshot of Chipotle Mexican Grill video ad on Facebook.

• Stories ads are for quick campaign messages. Their ad is in full-screen format that appears across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, or WhatsApp and can be displayed with video, image or gifts by offering different features like "swipe up" to direct users to the business page. 

Screenshot of Yoga International stories ad on Facebook.

• Carousel ads are for consistent clicks and engagement goals as they allow you to post up to ten separate images and videos with their title and description linked to the product page sharing the same CTA. This option lets you promote multiple products with different features to drive audiences to the relevant landing pages, being one of the most cost-effective formats to tell a story. 

Screenshot of Local Toyota carousel ad on Facebook.

• A slideshow ad is a video with a series of images moving with effects of motion, sound and display text. It's an affordable way to make assets more impactful through eye-catching motion. Works well for businesses when they want to show some process or explain product advantages.

Screenshot of Charter College slideshow ad on Facebook.

• Collection ads are very effective for e-commerce businesses to increase conversions. You can upload separate images and videos displaying one item on top and others underneath. Allows you to purchase and explore items through their product catalogue using Facebook templates. 

Screenshot of Jasper’s Market collection ad on Facebook.

• Instant experience ads are presented in full-screen format. They are good to increase brand awareness and online sales for their engaging and powerful visuals. It showcases images, videos, carousels and collections. 

Screenshot of Jeep and Tymestyle instant experience ad on Facebook.

How can you target audiences when creating a Facebook advertisement?

Social media advertising is an effective tool because you can target audiences and reach the group of people you want for your ads by choosing demographics, locations, and interests. Facebook have different types of audiences (Kinga Edwards, 2023).

The first is the custom audience, which works through customers' data information from email lists, website visitors or page interactions and is people who have a previous relationship with your business. You can personalise this audience based on costumer's behaviours, preferences, and demographics. To create this audience on Facebook, you need to select two different meta-sources: the first one by uploading the customer data of a website, app activity, catalogue, customer list, or offline activity and the second one by choosing the interaction audience from your costumers like video, lead form, shopping, events, or more. Once these sources are selected, you can apply customer filters by targeting particular interactions with your business. This audience selection works for those businesses that have the right and enough data. 

The second is the lookalike audience, people who haven't interacted previously with your business. The first thing is to create a custom audience. Facebook collects customer data and generates groups of users with similar characteristics to the audience selected by location and size of matching audiences with the source group, choosing from 1% to 10% the percentage of lookalikes with similar characteristics to your source audience. For example, if you select 6% audience size, Facebook will find 6% of users with similar attributes to the custom audience according to the location chosen.

Saved audiences are when you create and save them for future uses. This type of audience lets you segment according to your needs through criteria like gender, age, range, and language or advanced criteria like job title, interest, behaviours, connections with your page or app, and custom combinations based on your need.

Explain the key elements that make up a great Facebook advertisement. 

Combining good strategies, experimenting with testing what works for the business, and analysing insights will help positively achieve the SMART goals. Some elements of good advertisement practices will make a business stand out from competitors and get a positive (ROI) Return on Investment (Sean, 2023).

Have a clear and measurable goal to determine other actions accordingly, like targeting the right audience to reach the right people. Understand the different audiences based on business needs and characteristics: everyone on Facebook (narrow specific targets), people connected to your page (warmer audiences with previous interactions with the brand to convert them into costumers), and custom audiences (generate lookalike audiences similar to the customer list provided previously to the platform). 

In terms of formats and visual ads, the eye- catches the attention of the target with bright, clean, and high-quality imagery containing less than 20% of the text. Videos are more engaging than photos, and relevant content will provide more valuable information to get success in Facebook ads. People like to see people's faces, and they appreciate people using products to make them feel more relatable. 

Attention grabber by creating good first impressions with engaging hooks to catch audience interest and add value to the copy, followed by a clear (CTA) call to action like "learn more" or "shop now", writing on them what you want the users to do. However, the advertisement has to be easy to read and natural, without sounding like an ad where you tell them what to do. 

Run several ad variations of copies and images to test the effectiveness to determine what works best for your business. Also, conversion pixels allow tracking of social media KPIs and conversions, which helps to redefine the target audience and re-market leads. 

Reference List 

Reggie Paquete, 2023. Revealbot Blog: All Facebook Ad Objectives Explained. [Online] Available at:https://revealbot.com/blog/facebook-ad-objectives/#:~:text=Facebook%20ad%20objective.-,On%20Facebook%2C%20there%20are%206%20campaign%20objectives%3A%20Awareness%2C%20Traffic,reach%20and%20granular%20targeting%20capabilities. [Accessed 12th January 2024]

Kinga Edwards, 2023. Kontentino Blog: Facebook Ads Target Audience: Your Guide for 2023. [Online] Available at: https://www.kontentino.com/blog/facebook-ads-target-audiences/#:~:text=First%2C%20you%20need%20to%20specify,any%20custom%20combinations%20you%20create. [Accessed 12th January 2024]

Sean, 2023. Life Marketing: 10 Essentials to Running Successful Facebook Ads. [Online] Available at: https://www.lyfemarketing.com/blog/successful-facebook-ads/ [Accessed 12th January 2024]

Lauren Breen, 2023. Klient Boost: Facebook Ad Types Explained With Examples. [Online] Available at: https://www.klientboost.com/facebook/facebook-ad-types/ [Accessed 12th January 2024]