Using social advertising to leverage offers with prospective customers

In my last post, I discussed the 4 steps businesses should take in order to develop a social lead-generation campaign: develop the offer, build a landing page to explain it, promote it to existing social communities and track their engagement. While this is an important first step in converting social communities into customers—by giving them a compelling reason or incentive to share their email addresses and thus enter your sales funnel—it does not address reaching new audiences.

While virality and the concept of social sharing might have carried your message to new audiences (prospective customers) a few years ago, unfortunately, that’s no longer something you can build a strategy upon because:

• The sheer amount of content that’s available socially—from businesses and individuals—makes it challenging for brands to appear organically.
• Social platforms have an obligation to make money for their investors. Ad units are how social platforms make money, and so they prioritize paid content over organic content in users’ feeds.
• While it is likely that friends have shared interests, friend networks are not targeted enough for niche messaging. If you’re running a lead-generation campaign, then you’ll want access to targeted audiences so you can reach customers who are the best match for your product or service, making the cost-per-lead as low as possible.

Social ads allow businesses to target their messaging to prospects and leverage the demographic information contained in each platform.

Before you begin developing ads, you’ll want to look at your website analytics to determine which social platforms are organically driving the most traffic or, if you’re an ecommerce site, the sites that are driving the most sales. Then, select the top 2-3 referring platforms (depending on your budget) and develop campaigns on those sites.

Each platform has its own take on ad units, and where those units appear on-platform, but Sponsored Content is a product offered by all of the major players. These ads look like a normal status update, except they are paid messages for targeted audiences. They appear alongside organic content, except with a label notifying users that the content is in fact not organic, but paid. Here’s an example of a sponsored post on Facebook from Sandler, one of our social lead-gen clients.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest offer this type of unit and we find it effective because:

1. You’re reusing content that you’ve already deemed relevant for your community. If you’re sending it to people who look like your existing community, or people who have expressed interest in this subject matter through their profile, then they’re likely a good prospective customer. This validates Hodges’ own social mantra about the importance of creating useful content.
2. This type of content looks so similar to organic content that in most cases, paid audiences think it’s the same.
3. Most social platforms have built in lead-generation-specific functionality into their ad units, which helps explain the benefit clearly to consumers and improve conversion results.

Developing promoted posts also allows you to leverage the endless volume of demographic and behavioral data available on these platforms. In order to reach the right audience, look at all of your internal data sources and learn more about your target. You can do this by:

• Pulling data on existing customers
• Collecting the information from your sales team that they use to prospect customers
• Checking out analytics for website visitor data
• Visiting the audience insights tab from the social platforms where you maintain a profile

This information will help inform the targeting for your first campaign, so that you can find customers who look like your existing audiences, but are not yet a member of your community. On subsequent campaigns, you’ll have the ability to look back at responder demographics (people who clicked on your ad or downloaded your offer) and target future efforts based on those learnings.

If this is your first crack at social advertising, or social lead generation, we recommend supporting select messages—like your offer posts—so that you can begin collecting demographic information on your target audience and their preferences (in terms of copy, images and offer). We also recommend investing enough in each post so that your message is visible for at least half a business day, which will make your dataset representative. Testing on all of these fronts will help you set budgets and collect the necessary data for successful future campaigns.

If you’ve got platform specific questions on developing a sponsored content campaign, or would like to share some of your own best practices, please do so in the comments section of this post.

Image: The Facebook Like Stamp by Denis Dervisevic, on Flickr.