Advertising in social networks: dispelling the main myths

How do I set up social media ads when there are SO MANY negative reviews?

If you are interested in attracting a potential audience of customers to your business and increasing traffic on the company’s website, then one of the best ways to promote is advertising on social networks. Social networks and advertising in them are shrouded in millions of disputes, publications, articles and videos, not all of which are useful.

For example, at KRAB Marketing Agency, we have conducted advertising campaigns on social networks, collectively, for all clients, more than 500 thousand dollars, so I can confidently say that not all opinions about the effectiveness of such advertising are truthful. There are many myths about how to correctly and incorrectly interact with the advertising cabinet. Today we will look at 8 such examples and prove their worthlessness 😉

Targeted advertising on social networks: The First Myth

Setting up ads requires extremely precise targeting. (You really, really need it, really)

Yes, the social network gives you the opportunity to choose a variety of indicators when you tune in to the audience. You can really show your ad to a very narrow circle of people, but…

There is one truth that needs to be understood: any social network is an extremely smart machine. She may not be smarter than you, but I would advise you not to find out this question, it will contribute to saving your advertising budgets. The bottom line is that the robot’s algorithms are extremely flexible and smart. Fine-tuning the audience often “ties” their hands.

In order to get high traffic, leads and conversions for the company’s website, you can try to choose a wider target sample, the size of which will depend on your financial capabilities, bids and goals. Try to keep it within 300,000 people or more by setting the appropriate rates and budget.

Advertising on social networks. Myth Two: Inefficiency for B2B sales

It seems to me that this is the most harmful myth for this business. B2B marketers often believe that even the coolest advertising setup is not able to bring professionals to their office.

But in fact, professionals spend much more time in this social network than in other social channels. It is much easier to attract the necessary specialists here, and if you do everything right, then the possibilities of advertising social networks for B2B business have no boundaries.

It makes it possible to reach users according to the following evaluation criteria:

• Demographic factor
• Field of activity
• Current position
• Annual income
• Workplace type and etc.

In addition, any social network creates similar audiences to automatically search for similar users for your advertising campaign.

For example, you create an audience of users and use the e-mails of your customers, and the social network is looking for similar customers to this sample for targeting. Thus, the social network sets up an audience instead of you, using the set of data about people that you have asked.

If you add the algorithm described above, you will get a powerful machine that generates leads.

How to set up advertising on social networks without a photo of a smiling person?

You have probably heard this opinion of colleagues, partners and other personalities who are sure that advertising in your company’s social networks should use photos of smiling, friendly people, because we all tend to also respond with a smile to the happiness of others. This is partially true, and such a technique will help to achieve partial, but not the best positive results.

Perhaps you are interested in what needs to be done to maximize the user’s impact? Think about which ad you will respond to and what will make you click on the link? For sure, it will be something that will attract you, that will seem worthy of your attention. In the vast majority of cases, these are far from photos of people and not pictures from stock photos.

Strive to create an ad so that when viewing them, it becomes immediately clear to the potential audience what useful things they will bring out for themselves. That is, what benefit will a click on them bring to the client. Often, when viewing a news feed on a social network, users do not seek to find something specific and do not spend their time getting acquainted with advertising posts. Thus, the image for your ad should instantly catch the eye, stand out from others in order to arouse the lightning interest of those who see it.

Order ads on social networks and pay for likes = save money

Perhaps this is the most common misconception among many companies that consider them one of the key KPIs. Large sums of money are allocated for “Like” marks, because firms believe that having a lot of “likes” will increase the attendance of their page and turnover. However, this is not the case because:

• A “liked” post on a page does not necessarily need a product or is not close to it at all
• Even your subscribers and fans will not see the information until it is “raised”

Concentrate on a specific goal. At the same time, it must be correct: the attitude of visitors to active users, downloading applications, attracted leads or traffic flow. In the course of thoughtful events, your page will receive “Classes”, as if by the way, and the budget will be spent efficiently.

In addition, there is a little trick: if a person has marked your ad or post from the page, you can invite him to put a “Like” on the page itself. Often such a “hack” works.

Advertising on social networks should be retargeted

Undoubtedly, the very phenomenon of retargeting is excellent, without a doubt. Many advertisers stop at this thought and, especially, do not worry, charging the same retargeting ad to the general audience of site visitors.

People come to you through different channels, view different pages and are interested in different products. Therefore, each of them is at a certain stage of the sales funnel, which means that retargeting must meet individual needs, i.e. it must be segmented.

Segmentation of users into categories is very important. So, some came to your page from an advertisement, therefore, they have already shown interest. Such an audience will be better converted and a separate ad group is needed for it.

Others visited the price list tab. Offer them a tempting deal – and get a paying audience. Such an investment will work much more effectively than with those who just viewed the main page and left.

Setting up ads in social networks via the right banner does not work

Most advertisers, having received low results from placing ads in the banner on the right, generally forget about this part of the screen. This is a misconception. Advertising can work here, but you need to be able to use it.

Such “right-wing” ads should be allocated to a pay-per-click group, not an impression. That’s the whole secret.

Due to less competition, ads on the right side can be shown to one user much more often. The result is a lot of impressions, little coverage.

Just select a specific group of ads, define them in the “Right Column” and set the settings to charge off the click, not the impression. This will result in a lot of expensive desktop impressions. Minus one: such an ad will not be optimized for conversion.

Remember that the right-sided images with ads are much smaller than the left-sided ones, adapt the font and picture.

Advertising through social networks has the main criterion: relevance

A large number of advertisers are fixated on the fact that the relevance coefficient is almost the most important indicator of the effectiveness of advertising, allowing them to make a profit. Not true.

There are only two things to focus on:

• For how much you bought the user;
• ROI.

Of course, relevance is important, but ROI is more important and they are not always interrelated.

Social networks rank ads based on the relevance of the audience coverage. “Like” and repost are the key indicator of the coefficient. However, people may like your post or page even without marks or repostings.

How do I set up social media ads if it’s expensive?

The last myth, but also one of the loudest: social networks charge a lot of money for advertising. Not true. And here’s why:

• social networks are almost the most popular channels of digital marketing, which will provide an opportunity to work effectively with a budget of $ 5 / day (if done correctly):
• An advertiser of any scale and significance can find a campaign for their needs in a test mode to evaluate the result.

Of course, advertising on social networks has much more myths, but I think we have closed the issue with the “hottest” of them today.