The Current Biggest Social Advertising Trends (Infographic)

I’m about to go on vacation, which means I’ve been searching for the best clothing and gear to buy for my trip, adding my favorites to my Amazon wish list. Those picks, in turn, have been following me to social media sites like Facebook, reminding me how excited I am to travel—and that I still need to buy another cute outfit before I go.

That’s what today’s marketers want: targeted ads that get consumers excited. And increasingly, they’re buying those ads via social.

A new infographic from Kenshoo reveals that social has grown significantly in the marketplace. Marketers are increasing their social spend by 50 percent year over year, and click-through rates have grown 64 percent. The big factors: the rapid evolution of Facebook as an incredibly powerful advertising platform, and the introduction of Instagram ads.

Search is also showing a significant boost, with spend growing by 8 percent year over year. Savvy marketers know that mobile is the best platform for both search and social; in fact, mobile accounts for the majority of growth in paid search spend.

Marketers are also embracing more product listing ads, which have expanded from 8 percent to 26 percent of all search impressions. But most of the product listing ads that catch my eye come from Facebook, which is another testament to the power of social.

Take a look at the infographic below for more insights into marketing trends—and see if you can remember the last social media ad that made you excited to buy.

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Are You Wasting Money on Twitter Ads?

With all the buzz surrounding word-of-mouth marketing and social selling, it’s easy to forget about the more traditional method of consumer outreach: paid advertising. While the focus for marketing and sales teams has shifted to a more relational, organic approach to customer interaction, we can’t ignore the impact that paid ads have in the social media landscape. (highlight to tweet)

More specifically, I’m talking about Twitter advertisements. We know that Twitter holds some (if not a good deal of) credence with brands and companies across the country when it comes to paid outreach. After all, the social media platform now boasts about 100,000 active advertisers, up 74 percent from the last active advertiser count. And, in an effort to further increase their ad revenue, Twitter recently announced a global expansion for their self-service ads platform—a service that will now cover more than 200 countries, up from the 33 countries previously served.

All of this information creates a convincing case for the effectiveness of a platform that promises to “reach potential customers” and “gain more followers.” But when you invest in Twitter ads, are you really getting the most bang for your buck?

Find Your Paid Promotion of Choice

To answer this question, let’s first take a look at the different types of paid promotion that Twitter offers.

First, there are the promoted tweets: a regular tweet that you pay Twitter to promote in hopes of reaching a wider audience, driving traffic, and spreading brand awareness.

Second, there are promoted accounts, which are regular accounts that appear in users’ “Who to Follow” windows in order to gain more followers and reach potential customers.

Finally, there are promoted trends, used for promoting campaigns (usually with a hashtag or keyword) that appears on Twitter’s “Trending Topics” list.

The benefits of investing in one or all of Twitter’s paid promotion options are substantial. For one, you have great flexibility when it comes to selecting a target audience. You can narrow your outreach based on interests, geography, gender, device, or users that are like your current followers. Twitter also allows you to maximize the relevancy of your message by targeting with keywords in people’s Tweets.

Another benefit is that your message is amplified and will reach more people, which can (but not necessarily will) lead to increased brand awareness.

Of course, there are some drawbacks, too. For example, you are limited by certain features of the interface and the navigation among campaigns. Overall, it seems that yes, Twitter ads can and do work. But are you getting your money’s worth? If you’re not sure, here’s how to get the most out of your investment in Twitter ads.

1. Create Quality Content

If the content that you pay to promote is subpar, then your results are likely to be unsatisfactory as well. While what constitutes “quality” can vary based on industry and target audience, the overall elements required to produce high-grade content typically remain consistent. Some markers of grade-A messaging include correct spelling and grammar, a high readability score, and hyper-tuned relevancy.

Quality content provides an engaging, relevant experience while establishing your credibility and building trust with your audience. Don’t let the technicalities of Twitter ads make you overlook the actual marketing message you wish to convey.

2. Set a Budget, Track Results, and Make Adjustments

While Twitter ads put you in control of your budget (you only pay when users follow your account or retweet, favorite, reply, or click on your Promoted Tweet), it’s important to keep track of the value of that budget, since the platform runs on a bidding system. If you are not seeing the level of impressions that you would like or are paying too much per result, adjust the bid accordingly.

You should also discontinue copy options that aren’t resonating with your audience, so that the remaining budget can be put to better use behind higher performing content. Once your campaign ends, you can then analyze your insights to find out your ROI, discover where you lost/gained followers, and tune into what worked or didn’t work in terms of content.

3. Test Different Types of Ads to See Which Performs Best

As I explained above, there are several different types of Twitter ads that you can try. If you’ve never used them before, it may be worth testing a couple different types of ads at the same time to see whether a certain type resonates with your audience and drives results. Because it’s relatively simple to adjust where you’re putting your funds, you can quickly track the performance of your ads and re-allocate resources to the ones that are working best.

To illustrate some different options for you to consider, we’ve put together a few examples of companies that are running ads the right way.

Here is an example of a website card:

Cards come in multiple forms, but by far the most common is this format. The body of the card is made up of the tweet copy, an image or video, a quick tagline, and a call to action button. There are numerous calls to action, including “Visit Site,” “Read More,” “Shop Now,” and “Book Now.”

The card serves as a method of catching the user’s attention, relaying all pertinent information the user would need to understand the brand and giving the user an avenue to act upon the ad, all in one concise package.

Here is an example of a Promoted Tweet:

As you can see, this is a normal tweet that can be used for less invasive brand awareness purposes. There are no direct calls to action, no catchy taglines—just a tweet, with or without an image, and a link.

Promoted Tweets are fast and simple. Brands can even promote tweets that have already been tweeted organically. This serves as a quick and easy way to take a piece of messaging that has been very successful and received great engagement and quickly scale it to reach a wider audience outside of your followers.

4. Adopt an Ads Optimization Platform

Want to get the best results possible from your Twitter ads? Insightpool’s Ads Optimization platform drastically increases the effectiveness of your Twitter ads while generating a higher rate of conversion. Through the use of our unique algorithm, the ads targeting platform not only utilizes interest data, but also analyzes thousands of behavioral data points to identify relevant people and predict those who are most likely to engage with the customized media campaigns.

When executed strategically, advertising on Twitter can successfully go hand-in-hand with word of mouth marketing and social selling efforts. When you plan carefully and analyze results, paid advertising can be a great use of your business’s budget.

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How to Create LinkedIn Ads That Generate Results For Your Business

Do you use LinkedIn to prospect for new business?

Want to reach a highly targeted professional audience with your message?

LinkedIn ads are an excellent way to increase visibility and generate leads.

In this article I’ll explain the different types of LinkedIn ads and show you step by step how to set them up to reach the ideal audience for your business.

Discover how to create LinkedIn ads that generate results.

Why LinkedIn Ads?

No matter what industry you’re in, it’s likely your business audience is on LinkedIn. The platform’s 350+ million users are almost entirely businesspeople, so why not use ads to get in front of your ideal prospects? Ads increase your visibility, and therefore improve the “know, like and trust” factor.

If your advertising budget equals or is more than $25,000 a quarter, you can get access to some amazing (and premium) advertising tools such as Lead Accelerator, display ads,sponsored InMails and sponsored groups.

The alternative, which is perfect for small- to medium-sized businesses, is sponsored content (similar to Facebook news feed ads or sponsored tweets) and text ads (similar to PPC ads on Google, or Facebook ads).

While LinkedIn ads tend to be more expensive than other platforms, they can be worth the money if you use their specific targeting options (companies, titles, education, etc.) anddo micro-campaigns (instead of doing one big campaign that reaches 50,000 people, do 50 micro-campaigns that reach 1,000 people each). This reduces the cost, is easier to track and gives you more visibility.

Sponsored updates, like this one, and text ads on LinkedIn are great for small- and medium-sized businesses.

There are two ways to set up ads: cost per click (CPC) and pay per impression (mille) (PPM).

When you do sponsored content, go with CPC, because people don’t click through as much on sponsored updates. LinkedIn will keep showing your ad until they get their money, which is why micro-targeting is such a good idea. This is perfect if your strategy is to start getting recognition and visibility.

When you do text ads, go with PPM. These ads are a good option for lead generation. For example, you can send a white paper or another incentive to get someone into your marketing funnel. Once folks feel like they know you because of your sponsored updates, they’ll be more likely to click on the link, and then you’ll have them in your funnel.

#1: Get Started

To use any ads on LinkedIn, you need to have a company page, which is easy to set up. Just click Interests and choose Companies from the drop-down menu. On the next page, click the Create button. Then input your company name and email address, and click Continue. Upload logos and content, and you’re good to go.

To set up an ad, go to the LinkedIn Ads page. Click Start Now to get started and thenselect the ad you want to set up.

Getting started with LinkedIn ads is easy. Image: Placeit.

#2: Set Up a Sponsored Ad

To set up a sponsored ad, click on Sponsor Content. First, type in a name for your campaign.

Choose Sponsor Content, give the campaign a specific name and then select the relevant company.

Choose something specific that you can easily recognize and track. Then select your company. If you manage pages for a lot of companies, you’ll get several options.

Now, choose an update that you’ve already created or create direct sponsored content. The limitation of doing direct (new) sponsored content is that you get fewer characters to work with.

Select the update you want to sponsor.

To promote an update you’ve already created, you can use 600 characters plus an image. If you choose to promote new, direct sponsored content you’ll have to limit your ad to 160 characters, and it won’t show up on your company page. If you want to offer something that you don’t want to show up on your company page, this is the route to go.

Once you’ve selected the content, do your targeting. Choose your audience, and at the very least, you have to choose a location. Be as specific as possible.

Then you can target by company or category (industry or company size). Focus on job title, job function or job seniority, as well as education. Another option is to target by group, because if you share a group, it’s easier to connect later on.

In addition to targeting who sees your ad, you can also eliminate specific groups, companies, skills and fields of study. So if you’re targeting marketers, but don’t want your competition to see your ad, you can exclude a specific company or companies. Or if you’re growing your mailing list, but you don’t want people with a specific skill set to click on your download (because it would be either over their heads or too simplistic for them), eliminate those skills.

There are many options for targeting ads on LinkedIn. Run many hyper-targeted campaigns.

You’ll also notice an option called Audience Expansion. It’s a good idea to uncheck this box, because it keeps your search as targeted as possible. According to LinkedIn, “Enabling this feature can increase your campaign’s reach by also including members similar to the target audience you’ve selected.” Test your ad for a week or so and if you don’t see the results you’re after, go back in and check it.

Once you choose your audience, it’s a matter of paying for it. As previously mentioned, do cost per click on sponsored ads if your goal is brand awareness. Pay per impression is usually three to four times more expensive.

Start with a minimum bid. Then if you’re not getting the results you want, update and increase your spend to somewhere between the minimum and suggested bid.

Next, set the daily budget. The minimum is $10/day. Be sure to include an end date.

Keep an eye on the campaign so you can adjust if necessary. You can edit an ongoing campaign, but you get cleaner metrics if you just start it over again, which is easy to do.

It’s easy to duplicate existing campaigns. You also get cleaner metrics than you would from editing a current campaign.

To change a campaign, first end the current campaign. Then go back to your Campaign Manager and either duplicate the campaign with different pricing and targeting or start a new one.

#3: Set Up a Text Ad

To set up a text ad, click Create an Ad and then name your campaign. You don’t have to choose a company for this kind of ad.

For each text ad, you need to add a 50 x 50 image, a 25-character headline and 75 characters to describe the content. Since the image is so small, the simpler it is, the better. Also be careful with the language you use. Similar to Facebook, you can’t do words in all caps. For example, “FREE” will get tagged, and your ad probably won’t pass.

Next, enter the ad destination, which could be a page on LinkedIn (such as your company page) or a URL.

For a text ad, name your campaign and upload the details.

Pick your audience and pay for the ad. For a text ad, you might pay for impressions, because you want more clicks. You can use text ads to feed people into your funnel.

You can do up to 15 variations of one ad. You can change the image, headline, text and destination. For example, use the same image three times with three different headlines, use different images with the same headline, etc.

Add up to 15 variations per LinkedIn text ad.

When you launch your ad, LinkedIn will run as many variations as you create, and you cansee which one was most successful in metrics.

LinkedIn is really good about metrics. Sort by amount spent, clicks, impressions, click-through rate (number of clicks divided by number of impressions), average cost per click and social actions.

LinkedIn offers a variety of metrics for ads.

If you choose to change an ad, just click on it, view the details and then edit it.

#4: Select Options in the Campaign Manager

Go to the Settings tab in the Campaign Manager for notifications.

There’s also a check box to select called Network Updates. LinkedIn will send your ad to your network for free.

Go to the Campaign Manager to update notifications and to check the box that will send your ad to your network for free.

One more thing: Every now and then, LinkedIn will offer you an ad credit as an incentive to run ads. This is something you’ll want to take advantage of. Just set your limits so you don’t go over budget.

Final Thoughts

While it’s true LinkedIn ads tend to cost more than Facebook ads or sponsored tweets, you may see some really positive results if you tweak your targeting strategy.

Try sponsored content and text ads, and experiment with different content and targeting to see what works best.

What do you think? Do you use LinkedIn ads? Which ones are most successful for you? Do you use pay per impression or pay per click? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

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