When Facebook released its second-quarter earnings report this year, it made clear that Facebook is running out of news feed ad space. This means simply that there is increasing competition among advertisers in the news feed..
As a marketer, how do you react to that? Does it mean that you have to invest less in Facebook?
Related Article: Important Social Media Network Updates?
No -- instead, you should make your social media strategy smarter by optimizing the segmentation and targeting of your audience.
Creating and promoting the content loved by your audience, by optimizing frequency, and by using advanced advertising options to further nurture your audience. Once you optimize, you can deploy with confidence the same budget or even more. In either case, an improved social strategy will lead to better return on investment.
But why a better content strategy? Because improved content quality leads to improved engagement, which leads to improved relevance score, and improved relevance score leads to lower cost per click (CPC).
Unfortunately, according to the Havas Meaningful Brands study, 60% of content created by brands is just clutter. Additional data gathered from a sample of purely Facebook ads posted by brands suggests that 44% of the content that marketers are putting their budget behind on Facebook is poor-quality content. This can not only potentially affect brand image but it significantly impacts advertising costs.
Related Article: YOUR Social Media Sales Targets?
Cost per click is 10 times higher for ads with 1% click-through rate (CTR) than ads with a CTR of 2%. When looking at CTR of 5%, the difference in costs is more than 30 times. The click-through rate here can be considered as a measurement of how valuable the content is for the audience as it quantifies users’ motivation to interact with the ad.
Facebook made the measurement of ad success easier for marketers by introducing the relevance score metric. The score ranges from 1 to 10, representing the ratio of positive versus negative feedback on each ad, with 10 as the best possible score.
Related Article: YOUR "Innovative" Social Media Advertising?
If you take a look at the relationship between relevance score and CPC, you can see that ads with a very low relevance score have 40 times higher CPC.
All of the data we’ve reviewed suggests that optimizing your advertising strategy has a significant impact on costs, and therefore on increasing social ROI. But in the end, it’s about the potential customer and what impression an advertiser can make within their limited news feed.
But let’s look at a hypothetical situation and evaluate the estimated advertising performance outputs for two extreme situations: an extremely low relevance score compared to an extremely high relevance score given a certain amount of money spent, in this case, $100.
In the chart below, you can see the predicted performance gap for ads with these two different relevance score intervals. This gap demonstrates a potential return loss in the investment that is caused by the fact that the ad is not optimized well.
Related Article: Cost-Effective Social Media Advertising?
The horizontal line represents the $100 spent and the vertical lines represent the predicted output – number of clicks for a very low relevance score of one to two versus the predicted number of clicks for a highly relevant ad with a relevance score of nine to 10.
If the advertising space is getting saturated, there’s an opportunity for you to now really start focusing on better understanding your audience and what they want. It’s not about mass advertising and blanketing the news feeds with your branded content. Now more than ever, marketing is about understanding your audience's needs and wants, carefully creating content that will resonate with them and delivering it in a cost-efficient way by tying outcomes to business goals.
Related Article: 8 Social Media Marketing Success Stories?
Here are a few really simple tips to help you optimize the return on your ad spend and keep your ad costs down:
Post Relevant Content
Content is king and that has never been truer than it is today. If your content is not relevant to your audience, they will reject it and click it away. In turn, this will have a damaging impact on your Facebook relevance score.
Post Your Ads At The Time Your Audience Wants To See Them
Timing is key to increasing the exposure of your ad. Marketers always need to ask themselves, Am I posting my content when my audience is online and ready to view it?"
Target Your Ads
Since the relevance of the content is critical to the success of the ad, marketers need to make sure that they are targeting the right content to the right audience. When it comes to sharing content with your audience, it’s not a one-size-fits-all case.
Related Article: Promoting YOUR Social Media Content?
Measure Your Success
Once the content is created and out there, marketers need to measure its success in real time. If something about the content or the time of the posting isn’t driving engagement, it’s better to know and rectify immediately rather than wait for days to pass before making adjustments.
If you’re really strong on measuring and understanding your audience, in the end, you'll end up optimizing your advertising costs. Instead of sending your content to audiences who aren’t interested in it, you’re focusing your efforts on creating relevant content for the most relevant audience groups.
Social media marketing optimization is critical to preventing marketers from making mistakes and inefficiently deploying budgets. Marketers cannot resolve this on their own; they need to be equipped with social media marketing solutions that help them make smarter marketing decisions.
Guest Authored By Dr. John Malatesta. John is CMO and Executive Vice President at Socialbakers, a global leader in social media analytics and management. Follow John on Twitter.
Related Article: Facebook - Beyond Social Media?
“Social media marketing optimization is critical to preventing marketers from making mistakes and inefficiently deploying budgets.
Marketers cannot resolve this on their own; they need to be equipped with social media marketing solutions that help them make smarter marketing decisions.."
Authored by:Fred Hansen Pied Piper of Social Media Marketing at YourWorldBrand.com & CEO of Millennium 7 Publishing Co. in Loveland, Colorado. I work deep in the trenches of social media strategy, community management and trends. My interests include; online business educator, social media marketing, new marketing technology, skiing, hunting, fishing and The Rolling Stones..-Not necessarily in that order ;)
No comments:
Post a Comment