Are You Using the Best Tools for Social Media Marketing?
Like most of marketing, social media advertising evolves at a voracious pace, which is what makes it exciting. Along with your growing daily task list, social media marketing is one of those things that falls victim to routine. We developed a process and expectations, then we rarely deviate from that routine. It becomes easy for us to approach our social advertising campaigns the same way we always have, without taking the time to evaluate how the social media channel itself has changed. Plus, there are new tools these platforms have made available to help businesses target and engage with brand followers in new ways. Here are a few things that I think are currently being underutilized in the social media advertising space, and some recent headlines that may help you inform your decision making.
If your Facebook page is not set up through Facebook Business Manager, you’re missing out on huge amounts of information.
Business Manager launched in 2014 as a way for Facebook to combat the host of emerging competitors in the enterprise social media management space. While Business Manager is by no means “new,” I continue to be surprised by the number of brands that are not taking advantage of this free tool. The level of insight for advertising is incredibly robust, particularly when it comes to audience insights and analytics, which makes it an incredibly easy way to improve strategy development, ad service, and campaign reporting. You can find more information about Facebook Business Manager here: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/facebook-business-manager
Know that your ad spend does not go as far as it used to, so the quality of what you publish needs to be higher.
In the wake of Facebook’s News Feed algorithm change earlier this year, Adstage estimates that the cost per thousand impressions increased 122% YOY compared to a 45% increase in the previous YOY measurement. This should not be surprising. Facebook has been very up front about its desire to again prioritize personal content over brand published content, and increasing the cost of delivering branded content is one way to accomplish that. In spite of the increasing cost of ads, most brands do not have the option to cut Facebook advertising from their marketing plan because it still remains the number one social media platform for many demographics, including those that we in the casino industry would identify as many of our best players. Look at this challenge as an extra quality control measure for any advertising you might consider doing. Knowing that it is harder to get ads in front of your target customers and knowing that it costs more money, is your campaign good enough to perform at or above your expectations given the constraints of the tool you have to use?
