If you’re a small business where budgets may be tight, social media advertising can become very expensive very quickly! So here are three easy steps to help improve the success of your marketing campaigns – without spending a ton of money…
Step 1. Think about your customers’ problems and language
Be clear on the problems you’re solving for your customers and present it in a way that resonates enough to convert into sales. There are lots of ways you can research this and some of the sources you can try include:
- Read the questions regularly asked in relevant Facebook groups. What are the common problems? What does your target customer want?
- Research relevant keywords on Quora and social listening sites such as Answer the Public. What language does your target customer use? For example, if you’re offering virtual admin services, do your customers refer to ‘virtual assistants’ or ‘personal administrators’?
- Maybe a less obvious one – use Amazon! It can be a goldmine of information about your target customer and the problems they face. Look up books by experts in your industry and scroll down to the reviews section. Why did they buy the book? What did they learn and what were they dissatisfied with? Use this information to help package your offer in the right way.
Step 2. Spy on your competitors!
You can find out what adverts your competitors are currently running, and ones they’ve run in the past by going on their Facebook page. Go to ‘page transparency’ in the about section and click on ‘Ad Library’. Take note of the keywords used, the types of images and the call to action messages. Think about how you can utilise and improve on these for your own adverts.
Step 3. Test your adverts for free
Finally, test your adverts for free using Clickable Cards. You can design these using AnyImage and convert simple images into trackable links. You can test different images, text and call to action messages without spending a penny. Clickable cards can be uploaded to your social media pages as native posts but you can track the number of people clicking the links using your analytics. Try different combinations of images and text and once you’ve hit on a combination that converts visitors into customers you can run an ad campaign with confidence that you’ll get maximum return on investment.
This article has been written by Lizzie Raffles of Inspiring Enterprise, a project run by WSX Enterprise which helps people into self-employment or a job, and a tenant of the Aldershot Enterprise Centre.
