Paid ads are one of the best and most solid strategies for upping your revenues and scaling your business. But don’t make the mistake of assuming it’s simple! There are a lot of factors you need to get right for a successful paid ad campaign. 

What You Need Before Starting Paid Ads

With social media marketing campaigns, some businesses think it’s enough to create materials, put them online, and then sit back and wait for the cash to roll in. But the truth is deeper: online marketing requires careful preparation and support to maximize your investment.

Even the greatest advertising idea can’t fully succeed unless you’ve carefully considered details like SEO, market research, and properly cultivated your online presence. We’ll help you lay that groundwork so your social media paid ads deliver the revenue you expect.

The Foundation 

Before your paid ads drop, you need to have a number of things squared away:

• Know the segments you’re targeting. Once you break down who you’re selling to and why they need your product, many other details further down this list drop into place. Deep and accurate analysis streamlines the entire process by informing creative processes, strategies, and eliminating less-effective ad channels and platforms. 

• Set reasonable goals. After laying out your field of customers, you’re ready to line up the goalposts. Dial in revenue expectations, identify the most critical KPIs, and set a budget that will allow you to deliver.
  

• Lock down your SEO to optimize your paid ad presence. 92% of people won’t go beyond the first page of Google search results, and half won’t make it past the first few items. When your paid ads use the right keywords to support your goals, your business shows up a lot higher on search results and makes it far more likely customers will see your content.

• Set aside an appropriate budget. An inflated budget has obvious problems: it’s wasteful, your ROI’s are lower, and your developing institutional habits that will cause problems on future campaigns. Budget too little and you’ll never get off the ground. And if you don’t set any budget and just wing it, get ready to start burning money via a stream of unexpected expenses (that you should have known about!).
  
  If you’re not sure where to begin with setting a reasonable ad budget for your paid ads, consider talking to an expert—they can set you on the right track in no time!

Polish Your Online Presence

Paid ads entice the best leads into your marketing funnel, but once they click through they need reasons to stick around and move towards conversion. Your online presence has to be sharp and professional, and offer customers fun and engaging ways to learn about your products and services without being overwhelming:

• Great website: nothing drives customers away faster than a bland landing page that looks like it’s been slapped together in a free editor. Content and presentation should be high quality and organized intuitively. Up-to-date, bug-free software is a must. Also, make sure those links work—there’s nothing worse for business than the dreaded 404!

• Brand-appropriate content. This can take many forms, but in general these are websites, social media accounts, and videos that customers keep clicking through. Quality landing pages, helpful blogs, and brand-supporting youtube content libraries are excellent ways to keep customers hooked and moving towards conversion. 

• Prepare your customer service department and supporting materials well before your first paid ads go live. Word of mouth spreads quickly, and your team needs to be ready to resolve customer issues. 

Product manuals, troubleshooting guides, and similar content need to be uploaded in an easy-to-find sub-page on your website, and customer service associates need to be thoroughly trained and supported.

Understand What to Expect From Your Campaign

Every marketing campaign is unique. Events will unfold at different speeds and volumes based on any number of factors, and some will probably be unforeseen. If you’re not in the right mindset or have unrealistic expectations, it can be easy to start tinkering with a campaign before you actually need to, possibly disrupting an otherwise sound plan.

• Be patient. Everyone wants their new campaigns to bring in customers like it’s Black Friday, but that’s just not how ads work (well, except on Black Friday). Your planning will have identified an acceptable range of KPI data to expect at given time intervals, so stay on top of it and make sure it’s tracking. 

• Update strategic thinking. Game-changing developments can happen quickly and quietly in the digital advertising world, and many people don’t know iOS algorithms recently and significantly altered the user relationship. In short, rather than dialing in perfect criteria, successful campaigns are weighted towards producing content that operates synergistically with the AI architecture, and it may be why your previously successful ads are now underperforming. Your campaigns will be at their most effective when you treat algorithms more as partners rather than tools, and if it sounds complicated, that’s only because it kind of is. It’s worth consulting with an expert to make sure your paid ads are aligned with current best practices. 
  

• Know when to adjust the campaign, and be ready. Timing any campaign tweaks can be tricky, and your plan should be prepared to inform these choices if they need to happen. And when it comes to ad variants and backup strategies, you’d definitely rather have them and not need them rather than needing them and not having them. It’s more work to begin with, but the time and money savings will definitely be worth it.

Know When to Partner With an Expert

Some companies have years of experience getting all these behind-the-scenes details worked out before their paid ads land. If you could use some help, a partner with a proven track record of success across a wide range of sectors can save you time, money, and stress when it’s time to launch your campaign. 

If you’re ready to build out high-performing campaigns and max out your ROI, Social Ktchn is standing by to answer any questions you might have! We’re Facebook and Instagram marketing experts who have decades of combined experience in the rapidly-growing arena of social media paid ads. 

Whether you just need a few tips, or want to explore how we can take your marketing to the next level, we’d love to hear from you!

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