How to Create a Social Media Advertising Strategy

1. Determine your budget.

The first step to create a social advertising strategy is to determine your budget, which should be based off of the goals you have in place for your brand. If you’re still working on this step, check out how we recommend determining your social media budget based on your brand’s annual goals for a starting point. Although this can be a tedious process, it is a critical step before moving forward with further planning of a social advertising strategy.

2. Get to know your audience.

Once you know your budget and goals, it is time to take a deep dive into your brand’s social audiences so that you can create content based on their wants and needs. Is your audience primarily male or female? Baby boomers or millennials? Where are they located? All of this information will help you to know exactly what type of content will keep these audiences engaged. It is also important to note that you should research your audience on each social platform separately, considering that certain personas gravitate towards certain platforms and you want to make sure you’re sharing the right content with the right people on the appropriate platforms.

3. Create the content.

This step is where everything so far really starts to tie together. Now that you know your budget and your audiences, it is time to determine the type of content to create. For example, if you are looking to target more Gen Z audiences and discovered that this age group is prevalent primarily in your Instagram audience, it is clear that you should allocate a large portion of your budget to Instagram to reach this age range. When it comes to content creation and what will catch their eye on Instagram, explore some of the different types of visual content that you could potentially create. You can also check out some recent visual content examples that caught our eye for some inspiration.

4. Execute.

Once all of the previously listed steps are in place, it is time to execute your social advertising strategy. Some tips that we have found when it comes to running ads are to always experiment with different creatives (you never know exactly what audiences are drawn to), experiment with timeframes and ad durations to see if longer or shorter ads garner better results, and analyze, analyze, analyze! With social platforms incredibly eager to take your brand’s money, it is important to keep a very close eye on any ads that you have running. There is nothing worse than letting an ad run its course and only checking in on it once it is completed to be disappointed with its results. By monitoring ads closely, you can quickly tell what’s working, what isn’t working, and how you can pivot to try and achieve better results.

Have any questions about the steps above, or any of your own tips for building out a social media advertising strategy? Comment below or reach out to us on Twitter at @TheCoreBlog!