As integrated as social media is in our daily lives, businesses must understand how to properly advertise on each platform. Whether you are new to social media advertising or have been at it for a while, when you are struggling to determine concrete ways to measure advertising success, your efforts can feel pointless.
Remember that when you manage social media advertising correctly for your brand or company, you should ultimately be building brand awareness, indicating purchase intent, and driving traffic to your website or online store. To simplify something that isn’t always so simple, we are giving you a breakdown of social media advertising and providing benchmarks to help you measure success.
Measuring Social Media Advertising Success
Start With the Goal
Before you plan to start an advertising campaign, it is important that you understand the goal of the advertisement or advertising set that you’re preparing to host. Common goals associated with social media advertisements are:
- Goal: Community Growth – These advertisements are specifically designed to grow your community and attract new people to follow your brand or to “like” your page.
- Goal: Engagement – This advertising approach is commonly executed by “boosting” a post and elevating it to your community in their “feed.” These advertisements can be an affordable and effective way to ensure your posts are seen, “liked”, commented on, or shared.
- Goal: Drive Traffic – If you decide to run a traffic advertisement, the goal of your post is to drive traffic away from activity within the social media network and toward your company’s website or blog, for example.
Understand Advertising Benchmarks
As explained previously, there are different types of advertisements based on the goal of the advertisement. In addition, there are variables in the way that we view benchmarks per social media network to help us determine if an advertisement was an affordable and successful solution. As we take a look at the various social media networks, note that the benchmarks below are being set based on our current book of clients and their general performance/expense over the past year.
1. Facebook
Facebook is one of the most widely used social platforms in the world, making it one of the biggest for social media advertising as well. Because Facebook is so large and reaches so many people, your advertisement has a better chance of being seen by the types of people who are interested in the information that you’re sharing! This makes Facebook advertising one of the most cost-efficient platforms in the social landscape.
2. Instagram
Using Instagram advertisements, we’ve found that engagement ads are extremely effective in garnering likes, comments, shares and follows. On this social media network, we’ve found that traffic ads are usually not as successful because they require a larger transition (call for you to go outside of the app), and we know that each additional step is a chance to lose your audience.
3. LinkedIn
For companies in the fresh produce industry, LinkedIn offers marketers a great way to connect with potential buyers, partners, and suppliers. In addition, the targeting capabilities that LinkedIn provides are the most granular of all the social media sites, which is great because you are easily able to target the exact people you want to reach. Truth be told, this hyper-targeting benefit does come at a higher price. Due to its detailed nature, the cost of advertising is much higher than on other social networks. Your leads are so qualified that LinkedIn charges more to reach them.
4. Pinterest
Pinterest advertising may not be for everyone, but as fresh produce companies who aim to inspire their audiences with delicious and inspired ways to enjoy their products, there is not a better platform! In our experience, we have found Pinterest to be great for driving traffic to recipe pages at a fairly low cost. For a low-risk trial in a traffic-driving experiment, we highly recommend Pinterest.
Accept the Reality of the Ever-Changing Advertising Landscape
Overall, the social media advertising benchmarks shared here are a good place for your brand to start. If you are adept at managing social media advertising, you already know that half the battle with getting healthy results with social media advertising comes along with its fair share of practice. After all of our years of experience managing social media ads, the one thing we know for sure is that we must accept that the landscape will continue to change.
When advertising on social media, remember to refer back to these benchmarks for your brand. See if you stack up or if you’re finding better or worse results. Either way, we’d love to hear from you. If you need help with this aspect of your marketing activities, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help and advise you more.
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