Adam Baetu — June 12, 2017 
Social media can be an enormously effective advertising tool, but it can also be a time and money drain. How do you know where best to spend your money? Just as importantly, do you have a tangible way to measure the ROI on your social media spend?
To help you avoid wasting money on social media ads that get you no ROI, here are some crucial tips to remember:
1. Target your audience. Any brand that tries to appeal to absolutely everyone, regardless of demographic, is doomed to failure. A successful brand is one that carves out its own niche and understands the needs, wants and challenges of its own particular customers. You should apply this same approach to social media advertising. Setting too wide a target audience is a waste of your budget. You should instead aim to squeeze every last penny of value from your social media spend by targeting your content – and defining your ad audience – to appeal to the people most likely to engage with it.
2. Steer clear of click-baiting. The social media world is a crowded one, with brands jostling for attention. It’s only natural that some brands seek more dramatic ways to get noticed, including click-bait headlines and content specially designed to hook in the user. This kind of content will definitely get you noticed and may even boost engagement, but it’s not likely to help your ROI figures. This is because someone clicking on such an ad will inevitably be disappointed – as where they click through to will not match their expectations based on the ad. It can even lead to negative impressions of your brand, as Digital Spy editor-in-chief Julian Linley pointed out when speaking at the 2016 Festival of Marketing.
3. Always include a call to action. Social media ads that do not instruct or persuade the viewer to take some kind of action are usually a waste of money. You need a clear idea of the exact action you want the user to take, and then craft a call to action that is as compelling as possible.
4. Direct users to the right place. Social media advertising is the most effective when integrated with other platforms and streams, as each supports the other and delivers a consistent message across all possible outlets. This is why dedicated landing pages can be so important. Rather than sending users through to your homepage every time, where absolutely all of the information is – direct them to a dedicated social media landing page where content relevant to the ad is the prominent message. Smallbiztrends has some excellent examples of other ways you can create an integrated marketing strategy.
Before you act on any of the above tips though, it is crucial that you establish an accurate way of measuring social media advertising ROI. This will give you a vital starting point for how your campaigns are performing now. If you make dynamic changes to your approach, you can track how successful these experiments are and will be able to demonstrate the boost to ROI with cold, hard stats.
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