Paid social is an ever changing landscape, and in recent times we have seen some of the biggest shifts in paid social advertising, particularly from Meta with the heavy introduction of AI based campaigns and audience targeting.
Also, with the changes in cookie policies, the way to target users has changed too. Despite this, paid social advertising is still an incredibly effective way to increase brand awareness, increase engagement and ultimately, generate sales.
In order to stay ahead of this evolving paid social landscape, it is crucial to have a strong and effective ad content strategy that works for your business. To do this, there are some fundamentals you need to apply to ensure that your content is right for your audience.
Understanding your audience
The age old question marketeers have asked (or should be asking) since the dawn of advertising, is “who is my target audience?” and with paid social, there are no exceptions. Before any sort of social media marketing, understanding your audience is the first fundamental to designing an effective paid social strategy. You should have a clear picture of who your audience are, what their behaviours and interests consist of, what their pain points are, what motivates them to take action online etc. By knowing and understanding this, you are giving yourself the best opportunity for creating compelling content that interacts with the behaviours of your audiences in the right way and ultimately, causing them to take action.
Picking the right platform
Before diving into any sort of paid social activity, it is crucial to understand whether the platform you’re wanting to advertise on is actually right for your business. Different audiences use different platforms, and often they use them for different reasons. For example: a user in a particular audience may use TikTok to switch off and maybe be very unlikely to engage with what it is your selling, whereas another user in a different audience may use TikTok as their go-to search engine, actively searching for/engaging with the type of products or services you sell. Everybody uses social media platforms in a different way, so knowing where your audiences are and how they behave is an extremely important step to formulating the best strategy.
This is where it is crucial to understand your audience, and knowing your audience could end up saving you and your business a lot of money by ensuring you pick the right platforms.
Creating compelling content
This is really where we get into the crux of things. One thing all businesses should remember about social media marketing is that you are not just paying to be there, you’re paying for attention. Social media is filled with content that users can digest. If you are not able to grab the attention of social media users with your ads, you’re losing the race at the first hurdle.
In order to ensure we are constantly grabbing the attention of users, it is crucial to utilise an effective content strategy that engages with users in the right way at the various stages of their buying journey. To do this, we follow a framework called AIDA. This framework aligns with the standing buying/marketing funnel, which gives us a useful guide to building content that resonates with users at each level of the funnel.
What is the AIDA model?
Attention is all about what it says, these creatives are designed specifically for the purpose of grabbing the attention of the users. This is particularly useful at the very top of the funnel, when trying to reach audiences who might not know about you as a brand just yet.
Interest is where we start to add some meat on the bones. Here we are generally engaging with users who either know of us as a brand, or are in-market and need less education around who we are/the products/services we sell.
This is where we want to really rely on the USP’s and benefits of our product or service. It’s also useful to highlight the pain points that your audience may face, posing your brand or product as the solution to the pain points.
Desire based content is sort of what it says on the tin, it’s about trying to get your audience to desire the product/service you’re selling. Here we want to really lean into the USP’s and benefits, whilst playing on the emotional aspect of the pain points the users face.
You’re really aiming to build an emotional connection, a desire, a feeling of necessity between your products / services and your audience, by showcasing how what you’re selling either fits in or improves their lifestyle.
Action again, is all about what it says. You want to lead with compelling calls to actions, in order to convert your ideal customer.
Testing, iterating and revising content
As with anything in life, trial and error is crucially important to paid social marketing, particularly when it comes to your content strategy. Once you’ve got your content strategy in place and you’ve launched your ads, reviewing and evaluating the performance of each ad allows you to recognise what messages resonate with your audience. To ensure you are always grabbing the attention of the users, we want to continuously test new creatives, whether that’s brand new ideas or iterations of performing content. By utilising creative iterations, we are again collecting more data to see what messages, images, CTAs, style of video your audience interacts best with, giving us a clearer picture of where to go creatively and strategically for the future.
Final thoughts
Paid social has changed, and will continue to change. In the current landscape, it is hard to understate the importance of your content. Nailing your content strategy is taking the first step to getting significant, tangible performance out of paid social and should be considered with as much importance as your actual audience targeting.
Remember, you’re buying attention, so treat your creatives as such.