Promoting Your New Biz: How To Maximize Your Ad Spend

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn provide a tremendous opportunity for raising the profile of a company and directly engaging with key audiences. As a result, new businesses are investing large portions of their marketing budgets to social media advertising, with the hopes of establishing a strong client base, growing their sales and developing repeat customers. Although social media advertising is an important marketing tactic, it’s vital to develop a smart strategy that gets you results, without breaking the bank.

Here are three tips for getting the most from your social media ad spend:

Experiment with a Low Budget

Before developing a comprehensive social media ad strategy, set aside a low budget for experimenting. This means creating test ads, which will help you get a better sense of the types of content that best resonate with your audience. Be sure to track not just the content of your ad, but also the visual component, length and publish time. These insights will help inform an effective long-term strategy.

Tip: Experiment with boosted posts on Facebook—they provide helpful information at a low cost.

Prioritize Compelling Visuals

When crafting effective social media ads for your company, visuals are just as important in conveying your message as words are. As such, invest the time and resources needed to develop tailored and professional-looking visuals, whether setting aside money for a professional photographer, or investing time in a social media video course. Doing so will help attract more people to your ad.

Tip: Cater your visuals to the specific social media platform you are targeting—videos work better than photos on certain sites, and vice versa.

Be Strategic with Individual Campaigns

Once you have a social media ad strategy in place, it’s important to do the same for individual ad campaigns. This means first establishing what you are trying to accomplish, such as more website visitors or more social media account followers. From there, target your ad toward the audience you want through tailored content and various return-on-investment tools.

Tip: Use negative keywords in each campaign—they allow you to exclude certain search terms from your campaign, which stops your ad from reaching unrelated audiences

Creating effective social media advertising tactics is a crucial step for every new and seasoned business owner that can help jumpstart a company and set it up for long-term success. In order to generate the results you want, it’s important to set aside a substantial budget for ads—which can be difficult for new businesses trying to save money. Developing smart, well-thought-out strategies will help address this challenge and give businesses the biggest bang for their social media advertising buck.