Technology Marketing in the Digital Age: How (and Why) to Begin a Social Advertising Campaign

You’ve spent time and resources creating newsletters, case studies, videos, etc. but how can you spread these to more people in order to get yourself more exposure? Social media is a great tool for doing this.

Here’s the rub. In the B2B market, I find that with most companies I work with, there is a cap on organic growth of their social media following. After a while, the growth slows to a crawl. In addition, an existing social audience may not always be relevant to the business. For example, many of my social media subscribers are competitors and parties who do not necessarily represent valuable business contacts that I really want to engage.

The benefits spelled out

According to the Social Media Examiner’s 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report greater than 88% of marketers who’ve used social media marketing for more than one year report that it generates exposure for their businesses. And 78% reported that it was a direct result of increased web traffic.

When you consider a paid social advertising campaign, you can target a large audience with razor like accuracy based on your own specific criteria. Your content will never go to waste.

According to Sysomos Social Marketing Playbook 2017, a social advertising campaign offers:  

•  A wider, more diverse target audience reach for your content
• Organic follower growth
• Opportunity to touch harder-to-reach recipients
• Intelligence that shows leads from click-throughs

What makes for good advertising content?

Any area in which you’ve invested precious time and resources that offers value and educates your stakeholders is an ideal candidate. You can direct your most valued prospects to a video, white paper or a landing page with its own URL that describes your offering, a downloadable asset and a call to action. (For more details, see my NJ Tech Weekly article, “Today’s content marketing and why it matters for your go-to-market strategy.”)

And there’s your earned media. If you are lucky enough to get press coverage, whether local or national, it’s promoted for about 24 hours and then lies dormant on its own URL. Sure, you post it on your News/Press website page, but what can you do to get more eyes on it? A paid advertisement that points to your article allows you to determine just who you want to see it and broadens your reach.

Before you start your campaign

When planning any advertising campaign, here are the top issues you need to consider:

• What are your marketing goals for the month/quarter/year?
• If you’ve done advertising before, what are your best performing content and campaign messages? (Tip: you’ll be able to repurpose them for your ad campaign.)
• Who is your target audience?
• What social media platform(s) is your audience primarily on?
• What will you use to measure your campaign success? Number of leads, request for demos, clicks, etc.

Get out your yardstick

Once you’ve set up a campaign, make sure you measure everything. Paid social advertising makes that easy to do. Metrics consist of who visited/downloaded your site/content, how long they were engaged (think video time), what they shared, and what actions they took. Use your cost-per-click to measure what each of these actions cost you and you can figure out total ROI for your campaign.

Now that we’ve discussed the pros of using paid social ads to promote your dearly made content, you understand why paid impressions can be one of your most prized techniques for getting traction with the right audience. Remember if you’ve invested in resources to create this content, you need to finish the race and invest in advertising that will increase your exposure. And that makes all the difference for your business bottom line.