The 10 greatest social media advertising tips for content marketers

Let’s start with the bad news first. It’s tougher than ever to get your content noticed.

Changes to Google’s search results pages have further obscured content organically, especially on competitive commercial searches. Meanwhile, paid search CPCs are at all-time highs in established markets.

Organic reach in social media? It’s pretty much dead. Half of all content gets zero shares, and less than 0.1% will be shared more than 1,000 times. And Facebook just announced that you’re even less likely to get your content in front of people who aren’t related to you. (Sorry.)

Additionally, the typical internet marketing conversion rate is less than 1%.

How content marketing doesn’t (usually) work

How does content marketing actually work? Many people believe content marketing is basically a three-step process:

1.      Create new content.

2.      Share your content on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, linkedIn, etc.).

3.      People buy your stuff.

Nope. This almost never happens.

Most content goes nowhere. The consumer purchase journey isn’t a straight line – and it takes time.

So is there a more reliable way to increase leads and sales with content?

Social media ads to the rescue!

Now it’s time for the good news, guys! Social media ads provide the most scalable content promotion and are proven to turn visitors into leads and customers.

And the best part? You don’t need a huge ad budget.

A better, more realistic process for content marketing would look like this:

1.      Create: Produce content and share it on social media.

2.      Amplify: Selectively promote your top content on social media.

3.      Tag: Build your remarketing audience by tagging site visitors with a cookie.

4.      Filter: Apply behavioral and demographic filters on your audience.

5.      Remarket: Remarket to your audience with display ads, social ads, and Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) to promote offers.

6.      Convert: Capture qualified leads or sale.

7.      Repeat.

You can use the following 10 Twitter and Facebook advertising hacks as a catalyst to get more eyeballs on your content, or as an accelerant to create an even larger traffic explosion.

1. Improve your Quality Score

Quality Score is a metric Google uses to rate the quality and relevance of your keywords and PPC ads – and influences your cost-per-click. Facebook calls their version a “Relevancy Score”:

Whatever you call it, Quality Score is a crucial metric. You can increase your quality score for Twitter and Facebook by increasing your post engagement rates.

A high quality score is great because you’ll get a higher ad impression share for the same budget at a lower cost per engagement. On the flip side, a low Quality Score is terrible because you’ll have a low ad impression share and a high cost per engagement.

How do you increase engagement rates? Promote your best content – your unicorns (the top 1-3% that performs better than all your other content) vs. your donkeys (your bottom 97%).

To figure out if your content is a unicorn or donkey, you’ll have to test it out.

2. Increase engagement with audience targeting

Targeting all of your fans isn’t precise. It’s lazy and you’ll waste a lot of money.

Your fans aren’t a homogenous blob. They all have different incomes, interests, values, and preferences.

For example, by targeting fans of Donald Trump, people with social media marketing job titles, NRA members, and the hashtag #NeverHillary (and excluding Democrats, fans of Hillary Clinton, and the hashtag #neverTrump), this tweet for an Inc. article I wrote got 10x higher engagement:

Keyword targeting and other audience targeting methods help turn average ads into unicorns.

3. Generate free clicks from paid ads

On Twitter, tweet engagements are the most popular type of ad campaign. Why? I have no idea. You have to pay for every user engagement (whether someone views your profile, expands your image, expands your tweet from the tweet stream, or clicks on a hashtag).

If you’re doing this, you need to stop. Now. It’s a giant waste of money and offers the worst ROI.

Instead, you should only pay for the thing that matters most to your business, whether that’s clicks to your website, app installs, followers, leads, or actual video views.

For example, when you run a Twitter followers campaign you only pay when someone follows you. But your tweet that’s promoting one of your unicorn pieces of content will also get a ton of impressions, retweets, replies, mentions, likes, and visits to your website. All for the low, low cost of $0.

4. Promote unicorn video ads!

Would you believe you can get thousands of video views at a cost of just $0.02 per view?

Shoppers who view videos are more likely to remember you, and buy from you. A couple quick tips for success:

§ Promote videos that have performed the best (i.e., driven the most engagement) on your website, YouTube, or elsewhere.

§ Make sure people can understand your video without hearing it – an amazing 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound, according to Digiday.

§ Make it memorable, try to keep it short, and target the right audience.

Bonus: video ad campaigns increase relevancy score by 2 points!

5. Score huge wins with custom audiences

True story: A while back I wrote an article that asked: do Twitter Ads work? To promote the article on Twitter, I used their tailored audiences feature to target key influencers.

The very same day, Business Insider asked for permission to publish the story. So I promoted that version of the article to influencers using tailored audiences.

An hour later, a Fox News producer emailed me. Look where I found myself:

The awesome power of custom audiences resulted in additional live interviews with major news outlets including the BBC, 250 high-value press pickups and links, massive brand exposure, 100,000 visits to the WordStream site, and a new business relationship with Facebook.

This is just one example of identity-based marketing using social media ads. Whether it’s Twitter’s tailored audiences or Facebook’s custom audiences, this opens a ton of new and exciting advertising use cases!