In social advertising, mistakes can end up costing you a lot. Before you run your first social ad campaign, make sure that you have a focus on your social advertising efforts.

Below are the biggest social media advertising mistakes, and the ones that you certainly want to avoid.

1. Not having a social advertising strategy

So you’ve got a lot of followers and likes. There are people wandering around your social networks. They’re inquiring about services and clicking on your ads. What’s next?

If you don’t have a strategy in place, then your ads serve no purpose. You need to define your objectives, tactics, target audience and what resources you’ll invest.

2. Not defining your goals

Far too many social advertising mistakes revolve around not setting goals or not setting the right ones. Before creating a social ad, ask yourself: what is the purpose of this campaign? You can’t run social ads without knowing what you’re trying to achieve from them. Are you aiming to garner more leads? Is it brand awareness? Or is it simply to boost sales of a product?

If your goals aren’t something you can measure, then you’re already setting your campaigns up for failure.

3. Not defining buyer personas

Personas are ideas of potential customers. Identifying your potential customers helps you understand your target audience. Not every ad will pertain to the same group of people.

A persona-based advertising strategy focuses on catered content. Usually, you can’t pull these personas out of thin air. They’re based on market trends and research of buying processes.

A persona-based strategy helps you discover the full picture of who you’re targeting, and without it, you don’t know what content will resonate with the customer.

4. Targeting too narrow or too wide of an audience

An 18-year-old female who lives in California will have a different lifestyle and set of interests compared to a 55-year-old male who lives in Florida. Know your audience and use data to back it up. Making the mistake of targeting a broad audience or a narrow group could end up costing you.

RELATED ARTICLEHow to use effective targeting to reach your social media adverising audienceBy understanding your best customer’s behaviors, attitudes and demographics, you can set your social media advertising campaign up for success.READ MORE

5. Not tailoring your ads to each platform

A display ad that cuts off due to the wrong ad specs certainly hurts your chances for success. All social platforms have different requirements, and it’s important to get them right. Where will your ads be running and what types of ads will they be?

Luckily, at Strike Social, we have a complete guide of ad specs and requirements to set yourself up for success.

• Facebook ad specs
• Twitter ad specs
• LinkedIn ad specs
• Snapchat ad specs
• YouTube ad specs
• Pinterest ad specs

6. No creative diversity

While your brand should have an overarching style, having creative diversity means exploring more creative options such as video, carousel ads and utilizing multiple platforms that make sense.

Discover where your audience is more likely to view media. Is it on their phone? Or a desktop? Do they consume video more than photos? Mix in engaging content that will resonate with your audience, and don’t always use the same creative.

7. No call to action

Forgetting your call to action could mean missing out on converting customers. A call to action is a clear statement about the next step for your customers to take. What do you want them to do next? If you want them to sign up for a newsletter, “Subscribe Now” is a clear call to action.

Call to actions must be quick and easy to see, helping your audience along the buying journey.

8. Always sending people to the homepage

Let’s say you’re advertising for a clothing company and have a call to action to “Shop Now” for a product. Sending people to the homepage only creates an inconvenience for them to have to search for the product, which creates the risk of losing a potential customer.

As mentioned above, call to actions help boost your customer acquisition, but you have to guide users along that journey. Send people to a landing page to achieve a better conversion rate.

9. Not tracking conversions properly

The beauty of social advertising is that you have the ability to track results, and that includes conversion rate. You know the journey your customers take from start to finish — if set up properly that is.

For example, the Facebook pixel is a piece of a code you put on your website that helps you measure your ads, but if you don’t set it up properly, you may not be tracking the data you need to be successful.

10. Not monitoring campaigns

Don’t ignore one of the most important pieces in social advertising. If you run a campaign and don’t monitor throughout, how do you know if it’s performing? Monitoring campaigns while they are live allows you to understand performance from start to finish and make adjustments to current and future campaigns.

11. Forgetting organic performance

If we’re talking about paid social, then what does organic have to do with it? A lot actually. Your organic performance can indicate how to spend your budget wisely.

Before running an ad campaign, test the creative organically to see how it’s received. If an organic post is well-received, continue to promote it even further as an ad.

12. Neglecting the power of A/B testing

Lastly, but certainly one of the biggest mistakes, is neglecting to A/B test. Rather than guessing and checking what works, A/B testing will give you real data to backup your decision to use a certain ad creative, headline or copy. Run two ads against one another and test which ad your audience responds to more. From there, you can refine your audience.

By not utilizing A/B testing, you run the risk of promoting an underperforming ad with no outcome.