Strike Overview
- With 72% of the U.S. population actively using social networking sites, social media presents a valuable opportunity to reach new customers, boost brand awareness, and increase your sales on social media.
- 26% of internet users aged 16 to 64 discover brands and products through social media ads, highlighting the potential for increased sales when social media advertising strategies are effectively utilized.
- Success in social media advertising relies on a strategic approach, including understanding platform-specific metrics, optimizing ad placements, and employing a multichannel strategy to enhance engagement and cost-efficiency, ultimately boosting sales.
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This post was updated in August 2024 to provide you with the latest information.
How to Use Social Media Ads to Generate Sales
There are many ways to use social media advertising according to your goals. You can promote a campaign to generate awareness or to capture leads to identify qualified customers. The end goal though, is to generate sales and increase your revenue either in the short or long term.
That is why a common question among advertisers is the potential to generate sales on social media platforms. The answer is you can definitely increase sales using social media if you know how to approach it the right way. As social media marketing campaigns become increasingly influential during major retail events like Amazon Prime Day and back-to-school shopping, brands must capitalize on the vast opportunities these platforms offer.
Are you ready to learn how to make sales on social media advertising campaigns? Follow our tips here:
8 Key Steps for Your Social Media Sales Strategy
Know your audience
First and foremost, it is essential to know your audience. In social media advertising, this means that you need to know what platforms your target audience are on, when they use social media and how they behave online. On a broader marketing scale, find out their buyer behavior. Also understand not just who you’d like to target, but who you already resonate with. It pays to expand your target, but don’t forget your core base.
Each platform attracts a unique user base, so understanding which one aligns best with your target demographics is key to generate sales on social media. Here’s a breakdown of user demographics across various platforms:
Different platforms require a different social media sales strategy. For example, when advertising on YouTube or YouTube TV, you can target specific audience segments, such as those experiencing significant life events like graduation or starting a family.
To ensure your ads generate the right clicks and drive sales from your target market, remember to exclude irrelevant segments, such as YouTube Kids channels, so you only pay for clicks and conversions that align with your objectives.
Define your goal
You will approach social media in different ways according to your campaign objectives. To increase online sales through social media ads, you should be more straightforward in your approach and think about effective calls-to-action that will lead a customer to perform the action you desire.
Each social media marketing app has its unique metrics that may be similar but are calculated and interpreted differently. For example, TikTok, primarily a short-form video ad platform, measures video view metrics based on 2-second and 6-second views. In contrast, YouTube advertisers, who may also utilize Shorts, typically consider 15 to 20-second views as more significant YouTube ad metrics for gauging video view completion rates.
Meet people where they are
Choosing the right social media platform to advertise is a major step to reach success. You need to advertise where your audience is. It’s your job as a diligent strategist to study the characteristics of each social platform and how audiences engage with content in them to figure out where you should invest your money.
For instance, LinkedIn is mainly a B2B advertising platform. If your goal is to acquire social media sales from businesses who are looking to acquire your services, this is the social media platform you should be focusing on.
Further Reading
Marketer’s Guide to LinkedIn Ad Specs (2024)
Know the specific sizes and formats of LinkedIn ads and their placement on users’ screens. We’ve provided a guide to LinkedIn ad specifications for each format to ensure you’re well-prepared before your campaign goes live.
On Facebook, you can utilize the Audience Insights tool to verify whether your targeted audience is engaging with your ads and page. This tool can help you determine if you should adjust your target to a different age or lifestyle group that may be more likely to convert and get you sales on social media.
Give customers what they want
Your ultimate goal should be to create a memorable ad experience for the consumer. Why? Because experiences improve the relationship between the customer and the brand resulting in brand loyalty. In that context, ads are a brand’s means of communicating with the client and cultivating that relationship. Take time to create a good ad that will resonate with your customer base, and you’ll be happy you did.
Research shows that Connected TV (CTV) ads are more effective in reaching consumers. In fact, 57% of viewers say CTV ads are more relevant and better targeted than traditional linear TV ads. Recognizing the benefits of CTV advertising, YouTube and Google have integrated YouTube TV and Google TV into their advertising network, expanding their reach and offering advertisers more opportunities to connect with engaged audiences.
Further Reading
What Are the CTV Advertising Rates and Benchmarks?
Get ahead of your media planning by staying updated on current CTV advertising rates. This will help you efficiently manage your CTV advertising budget and keep your social media strategy on course.
Take people to the right place
Make sure that you redirect the people who click on your ad to a page with which you can convert them into your customers. Ideally, you should redirect your clients to a place where they can take the next action you want from them. Consumers are not likely to go out of their way to explore your website and find things by themselves. Make their journey as short as possible to catch their attention and generate potential sales.
A major factor that can deter a potential customer is if the landing page is slow to load or doesn’t align with the ad’s content, such as directing them to a different product than the one advertised. Not only does this reduce the chances to increase your sales on social media, but it can also lead to ad rejection and negatively impact the progress of your campaigns.
Focus on ad placements and optimization
Before launching anything, make sure your campaign is optimized for the particular platform that it will be displayed on. In Facebook advertising, for example, you’ll want to optimize according to Facebook’s advertising formats and use the right sizes and specifications for each ad within your social media campaign.
Proper optimization guarantees that your ads display correctly on users’ screens, making it more likely that your targeted audience will engage with them as intended. Poorly designed creatives can turn off consumers, leading to over 50% of ad spending being wasted. To maximize engagement and generate sales on social media, combine effective audience targeting with visually appealing and well-optimized ads.
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Use multiple channels
Don’t rely solely on one single channel to acquire sales on social media. If you want to invest some money in stocks, any financial advisor will tell you not to put all of your eggs in one basket. If that one basket fails, then you’re out of a lot more than if you had put your eggs in several baskets.
The same principle applies to social media advertising. You want to diversify your campaigns to be able to access a larger audience than you’d be able to access by using one channel exclusively. By utilizing a multichannel advertising strategy, you can reach a broader audience by utilizing various channels and mediums, increasing brand recall and keeping your brand top-of-mind across different platforms.
Collect data, improve, repeat
Perhaps the most important thing to do when advertising in social media is to constantly analyze the performance of your campaigns. You do this because you want to be able to make improvements before any shortcomings or misdirections become larger, more complex problems.
By collecting and analyzing data, you can see where improvements can be made in the campaign, whether that’s in ad content, targeting strategy, or placement. This ongoing process allows you to make real-time adjustments to optimize your current campaign for better results and cost efficiency. In addition, the insights gained can inform your future campaigns, helping you refine your approach to increase sales using social media advertising.
