Social media advertising is a great way to quickly generate new customers and create a social media buzz around your (new) product.
But it can be quite costly, especially if your team fails to continuously invest time into fine-tuning your strategy.
Social media strategy needs constant tweaking, analyzing, and learning from your or your competitors’ successes and failures.
Apart from the obvious tools (like Facebook and Tweet/Analytics), here are five tools to help you come up with new social media advertising tactics:
1. ChatGPT: Fine-tune your copy and targeting
ChatGPT is a tool you can use pretty much for anything, including improving your social media advertising campaigns.
I am a marketing manager for a peer-to-peer loan company and I’d like to create a social media lead-generation campaign. Create my targeting settings and also come up with at least 5 copy ideas targeting entrepreneurs who may be interested in P2P loans.
And here’s what it came up with:
You can prompt ChatGPT to add emojis or hashtags if you are going to extend your campaign to Instagram and/or Twitter. You can also regenerate its responses until you find copy ideas you are better satisfied with.
You can also follow up with more prompts to get more ideas and better targeting. For example, I asked to come up with buyer personas for the campaign:
Come up with buyer personas we are targeting on Facebook and craft a copy for each one. Return as a table
Here’s the result:
While you may not be able to create an advertising strategy using ChatGPT (as it doesn’t know your niche as well as you do), you can certainly find ideas and refine your copy.
2. Awario: Position your brand better
What engages your social media best? What types of special offers and product features are being discussed on social media? What annoys your customers most, urging them to voice their complaints on social media?
A well-set-up social listening strategy will answer all of these questions and more. Apart from using social media listening as part of your customer support and relationship management strategy, make sure to set up a few more alerts to keep an eye on:
- Your competitors’ unhappy customers: Are they complaining about missing or limited features? Can you create a product positioning strategy to cover that gap and reflect that positioning strategy in your social media ads?
- Existing product names: What are well-known product names in your niche? You can learn a lot about how your target customers are using competing products by monitoring their names.
- Your core keywords: Keep an eye on general niche discussions to better understand what your target customers are discussing online and pique their interest.
Social media listening strategy provides a goldmine of data for you to create a better-informed advertising strategy.
Awario is an advanced social media listening platform that has a powerful market research component allowing you to better understand your niche. Use the Awario boolean search feature to create advanced alerts that include several of your competitors’ names within one dashboard or let you monitor all of your target keywords.
Awario uses smart algorithms to prioritize those mentions and generate a handy email digest for you to save time going through daily alerts.
Apart from using social listening for market research, there’s another powerful tactic few brands are utilizing:
- Curate your brand’s social proof and use it as an ad copy. It is also a great idea to set up your business digital card to curate your brand’s social proof. It always helps a brand look more relatable and trustworthy!
- Create a separate alert to get notified of your brand’s mentions with positive sentiment and collect those updates for future reference when you are fine-tuning your ad copy or looking for new ideas to position your brand when advertising on social media.
Finally, Awario allows you to evaluate your new advertising strategy by giving you access to your brand’s growth stats and allowing you to see how the sentiment has been changing:
In fact, when creating a social media ad, try using all kinds of marketing experiments. For example, look at your most effective email blasts and try re-using those subject lines. Or look at your most successful headlines or CTAs and find a way to follow the same style in your advertising copy. Make sure you have a solid CRM solution that collects information from your social media analytics platform and saves all the records.
3. Buzzsumo: Spy on your competitors
While you may already be aware of the Facebook ads library allowing you to see which advertising strategies your competitors are using, Buzzsumo’s Facebook tools may be new to you.
Buzzsumo allows you to compare two or more Facebook pages and their content performance, side by side.
You can filter updates by post type to evaluate your competitors’ more creative tactics, like engaging questions they ask their audience or videos they invest in promoting.
3. Text Optimizer: Create a better copy
Finding the right words for an engaging ad copy is art.
It’s also a process that never ends. You need to constantly come up with new ways to craft a message so that it can engage new customers.
Text Optimizer is my source of never-ending inspiration. Just type your core keyword and it will come with a huge list of related concepts your customers are also interested in. It will also allow you to analyze popular niche questions and suggest the most relevant and engaging context.
Use the tool whenever you feel stuck and need some inspiration, like new angles and copy ideas.
Traditional keyword solutions may also be quite helpful as they give you ideas on your target audience’s pain points you can address in your ad copy. SE Ranking keyword research is an ideation tool I often use for any type of content marketing, including social media copy. It shows popular ads for any keywords allowing me to see which wording competitors are using for their PPC ads:
5. SparkToro: Research your audience
Who are the people behind your target social media accounts? Which hashtags are they using? Who are they listening to?
Answering all of those questions can help you on many levels, from creating a buyer’s personas to target your ads better to finding more ways to create your targeting strategy, like hashtag- or influencer-driven targeting.
SparkToro is an audience research tool that allows you to access lots of well-organized data on how your customers are discussing your primary topic, who they engage with on social media, which Youtube channels they are subscribed to, and which blogs or magazines they read.
There’s also a detailed report of your target audience demographics and popular topics they tend to discuss:
Click any report section to access even more data.
All in all, the platform is everything you need to create a smarter targeting strategy.
When it comes to marketing research, surveying your current customers is also always a great idea. This is the fundamental customer-centric content tactic that will breathe new life into any marketing strategy.
6. Heatmaps: Understand your visitors
Don’t you want to know how your social media users engage with your landing page?
Surely, your response would be “yes”, because you spend money on attracting that click. Obviously, you want to make sure that visitors will engage with the page and become your customers.
While you are already using Google Analytics, it is not always easy to visualize what really attracts your site visitors’ attention and what attracts them.
Any time you are launching a new advertising campaign, set up a new tracking campaign using heatmaps. Heatmaps visualize clicks and mouse movements on your page allowing you to see which page elements should be rearranged to make the page easier to navigate.
Unlike Google Analytics which is continuously running on your pages, heat-mapping tools rely on a sample of data. Create new tracking, every time you have a new ad. This way you will be able to go back and compare your past heatmaps and identify what worked and what may have made things worse. Using A/B testing to pick a better-performing landing page is also a very good idea.
Conclusion
As they say, when starting a social media campaign, it’s more about collecting the data than sales. Focus on learning from your successes and failures and make sure to use Facebook/Instagram and TikTok remarketing pixels to be able to reach out to those visitors again with better-targeted ads.
There are lots of businesses that readily invest in social media ads because they seem to be more affordable than Google ads and require less set-up time. Yet, few of those advertisers are doing their best to boost their strategy performance. Hopefully, the above tools will give you ideas on how to innovate and improve your social media advertising strategy.
Good luck!
