Social Media Marketing is a daunting task. At first glance it seems easy enough, but it's common to get overwhelmed as you dig deeper and deeper into the confusing, complex, and sometimes contradictory process that goes into making it work. That's why we've worked to assemble this (fairly) simple guide to conceptualizing, creating, and implementing campaigns that work in a painless manner. From creating a message to choosing the right dimension for that image or video, we're here to help.
Do you have a solid brand persona? Have you dedicated time to crafting your voice? If so, congratulation! You’re ready for the next step. Otherwise:
The first step to creating a campaign is establishing your brand internally. Building a detailed brand persona will set the foundational elements of how you are presented. Through this process, you should establish a voice, a personality, and a key goal while also visiting what weaknesses you have to get over and familiarizing yourself with the competitive arena you’re entering.
Knowing yourself is important, but it’s equally as important to know your audience. If you haven’t already, you should delve in and research who your consumers are. This step lets you build an in depth persona of exactly what your typical buyer looks like so that you can optimize your campaign to directly address their wants and needs. The information you form in this step will also be what is used to create targeting specifications for your ads.
Regardless of the platform, a successful campaign requires a strong and cohesive message. This is truer than ever on social media where the average person will spend seconds at most viewing your ad.
Finding your message starts with zeroing in on what you want (or need) to portray, what it is that your customer base and demographic are looking for, and how you can merge those things in order to produce the best outcome.
With the general concept in mind, the true creative portion of your social media marketing endeavor takes hold. The next step is to work to create the three primary components of campaign messaging: a core idea that needs to be put across through your copy, a tagline that embodies it and serves as the primary headline of your campaign (think ‘Just Do It’), and a system of image and video assets that support and enhance it. These three central elements fuse together to build the framework of successful social media marketing.
Now that you have your message and assets together, it’s time to meld them into an attention grabbing, relevant, and high-touch visual system. Here, you should look back to the voice formed within your brand persona in order to find a solution that best fits the goals at hand within the paradigm of your brand’s personality and demographic.
Make sure that you tailor your campaign to the websites that match your audience. If you’re trying to target millennial men, Pinterest would be a bust due to their dominantly older, female users. Likewise, marketing a product for middle-aged mothers on Twitter would fall on deaf ears with their predominantly youthful base. You can find an in-depth breakdown of current demographic by platform here!
Lead Ads
These ads let people interact with your brand without leaving their app. Form information with automatically filled using their profile information the second they agree to your proposal, from which it can directly enter your CRM platform.
Recommended Image Size: 1200x628
Video Ads
Facebook is a juggernaut of digital media with around 100 million hours of video watched every day, which makes video ads a pristine way to build brand awareness.
Carousel (Multi-Product) Ads
On average, these ads perform up to 10 times better than the average Facebook ad. You can use them to show multiple products or services, each with an individual image and link, which maximizes the potential for clickthroughs.
Boosted Posts
This type of ad is near solely focused on brand awareness. For all intents and purposes, it looks identical to an organic Facebook post (minus a small ‘sponsored’ tag on top) and works to grow engagement and traffic to your Facebook account.
Link Click Ads
This is the simplest and generally the most common form of Facebook ad. The primary goal is to generate traffic to a landing page. The entire advert works as a large link that you can layout to fit whatever message you’d like.
Canvas Ads
Canvas ads are among the most complex. They allow you to create a fully immersive brand experience on the viewer’s mobile phone without leaving Facebook. Upon clicking the ad, viewers can be presented with things ranging from a slideshow to a panoramic experience.
Dynamic Ads
Dynamic ads introduce automation to the picture. This format allows you to create multiple ads which are then shown to relevant audiences based on their interests and interaction with your brand.
Collection Ads
Ideal for eCommerce, this ad format lets you present a collection of products within one ad from which viewers can then navigate to within you shop.
Advertisements on Instagram, with the exception of Story Ads, are similar to a sponsored post on Facebook in that they will appear near identical to a regular Instagram post minus a small ‘sponsored’ tag on top and, depending on your campaign objective, a call-to-action button.
Instagram ads types:
Images
Calls-To-Action
If you use a single image in your Instagram ad, your image may appear in the square, landscape or vertical format. - Instagram Guidelines
Videos
Calls-To-Action
If you use video creative in your Instagram ad, your video may appear in the square or landscape format. - Instagram Guidelines
Carousel
Calls-To-Action
If you use the carousel format as the creative for your Instagram ad, your ad will appear in the square format or vertical format on feed and stories. - Instagram Guidelines
Instagram Stories
Calls-To-Action
While it's recommend to use mobile optimized for story ads, this format can support the same media you use in your other ads. Stories ads can support all feed photo and video dimensions, meaning you can upload a single photo or up to a 60-second video in any dimension. - Instagram Guidelines
Twitter is unique in that the platform offers two very different approaches to advertising: Twitter Promote and Twitter Ad Campaigns, though not of them rely on promotion meaning that the ad guidelines remain the same as those of a regular post.
Twitter Promote
Twitter promote is an automated system. Their algorithm automatically selects and promotes ten of your tweets per day to your specified audience, which mean that as long as your account is relatively active you can just zero in on your demographic and let Twitter handle the rest.
Twitter Ad Campaign
This method gets a bit more hands-on. While the basis is the same, Ad Campaign allows you complete control of your promoted content. You can choose which tweets to promote, choose when to promote them, and even create new tweets that are to be used solely for advertising purposes.
Pinterest works in a way similar to Twitter’s Ad Campaign option. Instead of separate ads, you can create and promote pins that are then shown to people across the site’s many boards and function as clickthrough ads to your landing page. They offer four types of pin:
Promoted Pins
This allows you to show one featured image alongside a description and are primarily used for brand awareness.
Promoted Carousels
This allows you to show two to five featured images, each with a different title, description, and landing page.
Promoted Video Pins
These pins function identically to Promoted Pins and simply replace the image with a video. They can be published in two sizes: Max Width and Standard.
Promoted App Pins
These pins are identical to a Promoted Pin or Promoted Video Pin but instead link outward to a valid app store allowing a mobile application to be downloaded from the pin.
Snapchat offers ads in two general formats: attachments and filters.
Attachment Ads
These are full screen ads that appear between stories and, unlike the rest on this list, only allow motion content such as gifs and video files. Swiping up on these ads then allows users to access your content in a few different ways:
Filter Ads
These ads allow users to apply custom, branded filters to their snaps which not only reaches out to them, but also opens up a pathway for your brand to be promoted organically from your ad. There are two major varieties:
LinkedIn Sponsored Ads
These are similar to Facebook’s Link Click Ads in that they live within the feed and work primarily to amplify a link and drive people to your landing page, though they also have an option for lead generation forms.
Sponsored InMail
This is a unique ad format that allows you to send sponsored messages directly to a user’s LinkedIn inbox. It also allows for A/B testing, so you can have multiple variations of a message going out simultaneously.
Text Ads
These ads are closer to what you picture when imagining an online ad. They display on the sideline of a user’s feed showing a headline, decription, and optional image that link you through to a landing page.
At Baker Street Digital Media, we’ve been working in the design and marketing world for decades and have conceptualized and developed a large array of campaigns throughout our time. Social Media Marketing is a core component of our process, and for that reason we're constantly tracking, optimizing, and improving our approach. If you’d like to see our work, check out the gallery here!
Or if you just want to learn more about us, fill out the form below and we’ll be sure to send out the latest updates directly to your inbox.
