5 Key Metrics Every Houston Businesses Needs To Track On..
Social media is a powerful tool that can shape your brand’s success in Houston’s competitive market...
Advertising on social networks is essential if you are looking to reach a new and specific audience quickly.
Let the digital advertising experts at OAK Interactive help you grow using various social media ads to fulfill your business goals and get the most out of your advertising investment. Take a look at our quick video introduction to advertising on social media.
What Are The Best Social Media Networks For Your Brand?
You’ll find several advertising options on the main social networks, but that doesn’t mean you need all of them. But which ones are right for your brand and your marketing goals? 
OAK first looks at which social networks work well for you organically. Before we think about advertising, which social networks are your fans engaging on and we consider those as our first options for advertising campaigns. Afterall, you’ve already laid the groundwork for the relationship.
Each platform skews to its own general demographic. Pinterest, for example, attracts more female users than male users because of its browsability. But, let’s say you’re targeting a younger audience, you’ll likely find them on Snapchat, TickTock or Instagram.
Does Facebook Advertising Make Sense For Your Brand?
OAK is constantly researching, modifying, and learning how to get the most out of our clients’ advertising on Facebook. Despite controversies surrounding Facebook, it’s still the largest social media platform in the world. And advertisers can leverage this audience and segment it by demographic, geographic and interests from celebrities to needlepoint groups. Our ability to pinpoint your audience and serve them with creative that compelling and relevant to their conversations are why our Facebook campaigns continue to be successful.
OAK can help you use Facebook for three main types of campaign objectives:
Awareness
- Brand Awareness
- Reach
Consideration
- Site Visits
- Engagement
- App Installs
- Video Views
- Lead generation
- Messages
Conversion
- Conversions
- Catalog sales
- Store Traffic
OAK can also create different types of ad formats to enable more brand distinction and engagement.
Video: Show off product features and draw people in with sound and motion.
Image: Drive people to destination websites or apps through high-quality visuals and messaging.
Collection: Encourage shopping by displaying items from your product catalog
Carousel: Showcase up to ten images or videos within a single ad, each with its own link.
Instant Experience: Instant Experience, formerly called Canvas, provides a full-screen, mobile-optimized experience instantly from your ad.
Lead Generation Ads: Collect contact info from people interested in your business.
Offers: Offer discounts you can share with your customers on Facebook
Post Engagement: Most page posts on Facebook can be boosted to deliver more likes, comments, shares, and photo views.
Event Responses: Promote awareness of your event and drive responses.
Page Likes: Drive users to engage with your content and Like your
Should You Decide Between Facebook and Instagram? Or Just Use Both?
Content that includes visual components such as featured images, infographics, or videos has a greater reach and is considerably more engaging than content that doesn’t. It’s proven that people respond much better to visual information than to plain text and Instagram is the ideal platform to disseminate this type of content in your digital marketing strategy. It’s the perfect way to increase awareness, positioning and traffic to your company’s website.
Here are some things to consider when adding Instagram to your social media strategy:
Growing – Everyone is on Instagram. This social network has been the fastest growing in recent times. In addition, as an important fact, most new followers are adults, an audience with greater purchasing power and who can become new customers.
Reach – The algorithm of Instagram allows you to show absolutely all your publications in the news feed of your followers. You will have a greater chance of showing yourself to a greater number of people.
Engagement – The interaction is greater compared to other social networks because of the high reach of the social network. The natural integration with Facebook is an effective and efficient pair.
Branding – Its visual nature makes it a support tool in any digital marketing strategy. It is important that you have a corporate image defined so that you create a feeling of belonging. (Brand Identity).
Diffusion – Using hashtags and keywords it is possible to obtain a high diffusion of all the published content. Users who have not yet followed your account will be able to reach you without problems using these elements. Of course, use them intelligently always using the natural words that users use organically.
Creativity – Instagram is the perfect space to play with your creativity. On this platform, you can develop in all its splendor everything related to graphic design, images, videos, and more. There are practically no limits. Be sure to review what your competition is doing, especially if it has more experience in the market, so you can always be one step ahead.
As you have seen, thanks to Instagram you can increase the virtual community that has been generated naturally around your brand. It is an indispensable tool in your content plan and in your digital marketing plan, regardless of the area in which you develop. Provide an innovative and dynamic image and capture your new clients in a natural habitat. OAK can support you in this effort.
How Do Facebook And Instagram Compare From An Advertising Standpoint?
Instagram and Facebook are the main social networks but if you take a deeper look, you will find they are different from each other. To know which one to use, you would have to analyze the differences between Facebook and Instagram and decide which of the two social networks best suits our online business and our audience.
| Facebook means reach and brand awareness. If you are not on Facebook, you do not exist. | Instagram means simplicity and depth, showing the most human and profound part of the brand. |
| Facebook provides us with several ways to create posts, without having to be knowledgeable in design or photography to create visually correct posts. For example, we can post long texts in notes or create discussions with questions. | On Instagram it is a must have a good knowledge in video, graphic design, or photography, to be able to approach this social network. The most successful accounts are the ones that create the best content from these formats. |
| Facebook is used more as a personal calendar where you connect with family and friends, (who reminds us of our friends’ birthdays?) | Instagram is used to connect more with other profiles for their likes and hobbies. Follow Brands and celebrities. |
| On Facebook you can generate enough traffic to the Web / Blog from different formats: post, stories, notes, images, etc. since it allows direct links to an external site to be shared. | Instagram is more difficult to generate external traffic since it has the prohibited links (except the BIO link) until you have a number of 10,000 followers. In this way you can share links in the posts published as stories. |
| Hashtags on Facebook have never been especially important so you can promote your brand without a hashtag strategy behind. | Hashtags for Instagram is an important factor and they will make you reach multiple people (since there is no option to share on Instagram, for that you need an app to repost on Instagram). |
| Facebook has very well incorporated the whole topic of online community: Profiles, Blogs, Pages, Online Store, Apps, Events, Groups, Messenger, etc. With Facebook you could have an ALL IN one. | Instagram it is focused on profiles. Although now you also have the possibility of showing it as an online store on Instagram and many profiles have become very visual blogs, you may have to complement Instagram with other online strategies. |
| Facebook Messenger and Facebook are connected, being able to reach your contacts with this messaging app quickly since it is implemented. | Instagram has not connected this app yet as it works with its own chat. |
| Facebook and its search engine are not very well implemented and finding something on this social network has been quite difficult. | Instagram has an amazingly effective and extensive search engine since you can find locations, hashtags, and names in a fast and efficient way. |
| On Facebook you have more and extensive information on statistics (followers, likes, reach, actions, publications, etc.) | Instagram allows you to pulldown basic statistics of your publications (impressions, reach, visits, clicks, hours …). Although they have expanded the analytics of Instagram and there is not as much difference as before. |
When Does X (Twitter) Make Sense?
Almost two-thirds of X’s advertising audience is male. With that in mind, OAK creates best-in-class X campaigns that increase your brand’s relevancy through combined organic and paid strategy. Based on your business, OAK can leverage this social media platform to achieve the following marketing goals:
Awareness
- Reach
Consideration
- Site Visits
- Engagement
- App Installs
- Video Views
- Pre-roll Views
- Followers
Conversion
- App re-engagements
OAK can help you to create promoted text, images, .gif, and polls and test each one to see which one is attractive and engaging.
Is LinkedIn Strictly For Business-to-Business?
Our LinkedIn campaign performance drives results when brands are looking to connect with both business-to-business as well as business-to-consumer audiences.
With OAK’s team, we’ll help you achieve three types of marketing goals:
- Awareness: Drive awareness and reach of your business.
- Consideration: Drive website visits, and increase engagement rate & interactions.
Conversion: Get leads and drive website conversions.
LinkedIn is more business-oriented and allows us to segment our audience by job title, seniority, and company size, among other criteria. For companies looking to reach key decision-makers as well as business influencers, LinkedIn is the platform for business engagement.
We can reach your LinkedIn audience through a combination of the following ads:
- Sponsored content: Titles less than 150 characters have the best interaction. LinkedIn recommends an image size of 1200 x 627 pixels. Larger images get higher click-through rates.
- InMail Sponsored Messages: Short body text (less than 500 characters) gets the highest click-through rate. The top five calls to action for InMail sponsored messages are: Test, Free, Today, Click On and Apply.
- Text Ads: Includes a 50×50 pixel thumbnail image. We suggest showing a human face and profile images test better than logos or images of objects.
What About Pinterest? Is It Effective?
Pinterest is a place where you can share photos, infographics, videos, and everything you find on the Internet. Many people use it as a catalog of ideas due to its characteristic format that helps to organize, archive, and share your pins (photo albums) grouping them by themes, interests, hobbies, etc.
The images on Pinterest are prepared to give complete information on a specific topic and this makes its users want to interact and share this information with other users, becoming content with great value and dissemination.
We focus on reach, awareness, and transactions—that is, users who purchase after seeing your business content on the site.
OAK will help you to target your advertising strategy to align with your business goals under a Cost-Per-Click (CPP) or Cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM) method.
Consider that Pinterest is a discovery platform. Almost all searches on Pinterest are unbranded, which means Pinners are open to new ideas and products.
Since Pinterest is used to plan and generate ideas, it has a longer wait time than other social networks. It´s advisable to start running campaign-linked Pinterest ads by season or by date approximately 45 days in advance.
Our recommended ads:
- Promoted Pins
- One-tap Pins
- Promoted Carousels
- Promoted Video Pins
- Promoted App Pins
- Buyable Pins
How Can YouTube Be Part of Your Media Mix?
Video content is powerful. In fact, YouTube alone has more than a billion users. This is almost a third of all people on
the Internet, and every day these users watch a billion hours of video, generating billions of visits.
What’s more, people ages 18-49 watch more YouTube on their mobile devices than any other television network in the United States.
But that is not all. According to a report on “The State of Video Marketing”, 81 percent of people are convinced to buy a product or service by watching a video of a brand. Additionally, 76 percent of companies say the video helped them increase sales.
Example: https://bit.ly/3gZBrPD
At OAK, we use proven approaches to help your ads deliver on your marketing goals. We can help you achieve the following business goals on YouTube
- Collect leads by embracing paid YouTube ads. including contextual, behavioral, geotargeting, retargeting, and search, to ensure that your ads reach the intended audience.
- Boost website visits
- Increase brand and product consideration
- Create brand awareness and expand your reach
Even though YouTube’s audience is well distributed among age groups up to 65 years, it does have more male than female users.
Here are a few ad options that we would explore with your YouTube campaign:
- TrueView Ads: These are the main format of YouTube Ads which give viewers the most control over the ads they see. Because of this, Google reports that eight out of ten viewers prefer TrueView to other in-stream video ad formats. But TrueView ads are great for businesses, too.
Advertisers only pay for TrueView ads when users watch at least 30 seconds, watch a full short video, or interact with an ad in some way, such as by clicking a call-to-action button.
- Bumper ads: YouTube’s bumper ad is a six-second, non-skippable video ad that plays before a YouTube video.
- Non-skippable video ads: Non-skippable video ads must be watched before your video can be viewed and can appear before, during, or after the main video.
- Outstream video ads: These video ads, available through Google Ads, expand your ad reach across the web while giving users the ability to choose how they interact with the ad.
- Masthead: These are video ads that appear at the top of the YouTube homepage. The YouTube Home feed is an especially important destination for viewers, and the Masthead ad allows you to be first and foremost in that home experience
If you’re looking to optimize your paid digital advertising—especially through paid social media—contact us for a free assessment.
