Small Business Marketing Series - Vol 3
This blog post is the third of our Small Business Marketing Series. The series’ aim is to provide small businesses in New Zealand with hands-on practical advice to increase their marketing performance. If your small business requires marketing solutions, get in touch with the team here.
SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING
Social media marketing – isn’t that just for spam advertisements?
This is an unfortunately common question that many small businesses in Palmerston North ask us. The reality is that conducting business on social media has never been more crucial in 2021 – with the current pandemic we’re in, digital sales have increased more than ever. In fact, PWC conducted a report in May 2021 identifying that eCommerce sales in the retail sector are expected to increase from 13.9% to 22.4% between 2019 and 2023.
There are many facets in which small businesses can reach their customers today, from Google Ads, Facebook and Instagram ads, to LinkedIn, TikTok, and Youtube advertising. Today, businesses don’t need to worry about pouring their money into one advertising channel (such as radio, television, or the newspaper) for near-immeasurable returns. With paid social media marketing, you can learn your exact cost-per-click, cost-per-lead, cost-per-customer-acquisition and more. Meaning that accurately calculating ROI and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) is possible. With such detailed data and analytics at a low cost, growing a small business today has never been easier.
Businesses don’t need to rely on paid marketing to return great results, organic content is free to produce and publish directly to your loyal customers following your page. Most importantly, they can purchase your services and goods directly through your page, or easily call you/visit your website to purchase there.
The best thing? You don’t need to initiate the sale, or spend a dollar to do so.
What makes effective organic content on social media?
Organic content is great if your business has a strong brand narrative that your loyal customers want to buy into. Your business may do this through multiple avenues such as environmental efforts, awe-inspiring product innovation, or family-focused approaches. Every successful business on social media has a narrative – why else would so many people be following their activities on a day-to-day basis?
An example of a business with great social media marketing is Trees That Count. You can find their Facebook page here. They are a great example because their organic content doesn’t deviate from their narrative and theme. People follow them and continue to engage with their page because of this feel-good ‘northern star’ promoting environmental initiatives that their following support.
What channels should I use – should I be advertising on Tik Tok?
The more channels you have, the more work you’re going to have to put in to grow your business page’s audience through organic and paid content. The good news is that not every channel is built the same, therefore you don’t need to be everywhere online right now.
Facebook is by far the most successful all-around business for a lot of small businesses. Facebook also owns Instagram, and therefore have an integrated Business Manager – allowing you to advertise across both channels from one location. Not every business needs to be on Instagram, but Facebook is likely a must-have.
LinkedIn is a great place for B2B businesses. If you run a B2C business and you’re advertising here, be prepared to pay a significant amount for sponsored ads as the average CPC is higher on this platform. Organic content will also be unpopular if your business does not speak to professionals on the platform.
Youtube is a good choice for visual media advertisements if you have strong promotional video marketing resources. The greater the quality of the script, video footage, editing, and narrative, the better your video advertisements will perform. In terms of the effectiveness of organic video content, it depends on your current followers and accompanying channels in order to determine how many views your video will receive.
TikTok is one of the fastest-growing digital marketing channels among younger demographics. In fact, based on data collected by Hootsuite 48% of users aged between 18 – 29 and 20% of users aged 30 – 49 use the platform. This platform is still young and growing and therefore a perfect environment for small businesses to jump on board with as long as the content matches the fun and exciting content already being posted here.
Get More Customers with Pay Per Click (PPC) Ads
What is PPC advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn?
Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns are paid advertisements that can be advertised to certain locations, audiences, look-alike audiences, age groups, genders and more. This form of advertising differs from a boosted post as it is not posted to your platform’s page, but rather it shows in the audience’s newsfeed that you’ve targeted
If you have ever noticed the advertisements that appear alongside search results on Google and other search engines, you are already familiar with pay-per-click, or PPC advertising.
How can I create effective PPC campaigns?
An effective PPC campaign starts with specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and timely goals – otherwise known as SMART goals. These goals are critical in understanding the overall objective that you wish your marketing material to attain, as well as the metrics/KPIs that you will track in order to achieve said goal. For example, if you wish to attain 10 more leads next month, you can’t simply create an ad, put $100 behind it and hope for the best. With this, there are no metrics for success – what is your cost-per-acquisition (CPA)? If it’s $100, then you would be generating 1 lead, not 10. In this scenario, you fail before you even begin without proper planning.
However, if you were to use the SMART goals principle, you might have the following goal instead:
To attain 10x more leads through Facebook PPC campaigns that are optimised for conversions. This will be measured with the CPA, cost-per-click (CPC), cost-per-lead (CPL), cost-per-conversion (CVR) metrics. This goal is attainable if we put a $1,200 ad spend behind the ad, as our average CPA is $100, and we are accounting for some additional ad spend if required. Lastly, the campaign will run over the next 30-days and will have ongoing management to ensure that we are on track.
Now, that’s a goal. It’s important to be data-driven when designing your goals and strategies – anecdotal evidence doesn’t deliver, only true data from your digital channels do.
How to get Return on Investment (ROI) through social media marketing
In order to determine whether or not your advertising on social media will be profitable, you first need to understand a few key metrics from your website and social media page.
From your website
Online store conversion rate (the percentage of sessions that resulted in orders out of the total number of sessions)
Average order value (value of all orders divided by the number of orders)
From your social media page
Average cost-per-click (CPC)
Average cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
Every click from your advertisements has a cost to it (CPC) and each click from your social media ads result in one session on your targeted web page (session). By using the online store conversion rate, we can determine what the average cost is to attain a client, and whether or not our ROI is positive or negative.
For example
Lucy sells lunchboxes online. Through her Facebook Ads she generates a CPC of $0.60 and converts on average 3.00% of online store sessions.
We can now calculate her cost-per-acquisition (CPA): 100/3 = 33.33 (sessions needed to convert for one sale). 33.33*$0.60 = ~$20.
Lucy can then use this number to compare against her current product margins to determine how profitable her current ads are. Ultimately, to make the most return on investment, CPA’s need to be as low as possible.
If the ads are profitable, Lucy may decide to make no changes to her ads or website. However, If she would like to improve her profit and ROI, she’ll need to diagnose potential issues and in order to accurately determine the problem-areas, an audit is required that includes, but is not limited to:
- Optimising the online shop for the customer’s journey
- Determine whether or not the social media ad creative outdated
- Testing whether the ad’s content is relevant or contextual to the end-user
- Split-testing and measuring for optimal results
All too often ads are thrown up on Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn without much success due to the lack of testing, planning, and optimisation – with the business owner abandoning all hope and moving on to the next potential platform. In some cases, this may be the right decision, however more often than not it’s simply a matter of adjusting the ad’s creative, copy, and audience.
Social media marketing for service businesses
If your business is a service-based business, measuring and tracking your performance is just as important and an eCommerce store. Local Palmerston North businesses can generate massive amounts of ROI through social media advertising. It typically all comes down to how much you’re willing to spend, what your CPA’s are and how your business differentiates from your competitors. Ultimately, you’ll need a strong marketing strategy over time that can be easily altered to fit your customer’s constant demands, today.
Have a free online consultation today, no obligations.
Now that you have everything you need to know to determine your social media marketing performance – to find out how you can generate more sales this week. We are an experienced Palmerston North digital marketing agency that can help with social media advertising, search engine optimisation, Google Ads, marketing strategy and more.