Targeted paid advertising on social media can be scarily effective.
How many times have you started to research a product or service, just to have ads for that very same offering continuously appear across your social media feeds?
There’s quite a few reasons both consumers and marketers can enjoy sponsored and targeted marketing posts. They work. On Facebook, sponsored posts on desktop ads have 8.1x higher click-through rates and mobile ads have 9.1x higher click-through rates than normal web ads.
Buyers see things that are relevant to them and connect them with products they may have never known they wanted to purchase. Marketers get to easily reach the right people without having to study and question every user.
As a result, everyone’s happy. Right?
Wrong.
As good as targeted marketing is, sometimes, small errors in the posts will cost marketers hours of time and money lost. Your brand’s stakeholders don’t want to hear that their money is being wasted on social posts that don’t convert. Here’s a list of your buyers’ biggest pet peeves with targeted marketing posts, and how you can avoid them.
They Already Bought Your Product
Nothing bothers a customer like getting badgered to buy your product when they have already purchased.
You’ve likely experienced this in the B2C realm. You buy a product on Amazon and suddenly, suggested ads pop up with what you just purchased. But you already bought it; why are you getting targeted for it again?
These paid posts know you liked the product and you were interested in it. Shouldn’t these targeted posts also know when NOT to target someone?
By targeting previous customers and treating them differently, you’ll find that you are spending less on paid advertising. You will no longer be wasting money targeting someone who is already a customer.
If you have the budget, target these same people with upgrades or requests for feedback. This way they aren’t getting badgered with your offering when they’ve already converted.
The Post Is Irrelevant to Them
Sometimes, targeted advertising gets it wrong. Maybe a company all works on the same IP address. Targeting them based on IP address may mean that Operations sees a post structured for the brand’s content writer.
This will frustrate users and make them less likely to believe in your brand.
Make sure your targeting deals with the challenges of creating relevant ads for all the proper stakeholders, but trying to avoid sending them to users who may want to or have the power to buy your products.
The Post Appears Too Frequently
Like anything in marketing, you should take care to not spam your audience. They may want to see your post on the virtues of marketing automation, but they don’t want to see it five times in one day.
Using A/B testing, be sure to figure out how many posts your audience would like to see in a single day and optimize appropriately.
Keep in mind, in Facebook’s algorithm, pages are penalized after a single post each day. Keep your posts at this limit and you’ll find that you’re wasting less time and effort on posts that aren’t successful.
According to LinkedIn, pages should post just once on the platform per day.
Your Posts Contain Typos
I recently saw a post that was giving away a set of free tickets for an event. The only problem was, they were giving away “tikcets” instead of tickets.
The post received insanely low engagement, despite being a popular brand in the industry. The top comment?
“You spelled ticket wrong.”
This targeted post hit the newsfeeds of a lot of people, but when they saw the glaring typo in the headline, they either ignored it or clicked on the comments to confirm someone had mentioned the typo. Then they kept scrolling.
This little anecdote is a good reminder for brands to have an editorial process in place for social posts. Even if your team is small, just writing the posts, looking away from them for a couple minutes, then reading them out loud would eliminate easy errors like I mentioned above.
Your Posts Are in the Wrong Places
I have my computer set up at work so that marketing advertisements don’t show up on my Facebook feed.
I don’t like seeing B2B marketing advertisements on my personal Facebook page. When I’m on Facebook at home, I don’t want to have the latest and greatest marketing software appear on my screen.
That’s something to consider when you set up paid social posts. Ensure that you are reaching for your customers on the right channels, otherwise, you are just wasting money by sponsoring posts that will never provide ROI.
Your audience loves social posts when they are done correctly. Don’t let them down. If you follow these guidelines, you will end up spending less on targeted advertising and will get more out of the money you do spend. That will make both your boss and your customers much happier.
What are your biggest pet peeves when it comes to targeted marketing? What do you do to make your targeted marketing better? Let us know in the comments.
Hi Acadia!
We all know that Marketing is not a rocket science. But we must not shy away from using some of our Brain Cells.
This is a very great post that covered all the good aspects of Marketing. A very good Marketing Tactic Must have the following ingredients:
#1. Market only to Target Your Ideal Customer.
#2. Marketing strategy must also cover how to keep in touch with the existing customer base and keeping your relations solid.
I used these same tactics to consult my clients and wrote a few of them to tell their importance. I’m glad that I visited to this amazing article. Thanks for sharing it with us.