Digital Marketing Mythbusters: Results From Marketing Campaigns Show Immediately

Welcome back to our Mythbuster series, where we’re putting the common misconceptions about all things marketing to rest. Marketing 101 are a digital marketing agency in Brighton to bring you the best tips and pointers to boost your marketing strategy.

As many businesses that use paid advertising on social media will be aware, sometimes it can take a little while for those clicks to turn into leads and conversions…

I want to invest in social media ads; is it worth it?

This entirely depends on what your aims are. However, social media advertising campaigns can achieve a wealth of results if you harness the tools correctly. 

You can gain more website traffic, generate new email sign-ups and direct people to a specific product or service all through social media ads. The most popular and used platform to advertise on is Facebook and Instagram, with the umbrella term being called ‘Meta Ads’. 

Why won’t I see results instantly when using Meta Ads?

Meta needs to learn how people interact with your ad and change who the ad reaches accordingly. There are many ways in which Meta tailor your ad content to ensure it reaches the right audiences…

One of the ways is through Audience Insight tools. This is a free tool within Meta which collates information from Facebook profiles, allowing businesses to understand their current and potential audience demographics, interests and more. This will in turn predict lifestyle choices and target ads more accurately.

How can I ensure the right audience sees my ad?

Businesses can create custom audiences within Meta Ads using data from their interactions with their brand on Facebook and Instagram.

A lookalike audience can be created based on this data, which in turn allows Meta to target potential customers who share similar traits and behaviours. However, Meta will learn over time who is and isn’t interacting with these ads and will adjust their algorithms. This is why you won’t see instant results from your Meta Ads.

It’s also important to remember that core audiences are based on demographics such as location, interests and behaviours, whereas custom audiences are ideal for targeting lookalike audiences for prospecting for new customers. 

Custom audiences are usually based on how users have interacted with your brand previously, including data from things such as website visitors, app users or people who have engaged with your Meta content. There is often some initial setup work required to make sure that any data captured is super-accurate, such as installing a Meta Pixel on your website (but a Marketing Expert will usually do all of this for you).

For example, if we were looking to advertise to an audience, one of the things we’d be looking for are people who have searched or interacted with the search ‘Digital Marketing Agency Brighton’, or people who have accessed our website previously.

Will my ad go viral?

This is not something that anybody can predict. As apps such as TikTok have shown, anything can go viral these days. It’s important to remember that going viral is an exception rather than the norm, so maybe lower expectations a little!

And what is A/B testing?

A/B testing allows you to create and compare two variations of the same ad to see what performs better. It’s important to note that you should only really test one variable at a time to ensure that you can work out what it is that is gaining clicks, rather than making the ads completely different and struggling to figure out why one is performing better.

So, picture this. A mobile phone company creates two images for a Facebook ad. One image is just a photo of the product and the brand logo, the other image is a text-based image noting the features of the phone. They set the ads live, and noticed after a month that the first image of just the phone was doing better than the text-based image. They learnt that their audience preferred the image-only advert and adjusted the rest of their ads accordingly. 

This of course is just a theoretical example, but it is a great way of defining what it is your audience engages with. 

So, we say go for it! If you’ve been toying with the idea of creating some social media ads but have heard ‘horror stories’ of ads going live for a week or two and not gaining any return, now you know why. 

These ads need time to marinate and collect that all-important data to help your ads thrive.

Marketing 101 isn’t your average digital marketing agency in Brighton. We have a proven track record of generating new leads for businesses, so if that sounds up your street then get in touch with us.