Look at your ad goals and your current financial situation, which can help you to determine your ad spend. Don’t spend too much – starting out small helps you to control your finances, and when you’ve got all the elements right, you may find that a small budget can bring you great results and a big return on your investment. 

Don’t underestimate the power of targeting – knowing who your target audience are is crucial for ensuring your ads are delivered to the right people. If you target your ads wrong you could end up wasting money and time on an Ad that doesn’t perform, so get a good idea of who it is you want interacting with your business and clicking on the links you have included within your ads.  

 

You want to consider such things as: 

 

• Where your audience are located – if you have a physical location, you may only be looking for people who live around the area your business is in. If you offer an online course, or sell online, you may choose to target multiple cities, the entire country or a global audience. 

 

• Their age – knowing how old your audience are will allow you to tailor other elements of your campaign such as your copy and graphics. Facebook typically lets you target users from the ages of 18 – 65+. 

 

• Their gender – Whether your business is created for everyone or you create products or courses specifically for women or men, you can use this to design your ad creative and target the correct people. 

 

• Their interests – What does you audience like? What personality traits do they possess? For example, if you run a sports company, you can target people who are interested in fitness or a specific sport. This can help to narrow your audience to those most likely to show interest in your ad. 

Next, you want to consider creating your visual elements. These must convey the message of your ad, stand out from the crowd and help to capture the attention of those scrolling through their feed. Your ad must be branded so it can be easily recognisable alongside your business – helping with building brand recognition too – using your logo, colours, fonts and tone of voice in your visual elements to create a cohesive campaign. You can use an image in a single or carousel format, or if you’d rather, use a video to help convey the message of your campaign – however, keeping these videos short, sweet and to-the-point can be much more powerful at retaining interest from your audience than a longer video. A/B testing can be helpful too – creating different variations of you visuals or using a video, single image and carousel and testing them to see which works better can help to shape your future campaigns. 

Now, you need to think about writing your copy. Your copy must be compelling, answers the pain points and wants of your audience by providing value to them, and encourage them to take the next steps via your call to action. Be direct with your messaging, get to the point and don’t make it too long – like your visuals, your copy must grab the audience’s attention straight away.  

 

Ensure it’s written in your brand voice, and works with the visual elements you’ve created. You can also decide to A/B test your copy, using different styles, lengths and messaging to see what your audience best responds to. 

Once you get these basic things set into place, you can begin to consider such things ad formats, placements, and reviewing each element of your campaign. If you’re creating ads, then these four things are key to know and get right before you begin running your campaigns. 

 

✅ Content Calendar – Having a content calendar can help you stay on track, especially for small businesses who’ll likely not have the time to spend on their social media marketing or have the money to hire a dedicated marketing department. Scheduling tools allow you to prepare posts to go out at the optimal times and days for your business – helping you avoid putting something together at the last minute and lets you consistently promote your campaigns, events or launches. 

 

✅ Brand Voice and Style – How do you want to sound and look to your audience? Writing your post in your brand voice and creating visuals that align with your brand’s style help to craft your online identity. Consistent posting in this voice and style allows you to build recognition and trust with your audience. 

 

✅ Variety – Content variety helps you to cater to different wants from your audience, and can help you to boost your engagement. With what you should already know about your audience, having a couple of different styles such as videos, static posts and carousel posts included in your content marketing allows you to mix things up whilst keeping your consistent style and messaging. 

 

✅ Add Value – Your content must provide value and hook your audience in – tips, how-to’s, behind-the-scenes or simple entertaining posts can all work depending on how you want to portray your business online. Think about the brands you purchase from and have interest in, consider how their marketing caught your attention, and then take look at your own business and how you can have a similar appeal to your target audience. 

Monitoring your data is extremely important, as it lets you know how you’re performing on social media and allows you to make changes and smarter choices. Here’s what you should have on your analytics checklist: 

 

✅ Engagement Rates – Engagement is a vanity metric, but it is still handy to measure as it points to how users are interacting with your content. High engagement can show that your audience is resonating with what you post, and minimal engagement can help you discover where things need to change in order to improve your performance. 

 

✅ Reach & Impressions – Track how many people are seeing your content, and how often. This will give you a good idea if it’s performing, reaching the right audience and if your visibility is good across the platforms you’ve chosen to post on. 

 

✅ Click Through Rate – If you’re including links or running ads, click through rate is an important metric to monitor. It lets you know how many people are clicking through to your landing page, and then from you can monitor whether they’re taking any action on the page. 

 

✅ Followers – Are you gaining followers or page likes? This can be a good indicator of your audience size and consistent growth can show interest in your brand – but this is also another vanity metric, so whilst good to monitor it doesn’t necessarily hold a lot of weight if you have a low follower count but high click through rate, sales, each or impressions. 

Building a relationship with your audience helps to increase brand loyalty and bring in great results. Here’s what to include in your Audience Checklist: 

 

✅ Personas – Create a target audience persona, so you know exactly the type of person you want your content to appeal to. Consider their age, gender, location, job type, interests and where they frequent on social media. Knowing this means you can then work out how to craft your content to speak their language and meet their needs. 

 

✅ Engagement Patterns – Your analytics will be able to tell you when your audience are most active, so that you can figure out when the best times to post are. Posting your content at the peak times they’ll be online can improve your reach, impressions and engagement. 

 

✅ Feedback – Your audience leaving reviews and comments can give you real-time insight into how they are feeling. Responding professionally and promptly lets you start conversations, answer questions, create relationships and solve any issues people may be having – good customer service is important, so make sure you’re keeping on top of this. It also helps you to create a deeper connection with your audience and improve your business/products in areas that they’ve had a problem with or don’t engage with – a win/win situation for you and them. 

By keeping these things in mind for your checklist, you’ll have a comprehensive guide to measuring and managing your social media performance. Revisit your checklist often, and update where necessary as your business and the digital landscape evolves.