Measures of Success: Social Media

The social media marketing playbook changes constantly, striving to keep pace with users whose habits and content preferences never seem to stay static for long. The challenges facing each brand amount to the same simple concept: how can we apply what we know about our audience in the most relevant time, place, and format possible?

The solution to this deceptively simple formula is to better understand how users act on each of the major social channels, and how best to apply this knowledge to every phase of the funnel. They say 90% of life is just showing up — here’s how you can use your KPI data to be there when your customers need you.

Full-Funnel Strategy: Facebook

The social giant isn’t new to marketers, but the scope of a full-funnel strategy might be a dramatic change for those who neglect Facebook’s most useful features. Facebook is a powerful engine many small business marketers drive well below the speed limit — there’s potential for more, and with 2.7 billion monthly active users, we’d argue it’s worth exploring.

The most common use for Facebook marketing also happens to be where a many ads get stuck: Awareness campaigns. Introducing your brand to new customers is the very foundation of your digital presence, but it should also guide users seamlessly into your additional campaigns aimed at further consideration and action.

Start with your audience. Launching a top-of-funnel campaign on Facebook from scratch means creating a pool of qualified potential customers. These loyal future customers are served ads based on shared similarities with users who have previously engaged with your brand in some way — maybe they simply liked your page, or more ideally visited your website and even added a product to their cart. This is the basis for your target ToFu audience, and it shouldn’t be skipped or left to seek conversions on its own without help from Facebook’s other tools.

Facebook calls the next stage “consideration,” or the ideal stage to wow your new leads with offers and make use of dynamic product ads and other retargeting options in the dashboard. Mid-funnel marketing should use KPIs gained from these engagements to your advantage by prompting customers to return to abandoned carts for easy checkout and letting Facebook do the heavy creative lifting by locating relevant product images, prices, and other details based on previous activity. It’s important to keep an eye on CTR and CPC metrics to ensure you aren’t bombarding users with ads, and to refresh or diversify your creative if these metrics start to slip.

These tactics lead seamlessly to your bottom-funnel efforts. By now you know who your customers are and what their journey has looked like, and the work becomes a matter of narrowing the gaps between their initial interest and checkout. Ensure every step of the checkout process is optimized through Facebook conversion campaigns, and consider adding a storefront on Facebook in-app to make it even simpler for users to shop without disruption.

Full-Funnel Strategy: Instagram

You might see some slight changes in terminology, but the game is the same on Facebook’s photo-sharing sister-app. Attracting customers with ads on Instagram allows you to flex your creative side, using photo album-style product stories and eye-catching video to their fullest extent.

On an app featuring roughly half a billion users all trying to get noticed (and half of those users following at least one business), the most effective creative will convey your brand’s values clearly and honestly. ToFu efforts should make use of the sharable nature of the platform and at all times promote some form of engagement — try running polls, promote ads on Instagram Stories, host contests, maybe even all the above if this is a new channel for you.

Instagram Shop creates a natural destination for mid-to-low funnel efforts taking your meaningful engagements and aiding users with an easy-to-use “Shop” tab. Where your ToFu content should always be shareable, the focus now should be making ads shoppable. Instagram helps out advertisers all the time with new innovations for exactly this purpose, so don’t be afraid to experiment with the other tools at your disposal.

Among Instagram’s most basic and most efficient tools is product tagging. The product functions similarly to tagging a person in a photo, displaying a shopping icon to shoppable products in any of your images by tapping on the post. Product tagging in promoted posts is a big reason 60% of users report finding new products on the platform.

Full-Funnel Strategy: Snapchat

Snapchat effectively delivers awareness ads by incorporating promotions into the very core of the app’s experience — after all, users are already looking for videos to watch and photos to view in bite-size portions. Advertisers can appeal to younger audiences by capitalizing on Snapchat’s slick slideshow-style visuals and in-app creative functions for easy-to-launch awareness campaigns. The app also has a Discover section displaying paid and organic content for users to skim through, making it worth your social media manager’s while to keep your brand’s profile and story updated.

As with the channels listed above, KPIs come into play heavily with Snapchat’s retargeting capabilities. While awareness ads simply flutter unobtrusively between user stories, retargeting ads prompt engagement by telling users to swipe up to leave the app. Web views will provide telling insights into which stories are most piquing your audience’s interest, and which types tend to fall flat.

One piece of data that may go underappreciated is Snapchat’s implied mobile connection — users only use Snapchat on their phones, which means app-install campaigns and other mobile-centric advertisers have much to gain from fully utilizing Snapchat’s many ad formats and placements.

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These three social channels form the foundation of most every brand’s digital efforts, which makes understanding them all the more important. Each can provide full-funnel support to your advertising and improve the methods by which you employ your KPI metrics, and lead to a more detailed image of your target audience’s ever-changing behavior.