Use these tricks to create a social media ad – Pick Dave’s Brain

Could sharing a picture of a messy office make you a Facebook millionaire?

This week’s question comes from Angy in Utah. She simply asks:

Q: What tips do you have for building an ad on social media?

Click to tweet this: Successful online ad campaigns begin with the question, “Who?” not “How?” @DaveCrenshaw

Video transcript:

Could sharing a picture of a messy office make you a Facebook millionaire? I’m Dave Crenshaw and it’s time to Pick Dave’s Brain!

This week’s question comes from Angy in Utah. She simply asks:

Angy:

What tips do you have for building an ad on social media?

Dave Crenshaw:

Such a short question and such a complex subject. I am going to try and simplify it just a little bit, though.

The first thing you want to do is target the right audience. This means knowing who it is that you’re actually reaching out to. Some people, when they’re first going into social media advertising, try to target everybody in the world. That is not the best bank for your buck.

So, first, we want to determine the network that we’re reaching out to. Do our people gather at LinkedIn or do they gather at Facebook, or Pinterest? Where are they? And then, when we go into creating the ad, we want to further segment the list according to things like age and geography. Even education or their job title on LinkedIn.

The more targeted you can be, the more effective your advertising will be because you will repeatedly reach those people over and over and over. And most people need to be contacted multiple times before they take action on an offer.

The two most important words in any kind of marketing are “test it.” We have no idea how well any ad that you come up with will perform until we actually run it in the marketplace. You may be a “Mad Men” genius and come up with a great idea, but if it doesn’t perform very well, then you don’t have a good ad.

I found–to my surprise–that the ads that I ran that showed a messy office outperformed ads that showed people who were all together. Now that may not be the same for your market, but you don’t know until you test it.

So, get a little bit of money. Try a small campaign and then see where it goes.

Thank you for that great question, Angy.

If you would like to pick Dave’s brain, all you need to do is click on that button underneath this video. Or you can go to DaveCrenshaw.com/ask.

And I really want to see what question you throw at me!