Check point before our Facebook and Linkedin ads guide, have you:

• Set up your Social Media Business Pages?
• Set up your Ad Manager account?
• if not please refer to our guides on how to create your business page and ad manager account

Guide to Social Media Advertising

Social media advertising is simply paid promotion of your products, services, or brands through social media platforms. Social media advertising offers businesses a unique opportunity to connect with a large number of users who actively use these platforms. It allows them to leverage the vast amount of user data (yes, even 65+) and advanced targeting capabilities provided by social media platforms to deliver targeted ads to specific demographics, interests, and behaviors (ex: those t65 in your market).

Depending on your business goals, Social Media can be worth investing in. Some of the benefits to running social media ads include:

1. Increased brand visibility: Allowing businesses to showcase their products or services to a wide audience, potentially increasing brand recognition and visibility.
2. Targeted reach: Advertisers can define specific audience segments based on demographics, interests, and behaviors, ensuring their ads are shown to relevant users.
1. Examples:
1. Reaching those turning 65 in your market
2. Hosting an event in your local area and wanting to target specific zip codes that events will be at
3. Life insurance agents to go into medicare
3. Engagement and interaction: Social media ads often encourage user engagement through likes, shares, comments, and clicks, facilitating interactions between brands and their target audience.
1. Insurance and healthcare is a business that thrives off of personalization and interaction. In a digital age this is a great way to be able to communicate with a wider audience and who are interested in your services.
4. Measurable results: Advertisers can track the performance of their campaigns through various metrics, such as impressions, clicks, conversions, and return on investment (ROI), allowing them to optimize their strategies and budget allocation.
5. Cost-effectiveness: Social media advertising can be relatively affordable compared to traditional forms of advertising, making it accessible to businesses of all sizes.
1. The cost per result (how much a lead costs you) for social media is less than the majority of other advertising mediums. For example, direct mail has a success rate industry wide of 1% and if you spent $700 on a 1000 mailer, expecting 1% response rate.

It is important to note that the effectiveness of social media advertising depends on factors such as campaign strategy, creative content, targeting accuracy, engagement with the audience and your budget. You must identify your goal and how your strategy and content will align. Social media ads take work and continuous monitoring, and optimization are crucial to achieving successful outcomes in social media advertising campaigns.

Creating you social media advertising strategy:

1. Determine your objectives and goal
1. What is your advertisement trying to achieve?
1. Use this SMART GOALS WORKSHEET
2. Identify your target audience
1. Where do they live?
2. What age range are they?
3. What are their interests?
4. What can you do to help them?
3. Choosing social media platforms
1. Based on the target audience analysis, select the most appropriate social media platforms for advertising.
1. For Medicare it will be primarily Facebook
4. Developing your ad creative

Always connect with your target audience, they should immediately identify with your post as well as ensuring your content aligns with your brand image.

Description:

How are you capturing the attention of your target audience and letting them know what you offer in a matter of seconds?

Call to action:

1. Are you leading people to your website?
2. Do you want people to call you?
3. Are you using a facebook lead form for lead generation?
4. Are you hosting an event and looking for RSVPs?
5. Are you linking to Spark’s permission to contact form as another avenue for lead generation?
• Testing different ad creatives, descriptions, and call to actions will help you understand your target audience more in depth and get the most leads for the lowest cost.
6. Set your ad campaign budget
7. Review your marketing budget and how much can be allocated to social media ads
1. For Facebook the Spark marketing team recommends starting at $250-500 with a duration of at least two weeks, 3-4 weeks recommended. If you have a higher marketing budget and see success start increasing your budget and duration which will expand your ad reach, marrow your targeting, and result in more leads,
8. If you will be paying an expert ad agency or freelancer to run your ads, also account for this cost in your ad or overall marketing budget

Best Practices for Social Media Ads from Meta and Spark Marketing Team

Creative:

• For videos: Keep videos under 15 seconds, grab attention in the first 3 seconds, and make sure to use vertical formats.
• For photos: Make sure to use eye-catching imagery and vertical formats that are relatable to your target audience.
• Spark Marketing Team Recommendation: You want your target audience to identify with any imagery, someone who looks like them, doing an activity they like, has the values they do, etc.
• Ensure your creative is capturing the target audience's attention in seconds.
• Clear call to action
• The imagery they can relate to, how can they identity with the image of the creative
• Your logo and brand colors

Budget:

• Meta has recommended budgets for each ad objective. Regardless, make sure you give your ad enough budget for 7 days so the system has time to optimize.
• Spark Marketing Team recommendation: 2-4 weeks ad duration with a budget starting at $250-500, increase if you are an agency with a large marketing budget and want to allocate a significant amount to social media ads. You are able to find the best amount to spend for results by having a larger budget, in theory, larger budget, larger reach, and results. However, this is a balance, and even with a budget of $250-500 a month, you can see results.
• Example real spark agent: spent $250 for 2 weeks and got 6 leads the cost per result (lead) is $40 through a video ad.

Audience:

• Most ads see the best performance with an audience size of 2-10 million. However, depending on your region and typical audience interests, your ideal audience may be smaller or larger.
• Spark Marketing Team recommendation: select all the states you sell in and increase the age range from below 65, with a demographic of 65+ in one state it is very difficult to get an audience size of 2-10 million.

Placements:

• Meta ads allow you to place ads on Stories, Reels, feeds and other placements across Facebook and Instagram. Meta recommends using Advantage+ placements to automatically find the best placements for your ad.

Success:

• Spark Marketing team recommendation: If you are not seeing success with your ad within a week, try changing a few things:
• Audience size
• try to have a larger audience, add in younger demographic, expanding to under 65+ and adding to the creative to include “are you or a loved one” that way anyone that has a family member aging into Medicare can also reach out to learn more.
• Location radius
• expand the radius
• Your ad creative
• change your headlines, imagery, etc on your ad creative to see if it will grab more attention from your target audience.
• Your lead form description / CTA
• Try different call to actions: “learn more about how you can take advantage of your benefits”, “speak with a local agent today”, “medicare confusion is gone click here to join the growing amount of seniors that I have helped get the most of their benefits”, “ready to throw out junk mail and tune out tv ads, call me”

To read more from Meta guides go HERE