5 Tools to Fine-Tune Your Social Media Advertising Strategy

Social media advertising is a great way to quickly generate new customers and create a social media buzz around your (new) product.

But it can be quite costly, especially if your team fails to continuously invest time into fine-tuning your strategy.

Social media strategyneeds constant tweaking, analyzing and learning from your or your competitors’ success and failures.

Apart from the obvious tools (like Facebook and Twitter Analytics), here are five tools to help you come with new social media advertising tactics:

What engages your social media best? What types of special offers and product features are being discussed on social media? What annoys your customers most, urging them to voice their complaints on social media?

A well set-up social listening strategy will answer all of these questions and more. Apart from using social media listening as part of your customer support andrelationship management strategy, make sure to set up a few more alerts to keep an eye on:

Social media listening strategy provides a goldmine of data for you to create a better informed advertising strategy.

Awariois an advanced social media listening platform that has a powerful market research component allowing you to better understand your niche. Use Awario boolean search feature to create advanced alerts that include several of your competitors’ names within one dashboard or let you monitor all of your target keywords.

Awario uses smart algorithms to prioritize those mentions and generate handy email digest for you to save time going through daily alerts.

Apart from using social listening for market research, there’s another powerful tactic few brands are utilizing: Curate yourbrand’s social proofand use it as an ad copy. Create a separate alert to get notified of your brand’s mentions with positive sentiment and collect those updates for future reference when you are fine-tuning your ad copy or looking for new ideas to position your brand when advertising on social media.

Finally, Awario allows you to evaluate your new advertising strategy by giving you access to your brand’s growth stats and allowing you to see how the sentiment has been changing:

In fact, when creating a social media ad, try using all kinds of marketing experiments. For example, look at your most effective email blasts and try re-usingthose subject lines. Or look atyour most successful headlinesorCTAsand find a way to follow the same style in your advertising copy.

While you may already be aware ofFacebook ads libraryallowing you to see which advertising strategies your competitors were using, Buzzsumo’s Facebook tools may be new to you.

Buzzsumoallows you to compare two or more Facebook pages and their content performance, side by side.

You can filter updates by post type to evaluate your competitors’ more creative tactics, like engaging questions they ask their audience or videos they invest into promoting.

Finding the right words for an engaging ad copy is art.

It’s also a process that never ends. You need to constantly come up with new ways to craft a message so that it could engage new customers.

Text Optimizeris my source of never-ending inspiration. Just type your core keyword and it will come with a huge list of related concepts your customers are also interested about. It will also allow you to analyze popular niche questions and suggest the most relevant and engaging context.

Use the tool whenever you feel stuck and need some inspiration, like new angles and copy ideas.

SE Ranking keyword researchis another ideation tool I often use for any type of content marketing, including social media copy. It shows popular ads for any keywords allowing me to see which wording competitors are using for their PPC ads:

Who are those people behind your target social media accounts? Which hashtags are they using? Who are they listening to?

Answering all of those questions can help you on many levels, from creating a buyer’s personas to target your ads better to finding more ways to create your targeting strategy, like hashtag- or influencer-driven targeting.

SparkTorois an audience research tool that allows you to access lots of well-organized data on how your customers are discussing your primary topic, who they engage with on social media, which Youtube channels they are subscribed to and which blogs or magazines they read.

There’s also a detailed report of your target audience demographics and popular topics they tend to discuss:

Click any report section to access even more data.

All in all, the platform is everything you need to create a smarter targeting strategy.

When it comes to marketing research,surveyingyour current customers is also always a great idea. This is the fundamentalcustomer-centric contenttactic that will breathe new life in any marketing strategy.

Don’t you want to know how your social media users engage with your landing page?

Surely, your response would be “yes”, because you spend money on attracting that click. Obviously, you want to make sure that visitor will engage with the page and become your customer.

While you are already using Google Analytics, it is not always easy to visualize what really attracts your site visitors’ attention and what attracts them.

Any time you are launching a new advertising campaign, set up a new tracking campaign usingheatmaps. Heatmaps visualize clicks and mouse movements on your page allowing you to see which page elements should be rearranged to make the page easier to navigate.

Unlike Google Analytics that is continuously running on your pages, heat-mapping tools rely on a sample of data. Create new tracking, every time you have a new ad. This way you will be able to go back and compare your past heatmaps and identify what worked and what may have made things worse.Using A/B testingto pick a better performing landing page is also a very good idea.

As they say, when starting a social media campaign, it’s more about collecting the data than sales. Focus on learning from your successes and failures and make sure touse Facebook remarketing pixelto be able to reach out to those visitors again with better targeted ads.

There are lots of businesses who readily invest into social media ads because they seem to be more affordable than Google ads and require less set-up time. Yet, few of those advertising are doing their best to boost their strategy performance. Hopefully the above tools will give you ideas on how to innovate and improve your social media strategy. Good luck!