In my experience, after working with so many small and big advertisers, I have seen that due to some preset notion of how things should be done has impacted a lot on their ROAS from social media spend. In fact over 60% of companies are actually wasting money or spending highly inefficiently – between 12-80% of their social media budgets.

To give few examples of waste:

Fixed Budget Allocation: Advertisers have a tendency to set a fix spend on campaign without actually identifying the best performing adset. As a result, if a campaign contains 5 ads with a fixed budget, and only one of those ads was performing better, you are actually losing almost over 70% of your budget if you are not dynamically directing your budget towards the winning adset.

Same Ad: Most advertisers – on average – let ad creative go stale (i.e. they stopped generating results) for a month before changing them out. This is easy to monitor, and generating/ testing new ads is quick and cheap

Not trying out new audience: I almost always find advertisers reaching out to the same audience segment for different types of ads that they run. But using features like lookalike, engaged, website visitors audience, advertisers can see a significant increase on their ROAS.

Limiting Ad Types: Many advertisers don’t use the range of various ad types available – which is criminal on platforms such as Facebook, when so many ad formats are on offer, generating radically different returns. Some examples can be Dynamic Product Ads,Offer Ads, Carousel Ads, Re-targeting etc.

Ad Creative: The difference between good creative and bad is enormous in terms of performance, yet most marketers still ‘sign off’ on each element of creative copy by committee, rather than based on performance. Here are some examples of how creative can impact performance: I have seen higher ROAS for ads that stated “X amount off” instead of “X percent off”, when images featured no gifts compared to images featuring gifts, when ads featured main courses instead of appetizers.

SOLUTION

It’s not simple and requires adaptation. In this new era of modern marketing, you will have to adapt to new changes, be flexible with experimentation and always try to use new tech and features available for reaching out to your target audience. It’s time for precision targeting so you don’t have the luxury to hold on to your old mass marketing habits nor the people, practices and partners who are holding you back.

Few things you can apply this year for a better result:

Set ROAS goals: Don’t spend money without identifying very specific return goals. It’s okay to get it wrong, but as long as you make it a practice, it will give you a better understanding of how to measure ROAS for future campaigns.

Run multiple ads: As I mentioned earlier, all ads don’t work well. So don’t rely on one ad. Create multiple tailored ads, 3-5 ads per segment if possible to best achieve or exceed your goals.

Test & Experiment: Your team or partner should make it a practice to keep on testing new audience, creative, ad types, bids etc. Just because something is working good doesn’t mean it can’t get better.

Use other media: Running social media campaigns gives you lot of data and insights into you target audience. Use that data to create ads in other media like display ad and traditional media.

So in 2018, plan your Social Media spend wisely and set specific ROAS goals to become an efficient advertiser. Have a look at your last year spend and set key indicators for future comparisons. This is a LOT of work, and can’t be done with your traditional manpower levels, or without the help of powerful technology, but if your media spend is meaningful, the ROI improvements on your media spend totally justify these additional costs.