Social Media Paid Advertising Training

Campaign Development

Now that you understand the basics of social media advertising it is time to start planning your campaign. Using the knowledge you have gained you will need to identify the following before going to market.

1. Are you boosting content or creating a campaign – Boosting content is the action of adding money to organic social posts to increase the awareness and reach an audience beyond your followers. The cost is usually smaller than a entire campaign and is done on a individual level. The boost can only be applied to a singular piece of content. A social media campaign is developing the content in the social media channel’s Ad Manager targeting an external audience and the content is not visible to page followers, just the audience you target. These are also called “dark posts” and the cost can be allocated across multiple creatives.
2. Share with C&PA – At any given time there are numerous advertising campaigns from different institutional channels in market. To ensure our individual channels are not cannibalizing each others content or bidding for the same audience, please share your plans with Communications & Public Affairs. If you are just planning on boosting content and the budget is under $2,000, you will not need to share your plan, unless you wish to leverage the central brand channels to share the content.
3. What is your target audience – Having a defined audience will help target your content to the right demographic. It will also help keep costs low by only targeting those that could be interested in what you are advertising. Main things to consider are: age, location, interests, education, and career. Advanced opportunities are available to create targets from lists, look-a-like audiences, and from those that engaged with content. If you are boosting, understand some of the limitations with creating a target audience.
4. What channel(s) to use – Now you know what your target audience is, you need to ask where do they live? Are they on Facebook? Instagram? LinkedIn? You can define this by looking at a breakdown of your channel audiences in the insights. Or if you wish to evaluate, determine what channel has the best chance to reach you target audience. Here is a helpful article to determine what channel to use.
5. What is your objective – Are you looking to increase event registrations? Create brand awareness? Lead Generation? Generate conversation? Grow page following? Other? Determining this will make generating content easier.
6. What content to share – After completing steps 1-3, it is time to start developing your content and media. Your social copy should be concise, easy to read and capture the attention of the audience. Exact skills are identified per each channel training below. For creating visual content, making sure that it is visually appealing, shares your main value ad, and aligns with the York University brand ensure trust and transparency with the audience. Here are some tips for creating visuals.
7. What are your KPIs – Now that you have your campaign set, it is time to identify how you will track success. This is dependent on what type of content you share, campaign objective and audience.
8. Identify your budget – Everything is ready to go, now to determine what to spend. Each platform will give you projected results based on the audience and spend.
9. What is the timing – This will be determined based on what the goals and budget are. If you are targeting for a specific event at the very least you should run the campaign two weeks prior.
10. Final Considerations – Will you do an A/B test? Target different audiences? This is great to optimize your campaign to the highest preforming creative/CTA. Note: These advanced techniques are available for certain platforms but require additional training.
11. Launch the Campaign – Success! You are ready to go into the channel ad manager and setup the campaign!