EMBiz: 3 Advertising Tips From Paid Social Strategy Experts

Hi everyone! I'm Laurel Mintz, founder and CEO of Elevate My Brand, and this is EMBiz. Here are three advertising tips from the paid social strategy experts at our agency. 

1. A/B Test

The first one is, of course, A/B testing. We've talked about this quite a few times. If you aren't doing this, then you're not paying attention. At Elevate, we call it "high-velocity A/B testing" because you want to test quite a few things, but you also want to make sure, like a scientific experiment, you're not testing too many things at once. So you want to first test the visuals, then the messaging, then the audience, and then (finally) your objectives. And you want to do these in very specific sets of ads so that you can compare apples to apples. And make sure that you're watching the metrics to see which visual performs better, which messaging performs better, making sure you've tweaked and targeted your audience properly.

2. Set Bid Caps

The second piece that you need to make sure you're focused on is setting bid caps. One of the biggest challenges, of course, for any startup business or growth business is budgeting. And if you are unaware of what bid caps are, it's making sure that you don't go above a certain number to bid against your competitors for that eyeball. And if you don't do this, you could be spending way too much money for an eyeball that may not even be the right eyeball for you. So make sure that you're setting again, what are called bid caps, to ensure that you're being very clear on what your cost per acquisition target number should look like as it relates to paid ads, which is really important. There are also tools out there that you can use to see what your competitors are spending per click, CPM, etc. So, bid caps are really important to make sure that you are really corralling that budget because, let's face it, none of us are unlimited in terms of our spending. 

3. Set Up Tracking Properties

And the final advertising tip from your social strategy experts is setting up pixels or UTM tracking. Once you've built the ads and you've figured out what is actually working for your audience, which visuals are landing and which messaging is working, you want to make sure that you're tracking the pixels from those social ads. What it really means is the ad is landing from your social channels to your website, your landing page, whatever that kind of call to action tracking methodology might look like. And pixels and UTM tracking are just the technical components of how to do that.

Again, like we always say, we are center-brained. We are inspired by the creative, which is the AB testing side, but really driven by the data, which are the bid caps, the setting up of the pixels, and the UTM tracking.