Brand recognition and user engagement are great objectives to have. But they’re just that – objectives. Ultimately, you’re doing social media marketing to generate and convert leads and maximize your return on investment (ROI). You need to be able to connect a social post or advertisement to a conversion goal on your site, such as a traffic or sales increase. In other words, convert leads into paying customers and bolster your social media conversion rate.
What is social media conversion rate, and what is the best way to improve it? You may already know that conversion is an action performed by your prospects after receiving a particular message from your brand or business. Social media conversion rate, then, is the percentage of conversions coming from a social media post or ad. And the best way to boost it is through paid social advertising, according to Alyssa Tear, Thrive’s senior manager for organic social media. It’s the opposite of organic content, which “can entice a user while in the research phase of their buying cycle,” she added.
In this blog, we explain the role of social media ads in lead conversion. We also walk you through optimization tactics that can help you produce high-performing ads on the most profitable platforms today.
• How to make social media ads click with your target audience
• How do you advertise on social media platforms like
○ Facebook
○ Twitter
○ LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest
Leads, Anyone?
In social marketing, you’re likely to be dealing with different kinds of leads at the same time. These leads go through various stages until they progress toward becoming paying customers:
• Lead generation: Finding new potential customers
• Lead nurturing: Building a relationship with potential customers
• Lead conversion: Turning potential customers into actual customers
Now that we have made that distinction, let’s move on to the ways you can carry out lead conversions through social media advertising.
Road to Conversion: How To Make Social Media Ads Click With Your Target Audience
Not all Facebook or Twitter ads deliver a high ROI. No matter how much of your social marketing and advertising is automated, you still need to ensure that essential techniques are in place to achieve positive results.
Consider the following conversion rate optimization (CRO) factors if you’re tapping into social media advertising for lead conversion:
1. Align Your Ad Messages With the Buyer’s Journey
In converting leads into paying customers, you find yourself in a bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) type of situation. This means you’re targeting people who are ready to make a purchasing decision. So it’s imperative to churn out sales-focused copy and even throw engaging deals into the mix. You should also be brand-specific at this point.
Don’t hesitate to share:
• Social proof: Include testimonials of past customers or clients to amplify your credibility.
• Product or service comparisons: Show them why they’re better off choosing you over your competitors.
• Relevant case studies: Compel them to buy from you or work with you using real-world examples demonstrating how you have helped consumers or clients accomplish their objectives.
Remember to apply the same tactic consistently to any stage of the buyer’s journey and your sales funnel.
2. Offer Incentives That Are Hard To Refuse
You know nothing is for free in social media and advertising. Your target audience won’t give you their email address or contact number without getting anything in return.
But those who are interested in knowing more about your brand, product or service may do so in exchange for:
• Contest prizes
• Promos and discounts
• Free product or service trials
• Exclusive content, e.g., webinars, white papers, comprehensive guides (also applies to lead nurturing)
A quick note: Conversion in social media marketing is a reasonable end goal for requesting user data. So make sure you don’t abuse this approach by failing to disclose the purpose of your data collection.
3. Use Social Lead Ads
A social media agency worth its salt will advise you to develop lead ads. These are ads that come with pre-populated forms that make it easy for users to add their information and for you to capture them as leads.
On Facebook alone, lead ads have a click-through rate (CTR) of 12.5 percent. They’re not given that much emphasis, but we’ll talk more about them and their impact on conversion in social media marketing in the next section.
4. Create Targeted Ads
What is social media conversion optimization without the targeting features of social platforms, especially heavy-hitters like Facebook and Twitter? Targeted advertising is practically synonymous with social media advertising. And that’s because it’s one of the first things you learn when you research how to market on social media.
Targeting is the ability to position your ads in front of a particular audience group. When in action, this feature pools certain user profiles together based on traits, behaviors and other parameters you set during ad creation.
5. Deploy Retargeting Ads
This technique is your second chance of driving your social media conversion rate up. Here, the retargeting ad appears only to past website visitors or database contacts. Think about customers who have abandoned their carts on an eCommerce site or leads who have downloaded a white paper without any follow-up action.
According to GrowthBadger, retargeting ads are more likely to increase the rate of conversion in social media marketing by 70 percent. Despite the bad rap surrounding this ad type, it might tell us something about human nature and how to market on social media without applying too much pressure on the audience.
We’ve just shown you several ways to optimize and maximize your social ad campaigns. However, the lack of bandwidth to support these efforts remains a reality among so many businesses today. In this kind of situation, it is best to invest in a results-driven solution: leaving all aspects of your advertising campaigns to an experienced social media marketing agency.
Now, let’s look at how to make social media ads that convert via the top channels.
How To Market on Social Media With Facebook Ads
Facebook continues to be a viable social media advertising channel with an ad system potentially reaching roughly 2.89 billion people monthly. Of course, you don’t have to display your social marketing ads to just about anybody. How do you advertise on social media as massive as Facebook? We’ve already given you the answer: targeting.
Learn how to leverage the channel’s targeting features to attract qualified leads. We reiterate that you must define your audience group based on targeting parameters. To give you an idea, here are the factors you must consider when creating an audience group:
• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Interests
• Past purchases or app/site visits
• Lookalike audiences
Next, you can generate Facebook lead ads campaigns to garner clicks from high-value users. This ad type lets people click on an ad and fill out a form with a few steps. It also works great on mobile – the preferred device for 98 percent of Facebook users.
Check out these few best practices for optimizing your lead ads:
• Ask the most important questions first.
• Provide a location lookup feature to match local searchers’ intent.
• Give people the option to call you after signup through a click-to-call feature.
• Let them indicate preferred dates for an appointment.
• Filter higher-intent leads by adding friction to your form, e.g., review page or slide to submit.
How Do You Advertise on Social Media Giant Twitter?
In the first quarter of 2020, Twitter grew its monetizable daily active usage to 166 million from 134 million, a 24 percent year-over-year (YoY) increase. The platform’s growth proves Twitter ads deserve a spot among top-notch conversion rate optimization services.
Specifically, don’t sleep on the channel’s direct response advertising. This service is designed to encourage app installs, video clicks and even product purchases. Twitter goes straight for the conversion and moves away from branded advertising – remember branded likes and brand takeovers?
To take advantage of the new system, your in-house or social media marketing agency customize your Twitter ad campaigns according to your target audience. Available targeting options are:
• Conversation targeting
• Event targeting
• Tweet Engager targeting
• Keyword targeting
• Movies & TV targeting
• Interest targeting
• Follower look-alikes targeting
Also, don’t forget to write a clear call-to-action (CTA), ensure the copy and visuals align with the landing page, craft ads for different user devices and avoid overusing hashtags and clickbait.
How To Maximize Social Media Services: LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest Ads
These three platforms have also grown in the past year:
• LinkedIn now has more than 740 million active users.
• Over 1 billion people use Instagram per month.
• Pinterest gained over 100 million monthly active users in 2020, the highest in its history.
Any discerning conversion rate optimization agency can take advantage of these upward trends, especially when advertising is involved. Here are a few quick tips on how to make advertising on these channels ramp up your conversions:
• Social media agency strategists would tell you to target the right audience group on LinkedIn, same as other channels.
• With LinkedIn being the leader among professional social media services, use professional ad copy without losing your brand personality.
• Design relevant landing pages to make sure you’re not going to lose high-value leads.
• Leverage the available ad formats, such as Stories, images, video and Shopping ads.
• Compel users to convert through visual content, which includes photos and illustrations.
• Write strong CTAs to guide the audience to the next step.
• Social marketing trendspotters see the value in Pinterest and recommend leaving your ads to its algorithm during Learning Mode.
• Find the ideal ad format for your brand, niche or industry: Is it Promoted Pins, Promoted Carousels, Promoted Video Pins, Buyable Pins, etc.?
• Target users based on keywords and interests.
High-Performing Social Conversion Rate Optimization Services
What is social media conversion rate optimization without our audience’s favorite platforms? We cannot deny how much influence and impact Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and Pinterest advertising have had on many businesses’ sales and revenue.
Indeed, the combination of social media and advertising is a powerful avenue for driving conversions. So you should consistently aim for mastery of this marketing strategy and its prevailing platforms.
In case you need help in this area, Thrive is here to show you the way forward. As your social media marketing agency, we can provide you with data-driven social advertising solutions, enhancing your targeting, ad creation and execution and, of course, conversion rate optimization. We can be your trusted conversion rate optimization agency, but with the capabilities of a full-service digital marketing firm.
Talk to one of our consultants today to learn more about producing social media ads that result in record-breaking conversion rates.
