We are all humans and therefore prone to making mistakes. However, when it comes to social media advertising, perfection takes precedence as there is no room for slip-ups. When the reputation of your business and financial resources are both at stake, and you do not want to lose sight of any one of them, you should not only be fully drilled in the common social media advertising mistakes that unfortunately befall marketers, but also how to avoid stumbling into those pitfalls. Pay heed to our words of wisdom and learn how to ace your social media game:

1.    Undefined Goals and Strategy

Setting a goal for your social media ad campaign is the first step to running a successful social media campaign. You must set SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound. Your ad campaign goals should have all these characteristics. Simply setting goals will not guarantee you success, especially if you do not know how to achieve these goals. This is where you need to strategize prudently. Create a social media strategy that aligns with your business objectives to achieve the best results with your social media marketing campaign.

2.    Not Creating Buyer Personas

“Get closer than ever to your customers. So close that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.”—Steve Jobs

You can never make a bigger mistake than not knowing the people you are selling to. Create detailed buyer personas to target customers accurately with social media ads. This will help you understand their purchase decisions and give you insights that you can leverage to target your audience effectively. The more information you garner about your customers, the better it is for your business because you can give them what they want in a manner that they want it.

Must Read: Latest Trends and Stats about Cross Device Marketing and Advertising

3.    Not Paying Attention to Timing

Timing plays a critical role in the success and failure of your social media campaign. Posting on social media when a major chunk of your audience must be snoozing off, or making your ad visible when there is no one to see it, will only lead to failure. You need to identify the best time to post on different social media networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Learn to identify when your customers are online and ready to engage, and post accordingly to amp up your engagement and revenue.

4.    Using the Same Formula for Every Platform

Most social media marketers and advertisers are guilty of hooking on to the “One size fit all” formula. Every social media platform is different and you need to adapt accordingly. You should tailor your social media ads according to the platform you are thinking of posting them on. Every social platform imposes a different set of guidelines for ads. For instance, Facebook allows only 90 characters in ad copy and 25 for the heading. On the other hand, Twitter allows for116 characters to be used in ad copy and 23 in headlines.

5.    Lack of Creativity and Diversity

Your customers are flooded with a deluge of ads every day, both online and offline. How many of them do you think they remember? Only a few of them, right?This is because only a few manage to stand out from the crowd and are creative enough to impinge on their memory. Similarly, if you want your social media ads to be noticed and clicked on, you should think out of the box and come up with a creative idea and write headings and ad copy in a way that persuades readers to click on it. You can easily find creative social media ads that went viral and take away key pointers from them to propel their brand message to new heights as well.

6.    Not A/B Testing

Every social media advertiser knows that success isn’t a piece of cake. What works on one platform, fails on the other. It holds true for different audiences as well. In the wake of such a situation, the best way is to create multiple versions of your social media ads and test them separately. Unfortunately, many companies fail to comply, which is why their social media revenues plummet down to the ground. By testing different versions of your social media ads, you can easily identify what resonates with your target audience and tick off all the right boxes with them.

7.    Not Tracking Results

No matter how efficiently you run your social media ad campaigns, if you are not tracking results, all your efforts will go down the drain. More importantly, you will not be able to identify the loopholes in your campaigns. This will put a damper on your ability to improve, hampering the effectiveness of your social media advertisements in its wake. With the advent of social media analytics tools, you can easily track every dollar you spend on your social media ads and scrutinize how your ads are performing across multiple social media channels.

Related Infographic: Mobile and Product Ads Statistics you Must Know Across Social and Search Channels – Infographics

Conclusion

Social media is evolving at a rapid pace and so are the user behaviors and preferences online. In order to succeed in today’s cut-throat social media environment, you will have to make your ads unique and creative to stand out in the sea of social media ads. Stop making the aforementioned social media advertising mistakes and you will soon see a massive difference in your social media campaign KPIs, and watch your social ad revenues rise up.

Which social media advertising mistakes do you regularly make? Feel free to share it with us in the comments section below.