The Current Social Media Marketing Landscape: What’s Working, and What Isn’t

It’s no secret that the strategies marketers use for their social media ad campaigns should evolve with whatever social media platform they’re using to advertise. Social media marketing platforms change their algorithms often and have new trends constantly, and no matter how big or small your business is—you don’t want to be left behind!

According to Statista’s data, compiled in October 2021, Facebook still holds its spot as the most popular social media platform worldwide, followed by YouTube and WhatsApp.

Thus, it’s no surprise that most businesses have been utilizing Facebook’s social media marketing platform to advertise their services for a while now – regardless of the breadth of their target audiences. At this point, it’s kind of a no brainer. Facebook ads provide a versatile way to advertise new products, promotions, sales – the list goes on.

Note

Before you read any further, it’s probably a good idea to gather your marketing team together and take note of which ad campaigns performed well and which ones performed poorly. The info you’ll gather will help you launch kick-ass campaigns this year that garner more engagements, more leads, and more sales.

The successful social media marketing strategies you used last year aren’t guaranteed to have the same results this year. It’s important to get ahead of the game when it comes to Facebook advertising so your business can have an opportunity to capitalize before their competitors start adapting as well. Plus, wouldn’t you rather invest your time and cash in methods that actually work?

Get your notepads ready. We’ve gone ahead and done the nitty gritty research on what’s in and what’s out in the world of Facebook Ads and social media marketing, and we’re ready to spill the tea.

Social Media Marketing Strategies to Start Implementing, Like, Yesterday

Start Using New Ad Formats

Facebook (and Instagram, for that matter) are always launching new and improved ad formats. Make sure your ad campaigns are using these new formats! Not only will it diversify the content of your ads and how they’re shown, but new formats = a higher ROI.

  • Highlight cool new products in Image Ads

  • Encourage engagement with a Video Poll Ad

  • Up your conversions and strengthen your relationship with your target audience via Facebook Story Ads

  • Show off your chops/what your products can do with a Video Ad

  • Put an array of new products in the spotlight at the same time with Carousel Ads.

Create Your Ads with The Mobile View in Mind

Let’s face it – we’re living in a mobile-first world. Just because you’re creating your ads on your desktop doesn’t mean your audience is viewing the ad on their desktop. In fact, most people (us included!) typically scroll on Facebook their phones. As of July of last year, a whopping 98.5% of users access and use Facebook from their mobile devices in comparison to the 1.5% of people who use the platform from their laptop or desktop computers.

The numbers don’t lie. Make sure your graphics are high resolution, and always see how your ad looks on a mobile device before publishing. If you can get your hands on a tablet, check it out on there too.

Go to the Next Level with Your Creative

While cultivating a relevant audience and paying attention to data will most certainly help your social media marketing campaigns, don’t forget to pour some energy into your ad creative!

It’s time to start investing some more time into your creative assets. Simply writing things like, “Learn More” or Click Here” is not enough to drive conversions. Get serious about prioritizing your buyer research, copywriting, graphic design, and video production in order to build a solid foundation for your ads.

At Red Egg Marketing, our rule of thumb is to try to cultivate ads across all platforms with our clients’ target audience(s) in mind. Speaking the language of your target audience is key to building an authentic connection with them, and thus, encouraging conversions.

Pro Tip

Personalization is kind of a big deal in the marketing world, and it won’t be going away any time soon. Make sure your Denver small business is integrating personalization into its marketing strategy.
Here’s How to Do It

Change Up Your Targeting

Facebook made some changes. Again.

Typical.

On January 19th 2022, Meta changed a few things about Facebook’s targeting capabilities. They’ve removed targeting options in four categories:

  • Health causes

  • Sexual orientation

  • Religious practices and groups

  • Political beliefs, social issues, causes, organizations, or figures

For ad sets created prior to January 19th, you’ll still be able to make campaign-level edits (like budget amounts or campaign names) without impacting targeting until March 17th. However, edits at the ad set level will trigger audience changes.

In addition, if an ad set is paused prior to March 17th, when it’s reactivated, the new targeting changes will kick in.

If any of your campaigns relied on any of the above to reach its target audience, now is the time to research new ways of reaching them.

Lookalike Audiences Should Be Your New Best Friend

Without Facebook lookalike audiences, Facebook Ads would be much, much less effective.

A lookalike audience is essentially a group of people that are very similar to another group of people. This is super useful for anyone who creates Facebook ads because you can take a list of leads or a list of customers, upload that to Facebook, and use it to create a lookalike audience!

Pro Tip

You need at least 100 people in your source audience to create a lookalike audience. But as soon as you do, make sure you add lookalike audiences to your Facebook ad campaigns.

Now, you may be asking yourself – when would it be best to use a lookalike audience in the first place? And we’d say, that’s an excellent question. We’ve put together a few of the most common scenarios so you’ll have a better idea of when to utilize lookalike audiences:

  • You want to engage with a new audience: Let’s say you want to reach a previously untapped demographic. With a lookalike audience, you can expand your targeting without going totally off-base in terms of interests.

  • Your existing ad audience isn’t engaging like it used to: If you suspect you’ve exhausted your customers as-is or your base is too small, these types of ads can help you test the waters.

  • You want to compare two audiences: Again, lookalike audiences can supplement any of your current ads. Comparing performance might open your eyes to new opportunities without blowing out your social media budget.

The Big Takeaway

While we did let you in on a few secrets that you should be implementing for your Facebook social media marketing ads, it’s an expansive platform, and different strategies align with different campaign objectives. And to make matters even more complicated, those strategies can change at the drop of a hat.

We always recommend doing a little research before launching a new ad campaign. If you want a bit more guidance as to how to get the results you want via your Facebook ads, try one of these bad boys to start:

At the end of the day, many Denver small businesses just don’t have the time to do the proper research for Facebook ads, and that’s totally okay. It’s a lot of work and it takes a lot of time and energy to get it right.

Red Egg Marketing’s dedicated, innovative social media marketers and creatives make it their business to know what’s what when it comes to online advertising. What’s more, we’re always devising and revising new and old strategies to get BIG results for our clients. If you’re a small Denver business on the hunt for a new ad strategy, let’s start a conversation.