7 Reasons Your Social Campaigns Aren’t Working

Originally published on Fruition.net
By LaRae Richards

Are you pouring your heart and soul into social ads, but still not seeing the results you’re hoping for? Here are 7 common reasons social ads underperform and how you can fix them.

The Message Isn’t Resonating with Your Audience

Too often marketers assume they know who their audience is without doing any type of analysis. What’s more, your traditional audience might be entirely different from your Facebook or Pinterest audience. It’s important to take a step back and collect as much information as possible about your audiences on each platform to ensure your ads are resonating with the right people.

During your analysis, pay special attention to why each of your personas are on a specific platform. For example, if you’re a fitness company, your customers might be using Facebook to browse health and fitness news articles, but they might be on Pinterest to collect workout and diet ideas. Knowing your audience will help you improve your imagery and copy, which in turn will increase your engagement and conversions on your social ads.

Your Audience Is Spending Time Elsewhere

Do you tweet every single day, but still only see a few clicks through to your website each month?This may be because you’re audience isn’t on Twitter, or at the very least, not very active on that particular platform. This drives home why analyzing and understanding your target persona is so important. Once you have an idea of who that person is and what they’re using specific social media channels for, you can start properly prioritizing platforms.

You’re Not Optimizing for Mobile

According to multiple publishers, 60% of North Americans are interacting with social media platforms via their mobile devices and over 85% of those users are also interacting with social with the sound off. Because of this, marketers can’t expect to use their top-performing TV spot on social and expect the same results. When you’re scrolling on your smartphone before bedtime, you aren’t in the same mindspace as when you’re lounging in the living room watching your favorite shows – and neither are your customers. When designing your social ads, always think about how users will see and interact with your ads on their phone. This means considering vertical imagery, compelling copy, and a message that makes sense even when there’s no volume.

Ad Fatigue is Affecting Your Performance

Were your social campaigns doing great, and now suddenly they’re not? This may be due to ad fatigue. This is a challenge that all digital campaigns will experience in their life cycle, regardless of how complex or simple your ads may be. This is especially true now that, according to the National Centre for Biotechnology Information, the average human attention span is about 8 seconds (that’s just one second below that of a goldfish!). To ensure your audience is engaged and responding to your campaigns positively, aim to tweak your imagery or ad copy every 4-6 weeks.

Your Campaigns and Your Goals Don’t Match

Think critically about why you’re using social media and what your goals are. Is it to get more leads for your business, sell merchandise, build awareness, connect with your customers, or all of the above? You’ll likely have multiple goals to reach customers throughout the marketing funnel. Regardless of what your objectives are, make sure both your organic and paid campaigns directly align with at least one or more of your goals.

You’re Not Thinking Full-Funnel

Another pitfall many marketers fall into is putting all of their budget into the final step of the marketing funnel. Even your most loyal customers don’t want to be bombarded with “buy now” type messages, and these ads can be even more off-putting to someone who’s new to your brand.

In order to avoid annoying your current clients and alienating your prospective customers, make sure you’re serving a mixture of content organically as well as targeting users through paid advertising. Use appropriate content depending on which phase they are at in the marketing funnel. For example, if someone is seeing your ads for the first time, a short video about your brand might resonate better with that person than an ad promoting a specific product or service.

Your Website Needs Improvement

While social ads can drive users to your site effectively at a low cost, you won’t see the impact of your social ads if your website doesn’t provide a great end-to-end user experience.Your social copy, imagery, and offer should match your website to ensure your audience feels comfortable and, therefore, more likely to convert and interact further with your brand. Once you get a user to your website, make sure you prioritize its loading speed. Research performed by Google has found that 53% of mobile visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t load within three seconds, so if your website loads more slowly, you could be missing out on valuable new customers.

Still not sure what your next steps should be? Contact Fruition for help with improving the performance of any of your organic or paid Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Linkedin, Twitter, Reddit, Twitch or other social media marketing needs!