Using Social Messaging Apps for Your Business

Social media is a crucial element of digital communication strategies. It gives measurable results in branding, leads, and sales. It provides marketers with great ROI as it enables them to reach large audiences at low cost.

In 2019, there are 3.48 billion social media users and the worldwide total has grown by 288 million (9 percent) since last year. Thus, almost half of the world’s population is now on social media.

The social media world is dynamic and it’s constantly evolving. Below are 13 great social media statistics to keep you up to date on the trends that will drive social media marketing this year. These stats will give you the boost you to need to take your marketing to the next level and convince your colleagues, workers, and clients that social media marketing should be a priority this year.

Social Media Statistics

There are 4.2 billion internet users. On average, a user has 5.54 social media accounts. The daily time spent on social media is approximately 116 minutes a day. On average, 75% of male internet users and 83% of female internet users are on Facebook. Female internet users use Instagram more compared to men, at 38% versus 26%. Link for more information – https://www.pewinternet.org/2016/11/11/social-media-update-2016-methodology/ On average, 95% of people aged 18-34 are more likely to follow a brand on social media. Analyze your audience and determine where they are more likely to follow your brand from. 71% of customers who have a positive social media customer experience with a company are more likely to refer it to others. So social media is an effective customer service tool to boost brand engagement and attract new customers. 63% of customers now expect businesses to offer customer service through social media platforms, and 90% have used social media in the past to communicate with a company. Don’t ignore social media as a key customer care channel. 80% of brands online think they deliver exceptional social media customer service, but only 8% of customers agree with this. Strive to be a brand that really does provide exceptional social media customer care. 81% of teenagers feel social media has a positive impact on their lives. Visual content is more likely to be shared on social media than other types of content (40 times more likely). Only 20% of Facebook posts generate an emotional response, and no ad does. Use Facebook as an emotional channel to deliver dynamic and tailored messages to people at specific stages of key times; this will yield better results. About 78% of people who complain to a company on Twitter expect a response within an hour. Customers use social media to ask questions and to vent their frustrations. Ensure you’re actively engaged on your social media channels.

If you aren’t taking advantage of social media, you’re missing out on an effective, fast, and inexpensive way to reach about half of the world’s population. If you use social media properly, you can increase your brand awareness and establish your brand as a thought leader in your industry.

Here are the top ten tips to boost your social advertising ROI.

1. Test Multiple Channels

Customers have multiple preferences regarding where they purchase their products. Some like to view products in retail stores before they buy anything. Others like to browse product apps and make a purchase. And others may see an advertisement on social media and make a purchase.

There are many customers online and offline and each consumer has a preferred channel of purchase. Gone are the old days when brands used to target customers through only one channel – retail, where you open a store and your products will sell.

Things don’t work like that anymore. It’s time to use multiple channels to increase your sales. This is the era of multi-channel marketing, and it works well for brands.

Consumers will buy the same product from different channels, so prepare messages and content for multiple channels. Strategize for different channels. This will increase your market potential and you’ll have more sales than those companies targeting only a single or dual channel.

Successful multiple channel testing starts with segmentation. When segmenting customers, you’ll discover that each segment is likely to communicate using specific channels. And each segment will have a certain level of profit. Combining the two characteristics will help you optimize your multichannel marketing strategy.

Establish a closed-loop marketing environment where promotions across all channels are planned and cohesively executed, and monitor response time. Begin by segmenting your customer base according to their lifestyle characteristics. Segmentation provides you with valuable information about customers, such as their age, income, life stage and the number of children.

Aligning your segmentation strategy with various tests across multiple channels will help you uncover your audience’s preferred channel. For example, you may realize older people like phone calls while younger people prefer emails.

It’s important to manage preferences and customer expectation with profitability in mind, because using an expensive channel to serve unprofitable customers (especially for those who are likely to be profitable in the future) makes no sense business-wise. Market to some customers in a specific segment using traditional channels like direct mail, and others through an alternative channel such as email or social media. Track the results to see the emerging trends. Establish if you can make unprofitable customers more profitable by gaining their attention through an alternate channel.

As a marketer, test multiple channels across different segments of your audience and prospect bases to discover channel preference. Then use this information across your brand. Also, approach multichannel marketing at the consumer level, not the corporate level. This offers a personal touch which only the enterprise-wise multiple-channel marketing can give to customers.

2. Create Small, Focused, Campaigns and Experiment on a Small Scale

The audience is the most crucial element of your marketing campaign. An undefined wide audience will not be as interested in your campaign as a well-defined one. The more segmented your audience is, the easier it becomes to figure out how they’ll respond to your ads.

Here are ways to create a well-targeted audience for your ad:

Target audience – While creating your campaign, add demographic restrictions for your audience.

Custom audience – Create an audience made up of your past customers or website visitors. This helps you to create a successful retargeting campaign.

Lookalike audience – For instance, if you’re creating a Facebook ad, Facebook will help you to find an audience similar to your existing one. This is a great way to expand your audience types.

In one marketing campaign, you can have multiple ad sets. And for each variation, you’ll decide how much budget to allocate. This is good, especially if you want the same ad to serve different audiences at a variable budget.

Having multiple and variable audiences offers you more options on who to target, and it reduces ad fatigue for your customers. Avoid audience overlap because you don’t want your customers to get tired of seeing the same ad repeatedly.

When creating your marketing campaign, if you try to reach everyone then it’s hard to reach anybody. And vague and generic messages will not resonate with audiences, so it’s essential to use specific and direct communication.

Creating a small and focused campaign that targets a specific audience helps you to speak directly to your audience. A campaign will resonate more with the audience when they can relate directly to the message. A brand with a large, varied market of customers will struggle to create marketing campaigns that speak directly to its audience. Since the viewers are so different, few stories or slogans will resonate with each person at a personal level. But through targeting a well-defined audience, you can ease this problem.

Brands often overlook the importance of segmentation in achieving greater ROI on their marketing spend. Understanding who your target customer is, is not enough; remember that the needs and challenges your customers are facing are different depending on the vertical. If you target wide and aren’t segmenting your target market, you’ll have problems creating a profitable campaign.

To know what works best for your advertising campaign, use A/B testing. Have a specific advertising campaign aim and create a split test. This is a profitable way of advertising without spending a lot of money. Set your marketing campaign objectives and parameters; these should be as specific as possible. For instance, “generate more revenue” is too broad. You should have a specific metric like “generate X amount of sales for product Y within Z amount of time.” This will make sure your campaign parameters are laser-focused, and it’ll be easier for you to measure the success of the campaign as it proceeds.

A/B testing is the most effective way of creating ads that convert viewers to buyers. Take your time to create two or multiple versions of your campaign; this will help you see what works and what doesn’t. A/B testing takes a lot of time but if you do it properly, it will increase your conversion rates.

3. Experiment with Different Types of Facebook Ads

Competition has led to a considerable increase in advertising costs, and Facebook is a powerful advertising tool today.

Leveraging different ad types is essential in getting the full potential of advertising and creating profitable marketing campaigns. Using the same ad copy and targeting conversion rates, CTR and ROI can differ by changing the ad type.

There are many Facebook ads you can use, but some perform better than others if you know the tricks. Carousel, video and collection ads, for instance, have a good record for success.

Collection Ads

Facebook collection ads contain a cover image or a video, followed by product images. This ad format is great when you want to showcase a line of products and you don’t to overwhelm your audience.

You can also create collection ads on Instagram. This enables brands to create eye-catching video above a swipeable carousel ad showing individual products on Instagram. Your customers can then click on the item to visit your website and purchase the item.

Instagram stories can have a maximum of three slides of different media, including photos and videos.

Collection ads are for mobile only and they maximize the mobile user experience. These ads are perfect for keeping users engaged and driving them to make a purchase. High-quality collection ads drive high-quality traffic to your site and they keep less interested users on Facebook. The autoplay feature attracts users and increases engagement rates.

Carousel Ads

The carousel ad is one of the best Facebook ad formats for product positioning through remarketing in your sales funnel. These ads are more interactive than the single image or single video ads, and they create more engagement – as well as boost the time spent on the ad. When potential clients click your ad, they’re able to see a full-screen version; this helps to boost engagement and get people interested and excited about your items.

These ads have a huge advantage over collection ads; desktop placement. Just because internet users spend most of their time on mobile doesn’t mean marketers should ignore desktop users, even on Facebook where mobile dominates.

Carousel ads provide a fantastic experience on both mobile and desktop by allowing users to slide easily through various images and move to a specific landing page. They may not have the level of engagement or conversion rates of collections ads, but they help to create a brand presence on Facebook.

Video Ads

Video ads are great for creating brand awareness and retargeting. You can retarget those who watch your videos with more ads based on the duration of the video they have watched.

Video ads marketing is less complicated because even a basic video can get you the results you want. This is because video is the most popular form of content right now. Facebook videos catch your target audience’s attention in the news feed and hold that attention for long, boosting engagement.

Video ads can help you get ahead of your competitors who are using only images to advertise their products. The single video format enables you to use the main video as your creative, and the best type of video for e-commerce businesses is the product explainer video.

4. Leverage Retargeting

In all the industries, the average conversion rate lies between 2 and 3%. And as a majority of customers will not convert the first time, retargeting is an essential part of any online advertising strategy.

Retargeting campaigns have a greater potential for improving sales because they constantly and consistently keep your business front and center of your potential customers when they’re ready to make a purchase.

When your visitors see your ad banner, it gives your business more credibility and it improves your brand awareness.

The high conversions and click-through rates with retargeting campaigns show the value of great branding and awareness. And any business with an online marketing strategy can reap the benefit of running a retargeting campaign. If your site attracts visitors, you have the chance to convert them into buyers for a fraction of the cost of getting them to your site.

Does your business have an active pay-per-click campaign? Then it’s more beneficial to run the campaign alongside a retargeting campaign. While the initial cost of getting those clicks was several dollars, you can continue to monitor those potential customers for a fraction of a cent per exposure.

Retargeting, especially on Facebook, is an indispensable tool for marketers and business owners who want to drive conversions, downloads, and lead generation. Facebook users check Facebook several times a day on different devices and so do your customers. Facebook retargeting will enable you to reach your customers on desktop and mobile with customized dynamic ads.

Yet you don’t have to be their friend to benefit! You can reach customers across devices with retargeted ads right on their right-hand column and news feed. Make sure you get the right ads for the right customers at the right to get the maximum benefit.

When retargeting, avoid showing too many ads. You don’t want to annoy your potential customers, right? There is a big difference between informing and annoying. Set a cap on how many ads you can show in a day. Also, remember that not showing your advertising campaign enough is equally a waste of money. Try your best to find your sweet spot. This varies from business to business.

The main advantage of retargeting is the ability to segment your audience and target your website traffic. Capitalize on this by creating ads that meet the specific needs of your potential customers. Also, make sure you deliver banners that will build your brand and encourage your prospective customers to complete their purchase.

Don’t forget to measure the success of your retargeting campaign. Put things in place to track your success. Have conversion goals and have a landing page dedicated to retargeting inventory. Ensure you capitalize on the potential of retargeting without wasting money.

5. Create Multiple Ads for Different Audiences

When you run ads on Facebook, you’re charged depending on the impressions your ad gets. So, if you run an ad and no one is clicking, liking, or sharing your ad, you’re paying Facebook. And if the people you reach click, like and share your ad, you’ll still pay the same amount of money.

By serving your ad to your best potential audience, Facebook will give you the cheapest cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM). You can do this by creating multiple ads and letting Facebook test them. But make sure your ads meet your other target stats and hit your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Many marketers fear that by running multiple ads, Facebook will choose the winning ad too quickly. But when you run a conversion campaign, even for a small budget of $5 per ad set, Facebook will test at least a few of the ad sets. About 10% of the time, Facebook will choose at least two ads to run. And if you aren’t happy with the results, you can turn off the ads and Facebook will test the other ones.

The main disadvantage of creating a single ad set with a huge audience and spending a lot of money on it is that even though the ad performs well, you’ll have learned nothing.

When running multiple ad sets, start by creating an ideal profile of your ideal audience. Pay attention to their age, where they live, their marital status, their education level, and their gender. This will give you a detailed picture of your audience. Then create a series of narrowly segmented custom audiences. Rather than dividing a large audience into a single custom audience, create multiple custom audiences. You can create custom audiences in terms of website visitors, email subscribers, Facebook likes, video viewers, four to five similar interests, and previous purchases.

Then use Facebook Audience Insights to compare your custom audiences and see if the picture of your ideal audience aligns with who they are. Compare what you’ve learned about the different audiences. Use the information you gather to decide which audiences are worth targeting and which aren’t.

Begin by running ads separately to each segment to see the best-performing audiences. Targeting different audiences with different ads is great because it helps to determine your best-performing audience. After identifying your top-performing audiences, scale those audiences to get full potential off them and build more ads to reach them.

6. Leverage Lookalike Audiences on Facebook

Facebook advertising is challenging. There are many methods of advertising and this makes it difficult to know the return you’ll make off your investment. This is where Facebook lookalike audience comes in.

So, what’s a lookalike audience? It’s simply targeting an audience similar to your custom audience. The custom audience includes your website visitors, email subscribers, and Facebook users who engage with your Facebook page and your video.

When you create a lookalike audience, Facebook finds people who have similar interests to those in your custom audience base. For instance, if your custom audience is the upper middle class aged between 25 and 40 who invest a lot in the food they eat, then Facebook will introduce a similar group based on its data and algorithm.

Audiences that resemble your customers are more likely to be interested in what you’re selling. And this works nine times better than other channels, which gives you better click-through and conversion rates.

So how do you leverage your lookalike audience? You can choose the audience size between 1 and 10% of the total population of the country you’re targeting. 10% gives a large targeting number but the response rate isn’t high. Targeting 1% improves your targeting quality and the response rate. Targeting small generates more leads, and it gives you a better click-through rate.

Lookalike audiences offer you a chance to reach a cold audience, beyond behavior and interest targeting. For instance, if you’re running your ads to warm traffic such as your website visitors or Facebook fans, lookalike audiences enable you to reach cold audiences who resemble warm audiences but are much bigger.

While lookalike audiences are cold audiences, they aren’t super-cold because Facebook uses algorithms to match your warm audience’s attributes and create a new lookalike audience. To reach people outside your warm traffic, use and test lookalike audiences.

Lookalike audiences are a good way to target new people and they’re less expensive compared to audiences based on behavior and attribute targeting. But to ensure the cost of lookalike audience is low, test and compare different audiences.

The main reason for targeting a lookalike audience is to find people similar to your existing customers. Do you have a customer list? Upload it on Facebook and create a custom audience of your buyers. Then create a lookalike audience from your existing buyers that targets people with similar interests to those who made a purchase.

To get high quality leads from lookalike audiences, create a custom audience from high-value customers. These are customers who buy frequently, and they buy premium products at premium rates. We all have those high lifetime value (LTV) customers and we all want to find more like them.

Create a custom audience based on your high-value customers by uploading their information directly into the custom audience database. Create a lookalike audience off this group and run introductory ads you think will resonate with their pain points. Sit back and watch leads start coming in!

Video is big, especially on Facebook. Video ads have higher engagement rates, as mentioned earlier. Use these ads to your advantage and create a lookalike audience from a custom audience created based on people who have watched your video. Create custom audiences based on multiple videos and you can target users who resemble those who have watched certain amounts of your videos. This will ensure your target audience are people who were engaged with your video.

Remember, when your ads are received well by your target audience, it shows they’re relevant to them. And if your ads are relevant to your custom audience, then they’ll be relevant to the lookalike audience. If ads are relevant, the conversion and click-through rates will be higher. Facebook will give you a better relevance score and this will bring down the cost of your ads. And low cost coupled with higher conversion rates results in a great ROI.

7. Split Test Everything

Split testing involves conducting controlled and randomized experiments to boost website metrics such as clicks, engagements, conversions, or sales. It helps to know what elements hinder the progress of a customer’s purchase path. Split testing helps to create a different version of one element to see if performance improves compared to the original version. Both versions are sent to equal audience sizes to see which improves conversions.

To succeed in split testing, first research and find out what website elements prevent potential customers from converting, by observing how customers interact with your site. For successful split testing, you need to ensure you’re testing the right elements and pages, so it’s crucial to collect data. Once you have analytics data, you’ll see which pages help your customers to take action and which don’t.

If a page has no effect on conversion, don’t bother testing it. And if there’s a page that most potential buyers visit before making a purchase, test and improve it. If you want to test multiple pages, first test the pages with the greatest impact on leads and sales.

Run your split test for a long time and use the right A/B testing sample size; this will make sure you get reliable results. Remember, the lower traffic you use, the longer you’ll need to run the test.

Split testing isn’t about making changes for the sake of it. Many marketers run split tests because they feel their marketing strategy isn’t working well and they feel they can get better results, like more sales or leads from a web page. It’s crucial to measure how sure you’re that making a change will lead to improvement. This should be at 95% and above.

What’s the benefit of split testing?

It helps you to eliminate any uncertainties in your marketing campaign by getting rid of guesswork.

It helps you to learn how customers respond.

It enables you to gain insights that can boost improvements in your brand.

You can create better, more valuable and more effective content that resonates with the pain points of your audience.

You can capitalize on web traffic and visitor engagement.

It reduces risk because you’re able to test changes before you make them permanent.

It improves revenue. When you get more leads and sales by making small changes, it makes your company more profitable and it improves your ROI.

To summarize, split testing is a cost-effective way to make your marketing and website better.

When carrying out a split test, ensure you compare like with like. For instance, when testing your opt-in campaign, it makes no sense comparing an exit pop-up with a welcome gate because visitors see them at different times. Instead, compare two versions of your exit-intent pop-up or two versions of your welcome gate.

Don’t forget; the more you test, the more improvements you’ll make. This is because each successful split test provides a baseline from which to run a new test, and you can roll out changes to other parts of your website.

8. Leverage Lowest Cost Cap Bidding on Facebook

Creating Facebook marketing campaigns that convert and meet your KPIs is challenging. This is because many variables come into play – such as targeting, ad copy and creative, landing page, and your bid.

Facebook’s ad delivery model relies on an auction model where advertisers try to get their ads shown to their target audience. Each advertiser enters this auction by setting the amount they want to be charged per action taken by someone in their target audience. This amount is called a bid. The bid is a major lever that will enable you to display your ads on Facebook’s ads placement.

Lowest cost with bid cap signals Facebook’s algorithm to get you the lowest costs possible while making sure that your costs per action won’t exceed your specified limit. This bidding strategy will help you get the most conversions for a bid and it helps you to lower your cost per conversion. But it’s important to note that sometimes the conversions you’ve optimized for will become rare and this will lead to increased cost.

This bidding strategy is perfect, especially if you’re on a tight budget and you know how much a conversion is worth to you. It’s also ideal if you want to spend less.

One of the main reasons you should use the lowest cost cap bidding is to improve your campaign performance. It helps to improve the distribution of your ads within your target audience. And by using the dominate method, you can set your bid cap at four times the amount of your target cost per optimization result. By doing this, Facebook will target the highest quality part of your desired audience who are likely to take the action you’re optimizing for, which helps you to outbid your competitors.

With the lowest cost with a bidding cap, you can stop bidding if your campaign is not performing well. This helps you to avoid wasting your money. Also, you can increase your cap if an ad campaign is performing well. So with this strategy, you’ll get the most out of your hard-earned cash.

When setting a bidding cap, remember that the number you enter is the upper limit of what you want to spend. This is not your target cost. So don’t set a bid too low, because Facebook will struggle to show your ads and you’ll get few impressions. Start with the most you’re willing to spend and adjust downwards from there depending on your ad performance. However, if you’ve been running Facebook campaigns for a while and you know your average cost per campaign, then you can set a lower bid cap.

9. Use Facebook’s Placement Asset Customization Tool

Facebook’s placement asset customization tool helps you to tailor your ad creative to each of your placements. Changing your ad creative in this manner helps to improve your ad’s relevancy, boosting the engagement rate and effectiveness of your advertising strategy. It also improves your campaign performance.

To activate this feature, select “Edit Placement” at the set level of your advertising campaign, then click “Select All Placements That Support Asset Customization” under the Asset Customization.

With this tool, you can customize your creative for Facebook feeds, Instagram feeds, Instagram stories, Audience Network Native, Banner and Interstitial, and Audience Network Rewarded Videos placements.

After choosing the relevant placements, move down to the ad level where there are two options for customizing your image creative.

The first option is to crop the creative with the asset placement to enable it to fit the native format of the placement options selected at the ad set level. The second option is to select unique creative assets for each of your placements. For instance, you may have a single image in your campaign which you want to run on both Instagram and Facebook. But the optimal image dimensions for Facebook are 1200 X 628 pixels while on Instagram they’re 1:1 square ratio of 1080 X 1080 pixels.

The main benefit of customizing creative assets by placement is that you don’t need to create multiple ad sets to assign the optimal image or video to a placement. This tool also saves you from the hassle of creating multiple ads. It contains your creative variations within a single ad. This is quite a time saver!

It may seem trivial to adjust the creative format to best suit your ad placement, but it has a huge impact in improving your campaign performance. This is because creatives which are optimal for relevant placement look more native and this boosts the relevancy of the ad to your target audience. Also, optimized creatives take up more screen compared to non-optimized ones. This improves engagement rates, and it results in better click-through rates and better relevancy score – which leads to great results.

This is a must-use feature when you’re running ads on multiple platforms.

10. Use Facebook’s Test and Learn Tool

Do you want to know how Facebook ads affect your bottom line? There’s a new tool to help you increase your ROI.

Facebook’s Test and Learn tool allows marketers to measure ad effectiveness in two ways: across the whole Facebook ads account and on the campaign level. This gives deeper insights into what’s working and what’s not from a marketing perspective. And if you use the tool properly, you can lower your advertising budget.

Through the tool’s campaign comparison test, you capitalize on campaign results that lead to the lowest cost of conversions, and eventually you’ll have the best use of your money. This works by comparing two similar campaigns. Choose campaigns that have one substantial difference, like design, content, or layout.

After picking the campaigns, Facebook runs your ads through a short test and it measures and compares the conversion rates of four diverse user groups:

Users from your desired audience who saw ads from the first campaign

Users from your desired audience who saw ads from the second campaign

Users from your desired audience who didn’t see ads from the first campaign for some reason

Users from your desired audience who didn’t see ads from the second campaign for some reason

When the test is over, you’ll see a detailed breakdown of which campaign had the most conversions at the lowest price. You’ll even know the exact amount of money you’re spending per conversion on each campaign, plus your lift percentage and the total number of sales and conversions the campaign generates.

This is different from the “cost per conversion” stats because the tool incorporates users who didn’t see your ads and it helps you compare the conversion lift.

You can also use the Test and Learn tool to measure the effectiveness of your Facebook advertising efforts. Running the Facebook ad account test will help you to know how much your Facebook ad account boosts the conversion rate and improves the purchase rate of your product or service.

To run the test, you need to know a conversion event you want to pay attention to. The tool will help you see how many users saw your ad and completed the specific event over a given period. This test also includes user control groups which were not exposed to your ad, and hence you’re able to see the conversion lift. It helps to know exactly the amount of additional downloads, revenue, sales or important conversions your ads are contributing to.

The Test and Learn tool is great in budgeting and in measuring efficacy in specific periods, such as vacations or times when you’re running sales or special promotions. With this tool, you’ll be able to know which strategies drive the best results for your business and you’ll have better ROI.