5 great ways to drain your social media budget

1. Get as many followers as possible

It would seem that the more subscribers you have, the more people see your posts in the feed. But it is not so. StudyDIGITAL 2020: GLOBAL DIGITAL OVERVIEW The Global Digital Overview confirms that as subscribers grow, organic reach - the number of people who have seen a post - drops significantly. This is especially pronounced for brand pages.

For example, on Facebook, it accounts for about 10% of the total number of followers for every posted post. On Instagram, this is about 20-40%.

You cannot control this factor: the social network, following its own algorithms, decides who and what content to show. Therefore, investing in followers is a rather risky story. The person you paid for can stop seeing your posts at any time.

Another reason why investing in followers is not the most viable investment in 2020 is organic churn. Often they are associated with the fact that the company initially attracts not quite the target audience.

As an example, giveaways, very popular in recent times, can be cited.

Giveaways are rallies in social networks where the user must perform several actions (one of them is subscribing to certain accounts). And initially, they really seriously increase the number of subscribers. But then they lead to a gigantic outflow.

Of all those who came to subscribers, most often only those who, after the competition, forgot to unsubscribe from the brand page, remain. AND content unfortunately they are not interested. Moreover, many unsubscribe as soon as they see that the company is engaged in such pranks. As a result, your costs do not justify themselves, and this once again confirms that subscribers are not the most important item of expenses.

Plus, investing in subscribers doesn't pay off when compared to ads aimed at engaging audiences and increasing reach.

For example, to attract 1,000 subscribers to a branded page, you will have to spend 20-30 thousand rubles.

For the same money, you can get huge reach and organic growth from truly interested people through other means. For example, Facebook creates an individualized audience of people in the ad account for this.

What actually: brand awareness and how many audiences react to your posts are important. KPIs (indicators of success) should be built based on the level of "health" of the brand - that is, on the number of people who choose you and buy your product or service. And the total number of subscribers doesn't mean anything yet.

2. Get hooked on performance marketing

Performance marketing is advertising aimed at attracting applications. For example, collecting phone numbers and addresses Email - when placing an order, customers enter this information in special fields. In the future, all this data is collected in a common database and used in the following advertising campaigns.

The same type of advertising can be attributed to message boards and forums. This approach effectively stimulates sales, increases reach and allows you to constantly keep your finger on the pulse, flexibly directing the company's actions.

So what's the problem? In fact, such ads usually have no effect in increasing brand awareness and, as soon as you turn them off, you stop receiving applications. So you have to connect it again.

As a result, you become addicted to performance marketing and your brand stops developing.

What actually: better to invest in brand awareness. When it comes to social media, run ads, video ads, or even start attracting subscribers (but only high quality ones!).

3. Stick to standards

There is a lot of researchYouTube Is the New Search — Advertisers Should Be Paying Attention “Why does the audience remember ads on Youtube? " However, despite the name, the results apply to other social media platforms as well, as all successful platforms use roughly the same ad formats.

This study analyzed how people react to ads and found that regular commercials that run on TV for 15 or 30 seconds are minimal. It is best when advertising is a kind of narrative - a story told in several parts. For example, in this Mail.ru video, one story follows from another, looping at the end.

What actually: experiment. You can “echo” the story — a clip of the highlights of your promotional video — or create an entire miniseries with a set, conflict, and resolution. Or come up with something else. And all this will be better than the same standard TV 15 seconds, which do not work on social networks.

4. Target large reach

Often large international companies promote posts (for example, in “In contact with») With gigantic coverage and frequency. However, out of the entire huge audience of publications, very few people are really interested in this information. This usually happens because advertisers are using creatives from other media.

It can be material from print ads, where it is quite effective, but it will not bring any results on social media.

Here is an example of statistics for a post like this with huge reach, but very low engagement rates:

What actually: always pay attention to engagement and how you get it. 100 thousand impressions of a publication does not mean that 100 thousand people really paid attention to the advertisement by scrolling through the feed. But 10,000 comments will make it clear that users are interacting with the publication.

5. Ignore community tools

This is a serious scourge of our SMM. Companies spend a lot of money on content but forget to invest in user feedback. Here you need to start from simple to complex:

• learn to answer questions;
• Sew calls for discussion into posts;
• process the negative;
• make simple contests related to your brand.

After that, you can engage your audience to create content. If you engage users, you can subsequently receive content from them. Then your social networks will work at full capacity and every ruble invested in promotion will pay off.

Checklist for brand promotion in social networks

• Focus on an adequate KPI system - brand awareness or sales.
• Don't just use performance marketing.
• Create creatives based on the characteristics of the site where you plan to place them.
• Work with the community.

All this is guaranteed to help you develop your brand and save you from unnecessary expenses on social media.