Short Term VS. Long Term Social Media Advertising Results

Social Media Advertising has some incredible benefits and can be an incredible revenue driver for many businesses. Just take a look at some of our case studies. But, it is very important to understand that social media is a long game. You will very rarely see results overnight, and you will very rarely achieve amazing results by just throwing money at Facebook. Here’s why:

Traffic is everything.

And not just traffic, Pixel tracked website traffic and events. If you’re looking to get people to complete an action on your website, i.e complete a purchase, fill in a contact form, add an item to a basket, if your Pixel has been tracking previous completions of these actions, Facebook has so much data to go off. Without this background data, Facebook is essentially guessing who your audience is. This, of course, in turn increases your cost per action and decreases the number of actions completed. If you put a Pixel on your website on Monday, and expect to have hundreds of purchases by Tuesday morning, you’re probably going to be sadly mistaken.

Who is your audience?

If you can’t answer this question, your social campaigns are definitely not going to reach the right people. When you launch social adverts, the most important thing is test, test, test, and test again. You can have the most experienced, expert social media manager running your campaigns, but every single account is different. What works for one account, most definitely won’t work for another.

There’s learning phases.

What is a learning phase? It’s kind of self-explanatory, but it is the phase where Facebook or LinkedIn are learning about your adverts. They are showing it to different people, testing their reactions, showing it in different placements at different times, etc. During this phase, your advert performance will be very unstable and results will be all over the place. The newer your account, (generally) the longer the learning phases last. This means that you may not have stable adverts running for potentially a week.

Have you heard of a marketing funnel?

We’ve all seen the images of marketing funnels. Awareness, consideration, conversion, loyalty etc. There’s so many variations. But the reason we’ve all seen them is because they really are important. You can’t go into a campaign expecting people, that have never heard of your brand before, to spend £50 on a jumper. This is where your retargeting campaigns come into play. (Big up the Pixel/Insight Tag once again). Drive new audiences to your website, then retarget them with an offer, maybe target them with a testimonial or a little more info. This process takes time and cannot be rushed.

It isn’t all doom and gloom however, because there are some tangible, short term results that you can achieve from social media. (Note: the short term results are great as part of a long term strategy – don’t aim just for short term goals.)

Traffic is cheap.

Relatively speaking, after brand awareness adverts, traffic is normally quite a cheap advert to run. This is great, because it builds up your Pixel/Insight Tag data, but it’s also good because website visitors = potential customers. Potential customers = brand awareness. You may even get some sales off the back of it, without even aiming for that.

Boosted posts can improve engagement.

I am a big advocate for boosted posts (when boosted correctly – see a previous blog post) and they can be great for giving you a quick lift of engagement. This engagement also eventually feeds into a page engagement custom audience, perfect for retargeting and adding into the funnel!

You can achieve incredible results with social media advertising, but it must be considered a long term marketing strategy. If you’re looking for purchases, don’t be surprised when a social media manager tells you that you need to run traffic only for the first month or so. It’ll all be worth it in the end when your ROAS skyrockets.