Social Media & Search Advertising
The following is provided as key information and ideas to get started with these technologies and not to be considered a full evaluation of available vendors or any issues associated with vendors.
Ways it can work in your agency:
- Use Facebook ads to target visitors based on their browsing history. For example, target potential new home buyers who have looked at homes in your town on Zillow with information about homeowner’s insurance.
- Share a series of videos on YouTube about how to prepare your home for winter. Target people in certain regions that are good areas for your business.
- Create a testimonial ad featuring a current client for cyber insurance on LinkedIn.
- Quickly target an audience for a new line of business such as workers’ compensation.
- Take cues from your organic social media posts to determine the content for ads. Track the topics that have the most views and engagement for inspiration on ads that will be most effective.
For a summary of audience and social platforms, check out Pew Research's Social Media Fact Sheet.
Features:
- SEO services
- Directory listings
- A/B testing
- Competitor research and reports
- Google advertising
- Facebook ads
- Photo ads
- Video ads
- Carousel ads
- Stories ads
- Instagram ads
All the major social networks offer advertising options. That doesn't mean you should use all of them.
Vendors:
Pricing:
You set your own ad budgets, which can range from $1 a day to $50+ per day and depending on whether or not you are seeking impressions or clicks. You may also be using a consulting firm to help design and execute your advertising program which can cost up to $1,500 per month or more depending on the scope and number of social media outlets you're targeting.
Guide for calculating ROI:
How to quantify the benefit of your social media and Google ads.
| (+) Increase in new sales | $ |
| (+) Increase in customer retention rates | $ |
| (+) Increase in lead-to-sale conversions | $ |
| (-) Advertising consulting fees | $ |
| (-) Advertising costs | $ |
Guide for KPIs:
There are a variety of Key Performance Indicators to measure the effectiveness of your social media advertising.
Cost per action
Can be very specific, such as people downloading gated content, signing up for a webinar or redeeming a code.
Conversions
Tracking those who take a specific action such as quoting, completing a form, signing up for an event.
Click-through rate
Track the ratio of people who have seen the ad versus the number of people that took action by clicking.
Traffic
How many are visiting your website or landing page.
Traffic sources
Where are the visitors coming from.
Mobile traffic
Devices visitors are using.
Lead acquisition cost
Total ad spend divided by the number of leads generated.
Customer conversion ratio
Track the number of leads who actually buy policies.
The major social networks offer analytics to help you measure the results of ads. Hootsuite offers several guides on how to use them.
- You can also use tools like Google Analytics and Hootsuite Impact to measure results across networks from a single dashboard.