Which Paid Media Platform Should I Use to Promote My Campaign?

People often think that they can run all of their campaigns across all platforms. However, just because you can run your campaigns across all platforms doesn’t mean that you should.

The first thing you should consider when choosing a platform is: what is the message that is being shared? Are people going to be actively searching for that message? If not, then your campaign is probably better suited for Social Media rather than a Google Search or Bing Search campaign.

This is primarily because, on Social, you can target by interests, behaviors, and demographics. As opposed to Google Search and Bing Search, where you are bidding on a specific set of keywords that are related to the content or service that you have on your website. Let’s look at an example:

Take, for example, the Bluleadz infographic for “An Inside Tutorial Explaining The BZ Modular Pricing Page.” Let’s consider how we would answer the following questions to analyze what platform this is best suited for:

• What is the message that is being shared? This is more of a conversational piece to help prospective clients understand our pricing options.
• Since this campaign is more ‘conversational’ a.k.a. “social,” it makes sense that it would be better suited for a social platform. But let’s take a look at the second questions anyways.
• Are people going to be actively searching for that message? The closest search term I could possibly think of was “Understanding Bluleadz’s Pricing,” but the likelihood that it actually gets searched are slim to none because people are a little bit more likely to just call us to get a better understanding. So, people probably aren’t actively searching it. Which means, it’s probably better suited for Social. Maybe even remarketing to people who have been to our pricing page, but didn’t convert.
• While someone may be searching for topics that are within your offer, the strength of your keywords will be pretty low and that will hurt your quality score.

Based off those questions, if you have decided on Social Media and aren’t sure which Social Media Platform to use, the next thing you should consider is Targeting Options on each platform. All platforms include location targeting, but each has their own extensive list of audience targeting beyond that:

• Facebook Targeting Options:
• Interests - “Reach specific audiences by looking at their interests, activities, the Pages they have liked and closely related topics.”
  • Business & Industry
  • Entertainment
  • Family and relationships
  • Fitness & wellness
  • Food & Drink
  • Hobbies & activities
  • Shopping & Fashion
  • Sports & Outdoors
  • Technology
• Behaviors - “Reach people based on purchase behaviors or intents, device usage and more. Some behavior data is available for US audiences only.”
  • Anniversary
  • Consumer Classification
  • Digital Activities
  • Expats
  • Mobile Device User
  • More Categories
  • Multicultural Affinity
  • Purchase behavior
  • Soccer
  • Travel
• Demographics - “Reach people based on education, employment, household and lifestyle details. Some data is available for the US only.”
  • Education
  • Home
  • Life Events
  • Parents
  • Politics (US)
  • Relationship
  • Work
• More Categories - “Find any Facebook or Partner Categories you've requested access to here. Some data is available for US audiences only.”
• Custom Audiences:
• Website Visitors
• Customer File
• Engagement on Facebook
• Lookalike Audience
• App Activity

Facebook doesn’t always have everything you are looking for. Always double check within Facebook if the targeting options you want are actually available before deciding on that platform.

• LinkedIn Targeting Options:
• Company Name
• Company Industry
• Company SIze
• Job Title
• Job Function
• Job Seniority
• Member Schools
• Fields of Study
• Degrees
• Member Skills
• Member Groups
• Member Gender
• Member Age
• Years of Experience
• Company Followers
• Company Connections
• Matched Audiences - “Custom targeting options to reach your website visitors, contacts, and target accounts.”

Similar to Facebook, I would double check that the targeting you would like to use is actually available within LinkedIn. Both Platforms will also show you your estimated target audience size.

If you still aren’t completely sure on what platform you should use. Try all of your options and use UTM tags to see what is the most effective. It might be a little trial and error, but at least you’ll be able to see, by platform, where you can get the most interaction.

Sometimes deciding what type of campaign to run on each respective platform can be confusing too, so let’s take a look a deciding which type of campaign might be best of your offer:

Deciding Which Facebook Campaign to Run

Website Click vs. Conversions vs. Lead Generation

Awesome! You’ve decided to run your offer on Facebook… Now, what campaign type should you run? There are three main campaign types on Facebook: Website Click, Conversion, and Lead Generation. First let’s look at a brief definition of what each are:

• Website Click Campaign - Website clicks simply drive traffic to the website, so these should mainly be used for branding purposes and generating interest around a specific piece of content, a product, or a service.
• Conversions Campaign - These are very similar to website click campaigns, but you can create a desired action, or custom conversion on Facebook, to track if people accomplish the goal of your campaign. So if you want people to fill out a form on a specific landing page, your custom conversion would be if they click on your Facebook Ad and then get to the thank you page for the form that is on the landing page.
  
  • For this, you will need to add a conversion pixel to your website.
• Lead Gen Campaign - When someone clicks on this, it will pop up a form within Facebook for the customer to fill out. After they fill out the form, you can provide a Thank You message and add a link to the next action they need to take, ie. the link on your site that has the eBook, or whatever you were offering them to fill out the form.
  
  • For both Conversion And Lead Gen ads, Facebook will target people it thinks are likely to convert.

When considering any type of offer and a specific campaign to run, you have to consider the following; Does the person think that the value of the content is worth the amount of information they are providing you? The reason you need to consider this is because a Lead Gen ad doesn’t give you a lot of space to discuss what the user will be getting after they fill out the form.

So you won't really be able to divulge the extent of the content, information, or service they will be getting. Also consider the short attention span of Social Media users, if they don’t get the info they want quickly, they are likely to X-out and keep scrolling.

Ultimately, you also need to think about what you, yourself would do as a consumer: what are you doing while scrolling through Facebook? For me, I just want to watch funny videos, or highlights from a Football game -- I don’t want to fill out a form.

So if your persona matches me, you probably don’t want to run a Lead Gen ad. But that’s not to say that if I were offered the right type of form, that I wouldn’t fill it out. For example, if ESPN offered a form to stay up to date with all things Michigan Football, COUNT ME IN! ...Go Blue!

via GIPHY

Is Facebook not right for your offer? Let’s look at LinkedIn insted:

Deciding Which LinkedIn Campaign to Run

Sponsored Content or Text Ad

Wooo! You’ve decided to run your offer on LinkedIn... Now, what campaign type should you run? There are two main campaign types on LinkedIn: Text Ads and Sponsored Content. First let’s look at a brief definition of what each are:

• Text Ad - This ad shows up on the side of the page and clearly states that it is an advertisement to users. This means that when someone clicks on it, they probably have a higher level of intent with your company because they know that they are clicking on an ad. With Text Ads, you are slightly limited with imagery and text and these can only be viewed on Desktop.
• Sponsored Content - Shows up within users’ news feeds and gives you more space to use images and text to entice your customers to click. (The news feed is also the main location people are paying attention to — why wouldn’t you want to show up there?) These can be viewed on any device. You can also create Lead Gen forms within sponsored content which are very similar to the Facebook Lead Gen Ads.

Generally, I would use Text Ads help to get your content or information out to a list of Marketing Qualified Leads that show high levels of intent for your offer, are ready to convert and don’t need the extensive information that you can provide in a sponsored content ad.

Since those sponsored content ads do provide the extra space, you can dive deeper into information about your product or service and entice users to click with a Call to Action and target those that show less intent.

Since LinkedIn is very business-focused (as opposed to Facebook, where I’m looking for funny videos), I would recommend keeping your ads focused on your company, what you offer, and how you can solve your prospective customers problems.