Paid social recently overtook paid search as an advertising channel, growing 25% YoY and exceeding $137 billion in total annual spend (just edging out search’s $135 billion).

With more businesses pouring money into their paid social strategy, you need to make sure you’re using your available budget efficiently to reach your revenue goals in an increasingly competitive space. 

Higher campaign price tags, paired with the fact that many consumers have developed a tendency to ignore social ads, reduces the margin for error. If you’re not strategic with your spending, platforms like Meta and TikTok will happily eat up your budget without delivering a significant uptick in sales. So what are the key pitfalls to avoid? 

In this final instalment of our four-part “Beat the Budget: Mastering Efficiency in Paid Media” webinar series we spoke to Fiona Bradley, Founder of FB Comms. Fiona was joined by Leonardo Pizzaro, Head of Demand Generation at Lunio, and the conversation was hosted by Lunio’s Content Manager, James Deeney.

Fiona was named Social Media Business Woman of The Year 2023, and has worked on campaigns for Coca-Cola, the NHS, Rolex and many more. A committee member for the After Work Club and Guest Lecturer at Durham University, she has a proven track record of delivering outstanding campaign results. 

During the session, Fiona gave paid social strategy tips to boost return on ad spend. The tips originally stemmed from our recent Performance Marketing Efficiency Playbook, and you can read Fiona’s chapter in full below.

You can download the 115-page playbook for free - no form fill required. Expect to learn: 

• How to calculate your Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER)  
• How to obey the 10 ad copy commandments 
• The 1-1-3-1 rule for landing pages 
• Ideal B2B & B2C PMax campaign structures 
• “Outside the box” targeting strategies for paid social 
• And lots more

Get Lunio’s Performance Marketing Efficiency Playbook

Webinar recording

Webinar timestamps 

• 00:00 - Intro 
• 05:28 - Is TikTok a national security threat? 
• 07:22 - Agenda
• 08:13 - Why invest in paid social? 
• 15:00 - Fiona’s take on Snapchat, Quora, BeReal & Lemon8 
• 21:03 - Best practices for advertising on TikTok 
• 27:45 - How to reduce your LinkedIn advertising costs 
• 34:23 - Challenges with automated paid social accounts 
• 41:43 - How to reliably track paid social performance 
• 43:30 - Best practices for paid social A/B testing 
• 47:13 - 2023 paid social trends to tap into 
• 51:45 - Q&A with Fiona 

TL;DR – Key takeaways 

• Always check which social channels your traffic and conversions are already coming from and double down on those. You can use traffic analysis tools like SimilarWeb to uncover which channels are generating most traffic for your competitors.  

• Reddit and Quora are two underused platforms. The ads are much more affordable than LinkedIn and deliver decent results when you get your targeting right for your paid social strategy.

• Just like your web domain and Google rankings, your social pages get a ‘quality ranking’. So decent engagement on your organic content means your ads are likely to be deemed “more relevant” and shown to more people.

• Snapchat has around a 50% lower click-through rate than TikTok, because the “Explore” page is updated so frequently, with so many different content options to choose from. On TikTok, ads are always displayed full-screen. 

• TikTok works really well for eCommerce companies selling lower value products. It’s harder to get the same level of conversions on luxury items. 

• If you sell higher value products, TikTok can still be useful for brand awareness campaigns and driving traffic to your site. You can then retarget those users and pick them up on Google or Instagram.

• You want your TikTok ads to blend into the feed as much as possible. So avoid logos, video templates and over-produced content. Fiona recommends CapCut for creating short-form video content for social ads. 

• User-generated content (UGC) can work well if you find the right people to partner with. Twitter is a great place to start as there’s a huge active UGC community on there.

• On LinkedIn, use very niche audiences, and always keep your audience size below 50K. Exclude job titles and specific companies (e.g. Fiverr, Upwork) that are likely to be irrelevant as the individuals are freelance. 

• Increase your investment in ABM on LinkedIn as it delivers higher ROI than all other types of marketing. Consider running one-to-one campaigns with highly-personalised creative as well as one-to-many. 

• When using automated campaign budget optimisation, one ad set / product tends to get all the traction and the others get ignored - so those products simply sit on the shelves.

• To manage manual bidding more efficiently, have your KPIs set. What cost- per-click are you looking for? What kind of ROAS do you need to hit? When these numbers aren’t being met, you can reduce the budget or switch off the ad set and tweak it.

• Always crosscheck the sales you see in the social platform with CMS and Google Analytics data. They’ll inevitably all tell you different numbers. So you need to define what your source of truth is for your paid social strategy.

• So you should be setting up multiple audiences, creatives, calls to action, and conversion points to continuously A/B test and reduce cost per click every time you run a new campaign.

• Test your product / platform fit too. Sometimes people just won’t care much about a specific product on a specific platform, no matter how good your ad is. If things aren’t working out, switch off the campaign and test the product on a different platform.

How to level up your paid social strategy

The 10 tips below from Fiona will help you build a more profitable paid social strategy by minimising wasted ad spend.

1. Focus ad spend on the right channels

Are people likely to be searching for physios on Pinterest? Probably not. So you're best investing in Google Ads if your audience is local and will be searching on maps over social media. Always check where your traffic and conversions are already coming from and double down on those areas. You don’t need to be on TikTok just because it’s the new trending platform. 

• You can use traffic analysis tools like SimilarWeb to uncover which channels are generating most traffic for your competitors. You shouldn’t blindly follow what others are doing, but this can be helpful for giving you ideas for things you’re not trying already. 

Here’s Fiona’s take on some of the most popular social platforms: 

"I had a client who had a competitor that was getting lots of traffic from Reddit. So we decided to experiment with Reddit ads. And it worked – they got a whole host of new loyal customers."
‍
Fiona Bradley,
‍Founder, FB Comms

TikTok 

TikTok works really well for eCommerce companies selling lower value products. It's harder to get the same level of conversions on luxury items. If you sell higher value products, TikTok can still be useful for brand awareness campaigns and driving traffic to your site. You can then retarget those users and pick them up on Google or Instagram. 

Facebook and Instagram 

When you run ads through Meta Business Manager, you can split them between Facebook and Instagram. Often ads will be shown to more people on Instagram as it has higher engagement rates. With Facebook you tend to get fewer clicks, but more of those convert. Facebook is really good for services like coaching and training. Localised ads and local stores also tend to do well. 

LinkedIn 

LinkedIn is the go to social channel for B2B businesses. But LinkedIn ads are incredibly expensive to run. So Fiona advises focusing on your organic strategy instead if you’re on a tight budget. Start creating value-added content, build up your network, and strike up conversations with the people who engage with your posts. 

Reddit and Quora 

Reddit and Quora are two underused platforms. The ads are much more affordable than LinkedIn and deliver decent results when you get your targeting right. With Quora you even have the option to place your ads within the Quora Digest email, which can be particularly effective. 

2. Don't neglect organic content

If you're running ads from a dead social profile, it's going to be a bit suspect or look potentially like a scam if the last post was made in 2018. Just like your web domain and Google rankings, your social pages get a 'quality ranking'. So decent engagement on your organic content means your ads are likely to be deemed “more relevant” and shown to more people.

How often should you post? 

Ideally posting frequency varies depending on your brand and audience. But if you want to gain traction, you should aim to post at least once a day. For example, with Instagram reels daily posting is crucial for driving meaningful growth. With TikTok you should aim to post at least five times a week while tapping into all the latest trending audios. 

That said, if you’ve got limited resources, it’s better to post three times a week with content that’s actually relevant. Don’t continue posting daily just for the sake of it if you’re getting no engagement. 

Hashtags 

Hashtags used to be more important as a search tool. But now all the social platforms will search the copy within your post itself and pull keywords from there. So you don’t need to spend hours doing hashtag research anymore. As a general rule of thumb, using three relevant hashtags per post is enough. 

Use humour to drive engagement 

"There’s so much boring marketing spam in everyone’s feeds. If you can make people smile you’re far more likely to drive engagement and sales. For example, I recently created a video ad of a shark hand puppet making a cup of tea. I could have just talked about the product, materials, and specifications, but that would have undoubtedly been ignored."
‍
Fiona Bradley,
‍Founder, FB Comms

Of course there are certain scenarios where humour isn’t appropriate. Some ads need a more matter-of-fact treatment. For example, if you're a wellness brand focusing on mental and physical health there’s not much space for humour. But outside of those particular cases, you should aim to spark an emotion, especially one people want to share which is the key to virality.

3. Don't rely on campaign budget optimisation

Most social platforms have an option where you set the budget at campaign level, and then let the algorithm decide which ad sets to allocate more of your budget towards based on performance. The problem with this is that one ad set tends to get all the traction and the others get ignored - so those products simply sit on the shelves. 

Manual bidding on keywords, ad sets and ads means they’ll all get enough airtime for you to see how well they're doing. You can then go in to move budgets over to those ads and audiences with the lowest cost per acquisition.

Maximising manual bidding efficiency 

The key here is to know exactly what you’re looking for. Have your KPIs set. What cost-per-click are you looking for? What kind of ROAS and conversion rate do you need to hit? When these numbers aren’t being met, you can reduce the budget or switch off the ad set and tweak it.

If you haven’t got quantified goals in mind it’s very easy to spend hours looking at all the numbers in the dashboard trying to make your budget allocation decisions. 

4. Avoid boosting posts

If you've ever posted anything from a business Facebook or Instagram account, you'll have seen that big boost button. Don't push it. It's good for engagement (i.e. likes and views) if you've already got a well-performing organic post. 

However, boosting posts offers you limited targeting capabilities. If maximising conversions and sales are your goal with your paid social strategy, Business Manager allows much more detailed audience targeting and tracking.

5. Use less-common audiences

Sorry to break it to you, but most other marketers will also be targeting more affluent areas, and people who have generic interests such as ”health and fitness” or “cooking”. Instead aim to use more unique targeting such as people that follow the “Ironman” page, like a similar brand, celebrity endorser, or have kids of a certain age. Only show your offering to people who it'll be relevant for.

"I worked with a life coach who was advertising coaching services via a free webinar about overcoming overthinking. We decided to experiment by targeting people that had just come back from holiday between one and two weeks ago. That audience blew the others out of the water in terms of sign ups. So that’s where we put all the budget.

On holiday people have time to relax and think. And when they come back, they often want to make a change in their life. And the webinar was a perfect fit for that frame of mind."
‍
Fiona Bradley,
‍Founder, FB Comms

Generating ideas for audience targeting 

It pays to think outside the box when it comes to audience targeting on social channels. So look at what your ideal customers are posting about on their pages. What kinds of threads are they starting or interacting with on Reddit? Do they ever mention any specific brands or influencers? It’s also worth diving into audience interest reports on Google Analytics.

It’s worth noting that Meta has become much better at wide targeting in recent years. If you have a large pool of historical conversion data the algorithm can pull from, you can just leave things running and give it enough time to optimise performance. But if you’re new to running ads on the platform and it hasn't figured out who your best converters are, get specific.

6. Humanise your ad content

You want your ads to blend into the feed as much as possible. So avoid logos, video templates and over-produced content. They say 'create TikToks, not ads'. That means showcasing your product or services without directly and aggressively selling.

User-generated content 

Some influencers charge extortionate fees for 15-second videos. But user-generated content (UGC) can work well if you find the right people. Twitter is a great place to start as there’s a huge active UGC community on there.

CapCut 

If you’d rather not work with UGC creators, you can do it yourself using CapCut - which is still completely free to use. And provided you put a bit of thought and effort into it, often the output is just as good. 

Optimising CTAs 

If it’s a paid social ad, it’s going to have the “Shop Now” or “Learn More” button attached anyway. So you don’t need to put anything overly pushy or salesy in the copy itself. 

CTAs are more important to think about when it comes to organic posts. What is it you want viewers to do? You need to be explicit, otherwise they’ll do nothing. 

• Save this post 
• Share it with friends 
• Tell me what you think in the comments 
• Tag us in your photos to be featured on our page

7. Only use lookalike audiences with enough data

If you’ve got a small number of customers, the platforms will find it hard to generalise and find decent lookalikes. If you have a batch of 10,000 super loyal repeat customers, the algorithm will have a much easier time finding people similar. 

As a minimum cutoff point, Fiona advises against using lookalike audiences unless you’ve got at least 5,000 really engaged and loyal customers. And the “engaged and loyal” part really matters. If you’ve got 20,000 overall customers, but they’re not loyal repeat buyers, it’s not going to work as well.

Tip: Always exclude your current customer list when using lookalike audiences to avoid spend inefficiency due to audience overlap. 

8. Make sure your tracking is working

Each platform uses their own tracking systems, usually a piece of code called a tracking pixel that you'll have to upload on the website. When customers take action on your site, these codes will fire and tell your ad platform it's working and your ads will get shown to more users. 

After setup, make sure your pixel is working correctly. Meta Pixel Helper (other social platforms have equivalent features) reports common errors that can happen after installation:

• Check out this guide to troubleshoot common pixel tracking errors

Always crosscheck your conversion data 

Even when your pixel tracking is working correctly, you should never take the sales and conversions you see within social platforms as gospel. Pixels record clicks. But someone can click on your website and then be refused for finance or payment may have been declined.

Always crosscheck the sales you see in the social platform with CMS and Google Analytics data. They’ll inevitably all tell you different numbers. So you need to define what your source of truth is. What are you actually going to base your performance off? 

Ultimately, the only thing that really matters is the money that went into your bank account. Which is another reason why calculating your marketing efficiency ratio is so important in your paid social strategy:

Total revenue from paid media ÷ total paid media spend = marketing efficiency ratio

9. A/B test everything

Your first ad is almost always going to perform poorly. So you should be setting up multiple audiences, creatives, calls to action, and conversion points to continuously improve your ads and reduce cost per click every time you run a new campaign. A/B testing is vital for an effective paid social strategy.

"Always experiment with products too. Sometimes people just won’t care much about a specific product on a specific platform, no matter how good your ad is. If things aren’t working out, switch off the campaign and test the product on a different platform."
‍
Fiona Bradley,
‍Founder, FB Comms

10. Optimise your checkout process

There’s no point running ads and spending money if there’s a huge drop-off between initiating checkout and purchase because your PayPal button isn’t working. Check each step is optimised at the outset. Here are are few things that can kill your conversion rates:

• A slow or poorly designed website 
• A postage payment that’s way above average 
• A complex purchase process with multiple steps 
• A basket that’s hidden in the menu and difficult to access 
• A purchase page filled with terms and conditions copy