Social media advertising continues to explode in all directions. Social budgets are growing by over 32% in 2018, social ad revenue is expected to climb over $51 billion dollars by the end of 2018 and 76% of total US consumers claim to have bought a product seen on social media. The numbers are only predicted to grow as we move into 2019.
Despite the growing importance of social advertising—particularly on Facebook and Instagram—marketers are still faced with a familiar nemesis. Time. With limited time and resources, oftentimes trade-offs are made between managing organic social efforts and optimizing through paid strategy. But this is short sighted decision making.
Paid social has much more to offer than increased impressions, clicks, video views and conversions. In the same way that organic social fosters real connection, at the heart of an effective paid strategy is a simple yet powerful lesson: Every ad is a chance to connect and expand your world.
Today, we’re excited to announce a big step towards helping marketers drive real connection with Sprout’s enhanced paid tools for Facebook and Instagram. With Facebook Paid Promotion, ad comment moderation and Sprout’s new Paid Performance Report for the Facebook Business Network, do-it-all marketers and social strategists alike have all the tools they need to make workflows more efficient, campaigns more effective and drive authentic connection right alongside their organic efforts.
Inspire Connection with Paid Promotion
Promoted posts present an opportunity to reach new people who may be interested in your brand but just don’t know it yet. With Sprout’s Paid Promotion for Facebook, you can quickly amplify top performing content or plan post promotions in the same workflow as your organic publishing. It’s easy to set spend and choose your pre-built audiences and campaigns pulled directly from Facebook Ads Manager.
Sprout’s Paid Promotion workflow can be leveraged in two distinct ways.:
- First, when supporting existing campaigns, you can save time by scheduling Promoted Posts (including Dark Posts) and maintain campaign organization right from the Compose window. Then, easily track and manage your promoted posts alongside your organic content strategy within the Calendar List and Week Views.
- Second, to support digital marketing efforts or maximize the value of organic posts, you can also repurpose well-performing content by boosting published posts from the Sent Messages Report.
Cultivate Connection with Ad Comment Moderation
While clicks and conversions are the end goal of many ad strategies, conversation is a critical component to any outcome. Ads can easily come off as cold and sales by virtue of their format, but with ad comment moderation in Sprout’s Smart Inbox you can bring an empathetic, human touch to your ads. By streamlining comments on your Facebook, Instagram and Messenger campaigns with incoming messages on your organic posts, your team can maintain a consistent brand voice and efficiently drive connection no matter where it’s taking place.
You can also view your brand’s conversation history with a specific customer inside the Instagram and Facebook Contact Views. Identifying whether a person’s first conversation with your brand was through an ad, or if you have an ongoing dialogue with them, is important context for building connection. Social media and community managers can better understand the full customer relationship—whether they’re responding to a comment on an organic post or a piece of sponsored content.
Analyze Connection with Paid Performance Reporting
The maturation of ad strategies doesn’t mean that clients, execs or your colleagues are moving at the same pace. It’s tough to communicate successes or even know which metrics to focus on when trying to optimize spend. Not to mention, pulling together concise wrap-ups—especially for various stakeholders—can be taxing and time consuming. To simplify this process, Sprout’s Paid Performance Report delivers near real-time insight enabling businesses to analyze campaign performance, highlight ROI and inform social advertising strategy decisions.
The Paid Performance Report gives customers on our Enterprise and Corporate plans an all-up view of campaign performance, visualizing data for ad campaigns executed through Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook Audience Network. The Overview provides a sleek, aggregated cross-channel look at campaign-level spend and KPIs such as video views, web conversions and cost per metrics for selected campaigns. The sortable Campaigns table provides a way to quickly solve for your desired KPI amongst selected campaigns and identify the channels that are driving the most impact.
Ultimately, do-it-all marketers can quickly get up to speed on paid campaign performance—no matter who is responsible for execution—to make sure their next campaign drives even stronger connection and conversion.
Just Taking Off
With today’s release, and our growing suite of paid products, we’re excited to help you build authentic connection through your ad strategy. And this is just the beginning! There is a lot on the horizon, with enhancements to the Paid Performance Report including additional channels and deeper, more customizable insights. If you’re already a Sprout customer, get started with Paid Promotion, ad comments and the Paid Performance Report simply by connecting your Facebook Ad Account today.