That’s where paid social media advertising has emerged as a game-changer in the world of marketing, offering precision targeting and measurable results. However, the competition for consumers’ attention is fiercer than ever.

That’s why in this blog, I’ve delved into the significance of harnessing the potential of paid social media and best practices to reach new audiences and drive business growth.

Why paid social media advertising matters

Paid social media advertising is not just about running ads, it’s about strategically targeting your audience to get the maximum return on investment.

Here are some key reasons why paid social media advertising is a game changer for businesses:

1. Precision targeting: Paid social media platforms allow you to target specific demographics, interests, behaviours and even geographic locations. This means you can tailor your ads to reach the exact audience most likely to convert into customers
2. Cost-effective: You have control over your budget and can set daily or lifetime spending limits. This flexibility allows businesses of all sizes to participate and compete in the digital advertising space. You can start small and scale your campaigns as you see results
3. Measurable results: One of the greatest advantages of paid social media advertising is its measurability. You can track key metrics such as clicks, impressions, conversions and return-on-investment in real-time. This data-driven approach enables you to optimise your campaigns for better performance
4. Creative freedom: Social media platforms offer a variety of ad formats, from image and video ads to carousel ads. This creative freedom allows you to experiment with different formats and messaging to see what resonates most with your audience

Best practices for paid social media advertising

To make the most of paid social media advertising and reach new audiences effectively, here are some best practices to follow:

1. Set clear objectives: Define your advertising goals, whether it’s brand awareness, website traffic, lead generation or sales. Your objectives will shape your ad strategy and measurement criteria
2. Know your audience: Take the time to understand your target audience’s preferences, pain points and behaviour. Craft your ad content to address their specific needs and interests

3. Create compelling content: Engage your audience with eye-catching visuals, persuasive copy and a clear call to action. A well-crafted ad will capture attention and encourage users to take the desired action
4. A/B testing: Test elements like headlines, images, ad copy and call-to-actions to optimise performance
5. Monitor and adjust: Regularly analyse your ad campaign’s performance metrics. If something isn’t working as expected, experiment with different ad variations to determine what resonates best with your audience

Paid social media advertising offers a dynamic avenue for businesses to reach new audiences, drive engagement and achieve their marketing goals. By leveraging the precision targeting, cost-effectiveness and measurability of social media ads, you can unlock the full potential of your marketing efforts.

At Brand8 PR, we understand the ever-changing landscape of digital advertising, and we’re here to help you harness the power of paid social media advertising.

Contact us to explore how we can create tailored social media ad campaigns that align with your business objectives and connect you with the right audience.

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Today, it is rare to find a strategy that does not use it as a core communications tactic. However, getting it wrong can undermine the effectiveness of an entire campaign.

Instead, when we explore the concept with our clients, our strategy lies in how we can work with them to generate insight-led content as the core tenet of our B2B messaging.

Insight-led content serves as a more tactical description of the spirit and rationale that was originally behind thought leadership when it came onto the corporate lexicon.

Taking this approach to B2B comms means clients, and their communications advisors, can broaden their horizons and develop messaging that aligns more closely with their industry’s needs, wants and goals.

Ultimately, our goal is to build and execute a B2B comms strategy based on meaningful and resonant intellectual pillars that support clients’ brand values and drive conversations with customers.

Don’t add to the noise

One of the areas where thought leadership can go wrong is if its basic principle of having meaningful insightful thoughts becomes lost.

Although this may sound obvious, it points to a fundamental component and a frequent trap that many leaders are at risk of falling into and why we adopt an insight-led approach with clients.

While it is important to identify trends, issues and challenges in your industry, simply regurgitating them runs the risk of producing noise which only dilutes B2B strategies.

Generating true insight-led content entails graduating from identifying these issues to examining how they will apply to a client’s sector and what they are doing to harness their impact to drive transformation.

From a comms and PR business partner’s perspective, this means identifying and asking key questions, continually honing our sector knowledge and ensuring we challenge where appropriate.

By taking this approach, clients will have started their journey to creating true intellectual capital that will be an attractive pillar supporting PR activities. This will also become a core asset for both owned and earned comms channels.

It also presents an opportunity that poses commercial benefits. With brand messaging grounded in authoritative insight-led content, clients can engage in sustained, meaningful conversations with their industry.

Put simply, insight-led content is an opportunity to listen and grow wise.

Data, data and more data 

It’s a given that data is transforming the world we live in, and it is something that needs to be harnessed in insight-led content strategies.

By grounding data into strategies, clients can add academic and authoritative context to their messages. In doing so, this will enable them to stand apart and reinforce credibility amongst peers and customers.

When considering the data element, there are a handful of sources and tactics available. One of the most direct and useful ways is through customer surveys specifically curated for insight-led content.

This has the combined benefit of gathering valuable insights and demonstrating new levels of engagement that position clients as committed to supporting their industry to navigate change.

In addition, it is important to consider where data can be researched or purchased from credible third-party providers. If an initial insight-led content strategy is well crafted, this can present a significant ROI.

After sourcing the data, it is essential to interrogate it thoroughly in collaboration with comms and PR business partners. This will help your data tell a story by unlocking the trends patterns and, in some cases, hidden truths that form the central tenet of insight-led content.

With a strong data foundation, clients are well placed to deploy their messaging through comms channels to enhance their share of voice.

Data findings can also form the basis of an enticing press release, forming an attractive pull for journalists and improving credibility and coverage while perpetuating further earned and owned PR opportunities.

Driving ESG purpose, vision and comms

Insight-led content is a powerful complement to a client’s brand, its purpose, its core beliefs, its vision, its values, culture and commitment to its customers.

However, it is important to remember that it can motivate clients in other equally powerful ways.

One influential area is the increasingly critical ESG (environment, social and governance) agenda. This is driving clients to adapt and evolve their practices and operations to a more responsible footing.

It is important to remember that ESG is not just a passing trend but an area of acute commercial pressure. In time, many will see it as a core marker of progress and a competitive differentiator for clients as they attract and maintain a more socially responsible customer base.

ESG represents another area where insight-led content will be important. While considering how clients can support their customers, it provides the opportunity to also think about why and how they can be more environmentally friendly, diverse, equal, charitable and community-driven.

Learn to listen and you will grow wise 

It’s an exciting time when a client starts their insight-led content journey. For a PR practitioner, it’s a valuable and rewarding opportunity to understand sectors, issues, challenges and solutions.

As well as being insightful for those who are naturally curious, at the end of the day, insight-led content is a powerful asset to a B2B communications strategy.

By identifying issues and challenges and avoiding cliché traps while building strong data foundations, clients can develop their insight-led content to articulate beliefs and commitment to change.

At Brand8 PR, we understand the critical role of insight-led content in enhancing your brand’s reputation. Our team of experienced professionals specialises in crafting traditional media content strategies that highlight your businesses strengths.

Start building your insight-led content strategy today; contact us to discuss how we can assist you in planning ahead to gain coverage. Your brand’s reputation is our priority, and we’re here to help you build it.

The post Embrace content to supercharge your B2B comms appeared first on Brand8 PR | PR Agency Leeds.

Data can feed into campaigns in many different ways, from supporting claims made in press releases to ranking the popularity of things or places based on relevant metrics. The key is to make sure the narrative you get from the research is going to be relevant to the journalists you pitch it to.

Here are some of our favourite (and proven) ways of collecting data that help forge a digital PR campaign.

Search volume

Search volume and digital PR campaigns go hand in hand, with spikes in figures being an easy source to draw from when creating content. It can be used to find industry trends to comment on or to rank things by popularity, the possibilities are vast.

SEO tools such as AHrefs and SEMrush provide some of the most comprehensive search volume figures available, whilst Google Search Trends is a good free-to-use alternative.

The main drawback though is that it lacks a lot of the capabilities the paid tools have such as; regional breakdown of figures, the ability to search for multiple keywords or phrases at once and being able to download the results quickly into a csv format.

Surveys

Surveys are a classic and essential method of data collection for any PR practitioner looking to create newsworthy content. If constructed correctly, survey campaigns often yield amazing results and appeal to a broad range of media outlets because it gives insights into what the public thinks, which nearly always generates impactful news stories.

There are two main ways you can a conduct survey campaign with the first being through a third-party company. This comes with a cost, however, you are guaranteed to get the number of responses you pay for, so it’s a no-risk strategy.

If you don’t have the budget for that, then a more cost-effective way is to carry it out yourself. This can be risky as there is no way of guaranteeing that you get the number of responses you need to give the survey the weight it needs to be newsworthy.

Free datasets

There are loads of fantastic, free datasets that can be used to fuel digital PR campaigns that can easily be found online. A good way to quickly check if data is available before you pitch your idea to the client is by using Google Dataset Search.

YouGov is also a great source of free statics, particularly if you are looking for figures to back up claims in your press release or campaign landing page copy. Statista and Kaggle also offer a range of free datasets, with both also having premium services.

The free versions are good if you can find what you need, however, they are limited and often not up to date. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) also has plenty of datasets that are completely free to download and use.

Web scraping

Scraping a website for data is one of the most effective and time-saving ways to get data for a campaign. There are a variety of different tools that can be used for this which have the capability to scrap most websites and extract all the data you need.

However, sometimes websites stop you from doing this, Twitter, for example, clamped down on PRs extracting data on the number of tweets containing keywords and phrases, which was extremely useful for creating sentiment campaigns about pretty much any subject.

Other online tools will also scrap data from specific sites such as The Playlist Miner, which finds how often songs appear on Spotify playlists based on keyword searches. APIs are also available for the likes of Instagram and TripAdvisor but require a basic level of coding knowledge to get the data you need.

Desk research

Sometimes the best way to get the needed data is by manually collecting it and collating it into a spreadsheet. Sourcing your own dataset means you have full control over the metrics, however, it can be time-consuming, particularly for bigger projects.

Campaigns which rank things are often a manual job, such as finding the most popular movie in a particular category. This would involve getting fan/ critic ratings, box office earnings, peak search volume figures etc. All of that information is readily available online, it’s just a case of pulling it all together and scoring your list of films against these metrics.

Although this is the most time-consuming method on the list, it is sometimes the only option to get the data exactly right for the purposes of your campaign. Spending a bit more time on the research phase will pay off in the long run if your ideas are relevant and newsworthy.

So there you have it, our top five ways of getting data for digital PR campaigns. Of course, there are various other methods that we haven’t mentioned here, but all of the above are some of our favourite tried and tested ways that, if carried out properly, will likely get results.

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