The success of any business is measured by results and like every E-comm business, yours deserve to have great results.

Social media marketing has grown to become an essential tool in boosting the overall growth of your e-comm business. Facebook advertising in particular has been statistically proven to work.

 

That being said, it’s essential to note that one of the biggest challenges of being a media buyer or running your e-commerce store is coming up with the right creatives, finding the right audience and ad copywriting.  

 

Social media marketing, in general, can be tricky to handle even for the well-seasoned pros. As you may have already come to know, there are common challenges every marketer especially small business owners will have to overcome in order to run a great campaign.

Keep reading and find out how to get the best out of your social media marketing. 

Is Social Media Marketing Worth The Hype?

Social media is a giant that needs no introduction. Its impact has continued to cut across all aspects of life so much so that it is hard to ignore.

With at least half of the world’s population actively using social media, it’s the ultimate location to boost your business to new levels. 

Facebook alone has 2.91 billion monthly active users. That's about four times the population of all of Europe. This makes Facebook the most used social platform on the planet and that creates a huge market for your business. Think about it, it's 2.91 billion potential clients!

Business owners like you have taken note of the infinite possibilities the social media giant is home to. It then doesn't come as a surprise that 92% of social marketers are using FaceBook for advertising.

Businesses are paying 122% more per advertisement unit on Facebook than they did barely a year ago for a very good reason, and that's because these ads work.

If you are looking to increase your business visibility, attract new clients and convert interested users, then it only makes sense that you give social media ads a closer look.

Top 5 Challenges Social Media Marketers Face And How To Overcome Them

While social media marketing holds great potential, the challenges marketers run into while running them all too often lead to mistakes that could cost you. In fact, a study by Symantec shows that social media mistakes have cost major corporations as much as $4.3 million on yearly basis. 

The good news is these challenges can be overcome with advanced preparation and effort.

For small business owners, there are a host of challenges to be overcome, with the first most times being a limited budget. Keeping up with the latest innovations and marketing techniques is a challenge of its own.

Having been able to have helped small business owners generate over $210 million from social media marketing, these are some of the top 5 challenges small businesses face and how to overcome them.

You can check out the step-by-step guide on the techniques my team and I used to generate over $210 million for our clients from Facebook ads alone here

It doesn't matter if you're a beginner, this guide will help you create great, eye-catching, high converting Facebook ads in no time.

Challenge One; Area Of Concentration 

There are several ways to promote your brand via the internet. The term social media in itself refers to more than one platform that can be used to increase your brand awareness.

While it’s great to have so many options, one of the tricks behind running successful social media campaigns is knowing where to find your clients and focusing on that platform.

So if your ideal clients would most likely spend most of their time on Facebook, then that's where your resources should be invested into.

Challenge Two; Limited Budget

Being a small business, there is only so much money that can be spent running ads. Sadly cash is essential in the running of a successful social media campaign especially if you intend to reach a wider audience.

A smart way around this challenge is to start with relatively cheap marketing strategies like running podcasts, webinars or simply posting videos to a page dedicated to your business. While these are slow and time-consuming, they still have a remarkable effect on your business.

If your business can afford it, a better option will be to invest in as much paid marketing as you can, these could be pay-per-click ads where you only pay after those ads have yielded conversions.  

Challenge Three; Lack Of Time

Running your own social media campaign is time-consuming, especially when you’re working on cheap marketing strategies. It takes time to write blog posts, update social media accounts, make videos, track the progress of your posts, determines which strategies work best, and so forth. 

Many business owners are not even equipped with the right knowledge needed to develop an effective content marketing strategy and that’s understandable since training and years of constant practice could be the defining factor in acquiring these skills.

There is no straightforward solution to this challenge but finding the right balance is the key. 

A dedicated social media person or content creator is one solution, but not everyone can afford that. However, learning all of these things when running your own business can be difficult and so you’ve to find ways to outsource essential tasks. 

Consider hiring an agency on a per-project basis or looking into virtual assistants and freelancers if you can't afford a full-time employee. Getting started is the most important thing. As your business grows, you can increase your efforts.

Challenge Four; Lean Resources

While struggling to balance money and time, another challenge common to small business owners running social media campaigns is having team members who have the skill you need in running your social media campaigns.

A study by eMarketer and Ascend shows that 43% of surveyed marketers pointed this to be one of the reasons why delivering on their campaigns proved to be so challenging. It’s always great to have skilled support.

Feeling understaffed is usually a sign that you might need to introduce new hands to your social team but with a limited budget, a good alternative is to effectively balance the social tools you have and to make the most out of them.

Challenge Five; Staying Unique

With so many marketers looking to have a taste of the goddess of social media marketing, standing out becomes an absolute necessity.

Your competitors are most likely already spending time and resources to put out ads on social media and of course, there is the temptation to copy what they are doing, ultimately making your ads look like thiers. This is a severe mistake you should not make.

Having a unique selling proposition is the most efficient way to maintain uniqueness. Why is your product different from others? What's the special feature your product has? What can our product offer to your clients that others can’t? Let them know about it.

In all your marketing outreach, don’t fail to tell your audience if your products offer the best discount, are the most natural, the cheapest, most luxurious, and so forth.

Branding also plays a key role in maintaining your uniqueness. Your social media page is an online representation of your business. Hence, maintaining consistency of your brand's tone, colors, and the overall image is a must.

Even after knowing how to overcome the challenges of social media marketing, it can still seem a huge task to come up with great content. That’s where creating a social media marketing strategy comes in handy.

This serves as a roadmap to your goals and guides the overall strategy, showing you how to go about your goals and a clear path of how to repeat strategies that work.

Facebook Ads; What They Entail

To understand how to create attractive ads on Facebook, let's take a look at the different parts it contains.

• Top Copy; This is the primary text that presents your product/service to the viewer. As you may have observed on Facebook, this write-up comes just under your business account name. You can write as many words as you like, but only the first 125 characters will be displayed with an option to expand. Its safer to keep it short as shorter text statistically have a higher chance of been read. without having the viewer click the ‘more’ option for the rest of the text to be displayed
• Creative; This could be an image(static or animated), carousel(selection of scrollable images)(a selection of scrollable images) or even a video. It is important not to have too much text on your creative since people might not get to see the image. Be intentional when it comes to selecting your creatives. It’s best to stick to original graphics. Visual contents are 40x most likely to be shared on social media, which makes it a must for you to invest your time in. Our trusted go-to source for top-notch creatives has been those created by our team. You too can have a team set up just for this purpose.

• Headline; After the image comes the headline which is a maximum of 40 characters

• Description; It comes just below the headline and it’s crafted to tell more about what your business offers and urge the viewer to check it out

• CTA; The choice is usually made based on the best fit out of a drop-down of options provided by Facebook. Some examples are Shop Now, Learn More, Download, etc.

Tips For Writing Killer Ads

Number of Characters; This refers to the number of word text used in setting up your ads. It’s only natural you want to go on and on about how amazing your product is but from our experience we’ve seen that the more the characters, the less the conversion rate. The top message, for instance, can accommodate up to 280 characters but only the first 125 characters will be shown by facebook without requiring the user to click for more of the copy and most often this yields far less conversion than ads that have only 125 characters. The goal for writing a top message as well as the rest of your ad is to keep it compact and catchy.  Facebook has word limits on the different segments of your ad, and exceeding this limit may have your ad disapproved. Remember there is only a short span of an opportunity to show your potential clients your product's best side and so it only makes sense that fewer well-crafted words can help you achieve that more efficiently. Aim to grab your audience's Attention, Interest, Desire as well as make them take Action with the fewest possible amount of words.

Emphasize On Pain Points; Your product/service like others seeks to help solve a problem your prospective client has. Always remember to emphasize that pain when writing your ads as this instantly draws the attention of the user that tries to scroll past your ad. Humans are predisposed to be drawn to a possible solution to a current problem. This makes emotional copywriting an essential marketing tool. If you decide to use this in writing your copy, ensure to make the pain point clear and make even clearer how your product provides a solution. A great way to go about this is using the acronym PASA-Problem, Agitation, Solution, Action to guide the structure of your copy.  Using this, you start with a problem that will be of interest to your potential clients, then you go on to agitate by talking a bit more about that problem, showing you understand this problem and how much things would be easier without those pain points. This creates a good opportunity to introduce a solution which is of course your product and finally end it all with a call to action. Don’t expect them to know what to do, go the extra mile and spell it out with a call to action.

Features and benefits; Your business might not be the only one using social media ads to suggest how their products empower users to eliminate their pain points and that's why adding the benefits and features of your products to your ads is an essential tool in creating high converting ads. Benefits help your prospective clients answer the why? Why buy your product? Why read your book? Why book that call? Etc. This ultimately tells why what you offer is unique. On the other hand, the features tell how to get these benefits with your product/service. While there is no right ratio of features and benefits to add, it's important to balance both and ensure there is more than one of each. This can be added as part of the text on your image or in the top copy or even both.

  

Use Urgency; Urgency is another great tool to use in creating eye-catching ads, the statistics show that using words that instill a sense of urgency increases the conversion rate. The fear of missing out is also a basic human instinct your ad should try to exploit. Exclamation marks are great for making any group of words sound urgent but it’s not always necessary if the message is already crafted with the right words to be urgent. One key tip in using urgency as a copywriting tool is you have to always have a why. A “why” justifies the need for urgency which makes the overall effect more powerful.

Establish Trust; Like everyone else, social media users that are your potential clients are attracted by safe rather than disruptive business, thus they tread with caution when interacting with your ads and business for the first time, so except your brand is a home name like coca-cola and the likes there is every need for you to prove you're worth been interacted with. People respect authority and thus the easiest way for your business to establish trust. Everyone trusts what the experts say, of course, they will trust your brand too if the experts say so. Adding testimonials from respected authorities would do a lot to persuade your potential clients.

Use Testimonials; If ads were to be racing, testimonials would be the nitro that boosts you to the endpoint of high converting eye-catching ads. 

Compare a 4.51% conversion rate vs. 1.725% conversion rate. That’s a 250% increase. Imagine what your sales would look like with a 250% increase. 

The power of online testimonials is too great to be overemphasized. Everyone is interested in knowing what everyone else is doing especially when there is doubt as to what to do and this is what makes testimonials a golden tool to add to your copy. Your potential clients will always believe many times more what your clients tell about your business than anything you have to say. So getting testimonials from a satisfied customer shows potential clients that someone like them that has experienced the same pain point as they have, has had that problem solved, and enjoyed your product/service.

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