#6: Dom Carter - The Power Paid Social Advertising

Dom started out as doing a side hustle at university through Facebook selling trips to Amsterdam then we he went on to teach himself how to run Facebook ads through watching YouTube videos.This is quite a bit different from his Geology degree and it proves that anyone can learn how to do digital marketing if you have the drive and desire. From there Dom worked for a business called Invasion mainly doing digital marketing and social media before he teamed up with a talented videographer called Chris Townsend to form a start up marketing business called What Marketing. the developed really engaging social content and started to push it through social and driving leads for businesses. Dome moved on to Cube3 who are a digital marketing agency based out of the Norther Quarter in Manchester to run their paid social offering. Dom then decided to set up as a freelancer doing the same projects with Claire who was a strong creative campaign freelancer and formed a start up agency called The Light Agency. Top tips: Split testing audiences and creative is the key to social media advertising working over time particularly in Facebook and Instagram. Facebook business manager give marketeers the opportunity to split test creative and give you a real indication of what they like and what they don’t like. Lift Studies is a great way of doing this to test your awareness ads before they go out as a full campaign with lots of budget behind them. Having a cross channel marketing strategy is really important with both Google and Facebook working together to target your customers in a customer journey rather than working on individual channels. Launching new brands for the first time need to be realistic with expectations when it comes to traction fro social media ads at first, you need 3 months worth of data and exposure before people start to recognise your brand. Due to the nature of platforms such as instagram people will see hundreds of brands and ads per month so cutting through the noise does take time and also they generally need to see your brand 6 - 7 times before they think about converting. It’s important to understand customer intent and brand recall when you are running social media ads, this is because users aren’t always looking to purchase when they are scrolling through Facebook or Instagram. You won’t convert people first time you you have to build brand and campaign awareness for the user to convert when they have the intent to purchase. As a client you need to know which agency is responsible for what when it comes to performance, it’s not uncommon for brands to be working with several agencies and it’s really important to be clear on who owns which metrics. The above includes in house teams as sometimes there is friction between agencies or freelancers and the in house team to take credit for traffic and sales performance. Attributing sales to the correct channel is key and Dom advises people to use Double Click to track last click attribution more accurately as you can’t be sure which channels are driving growth. The decline of organic social is well documented and it is part of the master plan for Facebook to make lots of money from ads. It started with Facebook Business Pages and people following them really helped brand have a presence on social media, this has now evolved to Facebook Business manager to drive more ads. Boosting posts don’t work on Facebook and Instagram in terms of quality of traction and conversions so unless you are happy to just grow likes (this is a poor strategy) don’t do it! Looks at what organic posts are working and you can run them as ads in FB Biz Manager to your audience with a pre-existing social proof for the post with likes and comments. Connect with the host, Paul Casey: @caseydigital on Instagram Paul Casey on LinkedIn @casey_digital on Twitter