Social media marketing is one of the most effective tools for increasing your brand awareness today. It allows you to build relationships with your target audience, communicate your value message, and lead them to your product or service.

However, social media marketing is a complete waste of time done poorly. Make sure you avoid these 3 common mistakes using social media marketing.

Setting the Wrong Objective

It’s imperative to get clear on the right objective when running ads on social media. Is it to develop more brand awareness? Increase engagement with your audience? Increase the size of your social audience? Or is it to convert your followers into qualified leads and customers for your new product?

You have to be specific about what your objective is when you run your ads or your ad spend will not be efficiently spent. For example, if your goal with Facebook ads is to increase conversions, then realize that it costs much more to get those transactions and you might see less engagement or page likes. If engagement or Page Likes are the priority to establish social credibility, you would want to run Facebook ads that encourage your audience to engage with your brand in an indirect way that doesn’t require them to buy anything.

Targeting the Wrong Audience

This is a common error we run into when working with clients. Though it might seem like everyone should be your target audience, that’s not very realistic or likely to get the results you want. Your social media marketing message will be very ineffective if you target the entire world with your ads. You have to create a custom audience that represents a model of the specific type of person who is looking for what you have to offer.

If people are seeing your ads who aren’t interested in what you are offering, your results will be disappointing, and your actual target audience is likely to miss the ad because it is being shown to the wrong audience. Worse still, if people flag your ad as inappropriate or uninterested in it, it can adversely affect how Facebook views your ad.

Not Using Analytics to Refine/Improve Campaign Performance

You must pay attention to the analytics that show how your smm ad is performing. You should create reports to show the areas of ad performance strength, and what can be improved to help it to be shown to more of your target audience and generate more leads.

Using this data will allow you to set benchmarks for your performance so you can make sure that it is improving over time. You can see what the best times of the day to post are, and which are the worst for your target demographic. You can see if there is anyone you are targeting who isn’t responding to the ad, and explore the reasons why. You will know what your top posts are, and can reuse them later to gain more traction as you build and scale. Ignoring these important analytics will cause your ads to perform poorly, and you will have no clue why!

Though the nitty gritty of social media advertising can take time to refine fully, avoiding these three common mistakes will save you a ton of time and money!