Since founding in 2002, ROI Revolution has offered services to help manage measurable, ROI-driven digital marketing efforts for its clients. Though initially a paid search agency, ROI Revolution now offers a multitude of services including Social Media Advertising, SEO, Marketplaces, Online Shopping, and Conversion Rate Optimization. Each individual client service fills a specific niche and function to help grow ecommerce business.
Over the next few weeks, this blog series will take an up-close look at what each service does and how they work internally and individually.
This week we examine our Social Media Advertising (SMA) service, as well as hear some specific insights from ROI’s SMA team lead, Erin Ewasyshyn.
Understanding Social Media Advertising
Whatever your brand or business, whatever your products or services, make no mistake – social media is not something you can afford to ignore in today’s ecommerce industry.
Websites like Facebook and Instagram, though colloquial in nature, are more than trendy toys to play with on your phone – they are vibrant, dynamic advertising channels that can foster engagement, brand awareness, and direct sales success.
Understanding how social media channels can be optimized to extend reach and increase conversions should be part of any online marketing campaign, and assessing those opportunities is what Social Media Advertising is all about.
Paid Social Media Advertising makes use of the targeting capabilities of social media sites, displaying relevant advertisements and content to a particular brand’s target audiences.
This process helps drive top-of-the-funnel traffic in the right direction for engagement and conversion, while jointly boosting general awareness by increasing overall organic social reach.
At ROI Revolution, we see SMA as being at the forefront of online retail success. With the growth rate for social ecommerce increasing exponentially faster than retail ecommerce, passivity isn’t an option for any business.
While the dawn of SMA may have focused more on engagement, we believe that the new age is about acquisition and conversion. With Facebook ads alone reaching an average audience of over 1 billion daily active users, the opportunity for success is massive.
Our Experts in Action
Failing to have a strong, active presence across social media is an egregious error, but not taking advantage of SMA capabilities is turning an equally blind eye.
Erin Ewasyshyn, resident social expert and team lead for ROI’s SMA service, says it’s all about showing ecommerce retailers how it works as a channel.
“It acts as an additional traffic channel, but we manage it with ecommerce and profitability in mind,” she said. “Most people think of Facebook advertising as branding or an awareness mission, and it definitely is. However, employing the SMA service at ROI works very well because we’re geared towards running our client’s marketing channels with profitability in mind.”
Erin said that she and her team focus campaigns around Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest advertising, separating marketing and prospecting efforts into unique focuses.
“We manage prospecting with some branding focus, but mostly with a direct response focus for new business, new clients, and new site traffic,” Erin said.
Making use of tools such as the Facebook Pixel, the SMA team is able to effectively target audiences with ads that are geared at increasing whatever metric a client is most concerned with.
Erin said that while the direction of full campaigns can be varied and they are mostly focused on driving sales, marrying intentionally curated ads with targeted audiences is always a crucial step.
“There’s a lot that’s in motion,” she said. “We go from really specific to really broad targeting to accomplish whatever the client wants, and usually it’s a combo of both. That service entails everything from ad and copy generation, copy testing, image correction – you name it.”
Starting in Q3 of this year, Erin said she and her team are looking to implement image and graphic creation, adding them as tools in their advertising arsenal. She said that as the service grows larger, it continues to meld better with other forms of online advertisement.
“That’s the benefit of our SMA service at ROI,” she said. “For the most part, our clients are also paid search clients, and there’s a real collaboration between teams. There’s a benefit to having everything under one roof. More than a larger agency focused solely on social media, our Social Media Advertising service is well versed, as is our team, on putting the focus on profitability rather than just awareness, which social generates inherently.”
Erin said that unlike ROI’s other services, most SMA clients don’t have incredibly established channels or a large amount of knowledge about paid social advertising. She said the more clients understand about how the service works, the better opportunity she and her team have to develop the client’s account.
“The best relationships we have are with those clients who understand where Facebook and social media ads come into the buying cycle,” Erin said. “It’s usually at the top of the funnel. Clients are going to see a lower profitability with social when evaluating it from a last touch point of view, but they have to understand there will be an add-on effect to other channels that are managed. Social inevitably drives brand awareness and new site traffic, even when we focus on it driving conversions.”
For ROI Revolution, Paid Social Media Advertising is about more than conversation and content. SMA is the bedrock of online branding, both drawing in consumers to the funnels opening and driving them through towards the path to conversion. And the results speak for themselves.
“Social media is powerful,” Erin said. “Facebook is the most trafficked website with the greatest amount of time dedicated in a single day. If you want to get your ads in front of somebody, if you really want to reach people online, you have the best chance of doing so through Facebook and other social channels.”
If you’re interested in learning more about our SMA service, schedule a complimentary 20-minute consult. Our team of experts will take at your current strategy and offer up actionable strategies and insights to move your business forward and grow your brand and social presence.
