Paid Social Media Mock Campaign

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This week, I was introduced to paid social media advertising and best practices for crafting a successful campaign. To get a better feel for what it means to create a paid social media campaign, I mapped out a potential strategy for Mia Piccola, a new coffee shop in my town, using Facebook’s Ads Manager.

Before jumping into the mock campaign, a few basics are helpful to know. Compared to organic content that focuses on long-term engagement and community building, paid social media advertising helps boost brand awareness and drive traffic quickly through strategic ad placement and audience targeting. Both methods serve unique purposes, but a combination of both is recommended for a well-rounded social presence.

With paid advertising, a few key metrics should be measured to monitor campaign performance.

  • Cost-Per-Click (CPC): Measures how much an advertiser pays per ad click.
  • Cost-Per-Mille (CPM): Measures cost per 1,000 impressions.
  • Conversion Rate: Measures the percentage of users who take a desired action after clicking an ad.

Targeting

One main component of paid social media advertising is targeting specific audiences to receive your ad. This limits your campaign’s spread to those who are the most likely to interact. Below are a few routes that can be taken to find a brand’s ideal audience.

  • Demographic: Age, gender, location
  • Interest-Based: Hobbies, behaviors, previous interactions
  • Retargeting: Ads shown to users who have previously visited a website or engaged with content.
  • Look-Alikes: Ads shown to users who share similar demographics, behaviors, and interests with your audience, but who haven’t interacted with your business yet.

Mia Piccola Mock Campaign

Campaign Objective

Because this coffee shop is new and gaining traction, this campaign is focused on the brand’s awareness.

Target Settings

Location:

For the shop’s first campaign, keeping a smaller, local audience is a great way to start. Since there is only one Mia Piccola location, targeting anyone who is not in the general area is unlikely to have any benefit.

This first campaign will target an audience within a 25-mile radius of Knoxville, Tennessee. This is likely where almost all customers will be from.

Audience:

Mia Piccola is for coffee and tea lovers of all kinds. Because there really is no age range and coffee is gender neutral, the audience for this shop is about as broad as it can get. I have chosen an age range of 18 to 65+ that includes all genders. To dig further into what type of person may be interested in stopping by, I added detailed targeting for a few colleges and universities in the area. College kids love a latte! I also included detailed targets for those interested in coffee, energy drinks, tea, and coffeehouses.

Budget:

Since Mia Piccola is a very new and small business with no experience in paid social media ads, I set the spending limit low as a sort of trial run to get comfortable with advertising. It is set for a daily spending limit of $3. This provides a low-risk start that can slowly increase to match the business’s goals.

Platforms:

Because the objective is brand awareness, pushing the ad onto all platforms will broaden its reach.

The success rate of this campaign can be measured with CPC (cost per click). Because the campaign objective is to increase overall brand awareness, having users view and interact with the advertisement is.

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