Rather than asking “how much should I be spending on social media?” every month, a much more productive question to ask yourself is “how can I get the most out of my social media budget?”.
No matter how much money you spend on social media, you should be confident that you’re spending it right. Which is why everything you do on social media should be driven by a solid recruitment marketing strategy.
Here are some tips on how to ensure you’re spending your social media budget in a way that will always maximise return.
Think carefully about your goal
Before starting any recruitment social media campaign, it’s crucial to think carefully about what your ultimate goal is: Do you want to get more eyes and applies on your job ads? More followers to your page? To maximise brand awareness? Different goals require different approaches and strategies, so you’ll need to have a clear idea about this from the very start.
And once you’ve established what your ultimate goal is, think about which marketing metrics you’ll use to measure success and work out a way of clearly tracking these that will not only make sense to you, but your manager too.
Without these goals in place before starting, you’ll risk blowing your budget with no real purpose or justification behind your spending.
Use recruitment marketing personas
Every piece of social media content you promote should have a clearly defined audience in mind – this is the only way to ensure you engage the people you’re actually wanting to reach.
And this is where recruitment marketing personas come in handy. Marketing personas allow you to build a picture of your ideal reader, which social media channels they actually spend their time on, the kind of content they engage with the most (image, video, etc.) and even the kinds of hobbies and interests they have (you can target your ads at audiences who have liked particular pages or indicate they have particular interests).
Using recruitment marketing personas when promoting content on social media will ensure you’re focusing your efforts on the right channels, building relevant target audiences and promoting content that your target audience actually wants to see.
Recognise that one size doesn’t fit all
Understanding which types of content work better on each social media platform is crucial to ensuring your budget is being spent effectively. It’s easy to think that if a post is performing well on one channel, promoting the same thing on a different channel will have the same engagement, but this will only result in you frittering your budget away.
And similarly, whilst promotional business content is likely to perform well on LinkedIn, it’ll probably flop on Facebook, as Facebook is better for sharing personal, non-promotional content. Respecting these small differences could save you a lot of cash!
Knowing the right formula to use with your social media statuses can have a big positive impact on your post engagement. As we cover in this blog, every social channel has a preferred formula (should you use text, images or videos? Emojis or no emojis?). It’s just a matter of taking time to recognise the differences between platforms and respecting them.
Test everything and learn from your results
Just because you’ve noticed a particular social media advertising strategy working really well for some other business that you follow doesn’t necessarily mean it will work for your brand.
The only way to find out what works and what doesn’t for your brand is to test out multiple strategies, and most importantly of all - making sure you learn from your results so you don’t make the same mistake twice.
Split testing (available on Facebook) is a great way to learn clear lessons about what your audience actually wants to see from brands in their news-feeds. With the split testing feature, you can deliver different versions of your ad to different users (with no overlapping audiences so no one will be shown the same ad twice). This will show you which is the most effective ad at the lowest price.
For example, you could send out a job ad with two different images for the same campaign (one more corporate and one more fun/light-hearted, for example) and see which image has higher engagement. If the results are stark, you can use what you’ve learned to inform your future campaigns too.
As tough as it can be to admit defeat, knowing when to pull the plug on a campaign that isn’t delivering on your defined goal is something you need to get used to in marketing, too. otherwise you’re just watching your money burn!
Test out different types of promoted content based on what you’ve learned about all the different social media channels and keep a close eye (and clear note) of the marketing metrics that actually matter and what is and isn’t providing you good marketing ROI.
For more information on getting the best ROI on your social media budget plus tips on getting started with different platforms, download the eBook below.
