Need a cost-effective way to attract new customers? Try targeted social media ad campaigns.

Per usual, Triumph received no financial compensation from the listed companies for writing this article. Straight from the heart, baby.

One campaign to rule them all

Today’s Triumph article is going to be a little different. We’ve heard from several Triumphers recently who are struggling, to put things mildly, with their marketing campaigns. These self-starters either don’t know where to begin—so they’re too scared to start marketing at all--or they’ve been throwing far too much money at advertisements without seeing any sort of meaningful results.

Marketing is more than running advertisements. It’s an essential method of creating and communicating brand value to the world. At Triumph, we know or a thing or two about running marketing campaigns and creating successful ad conversions because we’ve been able to get our hands dirty with it. We’re honored to say we even have fellow Triumphers who outsource their entire marketing and brand management operation to us, leaving them more time to focus on what matters most to them and their business. You could join the party and do that as well, but enough tooting our own horn. We’ve got an article to write.

Regardless of your new venture’s size, if your business model requires a regular influx of new customers, you need to be marketing. That is not a suggestion, it’s a command.

How much hits the mark?

Now, granted, your marketing budget doesn’t need to shake your reserves. It’s long been a general rule of thumb to place your marketing budget between 6-12% of your monthly revenues. We’re not sure who’s thumb they used for that, so we also recommend you don’t take it as Gospel. We’ve seen situations where investing 3% of revenues into marketing still yielded worthwhile results, and other times where an aggressive growth strategy demanded a marketing push closer to 25%.

In our humble opinion, the magic formula for marketing is to remember that there is no magic formula for marketing. You need to understand your brand and your audience intimately well to best position yourself for conversions. And for those new to the marketing world, “conversions” is just a pretentious word for sales resulting from your campaign.

To understand your market, you need to hear from your market, and that requires—well—marketing. But even if you don’t have the time or budget to put together a world class commercial:

There are plenty of other ways to generate the insights you need.

Data, data, data

If you find yourself stuck in a marketing rut, we recommend a shift to social media ad campaigns, at least for a period of time. Why? We’re so glad you asked. While we truly do believe there is a time and a place for every type of ad placement—depending on the brand strategy—social media campaigns are the most cost-effective way to garner massive amounts of data on your potential audience.

Don’t believe us? Just the other day, we were able to get a client over 30,000 quality ad interactions over a two-day period, all for less than the price of a round-trip Uber. Not only that, our client also enjoyed a sales spike from the campaign. But even if our Triumpher hadn’t, we’d argue the process would still have been worth it.

Tens of thousands of eyeballs can tell you a lot about your brand. If you’re willing to take some time and parse through the data, trends emerge. Who actually responds to your ad? Who doesn’t? Which keywords and color schemes seem to do best with your specific audience? And most importantly, what do people actually want to buy? You’ll quickly find that your customers may not always be limited to who you think they should be, and they oftentimes are looking to buy things other than you assumed they would want to buy.

People may surprise you

A brief example by way of anecdote. Triumph was handling the brand strategy for an apparel company that was—within its sphere of influence—known for one specific hat. The hat had solid brand recognition among the brand’s niche target market.

However, one day a customer emailed in and suggested a new design for the brand, one that was drastically different then any of their existing designs, you know, the ones they assumed everyone wanted to buy. But, this Triumpher decided to take our advice and create the hat anyway, even going so far as to carry the new fan-inspired hat in their store. Within two weeks, that hat became their brand’s top seller, even though it was outside of what they had assumed their customers wanted to buy.

Why are we blabbering on about all this? Because characters might change, but the story remains the same for your business. None of us perfectly understand our customers. But the more we attempt to understand them, the better we will be able to serve them—and the more we can sell. This story may have been about a client selling apparel, but the principle holds true for selling all types of goods and services.

So, what now?

If you’ve spent more than five minutes on the internet, then you know that just about every social network offers some sort of advertisement opportunity—and they probably spam you about it regularly. These ads might get annoying, but hey, they’re also effective. I mean, we’re only annoyed because we’re seeing them.

Now is the point where most articles would give you their recommended, click-bait, secret sauce marketing key to always see huge returns on investments from your campaigns. But we’re not going to do that, because—at least in our experience—there is no one-size-fits-all. To develop a winning strategy for your brand, we’d need to thoroughly understand your brand. Which we don’t, at least not yet.

But you, dear reader, probably have the best idea of your audience. Like we said, it’s far from perfect, but it’s the best you’ve got to go on. Even if you have a little bit of website traffic, you can use that data to run better-targeted social media ads on certain platforms. It would take pages to unpack that last sentence, pages that we don’t have right now, so we’ll leave it at that. Enjoy the cliffhanger. Maybe we’ll write another article on the subject, maybe.

Personal Foul, targeting on the play

So, what’ve we learned today? The power of a targeted social media ad campaign! The more you can zero in on exactly who your audience is and what they want to buy, the more effectively you can generate leads and convert sales. So, if you don’t market at all, start now, even if it’s just a few dollars a day on social media platforms. As the data stacks up, review it carefully, and try and identify trends. Implement those trends in your next marketing campaign, and watch your return on investment skyrocket. And most importantly, if you don’t have the time or desire to do any of the things we just laid out, let’s talk. Perhaps it makes sense to bring the Triumph Team aboard to handle your brand management. We’ll even bring snacks.

As always, feel free to Ask Triumph with any additional questions and consider Supporting the Team.

All views expressed in the article are opinions of the author and should not be misconstrued as professional consulting or legal advice. Users are responsible for verifying all information before taking action, and Triumph Group LLC is not responsible for any outcomes. Pursue subjects at your own risk. Seriously, man. It’s your life.