What began as a platform to connect, express and create has evolved into a combat zone for brands. Of course, we’re talking about social media. Each brand is trying to outdo the other to develop a better and far-reaching digital presence. Every now and then, brands are experimenting with a large number of strategies to build a strong relationship with their audience.
For the same reason, businesses are also emboldened by their competitors. Brands study and look out for their competitors because it validates the presence of a market for their product or service. This implies that there are strategies and methods that are capable of holding the audience’s attention. Thus, studying these strategies can give you a direction for your marketing efforts and also help you come up with better ways to expand and improve your business.
What are social media ads?
Advertising on social media is a direct way to get in touch with your prospects. You can target new customers or even your loyal ones. In order to get the most out of your social media ads, it is also important to understand and evaluate which networks are most effective and popular with your target audience. This will help you run ads and reach out to people on appropriate platforms only.
Where is my target audience based? Which platform sees maximum activity and engagement by my followers? Where does my content resonate with people?
These are a few questions you should ask yourself before you set out to advertise your brand on social media. Here’s a quick round-up of why you should advertise on social media platforms.
- To generate awareness for your product or service
- To access varied platforms and advertising formats (Instagram ads, Facebook ads, Photo ads, Video ads, Instagram Stories ads, Carousel ads, Slideshow ads, Collection ads, Messenger ads)
- To create specific target audiences
- To drive targeted traffic to your website or landing page
- To get you more sales
- To understand and evaluate customers’ response to your ads, product and service
Evaluating your competitors’ ads can help you put your product or service against their strengths and weaknesses. A few reasons you would like to spy on your competitors’ ads-
- To evaluate what kind of product or service your competitor is focusing on at a particular time, season, festival or occasion
- To understand the style of copywriting
- To understand what kind of graphics, visuals and tonality is working out for other brands in your industry and other domains as well
In order to help you with the same, these few steps will familiarize you with the process of spying on facebook ads and what they can help you with.
- Type ‘Facebook Ads Library’ in your search engine.
- Look up for a brand by typing their name in the search and observe what kind of ads they are running.
- When you land on the brand page, it will give you an insight into a lot of useful information. This includes:
- No.of page likes
- Instagram handle name
- No. of followers
- When was the page created?
- Other countries/regions managing the brand
- Expenditure on ads related to social issues, elections or politics
- Duration of expenditure on ads
- Scroll down to see a variety of ads they run.
- Here, you can have a look at active ads, past ads and when they were taken live.
- You can also check the platforms where the ads are running. In addition to Facebook and Instagram, this ad library also shows ads that are running on messenger and other audience networks.
- In order to search international ads, you will have to change ‘Filter By: India’ to ‘Filter By: All’.
A few ads have multiple versions. This means that the ad is using a dynamic creative model. “Dynamic creative is a process wherein the brand uploads multiple image and text options and the best-performing combination for the audience is created.”
A thorough study of these ads can give you an understanding of which particular product is your competitor focusing more on. Thus, diving into this ad library can give you information which you can use to improve your business and marketing tactics. The copy, graphics, types of ads and budget all play a key role in helping you devise social media strategies for your brand.
So, make sure you do significant research on your competitors so that your brand can set a new benchmark and outshine other brands on the social media space.
