Making the Most of Paid Social Media to Gain New Photo Booth Customers
In the business world, social media’s reputation has quickly gone from “something that can tank employee productivity” to “something that can bring in a boatload of customers.”
For photo booth owners, social media advertising can be a potent tool for generating business. Paid social media campaigns for photo booths are easy to set up and easy to control. You can set a reasonable budget, adjust your audiences on-the-fly and perform a number of other handy tasks that make it relatively low-effort and low-risk but high reward.
As with any type of paid advertising, though, you have to know what you are doing to avoid wasting your hard-earned money on senseless social campaigns.
Read on to learn social media promoted post best practices that help maximize your dollar, teach you how to find your audience more precisely and book more customers in your area than you ever imagined.
Start Strategizing Paid Social Media Campaigns for Photo Booths by Setting Goals
Your first order of business before even considering a paid social media campaign is to set goals. The goal you have selected should affect the entire way you run your campaign, from creating it to monitoring it to deciding if it is a success.
Since the name of the game at this point is likely to earn more customers, most photo booth owners will want to steer away from “vanity” metrics like likes, clicks and comments. Instead, tie your social campaign to a more direct business goal, like:
- New bookings
- Increased referrals
- Email signups
- Shares to new potential customers
- Website visits
Put a number on your goals, and create a strategy for reaching this number. Don’t worry if you hit nowhere close to the mark on your first try! You will learn over time, which includes more realistic goal-setting. Also, failing to meet a lofty goal is better than having no real measure of success in the first place.
Get Into the Heads of Your Customers
Your next step before creating your campaign is to try to strategize a way for your paid/promoted social media posts to lead to the desired outcome.
If your goal is to increase bookings for an event like weddings, you should discover the type of content that brides and grooms to-be typically respond to and use it as a template for your ads. Your best resource is the people themselves; see the type of content brides share on pinterest or the types of posts that become popular in Facebook wedding planning groups.
If your goal is to book more corporate events, study company posts on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to see the types of values and details these businesses seem to care about most.
Once again, over time you will find more success at researching what makes these groups tick and hitting close to the mark. But even as you start learning, doing a little bit of clicking around to scout out your audience is far better than designing a paid campaign blind.
Use Precise Audience Targeting
One of the biggest culprits behind growth of paid social marketing lies in “custom audiences” features. When building a campaign with a custom audience, you can fine-tune your targeting parameters to ensure that your ads are only shown to people who are likely to buy your product.
For photo booth owners, geo-location would be one parameter they would absolutely check, for instance. You can target people living in individual cities or more general areas around these cities. You can also target people by age, gender, and interests, including whether or not they like things like wedding planning pages.
Never publish a paid social campaign without selecting some sort of targeting parameters. Otherwise, you end up showing your post to people who have no intention whatsoever to use your services.
Test Varied Posts to Discover What Works
When setting goals, applying custom audience attributes and making your first few campaigns, you have no clue what will work at this point. Even an early success will tell you little since you will not want to repeat your post verbatim for more than a month or two at a time.
Instead, get bold and experimental. Play around with different audience targeting using a minimal budget. Try different types of ad messages or photos within your promoted post formats.
One area ripe for experimentation will be timing. Try promoting your posts at different points in the day to see what drives the most success. Some people may prefer thinking about party planning on the weekend, whereas others will want to jump on the computer after work from 5:30 PM to 8:00 PM.
Even when you find formats and campaign attributes that work, keep trying new things. You can always put a normal budget behind proven practices and spend less on the weirder stuff, but only by experimenting can you discover what works.
Measure Diligently and Optimize
Platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter all provide detailed analytics to track your campaign. You can see exactly how many people saw your ad, how many clicked on it, the peak times when they clicked and, often, demographic data on which audience attributes lead to the most conversions.
Keep track of these measurements and write down trends you observe for each campaign. These notes will help you make smarter decisions in the future to repeat successes more often and reduce your rate of failure.
Build Your Promoted Social Media Posts as Part of a Customer Journey
The beauty of paid social media posts is that they can become a facet within your overall marketing plan. Let’s say you increase the bounty on customer referrals — a Facebook post can make people aware of that and reinforce that campaign.
You can also use “lead magnet” content to encourage people to click on your promoted post in order to view a document like “10 Tips to Plan a Better Fundraiser.” Since someone planning a fundraising event will be likely to click on this post and you can specifically target those who work with non-profits, paid social posts can help maximize the impact of each asset.
As your marketing approach gets more sophisticated, you can run several targeted campaigns at once, each with their own goals and customer journey where targeted social posts play a big part.
Use Eye-Catching Photos With Funny Photo Booth Props
The biggest advantage paid social posts offer over organic reach is that they are essentially guaranteed to show up on someone’s newsfeed. When they do see your promoted post, you want them to stop scrolling immediately.
Luckily, as a photo booth operator, you have a potent weapon in the form of engaging, fun and funny photos. Remember to only use photos where the subject has given you permission and to add as many things as possible that help the photo stand out.
In that respect, photo booth props are some of the best tools you have for drawing attention to your posts. You can also use photo booth backdrops that set the stage for fun, wacky photos that look equal parts professional and professionally silly.
Take a look at our amazing selection of photo booth accessories, props, signage, tablecloths and more to set yourself up for success with promoted social media posts.
Meta: Learn the fundamentals of paid social media campaigns for photo booth owners and how promoted social media posts can become a powerful marketing tool.
KWs: paid social media campaigns for photo booth owners
