5 Tips on International Social Media Advertising Campaigns

We’ve been running internal communication blogs and social media platforms for multinational clients for some time now. We’ve jumped over the initial hurdles that are always poised from larger clients about the risk of sharing content on open platforms and are well into the realms of running monthly international social media advertising campaigns.

We’ve created a list of five top tips from the campaigns that we’ve been running. Note that this advice only relates to Facebook and Twitter.

1. Reporting

Reporting is the most important aspect of any campaign, this rings true as a standard across everything we do, it’s difficult to define success without first agreeing on your KPIs. 

Agree on what your most important metric is, we usually go for clicks, engagement and reach. Audience acquisition is not always the best KPI as the (vanity) numbers are less and less meaningful, especially on Facebook, thanks to it’s constantly changing algorithm. 

In your reporting, consider the weighting of your results, are you looking for more in a certain country or area? If your results are returned with an unexpected skew towards a certain geographical area, do you have a plan in place to balance this out? (If that’s what you want.)

2. Targeting

Targeting is a crucial element of your strategy. The most important thing to remember though, is that none of your audiences are set in stone. With Facebook you can amend your target audiences at any time and create an endless amount of audiences to test. With Twitter you can also upload a list of email addresses which is great news for companies setting up campaigns for internal comms.

As one of our major aims is clicks to site, we often also use Facebook and Twitter’s remarketing pixels which targets users who have visited the site in the past. 

3. Refining

Refining your campaigns always ensures you get the best result at the best price. We will usually run our campaigns over a monthly basis so we can report at the end of the month and refine our strategy going forward.

We also refine our campaigns once or twice a month. Entering the campaigns while they’re still running, culling the less effective ads and creating new ones that are a mix of the best performing copy, images and calls to action, sees your overall results a lot more fruitful.

Adding new content to your campaigns works as both Facebook and Twitter don’t like to serve the same content to their users too often. You may find that one image has done consistently well for an audience but, the results start to degrade over time. Add fresh imagery at regular intervals, this works better than adding a huge new catalogue of images less regularly.

4. A/B Testing

In our international campaigns we like to run a general campaign that covers a huge area like EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) and run a country specific campaign simultaneously to ensure that none of our results become too swayed towards a specific country or area.

In our country specific campaigns we A/B test both English and native language ads. We’ve found that some countries such as The Netherlands respond the same to English and Dutch ads where as countries like France prefer to be served with ads in their mother tongue.

These are good tests to run, especially if you are spending money on outsourcing translation services.

5. Research

We also like to research the countries we are advertising to. There is a lot of information out there as to the what types of content resonate within different cultures across the world.

We also use our contacts in these countries as sounding boards. We ask for their unique viewpoint on what ads would work within a particular area, what images and calls to action would resonate with the population. 

Again, when running click campaigns that are overlaid with country or area specific targeting, it’s a good idea to ensure the target URL in all of the ads is to content that’s relevant to the audience. This means you can start really experimenting with mentioning local areas in your copy and calls to action.

If you’d like to learn more about setting up your own campaigns that stretch over international borders, get in touch and we’d be happy to have a chat.