3 Best Practices for Advertising Your Brand’s Weekly Circular on Social

It’s no secret that most people follow brands on social media to get deals & discounts. In fact, one study showed that as many as 77% of people decided whether or not to engage with a company based on if they offered incentives.

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Knowing this, it’s important to occasionally meet their expectations. However, posting the same ad creative you use for traditional marketing or circulars can hurt your brand more than helping it. Follow these 3 best practices to help get the most out of your sales-driving social posts.

1) Decide if your weekly ad belongs on social

Social media marketing should not be viewed as another advertising platform. As Gallup stated, “Social media sites are highly personal and conversational … consumers who use these sites do not want to hear sales pitches.” You have to keep in this mind when creating sales posts for social. While you may want people to know your latest deals and sales, your audience doesn’t want to hear it as a sales pitch in between dog videos in their timeline. It ruins their experience on the channel. Sometimes the best course of action is not to post your circular at all, but instead break it down into individual posts that are more aesthetically pleasing and social-friendly.

Our client, Save Mart, does a great job with taking their weekly sales ads and breaking them down into social-friendly posts, like this one:

Another client of ours, Lowe’s Home Improvement, pairs useful tips & tricks with their sales posts to ensure that people don’t feel like they’re seeing a sales pitch.

2) Create or curate assets that are authentic to the channels you’re using

Brands often make the mistake of trying to use creative from print ads, banner ads, or circulars to advertise on social. The problem with this is that social channels are supposed to be more conversational and realistic to the user’s life. If you put a regular ad on there, it stands out from the rest of the content in their timeline and not in a good way. By utilizing authentic creative that seems more like something your audience would post themselves, you can have more thumb-stopping posts. User Generated Content (UGC) is a great way to showcase authentic images without having to create them all yourself.

Our client, Staples, does a great job at translating their weekly circulars into more social-friendly posts. When they switched from posting their circular on social to a social-friendly version with humor and organic images, they increased the click-through rate by 135%.

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Publix also has a good way to showcase their weekly ads, while still utilizing best practices for social channels.

3) Use different post formats to encourage engagement

Posting a photo or video can help garner awareness for your weekly ads, but if you really want to drive click-throughs to your sales, you should use a format that encourages clicks. Link posts are a good way to do this, but Carousel Ads are even more effective.

Here are some examples of how brands are using Carousel Ads to showcase their sale items and circulars:

 

Old Navy used a Carousel Ad on Instagram to showcase their sale items:

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Overall, remember that your social posts shouldn’t sound like a sales pitch. They should be engaging and unlike traditional sales ads. Taking the time to brainstorm creative concepts and utilizing various formats will help your ads be more successful on social.

Want to learn more? Tweet us at @ignitesma or contact us via our website.



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