August is back-to-school season for many families, and at KWSM: a digital marketing agency, it’s not so different. Continued learning is a pillar of our agency, and this takes many different forms. One of our favorites? The KWSM Mentorship Program! A couple of times a year, the KWSM team splits up into mentor and mentee partnerships with a shared goal to learn something new in a particular area of digital marketing. For 12 weeks, mentors and mentees meet and coach on a topic the mentor has experience in, and the mentee has an interest in. For this term, I was paired with Digital Marketing Specialist Savana Harris to help uplevel her knowledge of social media advertising.
Our Mentorship Program Goals
During our first mentorship meeting, Savana shared that she had a few goals in mind. First, she was hoping to take what she learned in real-time and run a successful campaign for one of her clients. Facebook and Instagram ads are not new to Savana. As a Digital Marketing Strategist on our team, she facilitates many ad campaigns for her clients. Our mentor/mentee pairing was an especially good match due to my certification in Facebook ad buying and 6+ years of experience in social media advertising. For us, it was all about advancing her skills in this area. To do so, Savana had another goal of better benchmarking campaign performance so she could optimize the campaigns she runs and best stack up against the competition. And finally, she wanted to ensure the accuracy of the data she was analyzing.
The Mentorship Program Curriculum
Based on Savana’s goals, I put together our curriculum. We spent the first week setting our goals and talking about what we were hoping to get out of our project. I then broke down those goals into a few different lessons. Meeting every other week, our curriculum was composed of 6 sessions:
Week 1: Setting mentorship goals and program outline
Week 3: Ad placements: Facebook vs Instagram vs Stories
Week 5: Different Ad Managers and how they work + Campaign Options
Week 7: Audience options, Pixels and Targeting
Week 9: Results and Optimization
Week 11: Ad inspiration/Ad planning
To supplement our time together, I gathered a library of video resource materials from industry experts which Savana would watch between meetings and we’d discuss together.
The Journey Forward
Throughout our mentorship program, Savana was running ads for her clients, while folding in the lessons we’d learn in our sessions and the resources she would study between meetings. We tracked this progress throughout and saw great results in just those few short weeks. Over a series of 3 campaigns, we saw an initial 56% improvement in cost per click, saving about $2.76 a click. By the end of our mentorship program, Savana’s final campaign improved by 89%.
This was my fifth time participating in the KWSM Mentorship Program. I continue to take away lessons from the process and the experience with others on the team. It goes to show that any opportunity to share knowledge amongst peers and team members can make a difference. This was only the start. Many optimization tactics take a few months to fully implement, but we’re encouraged by our initial results and inspired to try new tactics learned during this process.
93 percent of social media advertisers are using Facebook Ads.
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