Create and promote promotional posts in VK Advertising

Relatively recently, the social network VKontakte launched a new type of advertisements, in particular promotional posts. They are a new format of classic advertising, allowing you to place it directly in the user's news feed. A similar solution is already actively used in practice by such social networks as Facebook, Х (Twitter). And the fact that today it has already been implemented in VK Advertising does not surprise anyone. The developers of the platform have introduced certain restrictions on promo posts, which eliminates the overload of the user's news feed. Thus, the first such advertisement will be displayed in the news feed in the range of 5 to 10 messages, while all subsequent ones - every 25. This is the solution that will make advertising effective, but not particularly intrusive.

Many advertisers have responded positively to the launch of such a strategy, allowing them to place advertising posts absolutely legally, that is, without fear of running into any restrictions on the part of the social network. At the same time, the help of the administrator of thematic communities is not required.

Now get to know in more detail what such a tool as a promo post is in relation to the VKontakte social network and for what purposes it should be used. Let's highlight the key advantages and disadvantages of such a solution. Let's pay attention to the requirements for the design of advertising posts and describe the sequence of actions for their creation and launch. The information received will allow you to independently perform these works and the most common mistakes.

What is a promo post

A promo post is a publication on your community page or even in a personal feed, which is used by the advertising account for paid promotion in the VKontakte social network. As a result, such a post will appear in the accounts of users that will relate to your target audience with the lower mark “Advertising in the community”. One of the most attractive features of this solution is that such a solution bypasses the restrictions set by the ad blocker, which means that they will be shown to users not only in the mobile application, but also in the classic desktop version of the social network. Today, absolutely all applications that block ads treat such publications as regular posts, that is, they do not apply their own algorithms to them.

Despite the fact that promo posts appeared on the VKontakte social network relatively recently, they have already proven their high efficiency in practice. And the main secret of success here is that they are considered part of the community feed. That is, they are published where people go at their own discretion. Moreover, visually they are not similar to classic advertising. People very often do not even distinguish them from other publications. This means that their attitude to ads will be more loyal. That is, a person will read the post, understand what it says and only then understand that there was an advertisement in front of him.

If we talk directly about the functional capabilities of promo posts, then it is worth highlighting:

• attracting increased attention to thematic communities;
• attracting the user audience to third-party sites, services;
• effectively informing the target market about new products, services, promotional offers;
• increasing the level of user engagement and their loyalty;
• forming a sustainable brand and its recognition in the market.

In terms of price, launching such a solution will cost you no more than classic advertising, but its effectiveness in practice will be much higher.

The main differences between promo posts and advertising publications

Compared to regular advertisements promotional posts placed on the VKontakte social network will have a number of distinctive aspects, in particular:

• simple and effective integration into the mobile interface, as well as into the regular web version of the social network: they are part of the news feed, harmoniously fit into it;
• high conversion rates, which is ensured by automatic promotion within the social network: shown to people who are obviously interested in the relevant product or service;
• increased number of views, increased interest in a particular publication, increased number of subscribers;
• transparent payment terms: charged for the number of views, in particular for every 1000 people;
• thanks to the presence of built-in algorithms in the VKontakte social network, promo posts not only bring subscribers, but also provide stable interest in the product, helping to improve the community's position in the search.

Now let's dwell in more detail on the main advantages and disadvantages of this tool.

Advantages and disadvantages of promo posts in the VKontakte social network

From the key advantages characteristic of promo posts, in relation to their use in VKontakte highlight:

• Universality of application. This is a solution that suits absolutely any business representatives, regardless of the size of the company, bloggers, as well as people who want to draw attention to certain courses, seminars, webinars, conferences.
• Variety of payment methods, as well as the ability to choose the most effective strategy for yourself. So, when launching promo posts through the VK advertising account, you can use a tariff with a minimum or maximum price (we will talk about their features below).
• Wide opportunities for setting up targeting and, accordingly, attracting the target audience. In this case, you can use both demographic and geographic targeting, individual preferences, behavioral factors, placement location, user audience.

If we talk about the disadvantages of this solution, then the only thing worth noting here is its limited application. In particular, promo posts will be available only to those communities that have more than 300 subscribers, where unique content of sufficiently high quality is posted on the wall. By the way, this applies not only to the text, but also to the visual accompaniment. Also, the system will not allow you to launch such advertising if you have recently performed such an action.

Another aspect characteristic of promo posts is that the VKontakte platform follows the new Advertising Law, within the framework of which all advertising publications must be registered and marked. That is, both the advertiser and the contractor will have to submit a set of documents to the register, including the contract itself, accounting calculations, creatives. Unfortunately, such phenomena are typical for any other social networks and platforms where advertising is launched. The only thing we would like to highlight here is that the VKontakte advertising account already provides the ability to upload all the necessary documents. Also here you will find detailed instructions on how to register advertising on the platform. That is, your work in this direction will be simplified.

Tasks that a VKontakte promo post can help solve

If you decide to use a tool such as a promo post from the VKontakte social network in practice, you will be able to solve 3 key tasks facing a business regardless of its direction or specifics of activity. In particular, we are talking about:

• Increasing the engagement rates of the target audience. Users can comment on such advertising posts, mark them with the “Like” type, subscribe to a particular group.
• Motivation to join the community. You can write an advertising post up to 2000 characters long to attract users to your community. Such a publication will be posted directly on users' pages. If they are interested in them, you can be sure that the number of subscriptions to your account will increase.
• Increasing the number of target actions. The thing is that promo posts are aimed exclusively at the target audience. That is, they will be shown to people who are interested in your products, services, information. This means that the probability of placing an order here will be higher.

But to get the best results in practice, you need to approach the issue of preparing a promo post comprehensively and professionally.

Basic requirements for the design of promo posts in VK

A number of requirements and recommendations are prescribed directly in the VK Advertising section, on the basis of which promo posts should be designed. Only if they are met, such content will be posted on the site. In this case, we are talking about the following points:

1. Only those goods and services that are not prohibited by the Advertising Law can be advertised. In particular, it is forbidden to prepare materials on topics related to cruel treatment, violence, weapons, alcohol, drugs and tobacco products.
2. It is necessary to exclude the use of tools aimed at attracting special attention. This can be an abundance of capital letters, exclamation marks, emoticons. Also, rude expressions and obscene language are excluded.
3. Avoid overly intrusive recommendations. The promotional posts themselves should look more like a regular publication, but only with a more detailed explanation of the features of the product or service. That is, there should be no intrusive recommendations for performing certain actions.
4. You can place an advertising post on VKontakte leading to a particular community only if its content corresponds to the main topic. That is, if your channel on the social network is dedicated to hunting and fishing, then you cannot launch promotional posts on it on the topic of designer clothes.
5. When preparing an advertising publication, you should use unique content. If you try to publish material borrowed from third-party resources, the social network will identify such violations. The post itself will be published, but it will not be included in the recommendations.
6. It will also be mandatory to thoroughly proofread the text before posting it. There should be no spelling or punctuation errors. The material should be presented as consistently as possible while maintaining logic. It is also recommended to see how it will look in the feed in advance. If you are not satisfied with something, it is better to make adjustments initially than to correct it after publication.

Preparing a Promo Post for VK Advertising

Preparing an advertising post for posting on the VKontakte social network is a job that requires a comprehensive approach and detailed elaboration. This is the only way you can end up with a publication that will work for your business and attract a user audience. Our recommendations will significantly facilitate this work and minimize the likelihood of errors. Follow the outlined sequence of actions step by step, and you will not lose out on important points:

• Conduct a comprehensive analysis of competitors. Before working with your product, you should understand what exactly your competitors offer to the market, what key advantages of their business or a particular product they highlight, what exactly they are betting on. You should also evaluate the length of the post, its writing style, and structure. If creatives were used, it is important to understand which ones. Also pay attention to the reactions that are under this publication to understand how the user audience reacted to it. Just do not copy the material of your competitors. Create your own unique promo post that will take into account the strengths of competitors and exclude their mistakes.
• Form your own advantages, and also highlight the strengths of the product that you are advertising. That is, at this stage, you should have your own unique selling proposition. Add numbers to it, indicate who it should target, highlight the strengths. This is what will allow the audience to understand what exactly you are offering them.
• Think over the text of the publication. Here we are talking directly about the ad itself, as well as about the choice of advertising creative that will be used to attract the attention of the audience. In any case, you should indicate the main idea at the very beginning. That is, from the very first lines, a person should understand what exactly is being discussed. Only in this way will he not pass by, but will click the "Show more" button. The text itself should be divided into small semantic paragraphs. If you are targeting an unwarmed audience, then make small publications of several hundred characters, while for people who know you and are already loyal, you can prepare texts up to 2000 characters long. The material should contain an introduction, the main part and brief conclusions. Avoid complex, flowery phrases, specific terminology. Do not include many ideas in one publication. Choose a single option and play it up as effectively as possible, give it an emotional coloring, add elements that will attract attention, but will not look too intrusive. Be sure to make a short summary of the post, once again indicate the idea that you would like to convey to the audience.
• Come up with an original title. In any case, it should contain the key query by which the user audience is looking for your products or services. It is also important to think about how to make this title as attractive as possible, so that people would want to read the material to the end. But at the same time, using clickbait is not recommended. The content of your post should fully correspond to the title. Also, you should not use vague wording that does not carry a specific meaning. If you add a picture, the inscription on it should be the same as the title of the future publication.
• We come up with creativity. This is what will attract the attention of the audience, instantly provide information about what the publication is about. Videos or banners are used to solve these problems. So, if you use a banner, it is important to make sure that the text occupies no more than 20% of the total area of the picture. In this case, such formats as “before and after”, analytical data presented in the form of graphs, numbers work well. You can also put the key values of your business or a separate product on the banner, as well as the offer that you are launching. This could be some kind of promotion, a giveaway, an additional discount, a free subscription, etc. Creativity is what will help you win over the audience. If you are just entering the market, you can make such a publication in the form of a picture for acquaintance, add a light, unobtrusive joke to it. You can also use videos with extraordinary solutions, which will allow you to effectively stand out from the competition.

At this stage, you already have a completely ready promo post. It's time to launch it. Read on to find out how to do this.

Launching a promo post on the VKontakte social network

At this stage, you already have a fully prepared advertising post for publication, taking into account the requirements of both the platform itself and the user audience, its interests. And now it's time to launch it. This can be done on the social network directly in your VK Advertising personal account. To do this, we perform the actions in the following sequence:

1. Directly from the advertising account, go to the "Target actions" tab and select the "Community and profile" option. Select the community to which you want to attract the user audience with your advertising.
2. From the presented options for target actions, select the one that you want to provide. As an option, for advertising a post and a community, the best option would be a solution such as “Increase engagement”.
3. Optimize your advertising budget. This VK Advertising option is activated automatically. It assumes that the funds that will be on your balance will be automatically distributed between all launched campaigns, but the bet will be made in favor of the advertising that gives the maximum effect.
4. Configure the bid strategy, the timing of the promotion, and also specify the budget. We have already said above that there are 2 options here: setting the minimum and maximum price. If you choose the minimum price strategy, the system will automatically try to get the maximum number of target actions within the allocated budget. In turn, the maximum price strategy assumes achieving the desired results taking into account the specified maximum conversion cost. In this case, you already specify which result will be suitable for you. But you need to understand that such a setting somewhat narrows the audience, so it is recommended to provide a reserve for the cost.
5. We configure the ad group. Here you set the parameters on the basis of which your target audience will be formed. So, this can be geotargeting, taking into account the orientation to certain regions, cities, countries. Demographic characteristics are also often used, including the gender and age of users. These 2 parameters are by default and are enabled automatically, but if necessary, you can disable them, thereby limiting sorting by these criteria. You can also set up targeting by behavioral factors and interests of the user audience, setting key queries that people can enter. Another option that you can use in the settings is custom audiences, offering to upload their own users, on whom targeted advertising will be configured. The last solution is display locations. Here are the automatic settings and there is no point in making adjustments to them. Moreover, your company will be launched exclusively on the VK space. At this stage, a tool such as data parsing will be useful. It will allow you to collect detailed information about the target audience automatically and with minimal time and effort.
6. Launch a repost of a promo post in stories. This is what will increase the reach of your advertising. To implement this idea, you initially need to go to your post, which is posted in the community and click on the icon with the arrow under the main text. After that, a new menu will open for you, from which we select a tool such as "Stories" and then you share this post. In the event that additional editing is required, there is a built-in editor.
7. Marking your post on VKontakte You should understand that promo posts in this social network are necessarily subject to advertisement marking, like any other similar ads. You can do this work yourself or with the help of intermediaries.

By and large, all work related to posting a promo post on the VKontakte social network has been completed. But you shouldn't stop there. It is also very important to constantly monitor the effectiveness of the launched campaign in order to make timely adjustments to it, excluding excessive spending of advertising funds.

We would like to draw your attention to the fact that in some cases promo posts do not pass the moderation of the site. The main reason here is minor inconsistencies. Alternatively, you can add 4 smileys to your text, while the permissible number here is 3. Or publish a picture that is protected by copyright, has a watermark that is not related to your company. There were cases when the system did not pass advertising publications written in capital letters.

The main problem here is that no one tells you why exactly your promo post was rejected. That is, you will have to guess on your own. But we have already talked about all the rules above, so study them carefully again to avoid stupid mistakes. If it happens that in your opinion you did everything correctly, but the post does not pass, try to re-send it for moderation. There is a high probability that it will be reviewed by another specialist and they will pass it. As a last resort, you can contact the technical support service for additional clarification, but here you can expect quite a long investigation.

Monitoring the effectiveness of promo posts

You can monitor the effectiveness of launched promo posts through your personal account on VK Advertising. The system offers statistics for the entire company, as well as for each of the ad groups and for individual ads. This is what will allow you to determine which of your decisions give the greatest result in practice, which strategy turned out to be a failure and, as a result, make appropriate adjustments or turn it off completely so as not to waste funds.

The built-in statistics of the VK Advertising account include the following parameters:

1. Budget. That is, the amount of funds you have allocated for your promo posts.
2. Result. Displays the number of target actions performed by users.
3. Conversion cost. That is, the amount you had to pay for one target action performed by users.
4. Spent. Displays the amount that has already been debited from your wallet for displaying ads at this point in time.

You can sort and move all these columns yourself so that it is more convenient for you to monitor the parameters. To do this, simply click on the gear icon and select the “Configure columns” option from the drop-down menu. Moreover, you will have the opportunity to manually configure the metrics that you would like to display in the table, thereby eliminating the solution that you do not need.

To understand how effectively your promo post works, it is advisable to analyze metrics that also display audience engagement. To do this, you need to go to the "Communities" tab and already here check the boxes opposite such metrics as the marks “Share”, “Like”, “To the community”, “Join”, and “Sales on VKontakte”.

Also, along with the basic set of metrics, experts recommend paying attention to other indicators, in particular the number of ad impressions for a certain period of time that you are analyzing, the number of clicks, the cost of 1000 impressions and one individual click, the total advertising reach for the period under study.

By and large, in order to determine the effectiveness of an advertising post, you need to take the number of all users that you managed to attract with this publication and divide it by the total number of your subscribers for the period under study, and then multiply the resulting figure by 100%. But in any case, to ensure high efficiency of promotion of promo posts, it is important to constantly interact with the audience, respond to comments, prepare new materials, no longer of an advertising nature, and do everything that will contribute to the effective promotion and development of your community.

That is, thanks to promo posts, you attract an audience, but it is also very important to retain it. This can only be ensured by comprehensive work with the community itself, communicating with people, providing them with original and interesting creatives. This is the strategy that will give the maximum result in practice and will optimize advertising costs.

Let's summarize

If you decide to use the VKontakte social network to promote your business, goods and services, then a completely logical and justified from a material point of view decision will be to use promo posts. Despite the fact that such publications are paid, they still do not look like intrusive advertising and are perceived by the user audience as naturally as possible, do not cause, so to speak, rejection. This is what ensures their fairly high efficiency in practice with relatively low initial investments. If you do this work correctly, that is, follow all the recommendations that we talked about in today's review, you will get quite impressive results in attracting new users, increasing engagement, sales levels and, accordingly, income.

Here is a short checklist in which we will summarize everything that we talked about today. It will help you build the most correct strategy for working with promo posts:

• formulate the task of your advertising post as briefly as possible, literally in one sentence;
• create a portrait of the target audience you are focusing on;
• study your closest competitors, as well as the strategies that they use in practice, choose the most effective solutions and discard the failed ones;
• define the requests of the user audience that your promo post can solve;
• create several headlines and the posts themselves, focusing them on different segments of the target audience to increase the effectiveness of the campaign;
• choose a beautiful picture or video, preferably unique, such that they attract attention;
• place the main idea that you would like to convey in your promo post to the target audience at the very beginning, literally putting in 200 characters: if you interest people, they will click on the “Read more” button and will study your material in more detail;
• be sure to monitor the effectiveness of the launched campaign in order to make timely adjustments to the strategy, remove those promotional posts that do not give the desired result, so as not to waste the advertising budget in vain;
• be sure to place a link to your community in the promo post, where you would like to attract the user audience;
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