Today, in order to promote a VK group and keep it active, you need both time and money. The times when this could be done for three kopecks are over, although not, but you will learn about this later.
In this instruction you will not find free methods because they are not effective at all. The owners of the social network VKontakte have long made sure that you spend as much money as possible within their system. After all, wonderful tools have been developed for this: targeting and market - platform (formerly the exchange).
This article will help you save both money and time when promoting and recruiting subscribers for your group. You will do all this yourself and from scratch without resorting to the paid services of SMM specialists.
Preparing the group for promotion
Naturally, first you need to create a group directly in VK. Then it needs to be made presentable. To do this, you will need to choose a high-quality group avatar or make a beautiful cover.
Fill the community with the necessary sections, for example, reviews, links, contacts, etc. Write a short description of the group so that people can understand what it's all about. You can read about the creation of the group and its design here.
Example of a community cover for a travel group
Create at least 10 – 15 of the most interesting posts. Be sure to choose beautiful photographs to accompany them. If you don’t know which posts are considered good, you can always look at your competitors’ posts.
Go to your competitor’s largest community and see which posts have the most likes and shares. This is the simplest (manual) method, but it works. Remember, a good picture can be worth 1000 words.
Important! First of all, people subscribe not to the design, but to interesting content. If the content is bad and uninteresting, then no amount of advertising will help get people to subscribe to your group!
Complete the sections for additional information
Now there are small moments that also have an impact.
Come up with a status . A huge text simply won’t fit here; it needs to be short and succinct. For example, your slogan will do. If you don’t have a slogan, it’s time to come up with one.
Add a link to the site . This is especially important if you want to bring additional traffic to your blog through public, for example.
Write your contact details and work schedule . All important information should be in the most visible place.
Include a signature . This recommendation is for groups of authors: you are developing a personal brand, so it’s better to become familiar and memorable.
Select a primary and secondary section . If you are a store, select “Products”. If your main content is articles, put them first.
Enable an action button . An action could be going to a website, making a call, or opening a form to send an email. Depends on your goals.
Optimize the group and work through all sections
2. Promotion using target (targeted advertising)
Targeted advertising allows you to fully control your advertising budget. It will be especially useful for those who do not have the task of gaining a large number of subscribers in a short time.
Another advantage is that you can attract only those people you need into your group. For example, Men over the age of 25 who are interested in business topics.
Hundreds of articles have already been written about the target. I will not describe all its capabilities, but will consider only one format, “Universal Recording”.
Universal recording is the most effective promotion format (native advertising)
This post will be shown in the feed. This advertising format will be seen by all users who access the social network from computers and mobile devices.
The screenshot in one of my groups shows that traffic from mobile devices reaches 84%, and visits from computers are only 16%. This only says one thing - there is a lot of mobile traffic and it cannot be ignored when promoting a group!
Share of mobile and web traffic in the group
You may have a question. Most likely, this is a young audience that “lives” on their phones. In the screenshot below, you can see the age of the people who are subscribed to my group.
Adult male audience
As you can see, this is a fairly mature audience interested in a specific topic. Subscribers to this group were recruited 90% from the target and approximately 10% from the exchange (market - platform). Let's start setting up.
Setting up targeting
Go to your advertising account and select “Universal entry”. Be sure to write a selling text! I called it selling because you will need to convince a person to go to your group and subscribe to it.
We all sell something to each other. And this is not necessarily goods and money. You can even sell a trip to the cinema with a friend. After all, you must first call your friend and persuade him to go with you, and he must drop everything he’s doing and agree.
If he agrees, then congratulations, you've made a sale. If not, then the deal did not take place. And on the Internet, in order to convince a stranger to take the action you need, it is very difficult. You have only one tool - selling text. It even has its own powerful formula.
Pay attention to text and pictures
If the text is weak, then the person will not subscribe. At the end, be sure to include a text link and write a “call to action.” Then choose a high-quality picture. If the visitor is attracted by the photo, he will read the text. Everything is very much interconnected. Click “create”.
Text + call to action + image
Select: topic, country, gender male or female, age.
Basic settings for targeted advertising
Let's move on to the settings based on interests. These are the options you will use most often.
Find all competitors' groups
Make a list of competitor groups. Take only the most active and largest ones. You can find them in the search for VK itself by entering the desired keyword.
Search for groups of competitors by keyword
For example, I took 3 links and pasted them into the “community” field. The system determined that the approximate audience that can see my advertisement is 315,000 people.
The more groups you add, the more people your ads will be shown to.
We add the list of competitor groups to “Communities”
You need to exclude your group so that advertising is not shown to people who are already members of your group.
All that remains is to set the price. Never set a recommended price! Especially if you are a beginner. Start small.
Always start with small amounts
If there are no impressions, then gradually begin to increase the price by 5 - 10 rubles. Limit impressions as you see fit. I set it to 1. If a person sees my post and does not click on it, then this advertisement will no longer be shown to him. You can create a “TV” effect by setting 20 impressions per person. Click “create ad.”
Set the status to “launched”. The ad has been sent for review and after a while impressions will begin and the first clicks will begin, and with them the first subscribers.
Carefully check all settings and run the ad
While the ad is being reviewed, you can check all the settings again. If everything is fine, then immediately go to your new campaign and set limits!
Set a limit for the entire campaign or for one ad.
This limiter is needed in order not to waste your entire budget “down the drain” in a matter of minutes! I bet 200 rubles.
If you replenish your balance by 10,000 rubles and do not set limits, and for example, go out to drink tea, then when you return to the computer, most likely you will find 0 rubles on your balance.
There is a known case when one webmaster forgot to set a limit and went about his business. When he returned, he discovered that 80,000 rubles had been written off from the budget.
Optimization and scaling
Now it's time to do some good work! Our task is to promote a group on VKontakte as cheaply as possible. And this is unlikely to happen from the first announcement.
You will need to decide on a budget. How much are you willing to pay for one subscriber? Each niche will have its own price. If you want to bring schoolchildren to your group, it will be one price. If you need adults, the price per subscriber will be much more expensive.
For example, you are willing to pay 2 rubles for 1 subscriber. 100,000 subscribers is 200,000 rubles. 1,000,000 subscribers is 2,000,000 rubles. I think everything is clear with this.
Once you have sorted out the money, you can start creating advertisements. You need to do them until you start receiving subscribers for 2 rubles.
Start with at least 10 and constantly add new ones. Test everything you come up with. Here are the most basic parameters for tests:
1. Headings 2. Texts 3. Pictures 4. Gender 5. Age 6. GEO 7. Different audiences 8. Call to action
Work to improve your CTR
Monitor the CTR in your advertising. The higher its value, the lower the cost per click (eCPC) will be.
CTR affects the cost per click
In my case, the average CTR is around 3.2%, and the cost per click is 1.44 rubles. A subscriber costs me no more than 2.5 rubles. Let me remind you that my settings include men over 23 years old.
At the same time, I can achieve even better results, but I’m just too lazy to do it. 2 – 2.5 rubles per subscriber completely suits me. To achieve this result, I needed to test 10 ads. But I have experience.
If you are a beginner, then do as much as possible. Do it until you achieve the desired results. If you are lazy, then you will make no more than 10-20 creatives and you will get bored. If you are determined, you will do 100. Just do not forget to set limits for each ad, otherwise all tests will end before they even begin.
VK even has a useful hint that will tell you how well you set up your advertising. It’s called “Advertising Post Evaluation”. For me it looks like this:
Find your target audience on VK
Almost a dozen!
