advertising
Promoting your business online in 2021 – Analyzing and Budget adjustments
Welcome back to promoting your business online, our ongoing series where we provide helpful tips for your online advertisement campaign during the holiday season. We arrived at the last days of October and need to get ready to make our first real adjustments. At this point it is very much the same for online shop owners in the US and Canada. The big ticket items in November are Black Friday and perhaps Cyber Monday, followed by the holiday season in December.
In our article “First Analytics” we talked about the questions we will have to ask ourselves. We also established our base line and can now use these information for future decisions. Today we have to prepare for the first real adjustments and have to make some hard decisions. Our tasks are:
- Finding underperforming platforms and decide what to do
- Adjusting or eliminating underperforming target groups and markets
- Increasing the budget to start the first push
The first task will relate to the questions we asked earlier. To refresh, we asked ourselves how well is a platform performing and used traffic, purchases and abandoned shopping carts as our guiding factors.
The bottom line is the question if a platform has returned our investment. So if we have invested $300 in September for platform A, we like to get at least $300 back. Ideal would be a return between 20% to 30% over the investment. However, it is possible you have not seen any sales from the ads in September due to the low budget or nature of the items sold on the store. We like you to keep that in mind. September is designed to start the season, establish a baseline and have the algorithm working in our favour.
Because we started all our advertisement with the same budget in September we can very easily compare each platform based on performance. Our baseline will also guide us for further adjustments later in November. Two more articles we like you to keep in mind are:
- Calculating Online Advertisement Budget, where we were calculating our budget.
- Distribution Online Advertisement Budget, where we decided where to invest our ad budget.
The two articles we published in August will come in handy again. Just to refresh your memory. In those articles we talk about calculating a budget for different platforms, how to invest in platforms that matter and what the strategy for the season for each platform can be. We started with a low budget in the beginning, to kick off the season, get some baseline information and help the algorithm. We then planed to increase the budget slightly and invest heavily at the end.
With the baseline established in September we have now a better idea which platform is performing well and which is not giving us a good return. We start by removing taget groups or markets that do not perform well. For example, if we are not getting any traffic nor sales from Region A we can assume this region is not performing in our favour. Another indicator is the average time spend on the shop. If visitors from Region B are only on the store for a few seconds might indicate the interest is low. Those regions need to go onto our ignore list to make room for traffic from regions with higher sales numbers, traffic and time spend on the website. We can go even further and look at other factors, but regions is in most cases the easiest to adjust.
Our second step is to slightly increase our budget. We like to refer back to the budget calculation and distribution posts we mentioned earlier. Based on your strategy you may have already increased your budget slightly by mid October or have waited and need to increase the budget by the end of October, after making the target group adjustments of course. The slightly higher budget will be needed to help with a push at the end. The next adjustment will be right before Black Friday and will stay that way until the end of the season. But we will have a few more posts for you ready by then as reminder.
Your tasks for now are analyzing underperforming platforms and consider removing them form your campaign. Use the budget designated for that platform to strengthen the platforms that perform better. If your social media representation is strong you can easily invest more in Google ads, if you feel ads on Social Media are still necessary keep them. The budget you assigned in the beginning of the season should lead you to more sales. In our experience the larger numbers will come in November and December, if you had already sales now you will feel more confident and have more datapoint to work with. If not and you feel an extra pair of eyes might come in handy, give us a call.
You can reach us at +1 833 TECCRAB that is +1 833 832 2722
You can follow our LinkedIn Page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/teccrab
Our website is http://teccrab.com
Interested in our WebShop Management Solution? Book a free Consultation via https://sales.teccrab.ca/wsms2021
Our friends and supporter from the construction industry will be happy to hear we also have special packages for you. You can leave your contact details to get more details here https://sales.teccrab.ca/construction-industry
Promoting your business online in 2021 – Happy Thanks Giving Canada
We like to start today by wishing everyone in Canada all the best for the upcoming Thanks Giving weekend. Hopefully you can enjoy it with friends and family in our trying times. Our neighbours in the US will still have to wait a bit longer before they can enjoy their turkey dinner. Regardless, welcome back to our series promoting your business online, where we share some online marketing tips for the holiday season.
Our update today is a good demonstration for your own content updates for your Blog or Social Media. As we already mentioned in the intro, Thanks Giving in Canada is this upcoming weekend. By publishing a few days in advance we are providing an update and increase our chances to be seen before Canadians get busy with preparations for the event. Obviously our goal is to show small business owners what we can do for them and encourage them to contact us for their online marketing needs. Today would also be a good time for you to have a special deal ready for your customers in the great white north.
A combination of a special deal, content on your Blog, shop and social media plus online ads aiming for this event would be a good combination. If you have the budget available you can consider having an ad running in addition to your regular ads or adjust the images and description on the one you are already running. The second event where you perhaps can test your strategy could be Halloween, where you can as well create a special deal, ads and content updates. Using those holidays in October will allow you to generate a datapoint at the end of October to analyze if your activities had a positive influence.
The datapoint we set in September will come in handy by the end of October. We mentioned in our update last week what questions you might want to ask. If you like to check it out here is a helpful link to our post from last week.
By the end of October you have a new set of data, perhaps with a holiday special or two already done. The next step will be to use the information to adjust the target groups set for your ads and also the budget for them. Depending on the strategy you have set for your business this year, you should feel comfortable with the data you gain to make the adjustment needed.
October allows you to have a good test run with a smaller investment and hopefully good feedback for your adjustments. In November we have Thanks Giving in the US, Black Friday and also Cyber Monday and this is kicking off the main sales season. With the data gained in September, the first specials done in October with a smaller budget should make you feel prepared for the main season.
If you like us take a look at your ad strategy for 2021, feel free to contact us.
You can reach us at +1 833 TECCRAB that is +1 833 832 2722
You can follow our LinkedIn Page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/teccrab
Our website is http://teccrab.com
Interested in our WebShop Management Solution? Book a free Consultation via https://sales.teccrab.ca/wsms2021
Our friends and supporter from the construction industry will be happy to hear we also have special packages for you. You can leave your contact details to get more details here https://sales.teccrab.ca/construction-industry
How to promote your business during the holiday season 2015?
October is one month of the year where promoting certain products becomes more important than at any other time of the year. There are special sales days and of course the winter holiday season. If you have followed our series “Promoting your business online” you may have found some useful tips and tricks. If you may have misses an article let us provide you with an overview. In our series we have published the following article:
Promoting your business online: Website
Promoting your business online: Online Marketing
Promoting your business online: Website Structure
Promoting your business online: Online Advertisement
Promoting your business online: Social Media
Promoting your business online: SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Promoting your business online: Blogging
Promoting your business online: Facebook
Promoting your business online: Twitter
Promoting your business online: LinkedIn
Promoting your business online: Social Media Advertisement
In the following weeks we would like to follow up our series with additional posts starting with “Social Media Management” followed by “Social Media Management Tools”
If you are located in Vancouver and like to learn more about promoting your business online, we offer our Online Advertisement Seminar again and would be happy to welcome you in our consultation location. More information about our seminars can be found via the event list link or simply by clicking here https://teccrab.wordpress.com/event-list/
But unfortunately the upcoming holiday season also attracts those how like to find ways to trick you into providing your money to them. Those who will try to steal your identity and credit card information. Just like last year we have also for this year planed to host some events regarding Internet Security. We offered last year two different seminars with overlapping topics and combined the two into one seminar we like to call Internet Safety Seminar. You can find the seminar details at our event list or by clicking this link: https://teccrab.wordpress.com/event-list/
To learn more about us please feel free to follow the links below.
http://teccrab.com – Web
http://blog.teccrab.com – Blog
http://twitter.com/teccrab – Twitter
http://facebook.com/teccrab – Facebook
http://plus.google.com/+teccrab – Google Plus
http://www.youtube.com/user/teccrab – YouTube
Promoting your business online: Social Media Advertisement
After introducing you to some of the main Social Media Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn we would like to talk about Adverting on Social Media. As you know from our previous article about Social Media in general, the strength of Social Media is the fact that you can build an audience and interact with them. If done right it will add a layer of transparency to your organization and can even help you to collect information before introducing a new product. But today we would like to talk about advertising on social media and to make it a bit easier we will concentrate on Facebook and LinkedIn for now, since both of them are very similar.
Why advertising on Social Media in the first place?
If you are using Facebook and LinkedIn you will have noticed that you are adding a lot of information about yourself to your profile. Almost all of those information can be used when you as advertiser want to target a specific audience. This is a huge advantage compare to other advertisement options such as Newspaper or TV for example.
What is the right platform for your business?
If you are following our series Promoting your business online you know that Facebook is certainly more consumer and fun oriented while LinkedIn is more serious business and networking. This can lead to the misconception that B2C oriented businesses should only advertise on Facebook while B2B oriented organizations should stick with LinkedIn, but this isn’t necessarily true. You should keep in mind that many business owners are probably also on Facebook and targeting them there might be useful to introduce your product to them.
You may have noticed that we haven’t included or even talked about Google Plus and YouTube. The reason is simple, both are Google Products and since they are somehow connected we will talk about Google Adwords, Google Adsense, Google Plus and YouTube in separate posts.
We now would like to give you some tips to create your first ad yourself. But before we get started we would like to remind you that you will be much more successful when you advertise not only on one platform. A combination of several advertisement options will always work in your favour.
Target Group
As mentioned before you have a lot of option to target the right audience. You can select a specific location, gender, age group and there are many more options. Picking the right target group is very important and you as business owner should know best who is your clientele. However, you should keep in mind narrowing down your target group to much won’t be beneficial either.
Example: If you are selling a product that usually 23 year olds are buying, do not just target the 23 year old, have a age range that is a bit more flexible such as between 20 and 25 for example.
Budget
The first thing you have to be aware of is that there is a high possibility that you won’t get any new customers in your first month. You may see an increase in traffic, but usually a campaign needs 3 month or sometimes even longer to get you to the point where your investment sees a return. We therefore recommend calculating with a 3 month budget and will explain further how to split it.
Example: If you wish to invest $1,000 per month, calculate with $3,000 for 3 month instead.
The first month
After you know your budget and target group it is now time to build your advertisement on the platform of your choice. As mentioned earlier be a bit flexible with your target group and regarding your budget take a small amount of it to get started. Keeping our example of an overall budget of $3,000 in mind you should now invest maybe $500 for the first month. This will allow you to collect data which you can use to optimize your ad.
Optimization and second month
With the data collected in the first month it is now time to make some changes. Maybe you have noticed that you gain more traffic from a specific location and almost none from another one. Remove target groups that don’t give you the traffic you have wished for and therefore give more money to the audience that will most likely click on your ad. It is now also a good idea to increase the budget a little bit for the second month of your advertisement campaign.
Third month
After increasing the budget a little and gaining even more information you will have a much better idea to get more clients and can now create an ad optimized to your target audience. The third month is where you should invest the rest of your budget and hopefully your hard work is now paying off. Traffic to your site should increase and your sales should go up.
We would like to mention that the “1 month/1 month/1 month” rule we described in our post usually works for a lot of products and services. However there are so many other options how you can divide your budget, which might be better for your goals. Asking an expert can save you money, especially if you have a larger budget. Many experts including ourselves offer free consultations and we can only encourage you to take advantage of those opportunities. We also host seminars and can even setup one just for your team. Of course we would be happy to take care of your entire online marketing needs, but can also understand if you wish to do it yourself, especially if you are just getting started.
To learn more about us please feel free to follow the links below.
http://teccrab.com – Web
http://blog.teccrab.com – Blog
http://twitter.com/teccrab – Twitter
http://facebook.com/teccrab – Facebook
http://plus.google.com/+teccrab – Google Plus
http://www.youtube.com/user/teccrab – YouTube
Promoting your business online: Facebook
In one of our previous posts about Promoting your business online we talked about Social Media in general. Today we would like to take a closer look on Facebook and why you should consider having a Facebook Page even if you are a B2B focused business. Let us start with some basics first.
Profile vs Page vs Group
Many are suing Facebook without knowing that there are some differences depending on how you want to use Facebook. We often saw business owners starting with a Facebook Profile instead of a Page. We therefore would like to explain the differences real quick.
A Facebook Profile is basically the account you need in order to use Facebook. A profile is just you, not your organization, just you. Facebook Profiles have a different protection when it come to updates and your privacy in general. You also need to have a Profile to login to Facebook.
A Facebook Page is your organization. You can give rights to others so they can publish updates, create events and answer comments or messages for you in the name of your organization. A Page is the right way to promote your business on Facebook. Updates published on a Facebook Page can also be seen even if a user is not logged into Facebook.
A Facebook Group is a space you can create on Facebook where you can exchange ideas. You can create a closed Group and invite others to join or have an open one. You could use it to build workgroups to exchange ideas with others while working on a project.
Why using Facebook?
It is the biggest social media platform at the moment. Having a page on Facebook can be very beneficial. You can easily connect your Blog with Facebook so updates from your Blog get published there as soon as you publish them on your Blog. You can also build trust and ask customers for reviews which will encourage others to trust your service more easily when finding your business the first time.
Advertisement benefits
Beside building trust you can also use Facebook for something else. Online Advertisement. Since so many millions are sharing various details about themselves you can have a variety on filter in place to aim for the right target group. If used carefully you can even, to a certain degree, see who would be interested if you plan to introduce a new product to a certain market.
Even if your business is more B2B focused you still can find new customers on Facebook. It is very likely that some decision-maker are also having a Facebook profile and running an ad on Facebook might finds its way to the right person. But everything does of course depend on your entire marketing strategy. If you like to learn more how Facebook can fit into your online marketing strategy we offer free consultations where we analyze your current online situation and advise you accordantly. We also have seminars available and will of course continue publishing more articles on our Blog.
If you like to learn more about us please feel free to follow the links below:
http://teccrab.com – Web
http://blog.teccrab.com – Blog
http://twitter.com/teccrab – Twitter
http://facebook.com/teccrab – Facebook
http://plus.google.com/+teccrab – Google Plus
http://www.youtube.com/user/teccrab – YouTube
Promoting your business online: SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Todays topic in our series Promoting your business online is certainly a more complex one and we feel it might be a good idea to start with some basic information. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and is what you need to do to get your website found on platforms such as Google, Bing and Yahoo, to name a few.
Depending on who you are talking to the opinion on what kind of work is involved varies. Some will see the implementation of keywords in your website, listing your business on search engines and some other more technical aspect as what SEO is about. Others might see everything to drive traffic to your site as SEO.
Beside the definition there are also many different ways to actually get your site up in ranking and there are even reasons why you may not want to do it. Yes this may sound strange, but you may not want to increase the traffic to your site and we will try our best to explain why.
Lets say you are selling products on your website you also manufacture. The traffic to your website is decent but not amazing. Now imagine the traffic to your site suddenly increases so much that the amount on orders you are receiving exceeds your production capacity. Soon you will find yourself in the unfortunate situation that you can not satisfy your customers anymore. They start to leave bad reviews all over the internet and the entire experience did hurt your business more than it helped.
A much better approach is to increase the traffic to your website slowly so that you have time to adjust and to decide if you need to hire more people and invest in new equipment. This is why you may want to consider getting help from an agency or hire someone to help you in this regard.
Now the problem is that anyone can call themselves SEO Expert and the unfortunate truth is that there are so many bad once out there. To find a good one is very important. We therefore encourage you to shop around before you decide who should support you and we hope some of the following tips will help you in your decision.
- Be sceptical if someone promises you to get you on top of every search engine in just a few weeks.
- A good agency will not only explain what they want to do, but also involve you in the decision process as much as you want
- A good agency will explain everything in terms you understand and will try their best to secure you feel included and be able to ask any question you may have
- A good agency will provide you with a long term plan and will inform you if adjustments are needed
- We here at teccrab will secure you have access to your Google Analytics Reports so you can check your traffic anytime you want. Even if other agencies prefer to use a different software to track the traffic to your website, you should get frequent reports regardless.
We had the unfortunate experience to meet some business owners who got burned by some “experts” who promised them to be on the 1st page on Google. This may sound strange but we as well get frequently Emails from “experts” who tell us our site needs help and promise us to be on the 1st page of Google. They claim to have analyzed our site meticulously without realizing we offer SEO services as well.
The problem as we see it is that good agencies have not only to comped with those “experts” but also get harmed by their business methods. We had clients who raised their eyebrows the moment we mentioned SEO, just because they get flooded with junk Emails. An even bigger problem is when you trust your website to the wrong SEO expert. Because it can be much more dangerous than trusting a bad printer or designer for example. Even if you have to pay for an awful designed website, a brochure or business cards you probably won’t be out of business. Trusting the wrong SEO expert can put you on the so called Blacklist and getting your domain off this list is very time consuming and to repair the bad reputation you may have received online can cost you even more.
Good agencies and experts will support your business with so called white head SEO. They will inform you about changes and advise you what to do. The process to increase the traffic to your site will be managed in a way that is beneficial to your business. A good agency will become a valuable partner you can trust.
We offer free consultations and encourage you to take our offer and compare it before making a decision. To learn more about us please feel free to check out the following links:
http://teccrab.com – Web
http://blog.teccrab.com – Blog
http://twitter.com/teccrab – Twitter
http://facebook.com/teccrab – Facebook
http://plus.google.com/+teccrab – Google Plus
http://www.youtube.com/user/teccrab – YouTube
Promoting your business online: Social Media
Social Media became in the last couple years more and more important also in regards of promoting your business online. With so many platforms to choose from it is understandable that especially newcomers can feel a little overwhelmed. Today we would like to post a few general questions business owners often have and answer them.
Why should I use Social Media to promote my business?
There are many reasons to use social media to promote your organization. One very important is transparency. This may sound wired but this is actually one of the most important reasons especially for new businesses. Just imagine you find a product on a website you have never heard of, provided by a company you don’t know. Would you give them your address and credit card details without hesitation? Now imagine you find the same company on Facebook and see that they have a lot of fans plus a lot of great reviews. It is now so much easier to trust them. If the same company has not only Facebook, but also Twitter, YouTube and some other accounts were they are actively post and interact with their audience you will feel much more comfortable to use their website.
Another reason for using Social Media is feedback. As soon as you have build an audience you can ask them for feedback. For example: You have a bakery and your blueberry muffins are the best. Now you feel it is time to introduce muffins with a different flavour, but before you go and buy the ingredients you can ask your customers if they would like to buy them. And later you can even ask them how they liked them.
Last but not least you can use various social media platforms to advertise. Depending on the platform you may be able to place a banner, text or even video ad. We compared text, banner and video ads in our post Promoting your business online: Online Advertisement
Should I use every single platform?
Well, it doesn’t hurt if you secure an account with the mayor platforms, just in case you want to use them later. However, if you don’t use a platform frequently you shouldn’t mention it on your website nor encouraging people to follow you when you know you won’t use it.
Which platforms are best for my business?
General speaking you may want to have a Blog and a Facebook Page, even if you are a B2B business, a LinkedIn Page might also be a good idea. We know some business owners who really like using Twitter, while others don’t know how. Google Plus and YouTube are also great platforms and there are of course various location based services such as Foursquare and Yelp you want to check out, especially if you are a restaurant or pub owner. Depending on the nature of your business you may want to plan which platform to concentrate on and which you can keep for later. In our free consultations we help you to figure out which one might be best for you.
Social Media Expert vs Do It Yourself…
This is not easy to answer. Some business owners love to use social media and to update their audience while others prefer to leave it to an expert. In our consultation we often bring up the example of using an accountant or doing accounting on your own. Some may find it easy and do not want to use an accountant while others prefer to have one. It is up to you what you feel is best.
How much does it cost to have an agency managing my social media needs?
It largely depends on the kind of platforms you want to use, the amount of updates you would like to provide to your audience and also how many platforms the agency has to manage for you. Another factor is if you need someone for setting up the account as well as your goals. Many of our clients like to combine related services such as Social Media Management and Social Media Advertisement.
All our packages are tailor made, this is why we offer free consultations to get to know you, your goals, your needs as well as budget. We also offer flexible packages so you can increase, decrease or even pause our services depending on your current situation. To learn more about us feel free to follow the links below.
http://teccrab.com – Web
http://blog.teccrab.com – Blog
http://twitter.com/teccrab – Twitter
http://facebook.com/teccrab – Facebook
http://plus.google.com/+teccrab – Google Plus
http://www.youtube.com/user/teccrab – YouTube
Promoting your business online: Online Advertisement
In our previous posts we provided some tips about building a website and talked about website structure. Today we want to give you some advise regarding online advertisement which helps to generate more traffic to your website. But before we get started we would like to mention our post about Online Marketing, which will give you some general information.
Having a well designed website is the first step to promote your business, products, services and even events online. The second is to generate traffic to your site and to hopefully get customers. One way to get more visitors to your website is to do online advertisement. Online ads can be in form of a simple text ad or a more engaging and colourful banner ad. Thanks to increasing internet speed and acceptance you also have the option to do online video advertisement.
We hope the following overview helps to demonstrates the differences between text ads, banner ads and video ads. We are sure you are well aware that Google isn’t the only one offering the possibility to advertise online. Beside Google you can also use Bing and several other platforms. To have a fair comparison, which we have included in our post today, we were running several ads via Google AdWords and hope the results will help you decide what is best for your company. Let’s get started:
Text Advertisement
This is a simple ad which you can find when you use the Google search engine. The ad appears either on top or on the right hand site. It is important to mention that Google has many partners across the internet so that your ad might also appear on other websites. You will have a title, description and link. When you are setting up your ad you can select keywords related to what you want to promote as well as a target group.
Banner Advertisement
A Banner is a fantastic way to give your ad a bit more colour. The Banners sizes vary from a small square size banner to a so called skyscraper or larger vertical banner. Similar to the Text ad you select your target group and pay only if someone clicks on it. If designing a banner is not your thing there are many possibilities to get a banner made. We would be happy to help you out.
Video Advertisement
Thanks to increasing internet speed we are able to watch videos and even entire movies online. This means we also have the opportunity to advertise products and services via online video ads. Producing a video is of course much more expensive compare to a Banner or Text ad, but when you look closely to the numbers in our example below, you will see that a video ad is actually giving you the best return. To demonstrate that even a small budget video can generate more traffic we produced the following video:
After introducing the different online advertisement options let us do a little comparison. The numbers presented in our post are based on campaigns we were running in 2014. In our example we wanted to have a total budget of $3,000 and to get everything done as affordable as possible with the best possible return. To make it easier we are not calculating with any additional monthly costs for an online advertisement agency, just the budget plus a small setup fee. The click rate is based on a calculation for a B2B business and can be different if you have a B2C business. Now lets get started…
Setup Fee / Initial Investment / Budget
Text Advertisement = ~$100.00 setup fee which gives you a Google AdWords budget of ~$2,900.00 for your 3 month campaign
Banner Advertisement = ~$250.00 setup fee which gives you a Google AdWords budget of ~$2,750.00 for your 3 month campaign
Video Advertisement = ~$850.00 setup fee which gives you a Google AdWords budget of ~$2,150.00 for your 3 month campaign
Obviously text advertisements are the cheapest way and producing a video more expensive. Please keep in mind that the video in our example is just a simple one with almost no production costs. We hope it demonstrates how powerful even a simple video ad can be compare to other alternatives. Now let us take a look at the return rate:
Clicks you can expect per month / for the entire campaign
Text Advertisement = ~180 clicks per month and ~540 clicks for the entire campaign
Banner Advertisement = ~300 clicks per month and ~900 clicks for the entire campaign
Video Advertisement = ~800 clicks per month and ~2,400 clicks for the entire campaign
We would like to remind you that the goal was to run each campaign for an overall cost of $3,000 for 3 month. If we compare now those 3 campaigns we can see that even if the initial costs for a video ad was much higher and because of it the budget for the campaign so much lower, we reached in the end more potential new clients compare to a regular text ad.
Of course the best way to advertise is not putting all eggs into one basket. Diversity is a much better approach, but we hope the little comparison did help you decide where your investment will give you the best return.
If you want to learn more about video advertisement solutions please feel free to
check out our website at http://teccrab.com
or send us your question at info@teccrab.com
or just give us a call at +1 604 685 9439
Promoting your business online: Online Marketing
In our previous post in our series of “Promoting your business online” we talked about some steps you should consider when you are going to develop a website for your business. Today we would like to talk about Online Marketing and like to give you an overview what to do after your website is ready. Online Marketing starts more or less already when you are developing your website. You may have heard the term SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization and is important to make sure that a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo actually finds your site.
But Online Marketing is so much more and includes developing strategies for your Social Media Activities, Online Advertisement, Videos and your entire Public Relations you do online. So where to start you may ask and we would like to try to point you into the right direction with this post.
1st Question: Your Website
Remember that you won’t have any traffic to your brand new website, except from yourself and your developer in case you have one. A good idea is to make sure the content on your site describes what your company has to offer. Make sure your website is optimized and easy to navigate. If your site is ready start submitting your website to search engines to get listed. Make sure you have important information on your site such as a sitemap, disclaimer and contact details. Google as well as Bing have so called Webmaster Tools which are very useful. You also should think about using Google Analytics to keep track of your traffic.
2nd Question: Budget
Make sure you have a budget for Online Advertisement and other Online Marketing Activities. If you have a developer on your site you may already have a starter package included to help your site getting a boost. If you want to try it yourself we recommend starting with a small budget to collect some data and increase the budget a little bit after the first month. Be aware that you probably won’t get any new clients when you run an ad for just a few weeks. But you should see a return after running an ad for 3 month. Many small business owners are not aware that Video Advertisement isn’t as expensive as it seems. Our CEO has published an article about this topic on LinkedIn which you can find here: “Why you should consider Online Video Advertisement”
3rd Question: Platform(s)
There are several platforms that might fit your business better than others. Make sure you are investing in the right once but be open to experiment with other options if you have the budget for it. Diversity is the key and better than putting all your money into one platform and hope for the best. If you are not sure which platforms are the best for your business we offer free consultations to help you finding the right once for you. Running a few ads on Bing or Google is for sure a good idea as well as starting building an audience via Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.
We hope our tips helped you to get an idea what to do. If you have any questions or would like to see what we have to offer visit http://teccrab.com
Social Media – Possible Game Changers in 2014
Before we all go into our well deserved Holiday Mode we would like to encourage you to take a moment to read this post with our opinion on the topic Social Media in 2014. If you follow the changes some platforms made or announced in 2013 you can maybe already guess what will become important for your business in 2014. But for those who are not following every single announcement or like to hear what we think, please read on to see our prediction for 2014.
Let us start with online videos. We think this will play a much more important role in 2014. Some social media experts pointed already last year out that 2013 is the year where you need to start a YouTube Channel and we think everyone who did will have an advantage in 2014. Not necessarily because of subscribers but because they already know what works for their business and what not. How much they need to invest in 2014 and how often they need to produce videos to keep their audience entertained and informed.
When talking about videos we need to talk about video advertisement too. Video ads will also become more important in 2014. But we think you should be careful because video ads can also become an annoying factor in 2014. You may have seen the announcement from Facebook regarding video ads in their newsfeed. We are sceptical and would like you to imagine the following to understand why we are not sure that this is a good idea. Imagine you login to your Facebook account and suddenly hundreds of video ads play their message at the same time. Well, even one or two at the same time will be annoying don’t you think? Now imagine your target group will get your video message on Facebook and the reaction might be that they are annoyed by it and do not buy your product or ask for your service just because of an automatically played video ad on Facebook.
Since we are on the topic. Did you noticed that the Rating System on your company Facebook Page is now much more visible? The rating system was implemented a while ago and is around for some time now, but was never really a big part of a company Facebook Page until recently. Now the problem is, and we know that as a fact, if you have only a few followers and even fewer rate your site just one bad rating and you end up with a low overall score. Bigger companies with many ratings may not need to concern themselves with this, but small business owner should. Because one bad rating and you suddenly have to deal with a two star overall rating and this can become a problem to encourage new customers to try your product and services.
We are sure you have noticed that videos are the main thing that will become more important in 2014, but we also would like to mention copyright issues on YouTube. If you create a video, upload this to YouTube and include any kind of footage, sound effect or music that is not 100% yours, it can happen that suddenly an ad, even if you are not monetizing your videos, is playing in front of your video. This is because of the Copyright ID system from YouTube which became an important debate in the YouTube Gamer Community. We posted about this in one of our previous posts which you can find here: “Google / YouTube Copyright controversy“
We hope that our post gave you a few ideas what to do in 2014 with your Social Media and Online Marketing Strategy and Budget. What do you think will become important and to watch out for in 2014? Leave a comment below and we wish everyone a Great Holliday Season.
Your teccrab Team
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