business
Celebrating our 10 year anniversary
We are celebrating a special milestone for our agency this year and look back to our humble beginnings. Knowing we are celebrating our ten year is certainly amazing, an achievement we like to share. Today we like to look back and invite you to be a little nostalgic with us.
We picked a few projects to showcase our achievements and hope you will enjoy checking them out.
Starting with our first client, Versicherungsbüro Archangeli e.K., an insurance agency in Germany. A bit of background about this relationship. The owner of the insurance agency and our founder know each other for many years. As of writing this post, Simon has supported the insurance agency, which is located in Berlin, for over 25 years now. It is therefore not surprising that they became our first official client. To learn more about them visit http://archangeli.de
Over the years we have supported many clients from different industries. Projects included web development, online marketing as well as producing promotional as well as educational videos. We even produced a web series, called the INTERNeX Explorer, which was uploaded to YouTube at first and later just to Facebook. For the series we teamed up with the PR Department of INTERNeX and created over a hundred episodes. We like to share this playlist with you, but there are many more videos on YouTube and Facebook https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83Xje8vVnWA&list=PLjwMrVzdykszYaYpH8iAIIgGBqKfpRUQL
A few years ago we became a Shopify partner. One of the stores we helped creating was the fashion store from Style of Life Canada. Check out their selection at https://styleoflife.ca
We also hosted various seminars, one of which was for the Log and Timber Builder Association about internet security, at their annual conference in British Columbia.
Our latest client is Bagwerk, check out their selection at https://www.bagwerk.com
In the past ten years we supported many clients from various industries including construction, entertainment, retail, whole sale, tourism, insurance, education and many more. Our clients are located in Canada, the US, Germany, Denmark, Australia, New Zealand, Netherlands and other countries around the world.
We have worked on countless web projects, online database systems, online shops, Blogs, have produced over one hundred episodes for the web show, educational videos, promotional videos, have hosted seminars online as well as in an office, helped organizing events, trips and other activities for our clients and supported them with their Social Media needs as well as Online Marketing Strategies.
When I started teccrab in February 2012, I wanted to give my clients the feeling of empowerment, by educating them about Digital Marketing. I believed by allowing them to look behind the curtain they would be less intimidated and trust my experience. This concept was certainly not new. I have always tried my best to share knowledge and to encourage people to do the same. It has served teccrab well and is part of our DNA.
– Simon, Founder of teccrab inc.
Over the years we have worked with many talented and creative people. We have also been supported by friends, family, partners, suppliers and of course our staff. The list has become long in ten years and we like to thank all of them. Please allow us to include a few here in this post. Very special thanks for your ongoing support goes to Alexander, Michael, Benjamin, Jonathan, Tobias, Yvonne, Stefanie, Diana, Jennifer, Denise, Anita, Udo, Robin, Jarod, Ron, Gerald, Axel, Alex, Martina, Caleb, Harley, Larraine, Nemma, Eugene, Mina, Tim, Tess, Janel, Tomotaka, Kerstin, Rebecca, Henrik, Jelle, Patricia, Irene, Mette, Petra, Franziska, Janus, Rick, Lies, Xenia, Kristina, Elke, Manouk, Maarten, Laura, Nadine, Mandy, Elisabeth, Justin, Sophie, Queenie, Lauren, Kate, Kristina, Mads, Jannik, Amiel, Claudia, Elvera, Danielle, Yennie, Clint, Rastin, Jen, Neelam, Lukas, Natasja, Bart, Jasmin, Felix, Iris, Lydia, Emmily, Tracy, Matt, Julia, Nadja, Laura, Karina, Ellemijn, Elliot, Felicitas, Megan, Florian, Jeff, Mario, Craig, Dorthe, Jeremy, Steve, John, Phil and so many more. Your support has helped us to build this agency. – Thank you
If you want to get a free consultation, like to use our services or learn more about us, feel free to reach out.
at +1 833 TECCRAB that is +1 833 832 2722
Promoting your business online in 2021 – Happy Halloween
Today we like to start by thanking everyone who enjoyed our series promoting your business online. We received more positive feedback than we would have imagined. Our goal was and still is to help small business owners to run a successful online marketing campaign. If our blogposts helped you we would be happy to hear from you.
As we have mentioned in our last post the main sales season is starting soon and beside wishing you a Happy Halloween, we also like to review the posts leading to this point. So let us take a quick overview of the previous posts followed by our plans for the future.
We started in July, with a short introduction post. It was just called Promoting your business online in 2021 and was designed to kickoff the series.
In the beginning of August we talked about Keywords and mentioned some tips how to categorize them and to use them for the sales season.
Our Audience and Platforms post was next, where we talked about ranking your social media platforms.
By now it was clear our posts where designed like a short step by step guide you can follow during the season. With the subject Calculating Online Advertisement Budget we used the previous information to calculate our available budget.
The post Distribution Online Advertisement Budget talked about how to distribute the overall budget. We advised to start slow in September to have a larger budget available for November and December.
In our post Starting the Campaign we provided an overview of the leading posts and did kickoff the season.
Planing out October, followed by November and December were three posts we prepared for you to help with content for the upcoming months.
By the end of September we posted First Analytics where we talked about setting a base line for our future budget adjustments
We used October primarily to make you fit for the months November and December. In our post Analyzing and Budget adjustments, published last week, we were hoping you felt well prepared to make the right calls. We advise you to consider adjusting your budget by the end of this week. Soon October will be over and we enter November. It is advisable to see what content is ready to be published, if you have specials going on for Black Friday and the Christmas season. Perhaps something for Boxing Day and the last week of December.
Our plan is to continue helping you with tips during the season and hope our posts are useful to you. We understand that a like might be right now the easiest form of supporting us, but we would be happy if you could also consider sharing and commenting on our posts.
Next week we like to share some exciting news. We are making some adjustments to our WebShop Management Solution Packages, thanks to new partnerships. Existing clients will already be able to enjoy and consider our additional services, which we are including in our upcoming packages.
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
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 – Planing out October
Welcome back to our series promoting your business online in 2021. We hope you had an excellent start with your ad campaigns for September and hope our previous post helped you out. While running the first campaign in September we like you to stay ahead during the season by providing some suggestions for the upcoming months. Today we take a look at October, what content you might want to prepare and how to slowly change your focus from gaining brand awareness to sales.
As always we have to make this post more general and your individual situation may not apply hundred precent to what we suggest. But we believe it will be beneficial regardless, even if you consider implement it in the future. We are more than happy to talk to your individual situation and offer free initial consultations. Just give us a call or use the link at the end of the post.
If you have been following our series so far you know that September is mainly to gather data for the upcoming season and to improve the algorithm on a minimal budget. October will provide you with opportunities to test your campaign on one or two events. Depending if you are selling your products to Canada or not, you can will have Halloween available. If you have customers in Canada you may want to consider having a special deal at Thanksgiving, which is celebrated in Canada in October.
A good strategy is to start your ads the week leading into the holiday with updates related to the events. In case of Halloween you most likely have already a strategy for your online shop. For the ads you created on Google you can switch images out to make them look more Halloweenie. Just create the images in advance, go into your Google Ads settings and switch out or add images that are in the Halloween spirit. Just make sure to remove them again after the holiday is over.
Depending on the strategy you follow for your ads, you may want to make sure you adjust your ad budget accordingly. Regardless which strategy you decided to follow. The first half of October is still less busy as the second half. As soon as we get into the second half we will have to make adjustments and this is where the first data from September can helps us out. The guidelines we provided in previous posts were designed to predict the holiday season, the data we gain during September will allow us to make smart adjustments.
Next week we will take a look at November. Staying ahead of the season and creating the content in advance will allow you to have additional time for customer service, shipping, returns and taking care of your sales cycle. Using the time now to get as much content prepared can save you time during the most busy 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
Promoting your business online in 2021 – Calculating Online Advertisement Budget
Last week in our Blogpost series about promoting your business online in 2021 we talked about Audience and Platforms and how to categorize them based on followers, likes and other factors. In this post we will show you how to use the information from the previous week to calculate a decent Online Advertisement Budget.
Before we get started let us not forget to consider running ads on Google. You may also have relationships with other platforms where you like to run separate ads. To make it simpler we will focus in our example on Google and Social Media.
Based on the ranking of the social media platforms we explained last week, you will have a good idea where your budget will reach your audience best. It is now time to put that knowledge to use. First advise we like you to follow is to calculate with at least $10 per day per platform as your minimum advertisement budget. If you can afford more as your minimum even better.
In our example we will have Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and TikTok, which brings us to a total of 5 platforms. We therefore need to calculate with $50 per day. Our ads for the Holiday Season should start in September to help with the algorithm. It will also allow us to make our first adjustments before the season really begins. We will aim to end the campaign on the 20th December, to have last minute sales we can still ship in time. So between the 1st September and the 20th December we have 111 days. Our first calculation is therefore easy 111 days x $50 = $5,550 for our overall budget.
Next we will look at the different platforms and rank them based on the method we described in our last post. The reason we have Google as the top platform on our list is because search engines have given us a better return of investment for the type of ads we are running during the season. We therefore assign to Google a fixed 40% and will assign the rest to the remaining platforms. In our example the list will look like this:
- Google 40%
- Instagram 30%
- Facebook 15%
- Pintrest 10%
- TikTok 5%
Right away we can see TikTok will end up with a very small overall budget and if we divide that by 111 days we realize the platform is way below our $10 per day rule. As long as we can not increase our overall budget we will have to eliminate TikTok from the list and adding the budget to the remaining platforms. Repeat the elimination process until you are able to run an ad for a platform for at least $10 a day. We did that with our example list too and after eliminating the least performing platforms our final list will look like this:
- Google 40% ($2,220.00 / 111 = $19.14 per day)
- Instagram 35% ($1,942.50 / 111 = $16.75 per day)
- Facebook 25% ($1,387.50 / 111 = $11.96 per day)
Please keep in mind this is just a simple example to calculate an overall advertisement budget quickly and is primarily aimed at small business owners with a very limited budget. However, the calculation today should allow you to get an overview and increase your success rate for your ad campaign during the holiday season.
After we have calculated our overall available budget for each platform we are now one step closer and can use the information from today in our next post. Next Wednesday we will concentrate on distributing the budget effectively over the holiday 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
Promoting your business online in 2021 – Audience and Platforms
Welcome back to our Blogpost series, promoting your business online in 2021. Last week we looked at Keywords and provided some tips. You can click on the link to see what you might have missed. Today we like to take a look at the best platforms for you to run ads for the upcoming holiday season.
Quick note, we designed this series to help smaller online shop owners to increase sales during the upcoming season. However, we believe many of the more general advise can also be useful for other businesses. If our advise helps to improve your current strategy or perhaps even helped you to create one for your business, please leave a like or comment and share the post.
A good strategy for small businesses with only a handful of followers on Social Media is to run ads to increase those numbers. However, during the holiday season you may want to put your advertisement budget to better use and increase sales instead of followers. Our advise for the upcoming posts should allow you to invest your budget more efficiently.
Today we like to give you some tips to analyze your current Social Media situation to make better investment decisions for your online advertisements. Look at the platforms you are using at the moment and analyze how each of the platforms are performing. Which Social Media channel is the one your audience is engaging the most? Which one is second and if we have even more we go down the list until we have a ranking of all of them. The criteria we feel are the best to rank your Social Media Platforms:
- Followers, Subscribers, Fans
- Likes on Updates
- Comments on Updates
- Sharing Updates
- Direct Messages
You might manage a platform with a lot of followers, but zero interaction. Meaning no likes, shares or comments. On the other hand there might be a platform where you have only a few followers, but a lot of engagement. So your audience is sharing, commenting and liking your updates. Based on a combination of the criteria mentioned above you should start your ranking list.
Sidebar: If a platform has a lot of followers and we run ads there, the chances are high the connections of our followers might see our ads and buy our products. On the other hand, the platform with only a few followers and a lot of interaction might share the ad. Leading to their connection seeing our product, reducing costs for running the ad. Either way might work. But our goal today is to get the most out of our investment for our online advertisements during the holiday season 2021.
Some other factors to consider to make the list even more accurate are location of our followers, age, gender and interest. But if you have been growing your audience more organic and not paid for followers, you can easily ignore those factors to build a list more quickly. If you however like to consider those factors and still want to have a quick list we advise to simple reduce the number of followers you don’t want to count from the overall follower number.
Another very important factor for your list is obviously sales. If your online shop allows you to track those numbers, add them as criteria to the list. No need to invest in ads for a social media platform where you already know the return will be very low. If your online shop is not tracking those information we advise you to change that. You can use Google Analytics, but many online shop platforms already have a tracking system in place. Running both will allow you to get a better picture.
In our next post we will talk about calculating an online advertisement budget followed by distributing this budget based on the list we created today, in combination of the details from next week. If you followed along so far you should be well prepared for the next steps.
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
Promoting your business online in 2021
We are happy to announce a new series of promoting your business online. It will include useful tips to help for running a successful online advertisement campaign in 2021. We believe especially small business owners will find valuable information in our series, even if you have only a small advertisement budget available. Today we like to outline the content you can expect in the following weeks.
Before we get started a short Disclaimer. There is no “fits all solution” when promoting or running a business. Also every investment comes with a risk. The advise in our upcoming series about promoting your business online in 2021 is primarily aiming to help online shop owners to increase their traffic during the holiday season. However, not every online shop is the same and our strategy might not fit your situation. We therefore can not guarantee any success when following our advise, even if we believe many will benefit from our blogpost series and able to run a successful campaign. With this out of the way let us give you an outline of the upcoming content.
For consistency we have planed to published each post on Wednesdays, starting next week. The first post will be about Keywords and Keyword research. We will give you some advise how you can categorize your keywords to have an easier time to implement them into your online strategy. The week after will be about target audience and platforms you might want to consider for the upcoming holiday season. The next two posts will be about calculating and distributing your online advertisement budget for all the platforms you might want to include into your overall strategy.
When you have followed our posts in August, you should feel prepared for September. We will continue updating you during the season with tips what to look out for, how to make adjustments, what details to analyze and even how to use the data gathered to improve your campaign in the future.
If you are a small business owner, who is located in Canada or the US, and you would like to get some feedback about your planed strategy in 2021. We offer free initial consultations where we analyze your situation and give you more tailored feedback and advise.
Hopefully you will find our tips useful and consider our services for this season our in the future.
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 are we doing?
It has been a while between our last post here on wordpress.com and our update today. As it has many others, 2020 did hit us very hard. Projects we had lined up for the Spring and Summer of 2020 were canceled and some businesses we worked with even had to declare bankruptcy. For a long time we were not sure how we can turn the tables and needed to make some significant changes. First we partnered with IONOS and with Shopify, allowing us to build attractive packages. Our first client for one of our new service packages was Style of Life Canada (styleoflife.ca). We helped them setting up a basic online store with Shopify. We advised them to build a solid structure, supported them with training and guided them with online marketing solutions and consultations. The team from Style of Life is very committed, environmental friendly and family oriented. Their values are very much in line with our own, which made it really easy for us to get behind their vision.
The new packages we were able to develop will allow smaller businesses, like Style of Life Canada, to take advantage of professional support for an affordable price. It combines the development of a basic store, training and ongoing support, guidance and consultations for up to 36 months. Our fee is calculated based on the length of the agreement, we combine the initial development cost, training and setup, add useful services such as support to build online marketing strategies, consultation, coaching and more and divide everything into an affordable monthly fee, allowing even small business owners to take advantage of having professional team on their site.
Another project we like to announce today, is our upcoming series of Blogpost. We will be publishing tips for promoting your business online in 2021. The series will be most useful for any shop owner, but we believe also helpful for other business. In our next Blogpost we will reveal an outline of what you can expect. We have planed to publish a new Blogpost for you every Wednesday.
Last but not least we like to share some details about teccrab inc.
Our phone number has changes about a year ago to a toll free number. You can reach us at
+1 833 TECCRAB that is +1 833 832 2722
We have been more active on LinkedIn lately. You can follow our LinkedIn Page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/teccrab
If you like to checkout our website you can find us still at 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 them. 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.
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