internet marketing solutions
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 – Our anniversary
Welcome back to our series promoting your business online, where we provide some inside tips and hopefully help you to have a more successful online marketing campaign. Today we like to reflect on some of our previous posts and also mention our upcoming 10 year anniversary.
Before we get started let us remind you, the strategy we aimed for is to increase sales. To be successful with any online campaign you will need to keep your goal in mind. Gaining more followers on social media will require a different approach than a sales oriented campaign. Also planing an event is different to sales or gaining followers. Having the right strategy and following through matters. It is also important to have a goal in mind. Those can be reaching to a certain number of followers by the end of the campaign, getting a certain number of bookings for the event or reaching a certain revenue in sales. The goal, strategy and campaign need to be realistic and in your available budget.
In the past weeks we have published many posts to get you were we are right now. We have more planed until the end of the year and hope each one is useful to you. Today we are more or less in the middle of our sales cycle. A week from now we will have to check our statistics again and consider our first budget adjustments. It is therefore a good time to see what we did to get here.
After our intro post in July 2021 we published a post about keywords in August. We were aiming to have meaningful keywords for online ads on Google as well as hashtags for social media and our Blog available. Having the keywords planed for the season allows us to get our content prepared and connected to the keywords we choose. To increase the rate of success we used the tool from Google to see how popular a keyword is so we can have a mix of high and medium keywords in our campaign.
Next step was to choose the platforms we want to use for our sales cycle. Because we are not looking for increasing our followers we had to analyze were to put our budget into to get the best return. We followed the next week up with planing our budget and by the end of August we had everything in place to start our ad campaign and how to distribute our budget in the following months.
September was the month for a soft launch with a low budget. The goal was to have a datapoint at the end of September, which will help us for the rest of the campaign. But it was also to introduce Google to our products and services for the season. While the campaigns run and the algorithm can already adjust the advertisement based on the target groups. This should get us a head start for the season. But September was also important to prepare some supporting content, some blogposts perhaps and some updates for our social media accounts.
October would depend on the target market and of course your products. Because Thanksgiving in Canada is in October you might have planed a special deal for your customers in Canada. Halloween is another event you might be interested in having a special for your customers.
To make it easy for you to follow our posts we have a category here on WordPress for you:
https://teccrab.wordpress.com/category/promoting-your-business-online/
In the upcoming posts we will continue guiding you. Next week we will talk about the first budget adjustments. We will use September as our datapoint. Depending on your strategy you may have already increased your budget slightly on one platform. By the end of October you most likely have to increase your budget and closer to the end of November once more. If you have followed our posts you should be prepared and know what to expect. Especially the posts about budgeting and budget distribution will be handy.
As we said in the beginning our agency is having its 10 year anniversary coming up. In February 2012 our agency was build with the dream to help small business owners to be successful online. Back then we couldn’t have imagined to celebrate our 10 year. In all those years we had many great projects, some very successful and others not so much. There is never a guarantee a project turns out the way you want it. But we always try our best to find the right solution for our customers and their success is our reward.
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 – 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
Promoting your business online in 2021 – First Analytics
We arrived at the end of September and with that we can create our first datapoint. Welcome back to our series promoting your business online in 2021, where we share tips to help you having a successful online advertisement campaign for the holiday season. Today we are taking a look at our traffic and see what adjustments we might want to consider to get the most out of our investment.
Before we get started it is important to mention our goal is to increase sales, not followers on social media. This is important for the way we analyze our data and plan target market and budget adjustments. A campaign for brand awareness and increasing followers on social media will most likely run for longer, with perhaps the goal in mind to enter a new target market and therefore investment considerations will look a bit different. But for sales oriented advertisement campaigns we have to make some more sales focused decisions to secure we get the most for each advertisement dollar invested.
We advise you to check for those three factors:
- Traffic Data
- Abandon Shopping Cart
- Sales
We primarily look into location data, not necessarily gender, age or other target market specific details. It will make it easier to adjust our online advertisement campaign.
The information we get from our traffic reports will also indicate which platform is performing best for our shop. In the beginning of this series we decided that Google ads are a good way to go. Ads we have on Google will need to run until December and will see the most change. But we also considered several social media platforms and might already see that one is performing better than the other.
Our goal today is to rank the platforms we run ads on and set a data point. The questions we will ask include:
- How well has the platform performed in terms of the three factors?
- Has a platform manage to return our investment?
- Should we consider shifting budget form an underperforming platform to the others?
- What kind of location adjustments should we consider?
Because we started each platform with the same $10 budget it is much easier to compare them to each other. A return of investment (ROI) between 20% and 30% is desirable, but might not have happen with a certain platform yet. Please keep in mind, September is not the high season for our sales cycle, just the first data point. However, if a platform has zero return and did not show any traffic increase it is safe to assume that platform is not performing in our favour. As mentioned many times in our series promoting your business online, our campaign is designed for increasing sales not awareness. Budget shifted from a platform that is not performing is a necessary decision we have to make.
September is helping with getting our first data point. Now based on the strategy we have set in the beginning we can now adjust our budget for October. Regardless which strategy you choose the budget may increase slightly for the next month, with the large portion still available during November and December.
Depending on platform performance, strategy and location our first adjustments will be necessary in October. The datapoint we established today will help us with the decision we need to make. It is advisable to check low performance platforms by mid October and the performance is not increasing one possible decision you can make is either running your ad with a low budget or use the budget assigned to this platform to increase it for a platform that is performing better.
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 – Prepare for November
To be prepared will allow you not only to stay ahead of the season, but also saves you time when you are getting busy with selling, shipping and customer service. Welcome back to promoting your business online in 2021 and we hope our series has helped you out so far. Today we are looking into November and see what we can prepare in advance to make it easier in our marketing campaign in Fall / Winter 2021. In our previous post we looked at October and today we are going to see what November might have in store for us.
November will for most kickoff the real holiday sale season. If you are on a tight budget a good idea is to have enough advertisement budget available for mid November until the end of the season. If you need some pointers check out our other post in our series promoting your business online in 2021.
September and October should allow you to predict where your customers are coming from. It is important to remember our goal is to increase sales, not necessarily our followers on social media. So our ads will in November look more like “special deal” and “holiday sale” and less “join us on …”
Depending on your region and target market you may want to have a special deal for Thanksgiving and Black Friday. As mentioned in our previous post it is a good idea to start a week before leading into the special day. For Black Friday you can have some additional items ready to be sold for a discounted price to gain more customers. Depending on your products you might want to “bring back” items form previous seasons to sell them at an extra discount.
November is also important to get prepared for December. Right after Black Friday you should switch your ads to accommodate the X-Mas season. Besides the keywords you use to support your store, make sure to add keywords such as Christmas Gift Ideas, Presents and other related keywords into the mix.
Some stores like to have a special event leading to the last day of special sales. Like a 12 days of Christmas or Christmas calendar, with a new item on sale every day.
Like October, we can split November in two half. We went into more detail about budget distribution in a previous post. But in general the first half of November can run with the same budget as the second half of October, allowing you to have a much larger budget available for the second half of November and December.
The traffic data from September and October should allow you to tighten the target group even more and hopefully allowing you to increase the return of investment. Keep in mind from our ads are focusing on sales, not finding new markets. Aiming for a tighter target group for your ads is therefore advisable. While you can still aim for both during September and perhaps even October. Late November is all about getting the most customers and sales.
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
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
How much does a website cost?
This post will be a bit longer because it is a question that is not easy to answer. I once saw a very clever post from a website developer who explained creating a website with buying a car. He explained in his example that you can get a cheap car or a luxurious car with a lot of extras and depending on what car you need or want you will pay for it either a little or a lot. I think that this example was very true and to the point. In my post today I would like to help you to get a better understanding for website development, how much you can expect your project will cost and will try to mention some prices so that you can do your own calculation.
The first question you will need to ask yourself is what kind of website do you need? The second is how much can you do yourself?
If you have a business where most of your costumers will visit your real store and not buy your products online, you most likely will go with a very simple website and use one of those “Do it Yourself” tools, to have at least something like an online business card.
But as soon as your business is growing you will see the need to present yourself a bit more professional and this will be the moment where you will start looking into the available options more closely. You will also see the need to look into someone with SEO knowledge and experience with social media tools as well as someone who can help you with internet marketing solutions.
You as successful business owner will have your experience with the fact that finding a good partner can be a challenge and you will know how important it is to have good partners on your site. Knowing that your online presents is an ongoing project and not just a tool you buy and use until it is broken is also a very important fact, because this will make you aware of securing the right partner on your site. To get back to the car example, you most likely will go to the same mechanic every time your car is broken, if you like and can trust this person. The same rule applies for sure for a doctor or dentist. If you do not feel comfortable with your doctor or dentist, you most likely won’t get back to that person. Read the rest of this entry »
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