internet
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
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: Twitter
Twitter can be a challenging social media platform, but also one of the most beneficial for your business. With only 140 characters per message, Twitter is certainly one of the fastest social media platforms. We experienced that many small business owners had difficulties getting into Twitter, just because of the character limitation. But with the right strategy Twitter can become a fantastic tool. Today we would like to post some of the first questions we get asked when we introduce Twitter to new clients.
Why using Twitter?
Twitter can be a very powerful tool when promoting your business, services, products or events. You can update your audience on Twitter more often than on other platforms and this can be a huge advantage. But be careful not to tweet to much or you will loose your audience faster than you were able to build one.
How often should you tweet?
It does of course depend on the nature of your business, your current situation and also a bit on the tweets you are sending out. General speaking you want to keep the updates relevant and shouldn’t tweet to many updates in a short period of time. You may find yourself in a situation where you will tweet more on one day than another, which is absolutely fine. If you are using Twitter to promote your business, services, products or your event try to schedule tweets so you can have them send out at different times. There are many tools available and we would be happy to assist you finding the right tools for you.
Who to follow?
When searching the internet for this question you will find some posts where you will get the advise that a good strategy to get more followers is to follow people back who started following you. But we think you should follow only those accounts that are relevant for you. After all your Twitter Newsfeed should be relevant to you. It is of course advisable to check out new followers once in a while to see if they have updates you like.
In our opinion it is more important to interact with your audience than trying to get more followers. Having an active community should be your goal. Providing updates relevant to your audience and to interact is what will help you grow a healthy follower base.
With our series Promoting your business online we try to give you an overview what you may want to check out. In future posts we also would like to get into more detail for certain subjects. You can contact us if you have questions and we will do our best to answer them.
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: 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
Mobile-Friendly Website
In our series Promoting your business online, we have talked about building a website and website structure. We as well posted a general article about online marketing and hope each of those articles were helpful. Today we want to inform you about a very important change from Google. We are sure you are well aware that Google is the most used search engine today. It is therefore important to get your website listed via Google and to make sure you are building your site based on the latest Google standards. To help users to get the best possible search experience Google had changed their search engine over the years many times. Certain standards are required to secure that your website is in good standing with Google and it is advisable to check them out if you are going to build a website.
One of the latest and very important changes is related to the increasing use of mobile devices. In the last couple years users have changed their behaviour when searching for information. Many are suing their mobile phones instead of their desktop computer to look up information. With this in mind Google has announced to change their algorithm in a way that would benefit those website that are mobile friendly compare to those that aren’t.
What does that mean for you?
Based on the information we have, mobile friendly websites will benefit from this change, if users are searching via mobile devices. Apparently the desktop search is not effected. However we have noticed a significant traffic increase to one of our websites in the last couple weeks. It is of course possible that this increase is due to the fact that Google is testing their system. We also would like to mention that we have not noticed the same change on other websites we maintain.
How to check if your site is mobile friendly?
It is very easy to check if your website is mobile friendly. Google is providing a tool to check your site for free. If you want to try it just follow this link:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
What to do to get a mobile friendly website?
If you are working with a professional website developer we are confident you will be in good hands. Especially if your website was build in the last couple months, we are sure your developer team has taken care of it. If your site is a little older you may want to talk to your developer. It is possible that simple changes can improve your site and if they are easy to implement it is very likely you will get them for an affordable price. In case you have build your website yourself and don’t know how to get it mobile friendly, we can offer you to take a look and to give you an estimate. If you are planing on building a new website we would be happy to take care of your project.
How much does a mobile friendly website cost?
The cost for a website depends on so many factors. We have build a tool to calculate the cost for a website which you can find here:
http://www.teccrab.com/index.php/website-development-cost-calculator
It is important to mention that the calculator was designed to help you to get an idea how much a website can cost. To get a real estimate you will have to talk to a developer about your project. A good developer will not only take the information and put them online, but will also advice you which elements are necessary and what you can add later.
We offer free consultations and work with many creative developer together. If you want to talk to us about your project we are happy to assist you. Hopefully this article was useful and if you like please feel free to share it. If you would like to learn more about us check out 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 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
Promoting your business online: Website
In our opinion the first step to promote your business online should be a website. A website is like your store, but in the World Wide Web. You can showcase your products and services, can have contact details available and depending on the nature of your business maybe even a shopping cart system in place. There are a few questions you should ask yourself before getting started.
1st Question: Your Budget
The first question you should asked yourself is how much money you have available for your website project. Your available budget will help you answering the next questions.
2nd Question: Platform, Host, Domain Name
Depending on the product or service you have to offer you may want to go with a WordPress Blog, a Joomla website or maybe an online store build with Magento. There are many other platforms to choose from and some are more suited for your business than others. If you are not sure which one to choose you can contact us for a free consultation. Some platforms require to be setup proper so you should check which website host is offering them. Last but not least you will have to get a domain name preferable something that is also the name of your company. Depending on the Host and the kind of domain name the cost can vary and the cheapest you can get is under $10 per month.
3rd Question: Developer
You may feel comfortable to build your first site by yourself but maybe you need professional help. Picking the right developer is an important step. Consider how much money it will cost to build the site by yourself and compare that with the costs of a professional developer. We have created a tool to give you an idea how much a website can cost. The calculator is designed to give you a general idea, prizes can vary a lot and also depend very much on the project. But we hope it will give you at least an idea. So please feel free to follow this link. We suggest to “shop around” a bit to see if you can find a developer that fits your needs, budget and can earn your trust. Trust is a very important factor when picking a developer. We suggest not to go with the fist guy, check out other options and find the one that is the right fit for your project.
After you have asked yourself those 3 questions you can go to the next step which is building the website. You may have seen many one page websites and those are often a great way to get started. But keep in mind a good website is changing, a successful website is growing and you should always try to add new content. Think of your website like a real store where you change the decoration depending on the season or add new products to your shelfs. With the right platform you will be able to create new content easily and if you have the right developer on your site it won’t be a problem to keep your website fresh and interesting for your visitors.
You also want to consider Online Marketing options such as Online Advertisement and Social Media to increase the traffic to your site. We can help you with every single step and even if you decide to go ahead and try it on your own first, it might be a good idea to have the knowledge that a professional have pointed you into the right direction.
Introducing “The Off Switch V2.15” by teccrab
We live in an age where technology is an important part of our lives. But by staying connected via Computers, Cell Phones, Smart Phones and other Gizmos we often disconnect ourselves from our real lives and sometimes turn into Technology Zombies.
As an Online Marketing Agency we use technology ourselves and understand how important it is to step away once in a while. This is why we would like to invite you to join us for an opportunity to turn off your devices and to talk about better ways to stay connected without disconnecting ourselves from family and friends.
The first thing we will do is to turn off our cell phones, laptops, tablets and other devices. We will even put them away and sit down with pen and paper while talking about our experiences.
To secure that everyone gets the most out of the event we would like to keep groups small. Included in the small $10.00 fee are snacks and drinks available to you during the event.
The first event is planed for Wednesday the 28th January 2015. Upcoming events can be found on our Event List.
We are looking forward to welcomeing you to “The Off Switch V2.15”
Your teccrab team
Battle For The Net
If you woke up tomorrow, and your internet looked like this, what would you do? Imagine all your favorite websites taking forever to load, while you get annoying notifications from your ISP suggesting you switch to one of their approved “Fast Lane” sites. Think about what we would lose: all the weird, alternative, interesting, and enlightening stuff that makes the Internet so much cooler than mainstream Cable TV. What if the only news sites you could reliably connect to were the ones that had deals with companies like Comcast and Verizon? On September 10th, just a few days before the FCC’s comment deadline, public interest organizations are issuing an open, international call for websites and internet users to unite for an “Internet Slowdown” to show the world what the web would be like if Team Cable gets their way and trashes net neutrality. Net neutrality is hard to explain, so our hope is that this action will help SHOW the world what’s really at stake if we lose the open Internet.If you’ve got a website, blog or tumblr, get the code to join the #InternetSlowdown here: https://battleforthenet.com/sept10th Everyone else, here’s a quick list of things you can do to help spread the word about the slowdown: http://tumblr.fightforthefuture.org/post/96020972118/be-a-part-of-the-great-internet-slowdown Get creative! Don’t let us tell you what to do. See you on the net September 10th!
via Battle For The Net.
teccrab inc. | Blog 