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: LinkedIn
The more professional oriented Social Media Platform called LinkedIn is in our opinion a must have for business owners. LinkedIn allows you to build an online profile based on your professional background, your work experience, education, skills and more. Connect with colleagues, send and receive recommendation, endorse or get endorsed for your skills and start networking with other professionals. You can also create a company page, showcase projects and join groups or become a well known publisher with hopefully a lot of followers. Today in our series Promoting your business online we would like to give you some tips to get your profile started.
Profile Picture
This may sound obvious but you should have a professional looking profile picture. Make sure your face is visible and upload the image in a good quality. After you have uploaded your profile picture you can make some adjustments. Try to make sure that your face is always visible in each of the previews you will find in the adjustment window from LinkedIn.
Skills and Endorsement
You can currently add up to 50 skills to your profile. Try to pick those that describe you best. Start with your strongest skills and keep in mind that you can more later. Depending on your settings your connections will see your profile from time to time with the option to endorse you for those skills. Make sure you are returning the favour and endorse others for their skills.
Recommendations
If someone is writing a recommendation for you, you will always have the option to read the recommendation before publishing it on your profile. Even later you can decide to unpublished a recommendation given by a coworker or business partner. If you receive a recommendation you may want to return the favour. We think recommendations are the best way to show that a real person is behind that online profile.
Work Experience / Education
This can be a bit tricky to find the right way to describe what you do and did before. Should you mention your internship at organization XYZ, which you did 20 years ago? Should you add the position you held at that one company? If you have worked for a long time you may have worked in many different positions and organizations. At some point you may want to remove the positions less relevant to what you do now.
Projects
Very much the same as with the work experience. You may have worked on many different projects and listing all of them would take way to long. You may want to reduce them to a few that stand out and leave out the once less interesting. Their are other platforms available that are much better suited to showcase all of your projects.
Public Profile Settings
Make sure you check your public profile settings and enable only those fields you feel comfortable with showcasing publicly. There is a lot of customization possible. You can for example enable or disable your skills, current position, past positions and language skills to name a few.
Make sure you are presenting yourself always in a professional way on LinkedIn. Connect with new business partners or contacts you made at the last fair as soon as you can to build up your network. The basic account is currently free, but you can have additional features when upgrading and paying for the professional packages, which you may want to check for yourself. We hope this brief overview of LinkedIn was useful. As always if you have any questions feel free to contact us. Check out the links below to learn more about us:
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
The teccrab 2013 Online Marketing and Social Media Management Seminar
Promoting your product and services can be challenging. For many small businesses and startups the internet seems to be a good and cheap way to do advertising. But before investing a lot of money in the wrong platform, you should know a bit more about the many different ways to promote your business, product and services online. Often a combination of more than one platform leads to a higher success than just putting everything into one online advertisement campaign.
Our weekend seminar is designed to help you to find out which platform is the best for your business. We will talk about Online Marketing in general and also talk about Social Media integration into your Online Marketing campaign. To secure that you will get the most out of our seminar we keep our groups small, only a max of 10 participant per weekend. We also decided to offer this amazing two day seminar for a very discounted price. Only $129.00 for two full days.
Included are the following topics:
Online Marketing
We will talk about Online Marketing in general. Mention the most popular platforms to promote your business, products, services or events online. Plus talk about possible combinations.
SEO and SEM
You may have heard a lot about those two. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and SEM for Search Engine Marketing, but what does it mean? We hope we can help to get a bit more light on this subject for you in our seminar.
Blogging
In our experience Blogging is especially for small businesses a great way to inform customers about your business, products, services, special offers and events. A Blog can be a very powerful tool to help you reaching your goals, even with a very low budget.
Keywords / Tags
To help your customers finding your Blog or website you will need to add keywords so that your site pops up when someone uses a search engine. Let us guide you a little by explaining how important Keywords and Tags are.
Social Media – Overview
Our second day is all about Social Media. We will start with a little introduction and we will also combine things we learned the day before into this topic.
Facebook
What is the difference between a Facebook Profile, a Facebook Page and a Facebook Group? How can you integrate them into your Online Marketing Strategy and more important should you?
Twitter
Telling a storey with only 140 characters is not easy. Is Twitter really the right platform for you? Or is it just a waste of time? Let us help you to find out.
LinkedIn
We like to call it the professional Social Media Platform. You can find here professionals from around the world, but can also use it to introduce not just yourself, but your business, products and services.
Google Plus
The Social Media Platform from Google. Some love it, some like it, some think it is not worse spending time and money on it. We would like to introduce it to you and maybe you will be surprised that you can find your audience here.
YouTube
Videos are a great way to introduce your products and services to your audience. Let us show you how you can use YouTube as a fantastic advertising platform.
We will close each day with an hour for your questions. We believe, because our groups are small, you can be sure that your questions will be answered. We are offering this seminar for this amazing price only until the end of December 2013. If you are interested check out our Event Calendar to find which weekend is best for you. The location of the seminar will be our consultation location in Downtown Vancouver.
We are looking forward to see you soon.
How to generate a more secure password?
You may have heard the news about Twitter and that many accounts got hacked. This may raises the question now, how YOU can protect your accounts and how to create a secure password? There are many tools available to generate a random password, but let’s be honest, who can remember those? It becomes even more complicated if you have a different random password for every single account. By the way, you most definitely should have different passwords for different accounts. So again the question, how to create a strong and secure password which you can also remember?
The answer isn’t as complicated as it may seems. One rule you should have is that each password should be at least 7 characters long, should include a number and should have one capital letter.
Before we now go and generate our passwords, sort your accounts into groups. Email, Bank, Social Media are some group examples, but you can also go with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or how about Business and Private?
The next step is to come up with a sentence you can remember. Like “My zip code as a child was 555”
Based on this sentence we generate now our basic password by using the first letters combined with the number. Our basic password looks now like this “Mzcaacw555” and now, to have slightly different passwords for our different accounts, we add the group to it. Here some examples:
Facebook = “Mzcaacw555-FB”
Twitter = “Mzcaacw555-TW”
Email = “Mzcaacw555-EM”
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