online ads
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 – 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 – Prepare for December
Welcome back to our series promoting your business online in 2021, where we share some tips to help you having a successful online marketing campaign. The last two posts were about preparing for October and November, today we take a look into December. This will conclude the preparation phase, next week we will provide some tips how to look at the first data from our campaign, which we started in September. If any of the post helped you with your campaign feel free to like, share and leave a comment.
Just looking back to our post from November, were we already talked about Black Friday and Thanksgiving in the US. With those two events we kickoff the holiday season and should have enough budget available to invest heavily into our campaigns. By the end of November we also have analyzed and adjusted our target groups. At this point we like to remind you, our campaigns are designed to increase sales, not necessarily followers on Social Media. Therefore we will be hard on the target groups, which we will talk about in our next post. The goal is to have the highest rate of return of investment.
In our posts about budget calculation and distribution we already mentioned the division of our overall budget. If you have followed our advice you should have by the end of November and during December a much higher advertisement budget available to catch shoppers for various holidays. In December we have of course Christmas, Boxing Day as well as Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. There are a few more and the assumption people will buy gifts for their family and friends as well as for themselves is very high. We therefore should do our best to be very active on Social Media and adjust our advertisements accordingly.
Depending on your own preferences you may want to create images for the season, definitely adjust your keywords and get into a more festive spirit. Adjusting your online store and perhaps have some special sales events. The 12 days of Christmas is very popular, Christmas Calendar or maybe you have special deals for other celebrations.
With the lower investment at the start of the season, you will have enough advertisement power for the time the most people shop and we hope you will see a very good return of investment. The goal for the previous posts was to get you prepared so you can concentrate on sales, shipping and customer service during the most busy time. When everything is planed you should only invest a few minutes to make adjustments like exchanging an image, publishing an update or answering a comment. From End of November until your campaign is over your should not need to adjust your budget again. The only budget adjustment you might want to do is around the 20th December. If shipping X-Mas Gifts in time for Christmas is almost impossible. To reduce disappointed customers you might want to reduce your budget and let the campaign run out to the end of December.
So far we have published every week an update for you and hope one or maybe even more of our tips were useful for your campaign. Next week we will take a look at the first data from September and give you some advise how to use the data to adjust your campaign. We will have more updates during the season, designed to be more of reminder and lighter to accommodate your busy sales season.
As we mentioned in previous posts, our advise is written more general. Not every strategy fits with your unique situation. But we hope many of the posts we published were at least helpful and pointed you into the right direction. Obviously we also hope our advise increased your confidence in us and encouraged you to reach out if you need our assistance.
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 – Distribution Online Advertisement Budget
Today we will look at strategies for distributing our online advertisement budget for the holiday season. In our previous post in our series promoting your business online in 2021, we covered a way to quickly calculate our available budget for different platforms.
As we did in our previous posts we like to mention the advise we share in our series is primarily aiming for increasing sales during the holiday season and might be especially useful for small business owners and smaller online shops. With this out of the way let us dive into our topic for today.
Distributing your available budget equally during the entire season is certainly a strategy you can use, but may not give you the best return. Adjusting your budget and keep some extra money for special events during the holiday season is more advisable.
First we will take the budget we calculated last week to use it for our example today. We had calculated the following:
- Google $19.14 per day
- Instagram $16.75 per day
- Facebook $11.96 per day
We advised to have a minimum of $10 per day available for the time between the 1st September until the 20th December (111 days).
At this point we like to mention that each platform has an algorithm that will need to run for a bit before you get the best results for your investment. We therefore use September to establish a base line and spend $10 per day per platform.
October has several options, depending on where you are located. If you are advertising to shoppers in Canada you may want to consider increasing your budget for Thanksgiving, which is celebrated in Canada in October. The second holiday you may want to increase your budget for is Halloween. But if you think either one or perhaps both holidays are not relevant for you, keep your budget at your set minimum and invest more later.
November has the US Thanksgiving, Black Friday and also Cyber Monday. Depending on what you are selling those 3 events are important opportunities to push your ads bit more. It is advisable and might be the easiest to manage for smaller businesses to increase the budget a week before the event and go back to a baseline afterwards. Because we have saved money in the previous months we can now increase our budget even more as if we would have set the budget to a fixed setup based on the calculation we mentioned earlier.
December is where the big push happen. From the first day of December to the end of our campaign, in our case the 20th December, we increase our budget and spend what we have left for our ad campaign.
After establishing a baseline we can now look at different options within our strategy and see how to distribute our budget. In any case our goal is to increase sales, meaning we will also have to factor in a certain flexibility and willingness to adjust our strategy accordingly.
When starting with a baseline and returning to it when a push is over, you have even a larger budget available for a platform such as Facebook, which had a tighter budget available to begin with.
Speaking of Facebook, let us now look at a possible budget distribution strategy for this platform. Based on our example we have $11.96 available per day. (How we calculated that was mentioned in our previous post). Since it is not making a big additional dent into our overall budget we will calculate with $12 per day. We decided to increase the budget for Facebook for the two weeks in October (Thanksgiving Canada and Halloween) to the $12 per day and keep $10 per day as our baseline. By the end of October we have spend a total of $496 for our ads on Facebook. In November we have 18 days with $10 per day, bringing us to a total of $676 spend so far. Our budget for Facebook for 111 days at $12 a day was $1,332 minus $676 we have already spend gives us a budget of $656 for the remaining 32 days, which would be $20.50 per day. We now have managed to have a much larger budget available at a time we like to push our products, while also helped our ad campaign to get the most out of the algorithm.
For Instagram we calculated $16.75 per day, again please check our previous post to see how we calculated the available budget. We start September with the same strategy as we did with Facebook, meaning we invest $10 per day. For October we decided to use $15 per day and not increase the budget for Thanksgiving or Halloween. In November we will stick with the $15 per day for the first 18 days and increase our budget to what is left until the end of the planed campaign. Let us do some math now. Our overall budget is $16.75 per day for Instagram. We plan to run our campaign for 111 days which get us a total budget for $1,859.25 in total. September reduced our budget by $300 and we spend between the 1st October until the 18th November $735 in total. Our remaining budget for the rest of our campaign is therefore $824.25 total. We divide that by 32 days and have $25.75 per day available.
To mix things up we will look into a different strategy for Google. We again have 111 days for our advertisement campaign, starting on the 1st September until the 20th December. We calculated last week that we have $19.14 per day available, which equals a total budget of $2,124.54 for Google ads. Our thought process for the different strategy is to get the sales from Social Media for the holidays in October and November. We use Google to support our Social Media campaigns and push sales between Black Friday and the 20th December, to catch as many Christmas shopper as we can. So we divide our budget like this:
- September $10 per day, a total of $300 for this month.
- October 1st to 15th we go with $10 per day ($150 until the 15th October)
- Rest of October increase to $15 per day ($240 for the rest of October)
- November until 12th November $15 per day ($180 until the 12th November)
- November 13th to 26th (Black Friday) $20 per day ($280 for mid November)
- From 27th November until 20th December $40 a day ($960 for the rest of the campaign)
Using different strategies for different platforms is in many cases advisable. Which one works best for you is hard to predict without knowing your business. But we hope our ideas help you to develop a strategy that works best for your business for the upcoming holiday season.
Our series will continue with useful tips during the season. Keep in mind the budget we calculated in the past two episodes should be a guideline for the season, not an unchangeable fact. There is a chance you see an increase in sales, allowing you to run additional ads. Or maybe one platform is underperforming and you decide to pull the budget away and add it to another platform instead.
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
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