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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 – 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
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