Promoting your business
Promoting your business online in 2021 – First Analytics
We arrived at the end of September and with that we can create our first datapoint. Welcome back to our series promoting your business online in 2021, where we share tips to help you having a successful online advertisement campaign for the holiday season. Today we are taking a look at our traffic and see what adjustments we might want to consider to get the most out of our investment.
Before we get started it is important to mention our goal is to increase sales, not followers on social media. This is important for the way we analyze our data and plan target market and budget adjustments. A campaign for brand awareness and increasing followers on social media will most likely run for longer, with perhaps the goal in mind to enter a new target market and therefore investment considerations will look a bit different. But for sales oriented advertisement campaigns we have to make some more sales focused decisions to secure we get the most for each advertisement dollar invested.
We advise you to check for those three factors:
- Traffic Data
- Abandon Shopping Cart
- Sales
We primarily look into location data, not necessarily gender, age or other target market specific details. It will make it easier to adjust our online advertisement campaign.
The information we get from our traffic reports will also indicate which platform is performing best for our shop. In the beginning of this series we decided that Google ads are a good way to go. Ads we have on Google will need to run until December and will see the most change. But we also considered several social media platforms and might already see that one is performing better than the other.
Our goal today is to rank the platforms we run ads on and set a data point. The questions we will ask include:
- How well has the platform performed in terms of the three factors?
- Has a platform manage to return our investment?
- Should we consider shifting budget form an underperforming platform to the others?
- What kind of location adjustments should we consider?
Because we started each platform with the same $10 budget it is much easier to compare them to each other. A return of investment (ROI) between 20% and 30% is desirable, but might not have happen with a certain platform yet. Please keep in mind, September is not the high season for our sales cycle, just the first data point. However, if a platform has zero return and did not show any traffic increase it is safe to assume that platform is not performing in our favour. As mentioned many times in our series promoting your business online, our campaign is designed for increasing sales not awareness. Budget shifted from a platform that is not performing is a necessary decision we have to make.
September is helping with getting our first data point. Now based on the strategy we have set in the beginning we can now adjust our budget for October. Regardless which strategy you choose the budget may increase slightly for the next month, with the large portion still available during November and December.
Depending on platform performance, strategy and location our first adjustments will be necessary in October. The datapoint we established today will help us with the decision we need to make. It is advisable to check low performance platforms by mid October and the performance is not increasing one possible decision you can make is either running your ad with a low budget or use the budget assigned to this platform to increase it for a platform that is performing better.
If you like us take a look at your ad strategy for 2021, feel free to contact us.
You can reach us at +1 833 TECCRAB that is +1 833 832 2722
You can follow our LinkedIn Page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/teccrab
Our website is http://teccrab.com
Interested in our WebShop Management Solution? Book a free Consultation via https://sales.teccrab.ca/wsms2021
Our friends and supporter from the construction industry will be happy to hear we also have special packages for you. You can leave your contact details to get more details here https://sales.teccrab.ca/construction-industry
Promoting your business online in 2021 – Prepare for 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 – Prepare for November
To be prepared will allow you not only to stay ahead of the season, but also saves you time when you are getting busy with selling, shipping and customer service. Welcome back to promoting your business online in 2021 and we hope our series has helped you out so far. Today we are looking into November and see what we can prepare in advance to make it easier in our marketing campaign in Fall / Winter 2021. In our previous post we looked at October and today we are going to see what November might have in store for us.
November will for most kickoff the real holiday sale season. If you are on a tight budget a good idea is to have enough advertisement budget available for mid November until the end of the season. If you need some pointers check out our other post in our series promoting your business online in 2021.
September and October should allow you to predict where your customers are coming from. It is important to remember our goal is to increase sales, not necessarily our followers on social media. So our ads will in November look more like “special deal” and “holiday sale” and less “join us on …”
Depending on your region and target market you may want to have a special deal for Thanksgiving and Black Friday. As mentioned in our previous post it is a good idea to start a week before leading into the special day. For Black Friday you can have some additional items ready to be sold for a discounted price to gain more customers. Depending on your products you might want to “bring back” items form previous seasons to sell them at an extra discount.
November is also important to get prepared for December. Right after Black Friday you should switch your ads to accommodate the X-Mas season. Besides the keywords you use to support your store, make sure to add keywords such as Christmas Gift Ideas, Presents and other related keywords into the mix.
Some stores like to have a special event leading to the last day of special sales. Like a 12 days of Christmas or Christmas calendar, with a new item on sale every day.
Like October, we can split November in two half. We went into more detail about budget distribution in a previous post. But in general the first half of November can run with the same budget as the second half of October, allowing you to have a much larger budget available for the second half of November and December.
The traffic data from September and October should allow you to tighten the target group even more and hopefully allowing you to increase the return of investment. Keep in mind from our ads are focusing on sales, not finding new markets. Aiming for a tighter target group for your ads is therefore advisable. While you can still aim for both during September and perhaps even October. Late November is all about getting the most customers and sales.
If you like us take a look at your ad strategy for 2021, feel free to contact us.
You can reach us at +1 833 TECCRAB that is +1 833 832 2722
You can follow our LinkedIn Page at https://www.linkedin.com/company/teccrab
Our website is http://teccrab.com
Interested in our WebShop Management Solution? Book a free Consultation via https://sales.teccrab.ca/wsms2021
Our friends and supporter from the construction industry will be happy to hear we also have special packages for you. You can leave your contact details to get more details here https://sales.teccrab.ca/construction-industry
Promoting your business online in 2021 – Planing out October
Welcome back to our series promoting your business online in 2021. We hope you had an excellent start with your ad campaigns for September and hope our previous post helped you out. While running the first campaign in September we like you to stay ahead during the season by providing some suggestions for the upcoming months. Today we take a look at October, what content you might want to prepare and how to slowly change your focus from gaining brand awareness to sales.
As always we have to make this post more general and your individual situation may not apply hundred precent to what we suggest. But we believe it will be beneficial regardless, even if you consider implement it in the future. We are more than happy to talk to your individual situation and offer free initial consultations. Just give us a call or use the link at the end of the post.
If you have been following our series so far you know that September is mainly to gather data for the upcoming season and to improve the algorithm on a minimal budget. October will provide you with opportunities to test your campaign on one or two events. Depending if you are selling your products to Canada or not, you can will have Halloween available. If you have customers in Canada you may want to consider having a special deal at Thanksgiving, which is celebrated in Canada in October.
A good strategy is to start your ads the week leading into the holiday with updates related to the events. In case of Halloween you most likely have already a strategy for your online shop. For the ads you created on Google you can switch images out to make them look more Halloweenie. Just create the images in advance, go into your Google Ads settings and switch out or add images that are in the Halloween spirit. Just make sure to remove them again after the holiday is over.
Depending on the strategy you follow for your ads, you may want to make sure you adjust your ad budget accordingly. Regardless which strategy you decided to follow. The first half of October is still less busy as the second half. As soon as we get into the second half we will have to make adjustments and this is where the first data from September can helps us out. The guidelines we provided in previous posts were designed to predict the holiday season, the data we gain during September will allow us to make smart adjustments.
Next week we will take a look at November. Staying ahead of the season and creating the content in advance will allow you to have additional time for customer service, shipping, returns and taking care of your sales cycle. Using the time now to get as much content prepared can save you time during the most busy 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 – Starting the Campaign
We have reached September and can launch our online advertisement campaigns. Welcome back to our series, promoting your business online in 2021. The previous posts were designed to help you be prepared to kick off the holiday season successfully. We posted about keyword research, audience and platforms, analyzing, calculating and budgeting your online advertisements as well as tips for advertisement distribution for the upcoming season. Today we like to recap the last posts, help you to connect the dots once more and outline what the next months will look like.
September should start with a low budget to get things going. We will use this months to start building awareness for the products we are about to sell, help the algorithm to aim at the right target audience and also collect the first data to analyze so we can make adjustments during the season.
The keywords we researched should outline what content we produce to help our online ads. The combination of the right keywords for search engine advertisement plus blogposts and hashtags should increase the traffic to our store. There are several strategies you can follow and this largely depends on your situation. But your main goal should be increasing sales, which means including keywords that have been driving traffic to your site in the past should be favoured. Also limit the number on keywords, focus on traffic for sales, not gaining followers on social media.
A well balanced combination of high value to mid value keywords is in many situations advisable, especially if you have already a more established WebShop. Most important is to keep in mind that the content you produce should have value to your audience. Avoid writing blogposts just for the sake of including as many keywords as possible. Look at the value you can provide to your clients and then see if you can somehow add the relevant keywords into your post. Keep in mind you are posting more than once during the season, so you don’t have to add all keywords into one post. Because we are aiming for more sales this season we can and should have a shorter list on keywords we can repeat in future updates.
Posting on Social Media should move from brand awareness to sales. September is still a good month to do both very balanced. In October, especially more to the end of October, you may want to shift the focus more to sales updates and less brand awareness.
Our last advise for September is to let the online ads run as you created them. Even if it is tempting to adjust the target, budget and perhaps the content. Try to let the algorithm adjust to your ads without tempering and only make adjustments if there is a very big issue. September will give you the base line you need to see if your traffic increases in October, which platform to favour and how to react during the season. September is therefore mainly to collect data and let the algorithm work into your favour, which should provide you a better return when it really counts.
We hope our series is helping you and your business. We would be happy if you consider liking, sharing and if you have a question perhaps leaving a comment. We like to wish everyone a successful start into 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
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
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
teccrab inc. | Blog 