small business
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 – 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: Online Marketing
In our previous post in our series of “Promoting your business online” we talked about some steps you should consider when you are going to develop a website for your business. Today we would like to talk about Online Marketing and like to give you an overview what to do after your website is ready. Online Marketing starts more or less already when you are developing your website. You may have heard the term SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimization and is important to make sure that a search engine such as Google, Bing or Yahoo actually finds your site.
But Online Marketing is so much more and includes developing strategies for your Social Media Activities, Online Advertisement, Videos and your entire Public Relations you do online. So where to start you may ask and we would like to try to point you into the right direction with this post.
1st Question: Your Website
Remember that you won’t have any traffic to your brand new website, except from yourself and your developer in case you have one. A good idea is to make sure the content on your site describes what your company has to offer. Make sure your website is optimized and easy to navigate. If your site is ready start submitting your website to search engines to get listed. Make sure you have important information on your site such as a sitemap, disclaimer and contact details. Google as well as Bing have so called Webmaster Tools which are very useful. You also should think about using Google Analytics to keep track of your traffic.
2nd Question: Budget
Make sure you have a budget for Online Advertisement and other Online Marketing Activities. If you have a developer on your site you may already have a starter package included to help your site getting a boost. If you want to try it yourself we recommend starting with a small budget to collect some data and increase the budget a little bit after the first month. Be aware that you probably won’t get any new clients when you run an ad for just a few weeks. But you should see a return after running an ad for 3 month. Many small business owners are not aware that Video Advertisement isn’t as expensive as it seems. Our CEO has published an article about this topic on LinkedIn which you can find here: “Why you should consider Online Video Advertisement”
3rd Question: Platform(s)
There are several platforms that might fit your business better than others. Make sure you are investing in the right once but be open to experiment with other options if you have the budget for it. Diversity is the key and better than putting all your money into one platform and hope for the best. If you are not sure which platforms are the best for your business we offer free consultations to help you finding the right once for you. Running a few ads on Bing or Google is for sure a good idea as well as starting building an audience via Facebook, Twitter and other social media platforms.
We hope our tips helped you to get an idea what to do. If you have any questions or would like to see what we have to offer visit http://teccrab.com
New teccrab Package – Website Start
Today we at teccrab would like to introduce a package which is, in our opinion, especially interesting for small business owners and startups. It includes everything you will need to have a professional looking, basic online presentation. A fantastic foundation for a more complex website. Of course the site will be created based on a standart template, but thanks to the amazing CMS, we will install for you, it will be easy to adjust the design and therefore change the look and feeling of your website.
We think, like mentioned in the beginning, that especially startups will like this package, because it will give you the chance to have a website created by professionals for very low costs. Thanks to many available components, modules and plugins, it will be easy to implement later things like an online shop, information request forms and/or an event calendar (to name just a few) as soon as you see that your business is growing.
Please find here the details of this amazing package:
- Your own CMS based website
- Up to 10 articles will be included in this package
- A standart Disclaimer Page
- We will setup your first Contact Form for you
- Basic SEO
Optional:
- Domain name registration
- Content Management
- Banner and Button design
- Twitter Integration
- Facebook Page
The price for this package starts at just $900.00 (*)
Additional to your new CMS based online presentation we offer our website support service for an amazing discount.
Sounds interesting? Than please visit our website and fill out the online form you which will find here:
http://teccrab.com/index.php/special-packages/website-start
(*) Please note – This offer will be for limited time only
teccrab inc. | Blog 