social media advertisement
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 – 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 – 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
Promoting your business online: Social Media
Social Media became in the last couple years more and more important also in regards of promoting your business online. With so many platforms to choose from it is understandable that especially newcomers can feel a little overwhelmed. Today we would like to post a few general questions business owners often have and answer them.
Why should I use Social Media to promote my business?
There are many reasons to use social media to promote your organization. One very important is transparency. This may sound wired but this is actually one of the most important reasons especially for new businesses. Just imagine you find a product on a website you have never heard of, provided by a company you don’t know. Would you give them your address and credit card details without hesitation? Now imagine you find the same company on Facebook and see that they have a lot of fans plus a lot of great reviews. It is now so much easier to trust them. If the same company has not only Facebook, but also Twitter, YouTube and some other accounts were they are actively post and interact with their audience you will feel much more comfortable to use their website.
Another reason for using Social Media is feedback. As soon as you have build an audience you can ask them for feedback. For example: You have a bakery and your blueberry muffins are the best. Now you feel it is time to introduce muffins with a different flavour, but before you go and buy the ingredients you can ask your customers if they would like to buy them. And later you can even ask them how they liked them.
Last but not least you can use various social media platforms to advertise. Depending on the platform you may be able to place a banner, text or even video ad. We compared text, banner and video ads in our post Promoting your business online: Online Advertisement
Should I use every single platform?
Well, it doesn’t hurt if you secure an account with the mayor platforms, just in case you want to use them later. However, if you don’t use a platform frequently you shouldn’t mention it on your website nor encouraging people to follow you when you know you won’t use it.
Which platforms are best for my business?
General speaking you may want to have a Blog and a Facebook Page, even if you are a B2B business, a LinkedIn Page might also be a good idea. We know some business owners who really like using Twitter, while others don’t know how. Google Plus and YouTube are also great platforms and there are of course various location based services such as Foursquare and Yelp you want to check out, especially if you are a restaurant or pub owner. Depending on the nature of your business you may want to plan which platform to concentrate on and which you can keep for later. In our free consultations we help you to figure out which one might be best for you.
Social Media Expert vs Do It Yourself…
This is not easy to answer. Some business owners love to use social media and to update their audience while others prefer to leave it to an expert. In our consultation we often bring up the example of using an accountant or doing accounting on your own. Some may find it easy and do not want to use an accountant while others prefer to have one. It is up to you what you feel is best.
How much does it cost to have an agency managing my social media needs?
It largely depends on the kind of platforms you want to use, the amount of updates you would like to provide to your audience and also how many platforms the agency has to manage for you. Another factor is if you need someone for setting up the account as well as your goals. Many of our clients like to combine related services such as Social Media Management and Social Media Advertisement.
All our packages are tailor made, this is why we offer free consultations to get to know you, your goals, your needs as well as budget. We also offer flexible packages so you can increase, decrease or even pause our services depending on your current situation. To learn more about us 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 