social media management
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
Introducing tangledthoughts.ca
One of our fantastic clients is Craig, who is updating his Blog tangledthoughts.ca frequently. Craig is a first class hairstylists located in Vancouver Downtown and his Blog is not just about Hair.
Since April 2013 we are working together with Craig and our goal was to establish a Blog that would be informative and fun. Thanks to Craig’s excellent writing skills and his fantastic sense of humour his Blog became step by step more successful and popular.
The first steps for a new Blog as well as new Facebook Page are always a bit difficult. You start with a blank page, nobody is following your updates and we often get the question if it is worse putting so much time and effort into it. We always answer that question by referring to other clients who had the same problems when they started using social media.
In our experience the first 100 fans are always the hardest.
Craig is at the moment at 87 fans, only 13 more to go and he has his 100 fans on Facebook. Important to mention is that we managed to reach this goal with a very low budget in just a few month. Craig is using one of our smallest packages, which includes frequent meetings and tips to improve his overall online visibility.
Check out his his Facebook Page at http://www.facebook.com/tangledthoughts.ca and feel free to become a fan. Please also visit his Blog at tangledthoughts.ca and leave a comment if you like.
Craig is in our opinion an excellent example for a small business owner who is successfully using Social Media to improve his online visibility without spending a lot of money and we are very happy to support Craig and have him as a client.
If you like to learn more about Online Marketing and Social Media Management join us in our seminar which we offer at the moment for a very low price. Or fill out our Online Information Request Form to get in touch with us. We would be happy to have you as our next success story.
The teccrab 2013 Online Marketing and Social Media Management Seminar
Promoting your product and services can be challenging. For many small businesses and startups the internet seems to be a good and cheap way to do advertising. But before investing a lot of money in the wrong platform, you should know a bit more about the many different ways to promote your business, product and services online. Often a combination of more than one platform leads to a higher success than just putting everything into one online advertisement campaign.
Our weekend seminar is designed to help you to find out which platform is the best for your business. We will talk about Online Marketing in general and also talk about Social Media integration into your Online Marketing campaign. To secure that you will get the most out of our seminar we keep our groups small, only a max of 10 participant per weekend. We also decided to offer this amazing two day seminar for a very discounted price. Only $129.00 for two full days.
Included are the following topics:
Online Marketing
We will talk about Online Marketing in general. Mention the most popular platforms to promote your business, products, services or events online. Plus talk about possible combinations.
SEO and SEM
You may have heard a lot about those two. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and SEM for Search Engine Marketing, but what does it mean? We hope we can help to get a bit more light on this subject for you in our seminar.
Blogging
In our experience Blogging is especially for small businesses a great way to inform customers about your business, products, services, special offers and events. A Blog can be a very powerful tool to help you reaching your goals, even with a very low budget.
Keywords / Tags
To help your customers finding your Blog or website you will need to add keywords so that your site pops up when someone uses a search engine. Let us guide you a little by explaining how important Keywords and Tags are.
Social Media – Overview
Our second day is all about Social Media. We will start with a little introduction and we will also combine things we learned the day before into this topic.
Facebook
What is the difference between a Facebook Profile, a Facebook Page and a Facebook Group? How can you integrate them into your Online Marketing Strategy and more important should you?
Twitter
Telling a storey with only 140 characters is not easy. Is Twitter really the right platform for you? Or is it just a waste of time? Let us help you to find out.
LinkedIn
We like to call it the professional Social Media Platform. You can find here professionals from around the world, but can also use it to introduce not just yourself, but your business, products and services.
Google Plus
The Social Media Platform from Google. Some love it, some like it, some think it is not worse spending time and money on it. We would like to introduce it to you and maybe you will be surprised that you can find your audience here.
YouTube
Videos are a great way to introduce your products and services to your audience. Let us show you how you can use YouTube as a fantastic advertising platform.
We will close each day with an hour for your questions. We believe, because our groups are small, you can be sure that your questions will be answered. We are offering this seminar for this amazing price only until the end of December 2013. If you are interested check out our Event Calendar to find which weekend is best for you. The location of the seminar will be our consultation location in Downtown Vancouver.
We are looking forward to see you soon.
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