Monday, December 4, 2017
How To Win At Your Holiday Email Marketing Strategy This Festive Season
‘Tis the season to be jolly! That’s right, the holidays are right here (well, almost)!
Marketers are all set to roll out competitive sales tactics to boost their revenue during the holiday season using a variety of marketing channels. Out of them all, email marketing continues to be one of the most effective ways to promote products or services and generate maximum holiday sales.
If you want to get in on the action, you need to plan out a logical holiday email marketing strategy to make sure that your emails entice customers to make purchases and help you drive business growth.
I have collated 5 different tips from leading industry professionals to make things easier for your holiday email campaigns.
Some of the experts who have shared their pearls of wisdom are:
- Christopher Donald, President of Operations and Managing Partner at InboxArmy
- Dennis Dayman, Chief Privacy Officer at Return Path
- Tink Taylor, Founder and President at DotMailer
- Sam Hurley, Founder and Managing Director at OPTIM-EYEZ
- Ryan Phelan, VP of Marketing Insights at Adestra
Here are the most striking insights provided by them for holiday email marketing planning.
1. Christopher Donald
Christopher Donald believes you should plan your holiday email campaigns early. Create calendars for scheduled content creation, email campaigns and marketing collateral so that you can implement festive campaigns more effectively. You should be prepared to make changes to your existing plans depending on the anticipated conversion rates and other email metrics.
Using countdown timers along with a discount offer in your holiday emails is a great idea to add a sense of urgency and increase sales.
For a great example of this in action, look at Lee. The jeans-wear company has perfectly combined the use of countdown timers and holiday discount offers in the below ‘Cyber Monday’ email. It targets Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and encourages the subscribers to make a purchase before the countdown timer runs out.
2. Dennis Dayman
Dennis Dayman points out that more than half of your subscribers are accessing emails on mobile devices, which means that you must ensure a responsive design for your emails to read well across all devices.
Write a catchy subject line that matches the holiday mood. Make it unique as well as specific.
Your messages should be short but engaging. More often than not, your target audience will not check their email inbox as attentively during holiday season. To make sure your offerings get read and engaged with, promote them across social media channels as well, and include social sharing buttons in your emails to obtain greater engagement.
Have a look at the holiday email below by corporate gifting company Chocomize. It gives an impression of being a personalized email from the founders Eric, Nick, and Fabian, but in actual fact promotes a gift certificate. Chocomize have also highlighted their online presence on social media platforms and their behind-the-scenes blog.
Image Source: Get Elastic
3. Tink Taylor
Tink Taylor says data is a crucial component of email marketing throughout the year. However, it becomes even more essential during the holiday season. Hence, email marketers should segment their target audience into key customer groups, including frequent shoppers, recent shoppers, and VIP customers, and target them according to their behavior patterns.
Take into consideration the past holiday campaigns that clicked right with your subscribers and optimize them for holidays 2017.
‘Gift guide’ emails are a brilliant way to help steer indecisive customers into making a purchase. You can see how Uncommon Goods draws special attention to gift ideas in their holiday email below.
Image Source: Marketing Land
4. Sam Hurley
Sam Hurley emphasizes how important it is to execute personalization and machine learning strategies in your holiday email marketing.
Go beyond the ‘first name’ to make your subscribers feel special. Create a social contest that applies the principles of game-mechanics (gamification) and creates a brand buzz.
UK digital marketing agency Two sends out a fantastic gamification email wishing their subscribers a ‘Merry Christmas’. The email is super fun, highly interactive, and encourages reward-based engagement from the subscribers. The agency has also successfully combined the power of social media and word of mouth by adding ‘Share on Twitter’ and ‘Forward to a friend’ buttons respectively.
Check it out here!
It’s important to note that in 2018, it’s widely tipped that the email marketing world will see even more integrated shopping carts, GIFs, emojis, videos, games, and quizzes. As the worth of the Artificial Intelligence market is expected to reach more than USD 16 billion in 2022, AI-based email communications will also make it an exciting era for both subscribers and email marketers.
5. Ryan Phelan
Ryan Phelan believes that it would be ideal if you could control the message even after you have sent it. With real-time content, you can. It comes with an added advantage that in the current digital market, we have powerful technology as well as cost-effective services.
With real-time content, you can update the changes in your inventory and make the holiday emails more effective for the recipients.
Email marketers should always remember that email addresses are more important than Social Security Numbers. This is because an email address can convey more information about a customer than most other sources.
It is quite likely that email marketers who have started using email addresses as individual identification parameters for their subscribers and grouped their lists according to data will be able to drive more business during the holiday season of 2017.
Phelan suggests you should also make use of third-party information about customer behavior on various other sites and target the customers accordingly. However, don’t intrude too far on people’s privacy! Go the extra mile by expressing gratitude through your emails but don’t go over the top. Design a subtle email that says ‘thank you’ to the customers for their loyal patronage towards your brand without being creepy.
Check out the example from Whistlefish below for inspiration.They thank their subscribers while taking the opportunity to promote their Christmas sale and bestselling products in one winning holiday email.
Wrapping up
This holiday season, subscribers are sure to witness a beautiful collection of marketing emails in their inbox. Use the above tips to make your email design and copy as creative, data-driven and engaging as possible.
As a bonus, here are some festive email marketing mistakes to avoid:
- Do not overuse trending hashtags just because everyone else is.
- Do not over-email and come off as a spammy marketer. Focus on quality, not quantity.
- Ensure your emails address a real person and are conversational in tone, rather than sounding like a sales pitch.
- Do not forget to adopt a fallback strategy like ‘View in Browser’ or use suitable Alt text in images for email servers that don’t support interactive elements like GIFs and CSS animations!
Have you planned your holiday email marketing yet?
Guest Author: Sam Pristley works for EmailMonks – one of the largest email template production companies – which specializes in converting PSD to email templates and custom MailChimp templates.
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Pre-Event Content: 5 Tips for Creating Excitement (and a Bit of FOMO)
Next week I’ll join my counterparts from around the world in Berlin to talk about live event experiences. It’s an annual gathering where we can share ideas, successes, and challenges, and learn to better understand each other’s businesses. For many, creating pre-event content to build excitement (and maybe a bit of FOMO [fear of missing out]) for our events is a hot topic.
Regardless of your industry or region of the world, pre-event content is an important element for delivering on an amazing event experience.
While marketing campaigns are often centered on content, event marketers often think about content too late. That’s precisely what UBM found in its Content Connects research among technology brands. Laura Forer of MarketingProfs, UBM’s research collaborator, notes that pre-event content shouldn’t be an afterthought: “Ninety-six percent of attendees look for information prior to attending an event, and 90% continue that search post-event. Effective content before, during, and after an event is vital to the overall experience.”
Effective #content before, during & after an event is vital to attendee experience via @MarketingProfs
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I’ll admit, I’m a bit jealous of the Diner en Blanc events – chic gatherings in beautiful places around the world that rely mostly on secrecy and word of mouth. They don’t have to spend time and budget on creative content – other than a tantalizing invitation – to draw thousands of people to eat, drink, be merry, and wear white.
The rest of us, though, need to be more vocal and consistent to make our events pop with high quality and engaging pre-event content (which, in some cases, can be used on-site and post-event.)
I share five ideas for pre-event content that you are welcome to steal as you plan your next event. And I’d love to hear about some of your favorites in the comments.
1. Create educational and fun videos to define event topics or goals
Short videos can give prospects and attendees a sneak peek at event topics and speakers. The CMI team posted videos before the 2017 Intelligent Content Conference (spoiler alert: we’ll do it again for ICC 2018 because they were effective). The videos were educational, but producer (and CMI Chief Strategy Advisor) Robert Rose also kept them lighthearted and funny to make them worth the three to five minutes people would spend watching them.
Short pre-event #videos helped prospects better understand topics in lighthearted ways, says @EditorStahl.
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They were designed to help marketers better understand tools and innovations behind content strategy – the topic of the conference. Subjects like augmented reality, content audits, localization, and journey mapping were part of the video series that were shared on the ICC event blog, promoted in emails, and posted to YouTube in the months leading up to the event. In each case, the ICC presenter on the topic was mentioned and additional related content was offered.
Watch Robert talk about journey mapping – and sing a Journey song. All I can say is don’t stop believing pre-event videos will work. These videos really resonated with the audience and didn’t require extensive time or budget.
2. Send a clever piece of (snail) mail
Yeah, you read that right – send the kind of stuff that shows up in a physical mailbox. In a time when digital is the primary distribution channel, a piece of mail can be a welcome surprise. Just ask Ann Handley, chief content officer at MarketingProfs. “The key is to send something fun, cool, AND that also encourages sharing on social platforms,” she says.
The key to pre-event snail mail is sending something fun that encourages sharing on social, says @annhandley.
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One of MarketingProfs’ most brilliant examples of pre-event snail mail was the creation of the “Flat Handley,” (a take-off on the popular and long-lasting Flat Stanley literacy project).
“We encouraged people to document their journey to Boston for the B2B Marketing Forum along with Flat Handley,” Ann explains. “Every year we try to outdo ourselves from the previous year.”
In 2017, the MarketingProfs team sent its mascot, Jay Bird, as a traveling buddy for attendees. The language on the back of the cardboard Jay Bird explained what to do – using some hilarious bird puns:
Hi I’m Jay! I excel at flying, and I’m here in your mailbox because it’s almost time for us to take flight for the MarketingProfs B2B Forum! I don’t want you to be owl by yourself; that would be hawkward. Document my journey on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram using the hashtag #MPB2B – it’s a great way to tweet new marketing friends, because more than toucan can play at this! I can help you take your relationships to the nest level.”
This seriously made me laugh out loud. As Ann notes – it’s “FOMO-liscious!”
3. Develop original research to be shared with attendees and used by event speakers
Original research is an important part of any content marketing strategy. It’s an opportunity to highlight industry trends, challenges, innovations, and above all, thought leadership. The content team that supports Interop ITX, an event for tech leaders, fields topical research surveys and shares the results with attendees, prospects, and speakers.
For its 2017 event, the team released four reports (IT Salary Survey, State of Cloud, State of DevOps, and State of Data Analytics) and published companion infographics, podcasts, and articles in the months leading up to the live event. The research topics directly reflect the event conference tracks and the Interop team encourages speakers to incorporate the data into their presentations where appropriate. Kelley Damore, executive vice president of content, says, “We – editors and presenters – are all speaking from the same data and highlighting the research.”
.@Interop ties its research reports directly to its event conference tracks, says @EditorStahl.
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The Interop team already released research on the State of Infrastructure that connects to the agenda for 2018.
4. Love your speakers
Your event speakers are your lifeblood. Their expertise makes your event educational and inspiring. Promote them. Celebrate them.
Mike Winkleman, founder of Leverage Media, is a big proponent of featuring speakers in the weeks leading up to an event. One of his favorite examples was a program he launched for Chief Executive Magazine in 2016 which included speaker-focused articles published in its e-newsletters about six weeks before its Talent Summit. The articles reflected thought leadership in key areas and helped promote the speakers’ expertise.
Says Winkleman, “Interviewing the speakers for the e-newsletter articles was combined with prepping them for their talks at the event itself, which gave it added value.” Subsequent post-event coverage in the magazine nicely rounded out the experience.
Visual content can also play a role in promoting speakers – and to have them promote your event. One of my favorite strategies for Content Marketing World comes from our creative genius, Joseph Kalinowski. He creates unique “posters” for all the sessions and speakers reflecting the event theme.
Check out all of the posters from Content Marketing World 2017.
Beautifully designed, they are easily shareable on social media by CMWorld speakers. The printed versions are displayed during the event and are often taken home by speakers as souvenirs. Find ways like this to share the love and speakers will share back.
Create #visual content for sessions & speakers using event theme. It's great for promotion. @EditorStahl
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I am STOKED for #CMWORLD. Who’s with me? If you aren’t yet, use code SPKR100. Save $. Sign up. Learn more @ 1 event than you might at many. pic.twitter.com/cTKnR8BCAp
— MichelleParkLazette (@mp_lazette) August 17, 2017
5. Highlight user-generated content that shows attendees how to make the most of the event and to have fun
When loyal audience members take the time to create content about your event, it’s like winning the lottery. It’s one thing for you and your brand to tout the event, but it is more sincere and meaningful when your audience does so. Embrace it and showcase it.
When audience members create content about your event it's like winning lottery – showcase it. @EditorStahl.
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In this blog, Unforgettable Value at Your Next Conference Without Being a Speaker, Content Marketing World attendee Aaron Orendorff (@iconiContent) highlights fun aspects of the event (including attendees being photographed in an orange hat and with Lego props), and offers great tips for making the most of the event.
Aaron, with Venngage’s Nadya Khoja, also created this infographic, 26 Headliners on How to Connect With Influencers (at a Conference), to showcase valuable insight on how to connect with conference speakers from CMWorld presenters and industry influencers such as John Hall, Andrea Fryrear, Michael Brenner, Andrew Davis, and others. Their comments are fun and thoughtful, and provide a great way to get the community talking.
Let’s get talking about pre-event content. What are you doing to draw people in for your event or what have you seen others do that you think is – in Ann’s word – FOMO-licious?
Be one of the first to see the pre-event content created by Content Marketing Institute for the Intelligent Content Conference and Content Marketing World. Subscribe to CMI’s free daily newsletter or weekly digest.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
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Sunday, December 3, 2017
3 Proven Ways To Get You Through Tough Times
I couldn’t handle it.
The pressure of closing the business, being hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt and in the middle of a divorce was overwhelming.
I felt like crawling into a cave.
Hiding.
I was in an ocean of pain.
Then I turned to someone I trusted.
Known all my life.
My brother.
I asked.
What should I do?
It was an answer I didn’t want to hear.
Keep going.
Your kids need you. You need to be strong.
But how do you do that?
I resorted to the 3 things that had worked for me in the past.
Read books that inspired me.
Exercised till I dropped.
Distracted myself by hanging out with fun and successful people.
It worked.
Still does.
So keep going when all seems lost.
Persist.
Pain doesn’t define you.
Your attitude to it does.
The post 3 Proven Ways To Get You Through Tough Times appeared first on Jeffbullas’s Blog.
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Friday, December 1, 2017
48 Significant Social Media Facts, Figures and Statistics Plus 7 Infographics
I came across some interesting social media facts and statistics that has me quite concerned about the dental hygiene levels on this planet.
Apparently there are 600 million more people that own a mobile phone compared to those who own a toothbrush.
Some research reveals that there are 4.8 billion mobile users but only 4.2 billion people with a toothbrush.
Does that mean that every mobile should be sold with a free toothbrush or should you need to produce your toothbrush before you are given possession of your new mobile phone to ensure that future personal close encounters are engaging and pleasant?
Another interpretation of those statistic is that toothbrushes are too expensive.
The Importance of Statistics
Statistics are used to make important decisions and social media statistics, facts and figures are often used to justify new media marketing strategies and tactics to the CEO.
The social media landscape changes rapidly and keeping up with the latest numbers is an essential part of continuing to make your marketing relevant and focused.
Here are the latest facts, figures and statistics for seven major social networks that marketers need to take notice of.
I have also embedded an infographic for each social media network.
Facebook continues to innovate and evolve and the the last 12 months have seen the new timeline introduced to personal profiles and brand pages as well as the purchase of Instagram, the mobile photo app platform, which has never made any money and has only 13 employees for a generous price of $1 billion.
This underlines two key elements that emerging as pivotal to the continuing evolution of the social web.
- Mobile
- Visual engagement
These two factors will continue to wield sizable impact and disruption to social networks and business marketing.
So what other numbers are important to take notice of when it comes to Facebook?
Some more Facebook Facts and Figures
- Monthly active users now total nearly 850 million
- 250 million photos are uploaded every day
- 20% of all page views on the web are on Facebook
- 425 million mobile users
- 100 billion connections
- Zygna’s games revenue is currently 12% of Facebook’s total income
- 2.7 billion “likes” per day
- 57% of users are female
Source: InfographicLabs.com
Twitter is still the enigma of the social networking fraternity with its usefulness questioned by a lot of people. Its simplicity is still its main attraction along with its immediacy in breaking news about the latest “events”.
Research shows that the main reason people retweet is due to interesting content.
As it approaches its sixth birthday its revenue is slowly climbing with projections that in 2012 its income will hit $260 million.
Some facts and figures to note about Twitter are:
- There are over 465 million accounts
- 175 million tweets a day
- 1 million accounts are added to Twitter every day
- Top 3 countries on Twitter are USA at 107 million, Brazil 33 million and Japan at nearly 30 million
- Busiest event in Twitter’s history is now “Castle in the Sky” TV screening 25,088 tweets per second (previous record was the last minutes of the 2012 Superbowl with 10,245 tweets per second).
Source: Infographic labs
LinkedIn started in 2003 as a professional business social network and as of February 2012, has over 150 million members according to the official press release from LinkedIn.
More facts and figures:
- 2 new members join every second
- USA leads membership at more than 57 million, Europe has more than 34 million members
- 60% of its members live outside the USA
- In 2011 there were 4.2 billion professionally oriented searches on the LinkedIn platform
- LinkedIn now has over 2,116 employees (at the beginning of 2010 it had only 500)
- The fastest growing demographics are students and recent college graduates
- Revenues for 2011 reached $522 million
- LinkedIn is the 36th most visited website in the world
Source: Infographic Labs
YouTube
Communication and engagement is much more than talking or writing and the popularity of YouTube is evidence of that. The availability of cost effective high speed internet access is making it easy for people to express themselves via video. Brands have seized on its power to be a viral media that augments traditional advertising media such as TV. YouTube’s advantage is it is always available and searchable. (it is the worlds second largest search engine after Google.
This capability has been displayed by the success of the Old Spice marketing campaign amongst many others.
Some facts and figures:
- 3rd most visited website according to Alexa
- 2 billion views per day
- It handles 10% of the internet’s traffic
- Average YouTube user spends 900 seconds per day
- 44% of YouTube’s users are aged between 12 and 34
- Over 829,000 videos are uploaded every day
- Average video duration is 2 minutes 46 seconds
Instagram on the surface appears very simple. It is an app for your mobile phone that allows you to take a photo, apply a filter to make it look awesome and then you can share it on Twitter, Facebook or to your email straight from the phone.
The headline about this social network was its acquisition for $1 billion by Facebook. This was despite the fact that it hadn’t made a dollar of profit. Despite this sizable investment it could be a very strategic and savvy move by Facebook that confirms its crown as the top photo site in the world. It also reminds me of Google’s purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006 which proved to be a great decision in hindsight.
Instagram Facts and Figures
- Founded in March 2010 with the initial name of “Burbn” by Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger with the $500,000 in seed funding. It was launched in the Apple “app” store in November of 2010. In February of 2011 they raised an additional $7 million including an investor called Jack Dorsey of Twitter fame.
- Instagram reached the milestone of 1 million users in December 2010 (only 9 months after being founded and only 1 month after going live in the Apple “app” store)
- In August 2011 Instagram users had uploaded 150 million photos
- 10 million users were using the app by September 2011
- Version 2.0 released including high resolution photo capability
- The release of the Android app version saw 1 million downloads in 1 day!
- April 2012, Instagram reaches the new milestone of 30 million users
Source: Visual.ly
It appears that simple ideas are sometimes the best.
Twitter is a minimalist 14o character social network, Instagram is a simple social sharing photo sharing app and Pintrest is about pinning images and videos that you like to an online pin board.
Maybe it is evidence of a cry for simplicity and efficiency in a time poor society.
Pinterest was established in December 2009 and launched as a closed beta in March 2010. It is barely 2 years old.
It wasn’t until the beginning of 2011 that it reached 10,000 users. Its breakthrough moment appears to be the inclusion in Time magazine’s “50 Best Websites of 2011”
Some more Pinterest Facts and Figures
- December of 2011 Pinterest became one of the top 10 largest social networks with 11 million visits per week
- In January it was driving more referral traffic traffic to retailers than LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+
- Over 10.4 million registered users
- Nearly 12 million monthly unique vistors
- Most of the sites users are female
- 97% of the site’s Facebook “likes” are by females
- It is the fastest site in history to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark
Source: Sandbox
Google+
It is expected that Google’s new social network Google+ will hit 400 million users by the end of 2012. It needs to be kept in mind that Google+ is more about being “core” to Google’s social web strategy as it aims to embed social signals into its whole web and search strategy as it aims to continue to be relevant in an increasingly social and mobile web.
Google makes it mandatory to join Google+ when you register for a Gmail account which really amounts to it being a forced membership. This non organic strategy means that its engagement levels are extremely low at 3 minutes per month compared to Facebook at 405 minutes, in fact they are less than MySpace.
It must be also kept in mind that Google+ is the glue that connects Google’s other social and web properties such as YouTube, Android and of course search.
Some Google+ Facts and Figures
- It was launched on June 28, 2011
- Google+ reached 10 million users by July 14, 2011
- 67% of Google+ users are male
- Google “+1” button is served more than 5 billion times daily
- It is gaining 625,000 users per day
- In less than one day the Google+ iPhone app became the most popular free application in the Apple App store
Source: Website Monitoring.com
More Reading:
- 20 Stunning Social Media Statistics Plus Infographic
- 30 Terrific Twitter Facts and Figures
- 50 Awesome YouTube Facts and Figures
- 50 Amazing Facts and Figures About Google
Image by socialmediahq
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How to Target Your Facebook Ads So That You Don’t Leak Money
Does this sound familiar?
You took a swing at Facebook advertising, hoping that it would help you increase your customer base and profits. You tweaked the copy of your ads, used different images, played with the calls-to-action (CTA’s), and so on. But, for some reason, you don’t see any significant return on your investment.
It feels like you are practically throwing money at Facebook with nothing to show for it.
The good news is that there is a way out of this conundrum, but you need to understand where you are going wrong and what you should do differently. Because there are other people getting a significant ROI from Facebook ads, and you could be too.
Below are five tips on how you should target your Facebook ads that will turn them from flops into thriving profit-drivers.
Let’s dive in.
1. Create Custom Audiences
Facebook advertising works on a pretty straightforward logic. If you don’t want to waste money, then target a very specific group of people before launching your ads. Sure, you may feel tempted to fish in a vast pond, thinking that’s how you increase your chances of reaching out to potential customers. But, in reality, that’s just a surefire way to lose money.
Think about it this way: if you target your ad to males, age 20-50, sure more people will see your sponsored posts, but how many of them are interested in the product you are promoting?
Segment your prospects by creating a variety of highly targeted custom audiences. Facebook allows you to create custom audiences based on a number of variables, such as a customer file, website traffic, app activity, offline activity, and engagement:
With each of these custom audience options you can get even MORE targeted. For example, you can create an audience of people who have visited a specific page on your website and then run ads only to that group of people:
Make sure you adapt your ads to each custom audience segment so that the ad copy, CTA and image are all aligned with the problems you solve for this group of people.
2. Run very specific audience segment split tests
Beyond creating simple custom audiences, you can also learn more about your prospects by split testing audience segments within these custom audiences.
Let’s imagine that your company sells organic, plant-based hand cream. You choose to target ads to a group of people that have visited the page on your website specifically associated to plant-based hand cream. This tells you that this audience has at least some interest in this product.
However, in most cases this group won’t necessarily all convert into customers. So there are some things you can do to figure out which audience segment is more likely to buy your products. For example, your custom audience may include people aged 18-65+, but you can segment them based on age groups such as 18-25, 25-35, 35-45 etc. By running the same set of ads to each of these age groups individually, you may determine that one or two age groups within your greater audience are more likely to convert into customers. This then allows you to focus in on this age group with your campaigns moving forward and reduce the cost per acquisition.
Doing this is fairly simple from the Facebook ads manager. All you do is replicate the “Ad Sets” within your campaign and choose to target a different age group:
You can use a similar process of elimination to test other demographic variables such as geography, sex and so on, but for better results you should only test one element at a time.
Bonus tip: Use images which will resonate with each audience segment. For example, if your value proposition is targeted towards couples, use photos of couples in your ads. If you are targeting women aged 35-45, use a photo of a woman from that age bracket as your image. The more aligned your ad imagery and copy is to your target audience, the more it will resonate.
3. Focus on targeted locations
Like I said before, making the world your oyster is not very effective when it comes to online marketing.
Think about it this way: if you run a pizzeria in Melbourne, would it make sense to advertise it to people in Sydney? Most likely not, because the chances of someone jumping on a 2-hour plane ride just to taste your pizza are pretty slim.
As a rule of thumb, if you run a locally based business, make sure to target prospects that are within a 10-20 miles radius around your location.
One effective way to find and reach people around your business is to use local awareness ads. This feature allows you to access the recent location function and target prospects that are the closest to your business.
4. Tap into Audience Insights to understand your prospects
Who are the people that visit your page? Why do they like it? How can you best target your ads so that you improve your chances of getting a reaction?
These are crucial questions you need to ask yourself before launching an ad campaign on Facebook. If you don’t know what makes your audience tick, it will be difficult to persuade them to click on your ads.
Fortunately, Audience Insights has the answer to most of these questions. From demographics data like gender, education, jobs, and relationship statuses, to information about their lifestyle, online behavior, passions, and so on, Audience Insights is a goldmine for any marketer.
For example, below is some of the basic demographic information for all Facebook users:
5. Separate Mobile and Desktop Campaigns
The smartphone is now the most popular way of browsing the internet. So you need to keep pace if you want to remain relevant in this mobile-first world.
One of the most important rules you should follow if you want to create effective Facebook ads is to ensure that you don’t use the same design for both your mobile and desktop campaigns.
And, here’s why:
- Different Audiences: People who use the mobile app may not use it on a desktop and vice versa. As of late 2016, there were more than 1 billion mobile-only users, so you need to decide where you want to invest and target. Although there is an option to optimize your desktop ad for mobile view, don’t leave it to chance.
- Image Optimization: Use the image size guide to figure out the size and shape of your ad. It tells you how your ad will look on the desktop and mobile app and what you need to adjust.
You may think your ad looks great on a desktop, but if it is getting shown to predominantly mobile users and they can’t see half of the image, or any of the text, then you are wasting money.
Conclusion
Spending money on Facebook ads is a little too easy and sometimes deceptive. You may not think it’s such a big deal, but $100 here and there will add up to significant amounts over time.
Making sure that your ads reach the right audiences, and that those who click on them can use the information provided, will spare you many headaches (and accounting nightmares). To this end, you need to segment correctly and design separate ads for each group, not a one-size-fits-all approach.
Facebook itself has a wide range of tools to support you in developing the best campaign and increasing your conversion rate. After all, your business is what brings them profit.
Guest Author: Nital Shah is the CEO and Founder of Octos Digital Marketing Agency. He is an expert in search strategies, planning and management with ten years under his belt and is serving top corporate brands in Australia. Nital can be connected on Email and LinkedIn.
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Publishing Frequency: Why (and How) We’re Changing Things Up
How often do you read the weekend posts on Content Marketing Institute the day they’re published? We can tell from traffic the answer is “sometimes” for many of you.
Before I joined the CMI editorial team in September, the same was true for me. The daily alert went to my work inbox, which I monitored on the weekend only for urgent communications. Most of the time, as valuable as the CMI articles are, they didn’t qualify as urgent.
Instead, like many of you, I reviewed them when my attention shifted back to work.
So, it should come as good news that starting this month we’ll help free up your inbox on the weekends.
Our new publishing frequency
Instead of posting to the blog every day of the week, we’re moving to a Monday through Friday schedule. Our daily alerts will continue to land in subscribers’ inboxes every weekday morning, but we’ll leave space on the weekends for you to pause and reflect.
.@CMIContent blog will leave time for readers to pause and reflect on weekends, says @Kmoutsos.
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Some of you might be wondering about two weekend stalwarts – the PNR: This Old Marketing podcast and the Content Strategy for Marketers newsletter.
Following the send-off episode on Dec. 11, PNR goes on hiatus. If you read A Content Marketing Love Letter, you know that CMI founder and PNR co-host Joe Pulizzi is setting off for some well-earned family time in early 2018 and “non-marketing writing projects (and other shenanigans)” thereafter.
If you subscribe to the Content Strategy for Marketing newsletter, you should have received the revamped version in your inbox today. You still got an exclusive column from Chief Strategy Advisor Robert Rose and a link to our latest content strategy article. Now, you’ll also get a digest of the other content published that week.
Doing as we say, now as we do
For years, Joe has encouraged companies to get strategic about their publishing frequency decisions.
Be strategic about the frequency of publishing your content, says @JoePulizzi.
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Attendees of Content Marketing World 2017 heard Jay Baer explain “how to get promoted by creating less content, not more.” (You can read about strategic changes made subsequently to the publishing schedule at Jay’s company, Convince and Convert.)
And just a few weeks ago, in PNR Episode 207, Joe and Robert talked about the latest research from Orbit Media, which shows a decline in publishing frequency (and an increase in post length) among individual bloggers.
In the podcast, Joe points out that companies like About.com are getting great results by pulling away from publishing more and more answers (recipes for apple pie, for example). Instead, they’re curating lists of their best answers. That makes life easier for visitors. It’s easy to update and avoids the challenge of having your new content competing with your old content (a problem CMI has definitely experienced).
We’re starting to see this trend in our own research, too. CMI’s 2018 study of B2B organizations found that almost half of B2B content marketers are creating less content than they did a year ago and driving better results from it.
Almost 1/2 of B2B marketers are creating less content than 1 year ago & driving better results. @cmicontent
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You may be wrestling with similar questions – how much content should you produce?
Here’s how we’re approaching this latest experiment of forgoing new content on weekends.
CMI Editorial Strategy Advisor Michele Linn led the charge in asking questions about our publishing frequency – the same questions all content marketers should think about:
- Are we publishing the right amount for our audience? Or are we just adding to the noise of their daily schedule?
- Are we publishing the right amount for our team or are we stretching our resources too thin?
- Are we getting the most impact from everything we produce?
Michele got the ball rolling by sharing lessons learned from earlier experiments and insights from key statistics with Joe and Robert, of course, but also with our editorial, website, marketing, sales, SEO, and social teams.
We carefully considered these factors:
- Daily publishing’s effect on overall site traffic
Organic search delivers the highest percentage of visitors on any given day. New posts account for a much smaller percentage of traffic overall. Since traffic dips dramatically on the weekend, we’re not anticipating too much of a traffic hit. Our search-optimized catalog still exists to answer questions no matter when someone is searching. And the extra time in our schedules will help us further optimize our best articles to make sure people can find them through search.
- Days attracting most email signups
We didn’t want to jeopardize the growth of our subscriber list, so we checked those numbers carefully. Again, weekends proved to be the lightest days for conversions. And, again, the door to becoming a subscriber is always open, whether we’ve published a fresh post that day or not. There just might be fewer people approaching the door on the weekends.
- Gut check by team
Although we did check the data before making this decision, there’s an element of going with our gut too. We work Monday through Friday (most of the time) just as most of you do, so the need for time to pause and reflect resonates. And we think, regardless of the effect on our traffic, most of our audience will appreciate the pause too. (Depending how this experiment turns out, we’ll thank or blame Jay Acunzo for encouraging us to trust our intuition in his inspiring keynote presentation at Content Marketing World 2017.)
What we’ll be watching
Making the change to publishing original content only Monday through Friday isn’t the end of the decision. We’ll keep an eye on email opens, click-through rates, and unsubscribes. We’ll also monitor site traffic and conversions along with search rankings and traffic volume from organic.
.@CMIContent will evaluate metrics and impact of not publishing on weekends, says @Kmoutsos.
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Our plan is to devote the extra hours in our week to optimizing and curating our existing posts on evergreen topics while continuing to spot trends and find the best advice on emerging topics that advance the practice of content marketing.
And, of course, we’ll be listening to your comments and feedback. Let us know what you think – and what you might do with the gift of a few more uninterrupted moments in your weekends.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
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