Author: ad_new

Being a digital agency, we have to keep up with the demands and needs of our clients, and we were recently given the task of filling off peak hour dips using Facebook Advertising. With the client having a fully staffed spa, the drop in sales during these hours was noticeably affecting their bottom line and overall revenue generation.

Since the foremost goal was to rake in sales for our client, we decided to use a different approach – a Facebook Flash Sale that would only run at particular times on specific days.  

The main idea behind introducing a Flash Sale was to bring in new customers together with bringing back previous customers who had tried/tested products in recent times but weren’t exactly considered a part of the loyal customers segment. The biggest advantage pertaining to this idea was that the product didn’t hold an inventory i.e. it was highly unlikely for the client to fall short once demand spiked.

The results from running a Flash Sale campaign? Our client received more orders than they initially expected leading to a drastic rise in awareness within the target market inevitably leading to an increase in sales.

So what makes a winning Flash Sale campaign formula?

1 – Targeting

With marketing, the most important thing before going live with your marketing campaign involves targeting the right. Without targeting the right people, your efforts will go to waste.

With a Flash Sale, you need to take a hands-on approach, one where you will be segmenting your target market. These segments will revolve around the following:

1 – New Customers

2 – Retargeting previous customers

One should note that retargeting to previous customers should not include your loyal customer base since these individuals already pay full price for your products.

Devise your Customer Avatar thereby paving the way for better segmentation of your audience inevitably leading to an Increase in ROI from your Flash Sale.

2 – Your Flash Sale Offer

Moving towards the offer. The main idea behind a Flash Sale is to drive up sales and spark interest within your target market. Your offer should be tempting, one that sparks impulse buying. Your offer should be clear and understandable to any prospective customer. It will either revolve around discounted products, product bundle offers or a mixture of both.

Devise the best offer which pertains to your business and target market, before we head over to the creative side of things.

3 – Be Creative

There are numerous brands and businesses conducting flash sales through Facebook but how will yours stand out? Since images and videos speak a thousand words by themselves, it’s best to focus our efforts on coming up with creatives that gain traction in the market, most importantly your target market.

Become the storyteller that you always aspired to be by speaking to your potential customers, allowing them to relate to your products which will inevitably rake in sales for you.

With Facebook Ads, you can make use of single images, videos and even carousels (three to five images one can browse through seamlessly via newsfeed). With an array of options at your disposal, your Flash Sale could capture more interest than you ever imagined.

3 – Time Your Flash Sale Accordingly

You might be thinking that Facebook Ads would lead to higher costs however one should note that the prospect of getting more sales is well worth it. More so, Facebook allows you to select how many days and during which hours your campaign should run making it perfect for Flash Sales.

Decide your campaign’s time frame in a manner when your target audience is active on Facebook and watch the social platform do everything for you.

Facebook Ads have opened up the doors for Flash Sales to cater to a larger audience, and actually get the word out to potential customers immediately.

Have you tried a flash sale campaign in the past? Was it successful? Let us know your experience in the comments below.

In the ever evolving world of technology more and more businesses are adopting digital marketing to keep up with the current trends. As a result, traditional methods are fast becoming obsolete.

Even with the ease of access and ability to measure your digital marketing efforts, there is no guarantee that you will achieve your desired business goals. In other words, nothing is a guaranteed success; there is always a risk factor involved.

Even with our experience, we too have had our fair share of campaigns that haven’t exactly yielded desired results.

Not to worry though since we have shed insight on the most common (and costly) digital marketing mistakes a business can make and how one can fix them.

1 – Not Setting Realistic Goals You Wish To Achieve With Your Campaigns

Just like traditional marketing methods, one of the biggest mistakes one can make in the digital space would be to overlook the planning phase. This phase involves one’s goal setting, the purpose behind running digital campaigns and the different strategies one employs in achieving the targeted objectives.

Without having clear realistic goals, your campaign has no purpose. Without having a clear road ahead of you, one will have a hard time employing analytics to measure the returns on investment i.e. your campaign loses its measurability.

With such massive implications of not setting goals and objectives before your digital marketing campaign goes underway, the need for goal setting couldn’t have been more important.

With a clear direction and purpose to your campaign, the task of creating teams capable of deploying the needed strategy and reaching out to the relevant audience becomes much more easier.

2 – Email Marketing Is Very Important

With the growing popularity of social media and mobile marketing, it comes as little surprise that they are fast becoming the go-to channels for companies’ marketing efforts. This strategy however has its own downsides; one of which is undermining the importance of email marketing.

According to recent studies, nearly 90% of business professionals have indicated that they like receiving promotional emails from subscribed companies or those whom they do business with.

While social media channels allow one access to previously undiscovered consumer insights, it’s important for one to incorporate email-marketing techniques together with these insights. This will allow you to meet consumer demands with a higher degree of personalization.

3 – Social Media

Social media has evolved into one of the core marketing channels and cannot possibly be overlooked, however marketers often forget how to make effective use of it.

Social Media is vast and gives companies and brands the most important thing in marketing; allows you to build one-to-one relationships with consumers however we often find ourselves believing that getting more likes is the name of the game. It is more about engaging with your audience as opposed to anything else.

The most important way one can make full use of social media is to promote engaging content. The art of storytelling in the world of digital marketing will allow people to relate thereby helping you build relationships.

4 – Testing New Technologies and Data

Similar to how writers come across writers’ block, marketers are also known to come across crossroads, where they face a struggle to reinvent themselves. During such times, marketers tend to become data centric and undertake rushed, unplanned decisions like making use of untested technology and products, which inevitably result in costly outcomes.

One should one make use of data that is relevant to the business or marketing campaigns as opposed to putting their fingers in any and everything. Before testing new technologies and previously unavailable data, it is recommended one do thorough research to ensure these integrate well in order to get the desired results.

5 – Measuring Your Efforts and Marketing Campaigns

The biggest advantage of digital marketing is its ability to allow marketers to measure it. One can track and measure results pertaining to engagement, leads, conversions, website clicks and many others. It could be considered a crime if one overlooks the need to measure their marketing campaign effectiveness and efficiency.

It often happens that companies and brands focus on implementing new campaigns without tracking the results of previous efforts. The need to measure results couldn’t be more important, it allows one to act upon bad consumer experiences and meet their demands to a more personalized level thereby improving future marketing strategies leading to continued success.

With a user base of over 1.7 billion people across the world, it was only a matter of time that Facebook’s Ad platform developed into one of the most powerful marketing tools available in the world of digital marketing.

With giving users the option of handpicking audiences based on their age, gender, location, income, job, and almost any other demographic one can think of, it has fast become a marketer’s dream. Despite its growing popularity there is a “but” involved.

There is no guide to the platform i.e. there is no one “get-em-all” approach to it. Despite all the different guides and digital marketing gurus around, no one will ever tell you how much money you should be incurring for engagement or leads on the platform. This is probably because the algorithm behind Facebook Ads works differently for different businesses and industries.

We are assuming you already have a pretty good idea about how Facebook Ads work and the different objectives one can choose in order to optimize their campaign.

While there are numerous tweaks and changes one can undertake in order to improve results, we will be providing a real time example of a client that got a whopping 89% increase in leads due to this one tweak.

Our client handed us the responsibility of running their marketing campaigns on Facebook, one that focused on bringing about more customers and thereby sales.

We optimized our campaign to “Clicks to Website”, mainly because it has proven to be fairly cost effective for us in the past. This option allows ads to be targeted towards people who not only belong to your target market but are also known towards taking action on ads they have come across previously.

Even with our experience and expertise in Facebook ads, there are times when our campaigns don’t guage much interest from prospective customers. We were getting a lot of clicks onto the landing page linked with the Facebook Ad however actual conversions were few and far between.

With such a mixed response from our campaign, we decided to incorporate a few tweaks here and there. Running a Split Test campaign running the same ad but with different objectives, gives us the opportunity to practice a Trial & Error method.

With the Split Test Campaign, one of the ads continued running on the objective of “Clicks to Website” whereas the other was now optimized for “Website Conversions”.

The results of running this split campaign took us by surprise, sales for our client increased considerably. On exploring the campaign’s insights we found that the one optimized for “Website Conversions” got us the most customers. It allowed us to get our client an increase of 89% in leads.

You might be wondering why this happened. How did tweaking the campaign ever so slightly get us such an amazing response? We have uncovered the reasons behind this below

Every Facebook Ad is optimized for a specific objective

In its early stages, our campaign didn’t fare well and the reason behind not getting desired results was fairly simple. Our ad campaign wasn’t optimized correctly.

You might think why we didn’t go ahead with selecting “Website Conversions” since we were aiming to get more leads from our adverts. The reason why we did was because the “Clicks to Website” objective is slightly less expensive, is proven to have worked for us in the past.

While our targeting remained constant throughout, you won’t be the only one to think as to why we our previous ad wasn’t getting results. Our ad was being showcased to wasn’t one that would take action, only those who would Click on it i.e. Clicks to Website optimization objective.

How does Facebook do this? Based on actions taken by users through the social platform. In other words, Facebook’s algorithm does almost all of the work for you; needing only for you to tell it what exactly it is you wish to get done.

After changing the objective to Website Conversions, our ad was now being shown to a more relevant audience, those more likely to take action and convert.

Whatever your ultimate goal is for your ad campaigns, be clear while selecting your ad objective. If you wish to get people signed up to your email list, to buy your product or attend your seminar then make use of the Website Conversions objective.

The incorporation of this tweak after running a Split Test campaign worked for us, who are to say it won’t for you. Make the right choices and sit back and watch Facebook do wonders for you.

We are presented with countless emails every single day, resulting in an inevitable overload of information. With everyone running on packed schedules, it comes as little surprise that most mails are left unopened.

According to findings, nearly 33% of email recipients ponder over whether or not to open one’s email based on the subject line.

With so many mails to sift through, how can you ensure yours stands out from the masses? We suggest your email subject line should KISS it.

When we say your email subject line should KISS it, don’t go sending across cheesy emoticons we often make use of on social networks. That’ll only result in you getting blocked from the recipient’s list at the very least.

By KISS, we mean to say Keep It Simple Silly.

According to MailChimp, arguably the most popular email marketing service around, short descriptive subject lines got a better response and open rate when compared to cheesy attempts to entice individuals.

Being memorable is almost every marketer’s dream, however implementing a strategy revolving around humor for subject lines isn’t the best time to put it to use, thereby urging you to KISS.

There are a number of ways you can ensure your email subject line should KISS it.

Be Clear

A clear subject line depicting the crux of your mail’s body is said to have received more clicks than other clever attempts to capture one’s attention. The minimalist view that underlines the importance of “less is more” couldn’t have been more fitting.

Your subject line should be understandable. Professionals wish to know exactly what they are clicking on. There is no room for unwanted surprises or time wasting. Avoid witty ambiguous statements.

Don’t showcase your selling skills

You might be inspired by the Wolf of Wall Street however we urge you to avoid using “Salesy” terms, it will only result in your mail ending up in trash

Be Precise

While many marketers would argue that humorous and creative subject lines work best, we often overlook the importance of simplicity. 50 characters or less should do the trick

Make it Personal

Everyone is dealing with an overload of information through selective perception. In order to catch attention, make your email subject lines more personalized. The mere use of the words like “You” can do wonders.

At the end of the day, the best strategy one can employ while devising email subject lines would be to put themselves in the recipient’s shoes. This will allow you to filter out those that you wouldn’t open yourself.

“You never get a second chance to make a great first impression. Make yours count”

We recently wrote a blog post on how Facebook has recently disabled their 20% text rule for ad images.

Since then, we’ve altered a lot of our campaigns in order to get the best reach possible with the new guidelines.

Images can be one of the most powerful factors in determining how well your ad is going to perform. So changing the way we create ad images meant noticing a significant difference not just in the reach of the advert, but also on the impact it had on the audience it was being shown to.

Here are a few of the things we noticed when playing around with different images:

Reach Vs Click Through Rates

While images with less text may have a better reach, you will need to keep a sharp eye on your stats to see whether the people being reached are even noticing your ad.

If the click through rates are low, the ad is simply not grabbing people’s attention.

So while your ad may be technically “reaching” a lot of people, it is not really performing unless the audience being reached is clicking and taking action on the advert.

Branding, branding, branding

Not using text in images means you are limited in what you can say through your creative – which is why you need to focus heavily on your branding elements.

People who are interested in the services you offer will recognize your colours, logo and design elements instead, which is what will make them take a moment to stop and go through what you are offering in your advert.

This is something especially important for people who do regular, long-term advertising on Facebook.

Strong Headlines

In the past, a lot of advertisers relied on their images to grab attention. However, it’s now become increasingly important to have strong, solid headlines to do the talking.

Your keywords should stand out, be placed towards the start of the sentence – and try to keep your headline simple. Snazzy headlines are great for creativity, but we’re trying to show our audience what we can offer them in the span of a thumb-scroll.. So make sure your headline immediately shows your value to them!

What changes have you made to your images and campaigns since Facebook’s 20% text rule change?

Are you facing problems with making your ads perform after this new rule has been implemented? Drop me a message to share your concerns.

Over the past few months, Facebook has slowly started disabling its 20% text rule for images used in Ads.

The previous rule prevented advertisers from using over 20% of text in ad images, and was supported by the handy Grid Tool.

Now that Facebook has disabled this rule, advertisers are free to use as much text as they would like in their Ad images.

So does this mean I can finally use text-heavy images while advertising?

Well, yes.. and no!

While it is technically possible to use text-heavy images, you will sacrifice your ad reach significantly by doing so.

This is because Facebook has started giving preference to ads that use little to no text in their images. The more text your image uses, the less Facebook will push the ad to its audiences.

Why is Facebook doing this?

While there is no solid answer to this, we believe that Facebook is trying to optimise user experience and would hence like to eliminate images that have a blatant “advertisement” look and feel.

Here is an official statement from Facebook regarding the recent change:

“To help advertisers achieve their business goals while providing people with an enjoyable experience on Facebook, we’ve had a policy limiting excessive text (more than 20%) on images in ads. We’re always looking for ways to improve the experience for people and advertisers, which is why we’re testing a new solution that will allow ads with text to run, but based on the amount of text in an ad’s image, the ad won’t reach as many people. We will continue to monitor how this test impacts advertisers as well as people and will iterate to ensure we are creating the best possible experience. We’re testing in certain situations but are not changing the policy across the board at this time.”

Bottom line: while your ad may not be rejected when you use a lot of text in the image, it will not be fully pushed to the audience on Facebook.

What do you think of this change? Do you think it will have a significant impact on how well your ads perform?

Send me a message to let me know your thoughts, or drop an email for any questions on this latest change implemented by Facebook.