Author: ad_new

New Year, New Beginnings. However, there is one thing that remains intact – the role of digital marketing in transcending your business to new heights.

If you are aiming that your brand continues to grow then it’s time you adopted an analytical approach and stayed in-line with the current trends and advancements in technology.

Customer preferences change widely with time, so it is important to take this into consideration while planning a perfect digital marketing strategy. If you are lacking sufficient knowledge and time, then hiring a reliable and professional digital media company is a great option.

1. Create Connections

Don’t just sell products/services through digital marketing, create a connection with your audience. The success of blogging, social media, and marketing hubs are the evidence of this.
For this, you ought to understand the needs, concerns, and challenges of your customers to offer them just what they want. Personalized, knowledge-based content will take you long way. So, engage your customers by delivering compelling and convenient content/visuals.

2. Increase Engagement

Nowadays, people are indulging themselves more and more into the social hub and they should feel a connection with your brand, product, people, etc. So, the need to make your customers feel connected with the people behind the brand couldn’t be more important. This year, look for ways to convert them into brand evangelists.

3. Follow the 80/20 rule

As per a well-known principle, nearly 80% of potential customers won’t engage with your marketing efforts and 20% will spend some time to look at them. Out of those about 5% will follow your call to action and will convert. So, while planning for 2017 digital marketing campaign understand the strategies and customers that come under that returnable 20% ratio to build it around them.

4. Emphasize on Visuals

If you look at the social platforms who are rising immensely are all visual mediums like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. So, no matter how good your content is, it needs to be visually compelling that can engage customers with it. It’s true when one says “A picture speaks a thousand words”.

Visuals can be infographics or a compelling image that captures the time and attention of your potential target market.

5. Analyze and Optimize

The world of digital marketing is evolving at an exponential rate, if you don’t innovate & improve in a bid to keep up with these, then don’t be surprised to find yourself at the bottom of the food chain.

Keep analyzing the result of what you are doing and constantly seek improvement to engage more customers. Because what worked last year, won’t work this year, even changes from month to month.

With the start of the new year, be ready to move with the flow of digital marketing.

If you have been spending thousands of dirhams on Search Engine Optimization for your website then this article is surely a must read.

Google is changing the way it’ll index websites i.e. the way your website gets ranked in the most popular search engine. The company has started rolling out their so-called “mobile-first” index.

By now, you probably know that Google crawls your site to add pages to its index. That is, it uses a bot to surf around your site like a real visitor and follows links on your pages.

In the past, Google crawled your site as a desktop user. Now, however, Google will crawl your site as a mobile user. That’s a distinction with a really big difference.

What if you don’t have a mobile site?

If you don’t have a mobile friendly Website, you might be asking yourself: “What’s going to happen to my site?”

For starters, your website might present a completely different display to mobile users versus desktop users. In some cases, links that appear on the desktop version of your site might not appear on the mobile version. That’s bad because the Googlebot can’t follow links that aren’t there. As a result, your site might take a hit in the SERPs.

Google has already started rolling out the mobile-first crawler.

Free advice, though — you should definitely switch over to a responsive template or in other words ensure your website is mobile friendly. In this day and age, anyone who’s serious about making a statement online needs a website that adapts to a mobile platform.

Request for a Free Website Review and get your Website Mobile Friendly in less than 7 days. We will not only make your site mobile friendly but get Google to index your site for mobile-first index.

Don’t get left behind in 2017, make sure your website is found by people searching for your services through Google.

Make your website Mobile Responsive now and save your Google rankings.

Request your website review

*This article was published by Entrepreneur Middle east. Read the full article here

The fact that your visitors are turning back from your website within seconds of landing is heartbreaking – more importantly, it’s a big loss for businesses aiming at more conversions through their website.

So what is it that triggers users to leave your website? What prompts them to click the back button?

It honestly depends on various elements of the website – right from typography and colors to images and logos – and what is being communicated to the user. If your website is too complicated or too unique, the average user is likely to bounce away.

Here are some useful tips that can help you enhance your web design to reduce bounce rates.

Embrace the white space

Remove all complicated color schemes and switch to white space. White spaces allow users to comprehend your website in a better way. Too much coloring can make it difficult for the user to understand the site, and the confusion will lead to the user going away from your site.

Get rid of pop ups

They used to be very popular but pop ups can be a big distraction. It’s true that pop ups have been helping many businesses collect leads, but most people now close pop ups immediately, without even reading them. Instead of annoying users with pop up requests, fit them into the website and do away with distractions.

Structure the navigation menu

A confusing navigation menu is a big reason behind high bounce rates. If you haven’t yet paid attention to your navigation menu – it’s time for some self-assessment.  Combine pages and cut down on the number of menu options – this way you’ll be able to please site visitors and allow them to find what they are looking for easily.

Offer quality content

Your website content is an imperative issue to address. Long-winded paragraphs, unessential copy, and pointless text boxes tend to crowd pages and overload visitors with information. Focus on writing striking content and pay attention on its formatting too. It should be readable and easy to understand.

Invest in responsiveness

Responsive web design is the need of the hour. Responsive design makes things easier and allows for a flawless transition from device to device.

Your website is your ultimate lead generation tool and by no chance should it fail to hold a user’s attention.

Want to know if your website is optimized to reduce bounce rates? Book a website strategy session with our experts by calling 04 321 2824.

Blame it on the larger selection options, better pricing, or convenience – a lot of people nowadays prefer buying stuff online instead of walking down to a real store.

Going by a recent survey, the number of online shoppers is estimated to grow from 1.079 billion to 1.623 billion by 2018.

So does that mean all e-commerce sites are enjoying great business?

Well, not exactly. In spite of the growing number of online shoppers, people are still cautious when paying for goods & services online. Customers still get nervous about giving their personal and credit card information to online retailers.

If yours is an ecommerce business – you will know that a major part of attracting and delighting your customers contributes to offering them a steady, dependable, safe, and smooth payment option.

So what can you do to increase your checkout conversions?

Multiple Login Options

Requiring your customers to create an account before placing their order is certainly convenient for your site, but this approach doesn’t always delight the customer. You might lose people along the way if you fail to give them the option to check out as a guest. You can always ask them to create an account once they’ve made the purchase. Also allow them to log in using any of their social media profiles, like Facebook or Twitter. This reduces registration friction as it makes the login process a lot faster.

Integrated Payment Processor

There’s no harm in using payment processors like PayPal, Stripe, Google Wallet, and Amazon Payments – but integrating a payment process directly into your website would be a better approach. In certain processors, users are redirected off your website – this disrupts their experience, and they may abandon the purchase owing to confusion.

SSL Certificate

This point is related to the above – for having an integrated payment processor, you would need an SSL certificate to protect customers’ personal and credit card information. It is the standard security technology that assures all data passed between a web server and a browser remain private.

Credit Card Logos and Security Seals

Adding credit card logos and security seals can be a great way of making online shoppers feel at ease. This assures the customers that your site is secure and can be trusted with their information.

Easy Return & Refund Policy

Buyers don’t get to physically look at or feel the product when purchasing it online, which tends to make some people anxious. You can help them build trust in your website by offering an easy return and refund policy.

Ensuring a safe shopping experience online is what helps ecommerce sites boost revenue and build in customer credibility – and your checkout process plays a critical role here.

Not sure why you’re losing customers on the checkout journey? Why not book a free website strategy session with our e-commerce experts? Call 04 321 2824 to schedule a session.

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.