Author: ad_new

As an entrepreneur, business owner, or social media manager, you’ve probably dabbled with Facebook Ads yourself.

It’s one of the most easy-to-use platforms for online advertising, and has features for both basic and advanced advertising, so that you can really scale your campaigns and get the most bang for your buck.

Plus, it’s one of the most cost-effective solutions, especially for small businesses that don’t have a lot to invest into their marketing budget.

I’ve met a lot of startups and small businesses that have been doing their Facebook Ads themselves, and have been getting some response.. But what I’ve noticed, very commonly, is that most of them have set up their ads without any real strategy.

They have an offer or a product they want to sell, and they create an ad to get people to enquire or buy.. And that’s it.

Sure, people do enquire and buy through these ads…
But the amount of money, and potential revenue, that’s being missed out by them is crazy – Just because they haven’t thought about using their Facebook Ads strategically!

The most basic way to think about your ads, so that you can really optimise your returns and improve your profit margins is to make sure your Facebook Ads are doing three things:

1. Acquiring new customers
2. Retaining existing customers
3. Upselling to customers

What most people are doing right now is focusing on acquisition, which is actually the most costly thing to do. It costs more to acquire than to retain.

And by not using ads to retain and upsell, they are missing out on the chance to maximize their profit and returns from that initial acquisition cost.

Let’s look at this further: A slimming center spent $5 to acquire a new customer for their slimming massage ($5 was basically their cost of acquisition, or cost per purchase).

They also do a package of slimming massages, where you buy 10 massages upfront and get a discount.

By creating an ad to upsell the package of 10 massages to the customer they spent $5 acquiring, they have the ability to maximize their returns on their initial investment, by selling them more at a lower cost of acquisition, since they are remarketing to them for higher value sales.

In the same way, they also retain customers by using Facebook Ads – ensuring that someone who has come to their slimming center once is urged to come back repeatedly, since they already know and trust their services and are a willing paying customer. If they haven’t made a booking for 2 months, there’s an ad that prompts them to schedule their next massage.. Which helps them keep their existing customers active, so that they can maximize the profits they make from them returning.

By using 3 sets of ads to cover these 3 areas of acquiring, retaining and upselling, you can make Facebook Ads really work as a complete selling system that supports your business’s profit growth.

Download our free guide, ‘Facebook Ad Design Checklist’ to ensure whether your Facebook ads are optimized to generate leads.

Click here to download.

If you have any questions on the topic, or want something answered, send an email through to learn@abovedigital.com and we’ll address it on our Facebook Live sessions, or directly via an email response.

Cash flow is something that affects every entrepreneur, and business owner.

You might be the best at your craft, but not knowing how to manage your income can severely limit business growth.

Arvin Daeizadeh, the co-organizer of the Dubai Cashflow Club, an avid follower of Robert Kiyosaki (author of Rich Dad, Poor Dad), and a cash flow investor who has been financially free for several years, shares his insights on how to manage money the best way possible.

In this video, we’ll be talking about the mindset shift that’ll allow you to look at cash flow from another perspective, and helping it leverage your business and attain financial freedom.

As always, thank you for your support!

If you have any questions, feel free to comment them down below and I’d be more than happy to answer them.

Don’t forget to tune in to our Facebook Lives, and join the discussion on my Facebook Page here – https://www.facebook.com/ramani.namita/ 🙂

One of the assets every business must focus on is having an active and healthy email list.

It’s important to understand exactly what an email list is, and how you can use it to speak to your customers and eventually be able to sell to them.

In today’s video, we’ll be sharing:

– Why having an email list is important

– How an email list can contribute to an increase in revenue and,

– Various ways to build your database quickly through cost-effective marketing solutions

I’ve answered all these questions on the video below, so make sure you watch until the end 🙂

Once again, thank you so much for your support!

If you have any questions, let me know down below and I’d be happy to answer them.

Make sure to also tune in to our Facebook Lives, and join the discussion on my Facebook Page here – https://www.facebook.com/ramani.namita/

As an entrepreneur or a small business owner, you most likely have multiple hats to wear. I know I definitely do!

I sometimes find myself having too many different aspects of the business to focus on, and realize that I’m focusing on the wrong things.

See, an important question that changed my mindset was: “Am I working IN my business, or am I working ON my business”.

I’ve dived into this topic in the video below, so go ahead and watch it by clicking the play button.

As always, thank you so much for all your support.

You can tune in to our Facebook Lives as they happen, and join the discussion by following my Facebook Page here – https://www.facebook.com/ramani.namita/

It’s 2017.
The world has just witnessed some very polarizing elections and there’s a very wide and tense divide on every social and political cause.

The digital world has especially been witness to this divide, with tensions running very high on every online discussion.

Amidst all this, two major global beverage brands risked it all by aligning themselves with highly controversial social causes.

Pepsi & Heineken.

It’s pretty well-known that brand social activism can make your social media engagement and brand value shoot through the roof, but there’s a right way to do it and a very wrong way. As demonstrated by Heineken & Pepsi.

In April, Pepsi decided to launch their latest campaign anthem ‘Live For The Moment’ intended to celebrate life’s such moments. The ad stars Kendall Jenner and an array of trendy millennials who leave behind their daily life and join what seems to be a protest (representative of the Black Lives Matter Movement). While the tension between the protestors and the police is evident, Kendall manages to break it by handing a Pepsi to the police, that seemingly bridges the divide between the police and the protestors.

The ad received a ton of backlash on every social media channel forcing them to take down the ad and issue an apology. Here’s what went terribly wrong.

For starters, picking a cause so freshly controversial was bound to ruffle a few feathers. But when a cause is linked to racial divide, killing of innocents and an ongoing protest; throwing in a product, much less, a soda as the solution to the problem is trivializing the entire issue!
The Pepsi ad is also class act of Influence Marketing gone wrong.

Kendall Jenner is hardly a celebrity crusader for justice, is she?

Check out the ad for yourself.

http://www.adweek.com/brand-marketing/pepsis-tone-deaf-kendall-jenner-ad-co-opting-the-resistance-is-getting-clobbered-in-social/

Heineken wonderfully released their cause-aligned campaign just a few weeks later, titled ‘Worlds Apart’. The ad is a social experiment that pairs strangers with polar opposite views and values, such as a feminist and an anti-feminist, a climate change believer and sceptic and a transgender with a rigid gender believer. The ad puts the opposites in a warehouse with the task of assembling a bar and the participants get talking. The climax shows the pairs having successfully assembled the bar with their Heineken in hand, watching a video of their partner completely rejecting their core values.

The pair is then given the choice to either share the beer with their partner or walk away. Not surprisingly, no one walks away but chooses to hear one another out.
The ad is a refreshing take on differing opinions; having an opinion completely different from someone should be met with discussion and understanding rather than hate, even better if it’s over a beer.

Watch the ad here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wYXw4K0A3g&oref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D8wYXw4K0A3g&has_verified=1

What’s interesting to see is that, both the brands took a similar approach; adopting a cause and integrating their product with it, in a not-so-subtle manner.
So how did one of them get it so wrong and one right?

Pepsi chose to go with a single cause, a controversial cause such as the Black Lives Matter Movement, and offered a rather trivial solution to the problem. Heineken on the other hand, didn’t directly take up a cause. Rather they focused on a perspective, a pertinent problem related to all causes, but none in specific. It just puts forth the idea that we call can be more accepting of each other despite different beliefs.

Every cause has it’s haters and believers and by picking none, Heineken won!

Pepsi chose a brand ambassador; Kendall Jenner who’s hardly a social or a political icon. It’s pretty obvious that Kendall was selected to get more clicks, further mocking the ads purpose.
Heineken on the other hand, used real people/ models for the job, adding to the realistic element of the ad.

The final nail in Pepsi’s coffin was the positioning of the product as the solution to a social problem which is by far, the most laughable element in the ad. Heineken got it right by not offering the product as the solution rather a the promoter of the solution. In short, beer just doing it’s job of making conversations happen, which seamlessly fits it worth the message of the ad.

This has been a great learning example for all marketers and advertisers.

Brand social activism is a very risky game. And here’s why.

Millennials can smell a pitch from a mile away. They know when they are being sold to. And, placing your product in the midst of an important social cause is the completely wrong way to do it.

While it’s great for your brand to support a cause, you have to make sure you aren’t doing it in a superficial manner as this can do some serious harm to your brand.

Almost every business, from the biggest of brands to smaller companies are investing in online advertising, for the reason that it is currently the most cost-effective platform to advertise on.

Sure enough, you’ve heard of the wonders that digital advertising can do for your business, but are your online campaigns not giving you any concrete results?

It is a very common practise for businesses to just throw in ‘digital advertising’ into their marketing mix and not really optimize their campaigns to get the best of results.

And that’s how most businesses are just wasting their advertising budgets!

While big brands can afford this as they also use other channels for advertising; it’s really painful to see smaller businesses waste their limited budgets on poorly-designed online campaigns.

So if you aren’t really reaping rewards from your online campaigns, it’s time you make sure that you aren’t just blowing your budget.

We’ve come up with a 4-step process for you to go through, so you can optimize your online campaigns for the maximum ROI.

1. Figure Out The Best Online Ad Platforms For YOUR Business.

Now, you may have read tonnes of articles discussing why Google is better than Facebook or why you absolutely have to try LinkedIn and Instagram ads!

In reality, each platform has its own advantages and disadvantages and you should ideally use a mix of these platforms to achieve your marketing goals.

But bare in mind that your clients and potential customers may not be on the these online platforms. So you need to figure out, which platforms your ideal customers are on and optimize your campaigns for those platforms.

For example, if your business is the kind that most people are researching for on Google, then you need to have a great Google Adwords campaign running!

On the other hand, if your ideal audience is inclined to spend more time browsing through Facebook and are used to purchasing on Facebook, then you need to have a great Facebook marketing strategy in place.

Then again, if your business is B2C, Facebook generally becomes the best platform to get your brand’s name out there.

Likewise, if you are a B2B business, then LinkedIn is a great advertising platform for your business.

2. Understand Your Target Audience

Knowing crucial characteristics (such as demographics, behaviors and interests) of your ideal audience is key to creating an effective campaign.

It isn’t enough to just get a large number of people to your website and hope they’d convert to customers.

It’s about getting the RIGHT customers there.

Always remember, quality trumps quantity.

The more targeted your campaigns are, the cheaper it’ll be to acquire your customers.

The best part is that Facebook, Google etc. have very advanced targeting options, so you can get your ads targeted based on location, gender, age, interests, nationalities, job profiles etc.

If you target your audience to match your ideal customers, you will attract the people most likely to buy from you. If you get a good balance of both volume and quality of audience, you’ll have a winning campaign.

3. Track and Review Your Results.

Here’s one the main reasons why most brand’s online campaigns fail.

With traditional advertising methods, you create campaigns that run for a long period and results are usually measured on a monthly or quarterly basis.

But with digital advertising, you will have to review your results every other week, to make sure that your ads are actually working. If they aren’t giving you desired results or if they are getting a good response, you have to tweak your campaign.

And this is a constant process.

You also have to be well-versed with your platforms tracking metrics. Don’t judge your campaign’s performance with just impressions and clicks. Rather focus on actual conversions and leads – these are the metrics that are going to bring revenue to your company.

Keeping a track of your campaigns results on a weekly basis will give you great insights into what’s working and what’s not, so you can modify your campaigns accordingly to get the best results.

4. Optimize not just your ads, but your website too.

If you’ve gotten all the previous points right, but you still aren’t getting good results, a good option would be to make sure that your website or your landing page is user-friendly and informative. A lot of businesses focus on creating great ads, but don’t really think about their landing pages.

Your landing page is equivalent to a salesperson, and a good salesperson can convince a hesitant customer to buy immediately whereas a bad one can drive away even an enthusiastic customer.

This is exactly what your landing page does.

A well designed landing page, with adequate information will push your lead to convert.

So make sure your landing page and website is optimized for conversions.

With online advertising, if you target the right people through the right platforms, you should be getting a good number of leads and conversions. If you aren’t seeing results, you’re definitely doing something wrong, and merely increasing your budget isn’t really going to help. So make sure you’ve covered all the points mentioned, and you should be converting a lot more customers!