Author: ad_new

If you’ve worked in an ad agency, you know how stressful it is to get your copy, visuals and social media updates perfect every single time; especially while juggling multiple clients.

It’s only human to occasionally mess up, and most often it’s likely that your mistakes will go unnoticed.

But then again, we’re dealing with the internet where posts are eternal and netizens are cruel!

We’ve all come across tweets and articles about Major Marketing Fails and honestly, it’s a guilty pleasure for us to see even big brands with their huge media teams and million-dollar budgets make cringe-worthy mistakes.

But, we really feel their pain!

So here’s our list of Major Marketing Fails!

Predictor Pregnancy Test:

Remember when we said that posts on the internet are eternal; well, Dutch brand Predictor felt the heat when an ad from way back in 2011 went viral last month. To be fair, the humor in this ad cannot go unnoticed and was just begging for the internet to troll it.

The Tweet back says it all!

Heinz QR Code Scandal:

While most often we can hold brands responsible for marketing fails, this is just one of those unforeseen events that landed Heinz in a real soup!

When a German customer scanned a QR code on one of the ketchup bottles, it led him to a pornographic site.

Granted, the bottle had expired and so had the particular linked website. It just so happened that QR code now led to a website domain that was re-purchased by a pornographic site.

Heinz was then forced to apologise to the particular customer who uploaded an image of the QR code and the pornographic site on Facebook. Which, of course, went viral. To the extent that, several news websites covered the story.

While most of these marketing fails are taken in light humor, sometimes brands mess up with terrible ads with the worst timing. Check out these next ads, which we think are truly distasteful!

Cinnabon – Carrie Fisher Tribute.

We know that brands are all desperately vying for the attention of millennials hoping for some profitable virality. An easy way to do this is to share pop-culture references. Well, here’s one way NOT to do it.

Ugh! 2016 was a terrible year for music and entertainment fans with a series of unexpected celebrity deaths. The death of beloved Star Wars actor Carrie Fisher was mourned by all and this is how Cinnabon chose to pay a tribute to her, which we think is in bad taste!

Here’s a tweet that pretty much sums up everyone’s feelings towards Cinnabon.

While Cinnabon deleted the tweet and released an apology, this one’s going to last in people’s memories for awhile.

4. IHOP’s Objectifying Pancakes:

In the quest to remain relevant and humorous in the eyes of millennials, sometimes brands go horribly wrong. A flat out no-no is the objectification of women. Advertisers have got to stop using the bodies of women for humor.

Thankfully, we can always rely on the Twitterati to call out on brands BS. After receiving severe backlash, IHOP issued an apology statement and now stick to posting food-related content Only!

Vera Bradley’s #ItsGoodToBeAGirl Campaign:

Bag and accessory brand Vera Bradley came out with the campaign last year intentioned at celebrating what’s special about being a woman. Women on the streets were interviewed and their responses were converted into social media posts and outdoor ads. While the campaign was aimed at celebrating femininity, the ads seemed to have reduced women to simple lattes and lipstick.

These posts can still be acceptable as aspects of femininity, but some ads went terribly wrong.

Ads such as this were seen all over NYC and well, Twitter fans did not take it lightly. It’s ads like this that put back the feminist movement back by so much!

Vera Bradley did take the heat for these ads and have since changed the tone of the campaign to make it more era-appropriate!

Lessons Learnt: Sometimes, marketing mistakes are inevitable and a simple apology can rectify the situation. But, more often than not, brands mess up with tonality and representation as a whole. This can cause a severe dent to the image of a brand and can alienate audiences. Brands should especially be careful when dealing with social issues. Gender equality is a major social issue and associating your brand with it has to be done right!

In this age, any publicity may not be good publicity!

Facebook has always been a great advertising online platform for small businesses. The two major reasons for this are:

One. Facebook lets you target your most ideal audience. You can narrow down your audience based on their geography, demographics and interests and your ads will be seen only by those who you think would be interested in your products or services.

Two. It’s Cheap! Compared to most advertising platforms, Facebook advertising is budget-friendly while delivering astounding results.

Combine these two features of Facebook ads and you have a winning advertising strategy, which is why Facebook has been so popular among small businesses.

But lately, it has come to light that smaller budget campaigns haven’t been running too well. It has also been noticed that the Cost-per-Clicks have increased.

Facebook said that average ad prices increased by 5% in the first quarter, as advertisers bought more mobile ads. While the average Cost per Click in the UAE still remains relatively low in comparison to other parts of the world, you may have noticed that you haven’t been getting as many leads as you used to.

There’s a simple reason for this.

Facebook ads have become extremely popular in the past few years and now too many small businesses are competing for limited ad space. It’s a simple imbalance of supply and demand.

To get a perspective on the level of competition, know this.

There are currently 4 million active Advertisers on Facebook.

In an intensely competitive environment such as this, it’s usually the big businesses that fare better owing to their bigger budgets and dedicated management teams that constantly assess the performance of their strategy and strive to improve their ads.

If you are a small business, it is very likely that you cannot spend too much of your time and resources managing and updating your Facebook ads performance.

So here’s what you can do to boost your Facebook advertising strategy and ensure that you get the best results for your campaign.

• Optimize Your Targeting:

For any marketer, Facebook’s targeting options are simply gold!

If you get this right, you’ve already made a long leap towards better gains.

Facebook knows a ton of information about its users which you can use to your advantage while targeting your ads. For instance, if you own a spa for women in Dubai, you can target your ads to women living within Dubai, belonging to the age group of 20-65. This would give you a broad audience. You could narrow your targeting to include women who’ve shown interest in spas, massages and beauty treatments for more relevant audience.

Besides, you have other features such as excluding audience sections that you don’t want your ads delivered to and you can create databases out of your existing customers.

The trick is to really get into the mind of your potential customers and gauge their interests.

Target only those who you think will be interested in your ad.

If your ad is viewed by someone to whom it is relevant, you have better chances of converting.

This way you can ensure that your budget isn’t wasted on an irrelevant audience and you make the most of your budget , even if it’s limited.

• Get your message right:

Remember that Facebook ads are different from Facebook posts.

Your copy needs to be straightforward and crisp.

More importantly, your visuals need to grab the attention of the viewer.

Get your visuals right and you ensure that the viewer doesn’t just scroll past your ad.

• Test your Ads:

Rather than creating just one ad and hoping it performs well, create a couple.

Play around with the text and visuals and see which ad performs better.

This way you can allot your budget to the highest-performing ad and get better results.

Keeping an eye out for ad performance and negative feedback will help you update the ads accordingly and ensure better returns for the money you spend.

• Make sure it’s Mobile-responsive:

You have to remember that most Facebook users are on their phones.

So your ad has to look great on a mobile phone screen.

Facebook gives you the option to review this while creating your ad.

Keep in mind that if your ad directs a viewer to another page, then that page has to be mobile responsive as well.

We very well know that you may have been getting all this right all along and you’ve still noticed that your ads aren’t performing well enough. So how can you surpass both Facebook’s ever-evolving algorithm and your many competitors?

Well, keep reviewing your ad performance several times a week. In the Ads Manager tab of your Business account, check the ‘Performance’ column above your ad sets. Customize it according to what you need to monitor.

If your ad sets aren’t performing well, keep a lookout for Relevance score, Positive and Negative Feedback, and Frequency. An ideal relevance score is between 8 and 10. It gives you a rating for how well your targeted audience is responding to your ads.

Also, keep a note of the Frequency. This figure stands for the number of times your ad is getting delivered to the same person. Depending on your campaign goals you may or may not want your ads to get delivered to one person too many times.

Make sure that your Positive Feedback is hovering between medium and high; and your Negative Feedback is never high. If it is, it means that your audience doesn’t want to see your ad. So, you’ve got to adjust your targeting and reach a more relevant audience.

While there is intense competition for the ad space on Facebook, if you get these points right, your ads will perform significantly better.

Despite the increase in prices of Facebook ads, it is still economical for small businesses as you have complete control over the budget. Besides, you just cannot miss out on a lucrative, leading advertising platform such as Facebook.

So make the most of Facebook’s brilliant ad platform and watch your business grow.

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.