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!

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.