Author: ad_new

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.

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.