March 2015

3 Steps for Optimizing Your Facebook Ad Scheduling

March 30, 2015/by Corey Padveen

With Facebook ad scheduling now easier than ever, these are the steps you need to follow to do it right.

Nobody likes wasting money. So when you’re running an ad campaign, the last thing you want to see is your ad spend draining while no one is actively engaging with your content.

With Facebook’s updated scheduling capabilities, that no longer has to be the case. There are three steps that any Facebook advertiser needs to follow in order to successfully leverage the capabilities and maximize the impact of your budget.

Step 1: Review Your Page Insights

On your Facebook Page insights, you’ll find that under the Posts tab there is a treasure trove of valuable information about your audience.

Select first the ‘When Your Fans Are Online’ tab, and then begin to review when your audience is most active. Keep in mind that all of these data are going to be registered in your computer’s timezone. Look to see what days have the highest volume of active audience members, and what hours of the day present a great opportunity to capture their attention.

Step 2: Set a Lifetime Budget

In order to utilize Facebook ad scheduling in its current form, you’ll need to determine a lifetime budget for your campaign as opposed to a daily budget.

Consider how much you would like to invest in the campaign and determine how long you would like the campaign to run.

Step 3: Choose When to Show Your Ads

Using the Facebook ad scheduling feature (shown below) it is easy to determine the exact times that you would like to show your ads to the desired audience.

Identifying (through the use of your Posts data in your insights) when your audience is most active, and when the largest segments of your audience are online, you can limit wasted ad spend that is not being shown to a maximum number of possible users at a given point in time.

This is a fairly simple process but it can do wonders for improving the performance of your ads and the optimization of your ad budget.

Give it a try and let us know how it works!

3 Things Many Marketers Forget in a Digital Marketing Strategy

March 23, 2015/by Corey Padveen

This article originally appeared on CoreyPadveen.com.

There are some things that even the most knowledgeable of marketers might be forgetting to include in their digital marketing strategy.

A digital marketing strategy is a pretty robust thing. With that in mind, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that most marketers and business owners often forget about a few important components that need to be included in a digital marketing strategy in order for it to be successful.

Like I said, there is a ton that needs to be considered in order to build a working strategy, and just because these three components are included, it does not mean that it’s a finished product. But they are important and they are going to help your brand grow online. That said, here are three elements that need to be a part of every digital marketing strategy in order for it to find success.

Social Media Advertising

Gone are the days when paid advertising was a luxury afforded to the largest and wealthiest of brands. Even in more recent years, digital advertising, which consisted primarily of Google AdWords and banner ads, was too grand a cost for most brands to bare. Now, with social media advertising becoming more commonplace (and about as simple a practice as any) all brands can and should be taking advantage of it.

A few months ago, I conducted a little internal case study/experiment in order to showcase the cost effectiveness of social media advertising when compared to ‘traditional’ digital advertising, Google AdWords. I decided to look at a relevant and pretty competitive keyword: ‘social media’. What I found was that on a CPC and CPM basis, social media advertising could be nearly ten times more cost effective when targeting the right demographics on social media (another value added).

So the question becomes, why are brands not jumping on the opportunity to build their digital presence by including a section devoted to social media advertising in their digital marketing strategies? The proof is in the numbers, and the more you work with social ads, the simpler and more successful they become to achieving business-specific goals.

Data-Backed Strategy

I’ve grown to accept that data is not for everyone; I guess my attraction to numbers makes me an anomaly. But if you don’t like data, at least do the longevity of your business a favor and find someone who can help you analyze data and incorporate it into your strategy. Hypothetical marketing plans are a thing of the past. We have a world of insights at our fingertips – literally!

Delving into your owned media (i.e. any digital media that you are in total control of, such as your website or branded social media channels) and industry media (using a listening or data aggregating technology) can produce some incredibly valuable information. This information can help you create things like content strategies, help you identify new demographics and opportunities and begin building ResponsiveBranding^TM campaigns.

Don’t let a distaste for numbers deprive you of a huge amount of potential. Let the data be the driving force behind your digital marketing strategy, and let it reinvent your strategy as it changes.

Influence Marketing

We often hear a lot about influence and influencers, but what exactly are we talking about when we say ‘influence marketing’? Leveraging the power of influencers can launch your brand into a new realm and expand your reach and your own influence in the marketplace. Why is that? It all comes down to trust.

According to the results of the 2014 Edelman Trust Barometer – an annual, global trust and credibility survey – 67% of people trust experts in a particular field, and 62% of people trust their peers (or, as the study puts it, ‘a person like yourself’). The beauty of influencers is that they can be – and often are – both of those things: industry experts that people consider their peers (in large part thanks to social media and its ability to connect people).

By identifying your industry’s influencers and reaching out to them, you can forge relationships that can turn into brand advocacy. This can be an invaluable asset when looking to build your business not only in the short term, but in the long run as well.

Conclusion

There is a lot that will go into your digital marketing strategy. These three assets will only be a small part of the overall product, but they can play an important role in the overall success of your business, and so few people are properly taking advantage of them. Next time you review your business strategies, consider including these three elements in your digital marketing plan.

4 Social Media Persona Criteria to Consider Targeting

March 16, 2015/by Corey Padveen

These are a few social media personas you might want to consider targeting in your next campaign.

When running a campaign on social media (or simply targeting your content), creating social media personas and leveraging their tastes and preferences for improved engagement is always a best practice.

Every brand will have its own strategy when it comes to crafting social media personas, but, just as there is the (more or less) universally coveted 18-34 demographic for advertisers, there are certain social media personas that virtually any brand can consider targeting for a number of reasons. Here are a few.

Existing Brand Advocates

Your brand advocates might be there to help you grow at every turn, but showing them a little bit of extra appreciation every once in a while does not go unnoticed.

Targeting some of your content to brand advocates that will appreciate it slightly more than the average follower/fan helps keep them around and goes one step further by strengthening their relationship with your brand.

Engaged/Active Online Spenders

This is an advertising category that is readily available on Facebook, and one of the more powerful capabilities, particularly for ecommerce or retail operations.

Centering your content around the benefits of your product or service, and targeting that messaging to users that are willing to spend online can lead to a very low cost-per-acquisition and high returns. Granted, just because they have spent in the past, it does not mean they will always be willing to spend. But when targeting by interests as well, you can increase the likelihood of conversion significantly. Speaking of which…

Interest/Preference

In what is probably the easiest form of targeting your messaging, preferences and tastes allow you to customize your message according to the themes around which your target audience is most engaged.

The ability to frame your messaging according to content or categories (e.g. the NFL or sports, in general) leads to an immediate ability to capture the attention of a particular group. The key to remember in a case like this is that as you cater your content to a given interest, your conversion increases, but your audience size decreases rather rapidly – but at least now you are focused on an audience that will be most receptive to the content. Creating multiple groups with a message around a theme is a best practice in this case.

Connections

When trying to grow your brand, your audience size or simply attract new prospects, consider creating a set of content that is a little more tame with regards to your product/service and more relatable from a personality standpoint.

Even the largest social media accounts in the world still hold only a fraction of the total social audience that exists on a given network. So for every campaign you run targeting your own fans and followers, there will be a virtually endless pool of prospects floating out there in the socialsphere that you have not targeted. The content that you create for these users should focus on the brand’s personality and appeal to their social side.

Conclusion

You’re going to craft your own social media persona as your audience, program and individual campaigns take shape. These are a few early criteria to consider when building hyper targeted content.

What other criteria have you included in your social client persona? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

6 Email Marketing Traps to Avoid [Infographic]

March 9, 2015/by Corey Padveen

It’s no secret: cold calling is a thing of the past.

For a long time, email marketing has been replacing the once-dominant form of reaching prospects, and, when used properly, email is still a hugely viable means of developing new (and maintaining existing) business.

Though it is more or less commonplace in the world of marketing, many of us still fall victims to some of the most detrimental traps when it comes to email. So if you hope to see success from your efforts, I can’t stress enough how important it is to avoid these six email marketing traps.

This very informative and creative infographic from Mailify goes into detail on how to avoid sinking your email campaigns. Number 6, ‘No Personalization’, is by far the easiest trap to avoid. It only takes a small effort to make an email personal. And the fact that personalized emails have, on average, a 20% higher open rate than those without personalization, is more than enough reason to make that effort.

So take a look, and keep these six email marketing traps in the back of your noggin when putting together your next email campaign!

How to Win Friends and Influence People (On Social Media)

March 2, 2015/by Corey Padveen

This article was originally shared to CoreyPadveen.com.

Almost 80 years after its first run, the tenets from Dale Carnegie hold true. (With a few notable differences.)

From the greatest businesspeople in the world (Warren Buffett still has his certificate from Carnegie’s course) to the not-so-impressive (Charles Manson reportedly used these techniques to influence his followers) people have found value in Carnegie’s lessons in How to Win Friends and Influence People. Today, on social media, a lot of this still applies. But some adaptation is needed for the modern era of communication.

How to Handle Your Fans and Followers

In order to properly handle members of your community, it is important that you not criticize, condemn or complain about them. You should also regularly show your appreciation for those members. That is especially true on social media.

Letting your fans and followers know that you appreciate their involvement in your community goes a very long way. One brand in particular that does this well is Cadbury. Here is one of the gestures they made to show their appreciation:

Making People ‘Like’ You

Now, the term ‘Like’ means something somewhat different on a social network like Facebook than what Carnegie had in mind, but the concept still holds up.

Of the six core traits that will lead to people liking you, there are a few that are particularly important on social media. First, developing a genuine interest in your fans and listening to what they have to say will improve the personal connection they have to your brand. What’s more, sending personalized messages using users’ names will be an important component of your communications strategy on social as well.

The idea of making people feel important when you talk to them is paramount when it comes to improving the customer experience. I don’t want to feel like ‘just another customer’ when I reach out to a brand. Even if that might be the case, I, the customer, should feel like the only person that matters when engaged with a brand online.

Winning People with the Way You Think (Your Brand’s Message)

“The only way to get the best of an argument is to avoid it.” Truer words have seldom been spoken.

As a brand, the moment your start to argue with a customer on social media, you’re wrong. It doesn’t matter how right you are, you’re wrong. It is important to know when you’ve been beaten, and when to walk away. Getting into a debate is not worth the harm it will almost certainly cause.

Often times, when a customer is upset, they simply want to be acknowledged and heard. Social media can be that platform. Simply letting a customer voice their displeasure and responding in a respectful way can be a major factor in turning them into a brand advocate, rather than a detractor.

Turning a complaint into a constructive conversation about how your products or services can be improved is beneficial for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that your business can improve its operations as a result.

Conclusion

If you haven’t read through Carnegie’s book, and you or your brand spend time talking to people (which you almost certainly do) it is worth a read. While there is some content that is dated, there is clearly a lot of information that can help you better communicate with your community on social media (and other forms of communication).

This article was originally shared to CoreyPadveen.com.

6 Email Marketing Traps to Avoid [Infographic]

It’s no secret: cold calling is a thing of the past.

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