Category: Social Media
The 6 Most Important Benefits of Facebook Advertising for the Festive Retail Season
Unsurprisingly, the festive season is one of the most profitable times of the year for businesses of all types and sizes. If you are wondering how you can maximize your sales this year, the secret lies in leveraging social media marketing, and Facebook advertising in particular. Here are the six most important benefits of Facebook advertising for the festive retail season as well as why you will definitely want to take advantage of them.
It Increases Your Reach
People are always on the look-out for great deals on gifts throughout the festive season. So, by enhancing your reach through paid advertising on Facebook, you are certain to generate a much higher number of website visitors and, hopefully, conversions.
It Allows for Accurate Targeting
You can ensure that your marketing budget is well-spent with Facebook’s accurate targeting options. Target by gender, age, interests and more.
It Provides Endless Options for Different Types of Ads
From canvas ads to slideshow ads and everything in between, the Facebook advertising platform has gone out of its way to allow marketers to really get creative.
It Makes it Possible for You to Keep Up with Competition
Why should you consider running Facebook ads during the festive retail season? Because you can be 100% certain that your competition is! The only way to keep up is to follow suit – and do it better.
It Allows You to Tap into a More Open-Minded Audience
At any other time of the year, people will think twice before purchasing something – even if it is offered to them at a decent price. During the festive season, however, people are ready and often looking to make a purchase. Entice them with a worthwhile offer and you are highly likely to convert them with minimal effort or spend.
It Is Budget-Friendly
Facebook advertising allows you to choose your budget from the get-go, so you are always aware of what you are spending.
Looking for assistance in terms of social media marketing throughout the festive season and beyond? Here at The Digital Marketing People, we specialize in digital marketing, online reputation management and social media marketing strategy for companies in Canada and the USA. Get in touch with us today to learn more.
Planning a New Year’s Sale? 4 Tips for Using Facebook Ads for E-Commerce Marketing
You’re now preparing for the Christmas shopping period, and you probably also have plans for a New Year’s clearance sale to kick in as the festive season winds down. You can use Facebook ads to increase the success of your sale. Here are 4 tips to create effective e-commerce marketing campaigns on Facebook, in time for your New Year’s clearance.
Constantly Improve Your Brand Identity
Facebook is a very powerful tool for building an identity, and creating an identity is the foundation of your business. Aside from any other strategies you use in your Facebook marketing, you should be using the platform to develop and improve that identity. Incorporate your branding into all social media content, whether direct ads or other posts. In the build-up to the sale, associate your brand with events, people, causes, and products that are most likely to draw the right audience. By the time the sale starts, you will have more loyal followers and, thus, more potential sales.
Re-target to Close Sales
Facebook is a perfect place to retarget customers you have already gained but who have not yet completed purchases. You can offer special deals to users who visited your site but never subscribed, or who placed items in their shopping cart and never checked out. Target their Facebook feeds with special offers designed to bring them back.
Advertise Multiple Products at Once
Multiple-product ads can be extremely successful. There are indications that they are efficient and more attractive to customers. The more products they can see, the more reason they have to click.
Go Soft Sell
Instead of posting an ad that specifically tries to sell a product or products, create ads that lead towards a sale via a more indirect route. This may sound contradictory, but remember that Facebook users see advertising everywhere and mostly manage to tune it out. So, instead of just putting your product in front of them, draw attention to something that is connected obliquely to your brand – perhaps an event in which your products will feature in some way. This creates interest in your brand in a gentler, more ‘soft sell’ way, which is likely to not only be very refreshing for your audience, but also to make more of an impression on them.
The Digital Marketing People are specialists in social media marketing. Contact us to help you create a great, unique, high-conversion strategy.
6 Affordable Social Media Marketing Tactics that Work – Just in Time for Christmas
The festive season is almost here with all its opportunities for stronger customer engagement and increased sales. One great way to boost both your online following and your customer engagement is through social media. If you aren’t making full use of this platform, you really should be. Here are 6 tactics you can use across all the popular social media sites to help you give your business a push. These will work well for the Christmas peak season, but can be successfully applied all year round.
Use a Chatbot
Chatbots are fast becoming ubiquitous in social media marketing and customer support. Thousands of chatbots are active on Facebook Messenger, with more being added all the time, and users are increasingly willing to engage with them. The technology is more responsive than ever, meaning you can create sophisticated algorithms to drive chatbots that will talk to your customers as if you are personally dealing with each question. You never miss an inquiry, all customers are answered and happy, and your staff can focus on tasks that really need their direct attention.
Target Your Video Marketing More Precisely
Everyone is doing their best to make video marketing work. However, you need to remember that social media users are bombarded with video content all day long, everything from ads to cat videos. You can’t compete by throwing your carefully created visual media into the “general population” of the social media world. Forget about going viral. Use keywords, good quality, and clever timing to hit the right audience.
Use Facebook Custom Audience to Hone in on Your Market
Facebook’s Custom Audience feature is something you should absolutely be using by now. If you aren’t yet, then look into it right away! It is the best way to make your PPC spending worthwhile because it enables you to target your advertising specifically at those people most likely to convert their clicks into sales. Say, for instance, you put out an ad that receives a high number of clicks from women aged between 20 and 25. The response from this group is huge but, unfortunately, few of those clicks (each of which you’re paying for, by the way) have been converted into sales. You find instead that men aged between 30 and 35, although fewer of them click, render many more conversions. With Facebook Custom Audience, you can then eliminate the non-converting group and target the converting group alone, maximizing your spending and making more sales.
Generate Short-Lived Content
Many social marketers have scratched their heads wondering how to make content that lasts on platforms where each post only has a lifespan of a few minutes. The approach now is to go the other way. Nobody is going to scroll back through their feed or search to find a story you posted yesterday. So, why not rather create content that appears, makes a strong impression, and then expires. This will generate engagement and drive users to your website if they want more information. Fleeting, tantalizing content is the way to go.
Leverage Voice Search
The ascent of voice search means that you should start shifting your content mix on social media towards a higher proportion of audio and video, as opposed to text. How-to videos, podcasts, and the like, will all be valuable to you as more people adapt to hands-free and reading-free searches.
Make Smart Use of Conversion Tracking
In order to make targeted marketing work, you have to track your clicks and conversions carefully. Facebook Custom Audience, for example, can only work if you have done all your homework. Set specific social media marketing goals and then measure your results against them with as much accuracy as possible. You can then constantly tweak your tactics to hit the targets better.
The Digital Marketing People specializes in generating highly effective social media marketing strategies as well as devising high impact short-term tactics. Contact us for help to perfect your strategies.
What Is Instagram Checkout?
Earlier this year, Instagram introduced its Checkout functionality, which is an extremely useful tool for online retailers. If you haven’t already looked into it, then you will more than likely want to do so after reading this blog.
Checkout on Instagram enables consumers to complete purchases in the app, without having to be redirected to the seller’s website. This would promote Instagram from a social media platform to a centralized online marketplace where an unlimited number of brands can make sales quickly and easily – on the spot.
When a user taps to view a product that interests them, the “Checkout on Instagram” button comes up, and they can complete the transaction right there if they choose. Payment will also take place within Instagram, as well as after-sales services such as tracking of orders. First-time users will have to enter billing and delivery information, much as they would on any other shopping site. These details are then saved for later use, regardless of the number and variety of sellers they buy from.
Now, this may present both good and bad possibilities for you as an online business operator. On the one hand, it could mean a reduction in traffic going through to your website from Instagram, but on the other, it would make for quicker conversions – and thus possibly an increase in conversions over time. It cuts out intermediate steps, meaning you get a more immediate sale. According to Instagram’s stats, 60% of users discover new products on the platform, making it a very useful promotional method. It now goes one step further, because it not only promotes the product, it can close the sale too.
The service is currently in closed beta testing, rolled out to a select few brands earmarked by Instagram. Once it rolls out of beta in general use, it is not certain what the cost of the service will be to retailers. But, it seems likely to be worth the expense. We’ll be sure to keep you posted.
The Digital Marketing People can help you create high-conversion e-commerce and social media marketing designs and strategies. Contact us to discuss your online business needs.