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How “New Year, New Me” Can Help Service Businesses

18Dec

Are you looking to get a fresh start during the new year? “New Year, New Me” has been a popular New Year’s saying for years, and it might actually be a good angle for your New Year’s marketing.

I’m going to show you which service-based businesses can benefit most from the “New Year, New Me” mantra, and why it’s worth your time and resources. Let’s dive in!

Who Should Use It?
I’m not going to tell you that, “People in these five industries should definitely use this strategy!” There are too many variables to say that only certain types of businesses can use it. Instead, I’m going to ask you a few questions to help you figure out how effective this new angle will be for your business.

If your customer could make themselves better, how would they do it? Then ask yourself: Can your business provide them with that change?

It sounds broad, but let me show you a specific example. Let’s say you own an auto repair shop, and you decide that your ideal customer is a young adult who just started a family and wants to make sure their car is safe. For that individual, they might want to be more responsible in 2019.

How can you give them that? You encourage them to be proactive in the new year by taking their car in for that oil change they’ve been putting off or some other routine maintenance.

Take a minute to think on it. If you think you have a way that your customer can improve themselves in the new year, then you should absolutely be telling them about it! But what makes this strategy so effective?

Why Should I Use It?
People in general (but especially on social media) are primarily interested in the “new.” While it helps to be constantly reinventing and improving your business, it’s hard to have a fresh, new idea every day of the week. Sometimes, giving the impression that you’re “new and improved” can be just as good, and tying your promotions into the new year is a great way to do that!

If your business has a presence on Twitter or Instagram, you’re also going to benefit from popular hashtags like #NewYearNewMe. When advertising how your service can help people improve themselves in 2019, use the hashtag to get some extra reach! Just be sure to add in another hashtag or two that are more relevant to your industry, since #NewYearNewMe is going to be filled with a variety of people who may or may not be in your target audience.

The new year is also a time when people tend to be busy. They’re worn out from the holidays and typically starting new projects at work, so you stand to gain even more by pointing out ways that your services will save people time. For example, maybe your landscaping business can free up your customers’ evenings, or your fitness classes offer effective, quick workouts to busy professionals. Find where your business fits in the angle and tell your customers all about it!

Keep Things Fresh
Stagnation doesn’t sell even in the calmest of times, but it’s especially useless during the start of a new year. Use “New Year, New Me” to give your business a great start in 2019. Otherwise, you run the risk of missing out on this once-a-year marketing strategy!

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Giving Back as a National Business

By Christopher Tompkins

5Dec

Business

‘Tis the season for giving back! As a national business, you’ve got the advantages of a larger budget for the season, but you’ll need to work harder to make your contributions feel unique and personalized. That’s why giving back in meaningful ways is so important for your business!

I’m going to walk you through how you can give to your employees, clients, and charities. If you don’t want to be seen as cold and heartless, you need to join in the holiday spirit and show people that you care about them!

Giving Back to Clients
No matter what industry you’re in, it’s safe to say that your clients could have easily gone with one of your competitors. Show that you appreciate them choosing you!

A great way to do this is to post holiday coupon codes on social media. Not only are you giving people what they want most during the holidays—deals—but you’re rewarding your most loyal customers. The people who follow you on social media are the ones who regularly buy from your business. Reward them for that!

As an added bonus, people will buy more from you when you have a sale. This is what truly effective giving back looks like—a sincere effort to help the people around you that just so happens to benefit your business!

Giving Back to Employees
Your employees aren’t just employees. They’re real people with unique passions and interests. Prove that you understand and appreciate that about them! One great strategy is to make a competition of it. Set trackable metrics for employee success and let each employee choose a charity. Those with the best performance will have donations made in their name proportional to how well they did!

You get a few advantages from this idea. First, your employees are working harder because they want to help a cause that’s important to them. It will give them an extra push to increase productivity, which can be especially useful around the holidays when many industries get busy.

Beyond that, you’re creating the opportunity to show your brand in a positive light. Use social media! You can give the winners an employee spotlight to show off how well they did, what charity they chose, and how large a contribution you made. Your employees will feel even better about their accomplishments, and your followers get to see how well you treat your workers!

Giving to Charity
Large companies donate to charities all the time. The bad news is that the majority of them are doing it wrong. It’s easy to just write a check to a random non-profit and call it a day, but that isn’t best for your business or the charity. You’ll be better served by finding a way to donate that makes sense for your business.

For example, a national restaurant chain donating to the Make-A-Wish Foundation doesn’t make a lot of sense. Sure you’d probably get some credit for helping out people in need, but ultimately, it would be too confusing for people trying to understand your brand.

But what if you ran a promotion where you matched donations to Feeding America? You could use one-liners like, “We Feed You, Now Help Us Feed Them!” The move makes sense for your brand, you’d help raise money for charity, and encouraging people to donate would simultaneously tell them how generous and thoughtful your business is.

That’s a great plan in and of itself, but you can do better. Keeping the restaurant chain scenario, why not offer your employees paid time to work in their local soup kitchens and food pantries? Share pictures of them across social media and watch the positive buzz come rolling in. This way, you get to show how considerate you are, and the charities get publicity from a national brand along with some real chefs in the kitchen!

Get Giving
As you wrap up the year, you shouldn’t be asking yourself whether you should be generous or have a successful business. When you do it right, you don’t have to choose! Use my advice to make sure your national business is humanizing itself by giving back in December!

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The Essential Guide to Spying on Your Competitors

By Christopher Tompkins

26Nov

Business, Social Media

Competition is a great way to make yourself a better marketer. You might be satisfied with your own results, but looking at a competitor can inspire you to keep trying. And why not let your competition help you become even better?

Today I’m going to share my best tips for spying on your competitors and using their successes and failures to improve your marketing strategy!

Find Your Competition
You’ll have to locate your competitors before you can draw any comparisons. But how do you do it?

Go to your preferred search engine and put in any keywords that someone could use to find your business. The brands that come up in that search (especially the ones that are outranking you) are your competitors.

For example, if you’re marketing for a home aide service, you would look up your city and some keywords from your industry. if you’re selling a product, include words that describe that product to help you find your competition!

Start Spying
You’ve got a lot of options when it comes to checking on your competitors. Use Google Alerts to set up a regular notification when anything new is published by or about your competitor. Just to be safe, you may even want to put an alert on their CEO.

If you’re receiving a lot of notifications about them, they’re probably sending out regular press releases or email newsletters. I recommend signing up for their email marketing pieces – it’ll help you see what they’re sending and how often! This can be a great way to see what they’re telling their audience. Even better, you may find gaps in their content that you can fill!

And of course, there’s the simple method of just following their social media accounts. Take stock of what they’re posting and how their audience is responding, and you’ll be ready for the next part of your social media recon plan!

Run a Competitive Analysis
To see how you stack up to your competition, you’ll need to compare. That means looking at a few key metrics!

How many followers are they getting, and how long has it taken them to amass their following? For example, you might be intimidated by their 50,000 page likes, but if you only notice that number growing by one or two per week, then you know they aren’t doing much to expand their audience.

It’s also smart to remember that followers don’t always translate to customers. What’s their engagement like? See which of their posts are getting attention and which are being ignored. This will help you determine what should and shouldn’t go in your content mix!

Keep Tabs
This isn’t something you want to do once and ignore for the rest of the year. Compile all your information so you can check back in and update your numbers. This will let you track how effectively you’re using their own strategy against them!

Start by creating a spreadsheet. Put in the name of each competitor and links to anywhere they have an online presence. Record monthly intervals of things like their follower count. Engagement is harder to assign a hard number, but maybe set up a numerical system for yourself: a zero if they’ve had next to no engagement that month and a ten if their audience just can’t get enough in another month.

This whole process will save you time as you check your competitors’ social media channels and see how they’re stacking up to your own!

Stay Informed
One of the worst things you can do is shove your head in the sand and pretend that your competitors’ actions won’t affect you. Keep on the ball, see what your competitors are doing, and you’ll be one step closer to leaving your competition in the dust!

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The Essential Guide to Engaging With Your Audience

By Christopher Tompkins

21Nov

Social Media

You’ve got great ideas for new content and ads, but how do you know who to target? It’s safe to say that your new boat engine isn’t going to be a hit among lower-income twenty-somethings, which is why you’ll need to speak to the right audience.

But first, you’ll have to find them!

Identifying Your Audience
A tried and true method of finding the right audience is to craft a buyer persona. A buyer persona is an imaginary representation of who you’re selling to, and it makes sure your content is appealing to the right person. Here are some questions to help you create yours:

Where do they shop?
What social media platforms do they use?
What do they wear?
Where do they work?
Are they married?
Do they have kids? How many?
What’s their family situation?
Where do they live? (Think city, but also house, apartment, etc.)
What’s their financial situation?
What do they spend money on?
What’s their name? (This can help you remember that your audience has real people!)

Get as specific as you can! Once you’ve identified exactly who’s buying, you can figure out how to engage with them!

It’s important to remember that engagement best practices will vary from platform to platform, so it’s best to optimize your strategy for each social network.

Facebook
Fair warning: Facebook is one of the most difficult sites for engaging your audience. You want to have genuine, organic conversations, but Facebook’s algorithms tend to prioritize paid content. However, there are some workarounds!

Creating a Facebook group for your business is a great way to foster natural engagement. It will provide a space for your audience to interact directly with your brand, and it isn’t subject to the same algorithms that are at play in the news feed.

When people like your posts, invite them to like your page! They’ve shown that they’re interested in what you have to say, so encourage them to take that final step!

To draw in your audience, you’ll need to create Facebook ads. When writing, keep a clear idea of your buyer persona and what they expect from your brand!

Twitter
When looking for new people to engage with, search by hashtags that your buyer persona would use. It’s all about meeting your audience where they are, not trying to change them!

Another great tactic is to look at who’s following your competitors. If they like what a similar business is selling, they’ll probably like you, too!

Once you’ve found your target audience, what do you do? Like their posts, reply to them, just show them that you’re sincerely interested in what they have to say! Retweeting and quote tweeting are also some great platform-specific tools you should use!

Instagram
The strategies for finding people on Instagram are almost identical to Twitter’s plan: search hashtags and find who’s following your competitors. However, Instagram has one key advantage: location. If you have a brick and mortar store, go after people in your area!

You’ll want to like and comment on posts as always, but don’t stop there. Ask for permission to share a potential customer’s post! Decide whether it would fit best as a post or a story, then show that user you value them by sharing their visual!

LinkedIn
Join groups to find people! These are especially great because you’ll have a common interest to start a conversation. Additionally, you can search for people based on their job title and location. If someone has a job title that usually sends you referrals, then you should connect with them ASAP!

For B2B brands, consider what businesses you want to work with and search for their employees. If you were able to connect with someone, why not go ahead and send invitations to the people they work with?

Of course, there are two very different paths on LinkedIn. A company account can be a great boost for SEO, but it’s irrelevant when you’re trying to engage your audience. If you’re looking to form connections, decide who in your company will be the human face that’s attracting attention on LinkedIn.

Some Guiding Rules
There are certain principles that will serve you well on any platform. These include:

Don’t make a sale on someone else’s post.
Make comments meaningful! Don’t just reply with a thumbs up.
Respond to positive and negative interactions, whether that be via comments or messages!

And there you have it! You have everything you need to find and engage with your audience in a way that’s effective and works toward your marketing goals!

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The Essential Guide to Visuals

By Christopher Tompkins

19Nov

Graphic Design

The best piece of content in the world will never get clicked on without a good visual. Of course, this begs the question: What makes for a good social media visual?

Well, there are a lot of things that factor into image quality: white space, kerning, and several others. But if you’re not an experienced graphic designer, just describing these issues isn’t going to tell you very much.

I’m going to show you real examples that my team made of good graphic design practices vs shoddy graphic design practices. Take a look!

1. White Space

White space is the empty part of a visual that gives it room to breathe. An image that’s crammed full of saturated colors and complicated patterns is going to exhaust anyone looking at it. On the flip side of that, too much white space makes your visual boring!

In this first example, the bad image has way too much white space. It’s boring, empty, and you’re only getting a glimpse of the one object in the image.

But white space is used much more effectively in the second image! It isn’t just a straight shot of the laptop, which would be dull to look at, but it balances the activity on the keyboard with the emptiness of the background and the rest of the laptop.

2. Text Layout

In our first visual, there’s a nice picture presented in an interesting way, but none of that matters once you notice that the text is cutoff. It makes the poster look amateurish, which is never a word you want associated with your brand!

In the second image, the text is in its proper place and you can fully appreciate the image and layout that the graphic designer chose. This visual is much more likely to earn some clicks!

3. Kerning

Kerning is the spacing between letters/characters in your visual, and it plays a huge role in how your work is received.

Look at the first design. There’s so much space between the letters that the text is right against the border and the edge of the image is cutoff. As a result, the whole thing looks like a crowded mess.

The second image tightens up the kerning, leaving plenty of room for both the visual and the text. Instead of cramped, this visual feels well-crafted and perfectly spaced!

4. Overcrowding

Sometimes, visuals just have too much going on!

The first visual’s funky background makes the entire thing feel too crowded. Your eye isn’t sure where to go, and your social media following would quickly tell you that your visual gave them headaches!

The revised visual is much more pleasant. There’s plenty of empty space, and your eye can much more easily focus on the central image.

5. Legibility

As a graphic designer, you have to carefully pair the color of your font with the image!

The text in the first image is clear—until we lose it in the trees and the woman’s hair. Because the graphic designer didn’t consider how a dark green font would look against leaves, you lose the tail end of the message.

The green text looked great, so our graphic designer fixed this by changing up the spacing. You get a clear, legible visual without sacrificing text that fits the image’s background!

6. Justification

In design, justification is how text/graphic elements are structured. For example, if text is “right justified,” it will all start from the right side of the visual.

This is where we enter the uncanny valley—something looks off, but the reason may not be obvious at first. In our first image, the text is all slightly mis-aligned, with the “No” slightly off from the preceding line of text.

Our second image changes everything to be left justified, and the entire visual is better for it. It looks crisp, orderly, and doesn’t make you scratch your head and wonder, “What’s wrong here?”

Invest In Your Visuals
There are a lot of elements that go into great graphic design, but it’s important that you keep them in mind! You wouldn’t skimp on your written content, and visuals are at least as important!

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The Essential Social Media Manager Tools

By Christopher Tompkins

7Nov

Social Media

You’ve set up your social media pages and you’re ready to get posting, but you’re quickly finding that keeping up with all these different platforms is next to impossible. It’s a common feeling among social media managers, and there is a solution!

In a word: tools. There are plenty of great resources out there to make your job easier and let you get ahead on your social media strategy!

I’m going to share the social media management tools that my team uses every day to make sure our clients’ pages are running smoothly and getting them closer to their goals!

Scheduling
Nobody has the time to go through and publish each individual post at just the right time every day. So what’s the solution? Scheduling tools! These little guys can let you write up a bunch of content, then schedule it to post at specific times on your preferred platforms:

Hootsuite: This is one of the most intuitive scheduling tools out there!
HubSpot: If you want a scheduling tool with all the bells and whistles (including monitoring your content’s performance metrics), this is the program for you.
Buffer: While not quite as well-known as the other items on this list, it’s a great program if you find that the other options aren’t suiting your needs.

Instagram is notoriously finicky for its scheduling, which is why you should consider using a tool that’s optimized for Instagram. I’d suggest:

Photos
Need to find stock images for your visuals? I’ve got a few resources that have always done right by us:

Pixabay: Want a huge, international stock of public domain photos, graphics, and footage? Look no further!
Unsplash: More than 70,000 photographers post their content here, all copyright-free under the Unsplash license!
Pexels: Another great source for public domain photographs!

Design
You’ve got your images, but how do you alter them to create your own unique, branded visuals? Try these tools:

Canva: This is a great tool for beginners, as it’s popular among professional and rookie graphic designers alike!
Photoshop: If you’re comfortable using more complex programs, this tool should be right up your alley!
Animoto: This is one of the top platforms for creating video slideshows and other short, moving content!
Ripl: A comparable product to Animoto, Ripl makes it easy to create animated visuals!
PicMonkey: Want to go back to basics? PicMonkey is a no-fuss image-editing program that’s also great for graphic design!

Writing
Writing up heaps of copy and content is no walk in the park! Creating content takes time, which is why I recommend not just creating original content for your business but also curating content from other sources. Instead of searching the internet for hours, these tools gather the content into one spot for you!

Feedly: Feedly lets you search by topics and pulls up great, usable content to help springboard your ideas!
Grammarly: To proofread any technical issues you may have missed!
Google Alerts: Set up alerts on industry-relevant keywords to make sure your writing is current and following trends in your field!
Hootsuite Streams: Track keywords and hashtags to see what others in your industry are posting. If you know what your competitors are talking about, you can figure out how to fill in the gaps they’re missing!
Hashtagify: Not sure what hashtags will get you attention? Use Hashtagify to track the impact of a hashtag and see what’s best for your posts!

When linking to another site, it’s important not to include the full URL. Many link shorteners allow you to see how many times the link has been clicked, which can help you track how your audience responds to content. Use any of the following tools to get shortened, convenient URLs for your posts:

Don’t Feel Overwhelmed
Being a social media manager is stressful, especially if you’re not using the right tools. Skip that anxiety and use these resources to make sure you’re not only doing your work efficiently, but as easily as possible. No social media manager can be successful without a little extra help, and that includes you!

Do you feel like you could use a little extra help? You can have a free consultation with our team of marketing experts!

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7 Social Media Marketing Things You Should Know but Don’t

By Christopher Tompkins

5Nov

Social Media

Social media marketing is constantly in flux, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change anytime soon. The best practices of yesterday are painfully outdated now. As a marketer, you’ve got two options: fall behind your competition, or stay sharp!

I’m going to share the seven biggest things across social media that every marketer should know—but most don’t. Let’s see how up-to-date your knowledge is!

1. You Need Tools
Social media management tools aren’t just flashy programs for people with money to burn. They’re an integral part of social media marketing, and if you’re not using them, odds are you’re falling behind.

Unless you like the idea of manually posting multiple updates across social media every day, writing error-ridden content, and having low-quality visuals, you’re going to need some help!

2. You Need to Curate Content
Thinking of fresh, original content every day isn’t going to work if you’re not seeing what other people in your industry are posting. Content curation lets you share relevant, valuable news with your followers and can give you ideas for how to produce your own unique content!

3. You Need to Understand Metrics
Nobody likes to learn a lot of jargon, but it’s there for a reason. In marketing, it’s not enough to just “go with your gut.” You need to have hard, quantifiable data to support your social media marketing strategy, and having a working understanding of metrics and when to track them is the only way to get that information.

4. You Need to Work on Visuals
Graphic design often gets pushed aside by marketers who chant the Bill Gates quote, “Content is king.” And sure, your written content is important, but nothing can replace the impact of quality visuals. Think about it: Would you read a blog with Pulitzer-worthy writing that looked like its visuals were made by a toddler? Of course not, because you never would have clicked on their content to begin with!

5. You Need to Find and Engage With Your Audience
The appeal of social media marketing is that you can target specific consumers who are most likely to buy from you, so why wouldn’t you make the most of that? By creating buyer personas and optimizing your engagement for your audience’s preferred social media platform, you can make your campaign much more effective.

6. You Need to Watch Your Competitors
It isn’t enough to just look at your own successes and shortcomings. Your competitors are, by definition, appealing to a similar market, so see what you can learn from them! By tracking their movements on social media, you’ll double your opportunities to improve your own strategy!

7. You Need a Checklist
If you’re running a multi-platform social media campaign, you simply can’t keep it all straight in your head. There are too many moving parts for anyone to remember every little thing! By keeping a checklist and running through it on a regular basis, you guarantee that nothing will slip through the cracks!

Don’t Stop Learning
These are essential parts of social media marketing, but it’s not enough to stop once you’ve mastered these! Take this information as a way to get you started. From there, keep reading! Social media will never stagnate, and neither can your understanding!

Everyone could use some help staying competitive on social media. If you’re not sure what to do, just schedule your free consultation with The Go! Agency!

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The Essential Guide to Facebook Live Broadcasts

By Christopher Tompkins

31Oct

Facebook, Social Media

No matter what industry you’re in, there are probably a hundred other businesses who do more or less the same thing that you do. You can tout your special features and advantages, but ultimately, convincing someone to choose your business is going to largely come down to how you connect with them.

The good news is that you can use Facebook Live broadcasts to create completely unique content that sets your business apart. Even if there are a dozen other breweries selling ales that are identical to yours, they can’t replicate your personality! Your style, your tone, your energy; those are the qualities that will draw in customers.

Your Facebook Live broadcast only works if you can create something worth watching, though. Awkwardly shuffling in front of a camera and muttering for fifteen minutes just won’t cut it. That’s why I’m giving you the complete guide to Facebook Live broadcasts!

Have a Strategy, but Don’t Over-Plan
You don’t want to go into your broadcast with no idea what to talk about. At the same time, your audience will be able to tell if you just memorized a script, so don’t be afraid to speak organically.

A good method is to go into your broadcast with a few bullet points that you want to hit. This way you can have a real conversation with your viewers without meandering onto the topic of politics in Uzbekistan during your broadcast about your new IPA.

Set Up Before You Go Live
Nobody wants to watch you orient your camera for the first three minutes. Before you even think about starting the broadcast, make sure your camera is set up so that it’s straight and you’re in the center of the shot.

Think beyond just you and your camera, though. How’s the lighting? Nobody wants to buy products from a washed out vampire, so make sure you’re brightly lit without draining the color from your face.

And what is your area like? Think of what background would best suit your brand. Are you a grungy, casual brand that can get away with a more casual backdrop, or should you be recording this in a meticulous office? Regardless, clutter and dust are probably things to clear away before you go live. If your viewer is focused on the messy space around you, they’re going to tune out your message!

Once your equipment and setup are ready to go, give yourself a test run! There will be hiccups the first time you try anything, so why make your viewers watch a subpar version of your broadcast? You can set your broadcast to be viewable by “only me,” run through your ideas, then look back at the recording. This is a great way to find and fix any awkward sections!

Be Charismatic
I said that your audience will respond to your style, tone, and energy, and that’s true, but only if you have a personality.

Meaning, don’t shift anxiously throughout the broadcast. And please, for the love of God, don’t keep promising that you’re “just about to start once a few more people join!” Nobody wants to wait for you to get to the point, and you’ll most likely end up losing viewers who got sick of watching you stare at the screen.

If you do need to wait for something, at least make it interesting. A good strategy to keep people engaged with what you’re saying is to give them a teaser for your next topic. “Okay guys, in 30 seconds I’m going to give you the micro brewing secret that nobody else will tell you.” This is also a good tactic if you notice your viewer rate is dropping off before you finish one of your points.

In that same vein, engage with your audience! Say hi to people in the beginning, and answer relevant questions as they come up. Facebook Live is a unique opportunity to speak one-on-one with your customers, so don’t waste it!

Get Filming
You can sit around and plan forever, but your best move is just to get started. Use this guide to troubleshoot any Facebook Live roadblocks you come across. Now get out there and show your audience what sets your brand apart from your competitors!

Do you want to talk specifics with planning your Facebook Live broadcasts? Set up a free consultation with The Go! Agency!

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The Essential Guide to Facebook Ad Split Testing

By Christopher Tompkins

29Oct

Advertising, Facebook, Social Media

As you plan your Facebook marketing strategy, how do you decide between one image style or another? Or find out what sort of ad copy your leads prefer? You could guess blindly, but you’ll be better off with split testing.

Split testing (or A/B testing) is the practice of sending out different ads to different sections of your audience. So Group A gets ad one and Group B gets ad two. From there, you can see which ad performed better, which informs the rest of your advertising strategy going forward.

Why is split testing worth it? How do you make an effective split test? I’ll go over the answers to those questions and more in this guide to creating successful Facebook ad A/B tests!

Why Bother?

For many people new to the idea, split testing seems like a waste of time and resources. Who wants to write double the ad copy and generate twice as many images? Well, as it turns out, you do.

Split testing has become an advertising best practice across the industry for a lot of reasons, but in short, it makes sure that your ad campaign is on the right track.

For starters, it’s an essential part of overall better marketing. If it turns out you’ve been appealing to people with the wrong angle, then you need to change that direction ASAP. Once you’ve made these corrections, you’ll probably see your web traffic, engagement and conversion rates all increasing.

This then translates to increased ROI. Basically, $100 of subpar ads may only generate half the attention that $100 of tested and optimized ads gets you. It’s a bit of extra effort now for increased effectiveness and revenue later.

So you know why you should be split testing your Facebook ads, but how do you get started?

Have a Goal and Expectation

Before you start writing up any ad copy, you need to determine what you want to test. Do you want to try a new headline style, or maybe you want to see what kinds of images perform best with your audience? Whatever it is, set one thing to alter. That way you’ll know exactly what changed your audience’s reaction between the ads.

This is where marketing and science start to blend. Form a hypothesis! Which ad do you think will perform better? Why? During this step, you’ll also want to establish what a successful split test will look like for you. If you’re advertising for your online store, maybe a 7% increase in site visits is a good goal for you.

Create the Ads

Now, draft your two ads with the one major difference. And really, it needs to be a MAJOR difference!

For example, let’s say you’re marketing for a gym and you decided to test the images used for your ads. You’re not going to have meaningful results if your first ad has a picture of a smiling, fit woman stretching and your second ad features a smiling, fit woman lifting weights. They’re just too similar to tell you anything important.

Instead, you might have your first ad feature the same woman sitting down, but your second ad could feature shots of your equipment or pictures of healthy foods and protein powders. This way, when one ad performs better than the other, you’ll know it isn’t just a coincidence!

Send Them Out and Analyze the Data

Now, publish your two Facebook ads and see what happens. Set which metrics you want to track based on your goals for this test, and may the better ad win!

Let the ads run for a set amount of time, however long your ads usually take to see optimal engagement, then step back and look at your results. If one ad outperformed the other, use this information as you plan your ads in the future!

If there weren’t significant results, don’t be discouraged! Make sure you made substantial changes between the ads or (if worst comes to worst) test a new part of your ads! There’s always something to improve on, and these tests are important to optimizing your processes.

Test, Test, Test!

The only way to improve is to identify problem areas, so get to work! You’ve got nothing to lose by testing, and a whole lot of revenue to gain!

Would you like to discuss your unique Facebook ad strategy? Schedule your free consultation with the marketing experts at The Go! Agency!

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Amazon Holiday Marketing Strategies to Avoid

By Christopher Tompkins

24Oct

Business

The time of seasonal sales is fast approaching! For many marketers, you’ll be promoting your products on Amazon this year, and you want to get the word out. And you should! American online shoppers reported that 76% would use Amazon for most of their holiday shopping.

It’s fair to market your Amazon products, but sometimes the moves you don’t make are as important as the ones you do. The internet is chock full of bad marketing advice to boost your holiday sales via Amazon, and you need to know what to avoid.

Read on for the worst Amazon holiday marketing advice you’ll hear and why you don’t want to follow it.

Buying Amazon Reviews

The lie:
Paying for reviews is a harmless way to make sure your products are ranking higher on Amazon searches! It’s completely untraceable, and your store will get a convenient boost right before the holidays!

The truth:
Some marketing strategies are just bad news all around, and buying Amazon reviews is one of them. Ignoring the ethical issues of paying nameless internet faces to write positive reviews in exchange for money or free products, there are a lot of practical reasons to skip this can of worms.

When Amazon finds out that you’ve been purchasing reviews (and they’re Amazon, so they’ll find out), your store account will be in serious jeopardy. If you’re lucky, every single review will be deleted from your page. Yes, even the real ones. You’ll have paid for all that work and have nothing to show for it.

If you’re not lucky, your seller’s account could be closed, and suddenly you’re barred from the largest e-commerce site in the world.

Save yourself the hassle and wasted resources. You may be tempted to boost your holiday sales with some timely positive reviews, but don’t fall for that trap. Earning real reviews will better serve your business in the long run.

Sending Direct Traffic to Your Amazon Products

The lie:
Sending ad traffic straight to your Amazon store can only benefit you. Consumers who click on your ad are shown immediately how to buy from you, and you’ll generate tons of sales this way!

The truth:
Sending traffic to your Amazon page is ridiculously unlikely to be a lucrative venture. Why? Well, let’s say you put an ad on Facebook for your target demographic, and the ad takes users straight to one of your products on Amazon’s website.

What percentage of people who click on your ad are going to complete a purchase? One optimistic study puts that number at 26 percent. That’s a great number, but you’re still paying for the clicks of the other 74 percent who looked at your product and decided not to buy.

More concerning is what these users do to your Amazon ranking when they don’t make purchases. Every time someone clicks on your Amazon ad and leaves without buying, your Amazon ranking goes down. After enough clicks that don’t end in conversions, you may find your product sinking to the third, fourth, then fifth page of results, where users are unlikely to ever see it.

Ads can be a great way to make sales, but you shouldn’t put your Amazon ranking on the line. Link back to your own website or another e-commerce platform that isn’t tracking clicks and applying them to your rank. Of all the great ways to build your name on Amazon for the holidays, this isn’t one of them.

Dodge the Pitfalls

Like with many other topics on the internet, holiday marketing on Amazon is full of bad information. Don’t risk your livelihood by following poorly-thought-out advice. Now that you know what strategies won’t work, you can redouble your efforts in more reliable areas!

You know what not to do, but are you sure what the next best steps are for your business? Schedule your free consultation with The Go! Agency to make sure!

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Tag : business strategy