Do you feel stuck with your Lead Generation Strategy? Everything has a season. It’s not always summer but if you take some measures, you can make it feel summerish. Here are 3 ways to revamp your lead generation marketing strategy and make it hotter.
Revamp your video marketing
Video-based content, such as webinars, live demos, streams, and result-driven informational videos on websites and social networks continue to perform well. The driving force behind this trend is consumers who prefer watching video-based content rather than reading text. Also, in a new marketing ecosystem where more people work remotely, they have more time and freedom during the day to watch videos on the internet.
Partner with social media influencers
Today, more brands are looking to influencers as a part of their lead generation marketing strategy. Fundamentally, influencers are individuals, brands, or digital entities who possess a higher level of authority in the niche a company is trying to reach. While they largely operate on social media, influencers come with different approaches of marketing to their audiences.
Create hard-hitting lead magnets
Share your detailed, real-world experience in the format of:
In-depth guides
Comprehensive how-tos
Detailed case studies
Resource libraries etc.
These methods do not guarantee leads, but they are worth trying.
A few weeks ago I was working with a client on their organic content to help compliment the work we’re doing on the ad side. When both organic and paid social media work well together, it creates a perfect storm for your audience. The client was in awe at the information we shared, so I wanted to toss it out for other brands to benefit from them as well. So let’s run through them:
Instagram’s algorithm makes it easier to go viral this way and prioritizes accounts with a small number of followers over accounts with a lot of followers on this.
2- Ask questions on your post captions
People will then answer and interact. The algorithm gives more value to how many comments you have per post than to how many likes you have. And your comments also count so it’s important for you to answer every comment even if it’s something simple. The questions could be simple too, I’m sure you saw accounts asking “Which of these pictures do you prefer?” “Which look suits me better?” “Which team are you rooting for tonight?” or “Are you a pizza with pineapple kind of person?”. These kinds of questions will encourage people to answer and debate, you can tell them what you think about their opinions too, and all this will generate engagement and make your account appear more often on the explore tab or when Instagram suggests accounts for people to follow.
3- Post stories talking
If you are comfortable on camera, try to upload informal stories: it gives a lot of value to your brand. Either the founder or employees could talk about themselves, their daily work, the brand, and new things they are working on or preparing at any level. It’s nice to meet the real people that are behind a brand, it makes it more personal and it makes your target audience become more loyal.
4- Include your clients in the decisions
If you want to launch a new product, why don’t you ask in stories what your target audience thinks? This is an amazing way to anticipate the reception a particular product will have on the market, if you should modify something or if your target audience would prefer something else entirely, or maybe a variation on your original idea, be it another color or whatever. Create a quiz, for example: “When do you normally take your cereal bar?” and you put options “For breakfast”, “When you go cycling”, “For a picnic”, “As a mid-afternoon snack”, and people can interact. Or “We are going to release these new sneakers, which color would you like them to be?” And offer different color options. Getting your audience to feel part of your brand’s decisions will generate greater loyalty on their side.
5. Keep in mind the kind of models you are using
We tend to think the better someone looks at our posts the better the post will perform. But this isn’t the case at all. The perfect models are the ones who look like your content audience, this includes models of their age and different body shapes so they can easily identify with your content.
I hope these hacks will make your account grow and help you connect and interact with your audience more. Please tell us what you think of them, share your experience and let us know if you want us to share more of them!
Instagram Shopping has been around for a while now. It was first introduced in 2017. Yet, we are still finding tons of businesses that are not using it.
Most users on IG are following business accounts and browse new brands and products daily. If your audience is between 18 – 34, then IG is definitely a NEEDED platform for your business. Plus, there’s a high percentage of users from 34 – 44 as well. As per Statista, this is the age distribution of Instagram users.
IG has roughly 1B monthly active users worldwide. The numbers say it all. Let’s not forget these numbers will only increase as we move forward. IG shopping creates a smooth and seamless buying process for consumers. It basically does the work and turns your followers into customers.
IG shopping has allowed businesses to showcase their product catalog and create posts tagging items in photos, arrange products into collections/categories, build ads using product tags, and help with product launches. Something important to note is that users can checkout on Instagram if your shop can support Facebook Pay which will allow you to pay directly on IG.
There is a wide range of features IG shopping offers and it all requires minimal effort from the advertisers. IG shopping is available in most regions and countries, but you can check that out here if your GEO is listed or not.
If you’re in the back of the pack and haven’t set up IG shopping, then it’s time to jump on the train NOW. Grow your business faster and display your products seamlessly on IG.
Lots of times clients don’t know what is the realistic KPI they need to follow when they are observing FB ads.
They are still comparing results to what was happening in their account 1 or 2 years ago.
And they want the same performance no matter what TODAY.
Read more:
But the issue here is:
1 – FB is more expensive than it was 6 months ago, 12 months, or 2 years ago
2 – Lots of conversions is not visible after iOS14 changes in FB analytics, so maybe 10-50% of sales are missing
3 – There are a lot more competitors nowadays who are fighting for the clicks
4 – Buyers today are not like they were 1 or 2 years ago. They are more aware of how the ads are working so it’s harder and harder to make them buy
5 – Product offers are in average made bad, so clients get very bad conversions on their website
Now, as many clients don’t know all this and how it affects the performance for which we (Media Buyers) are responsible, there is a lack of ‘communication’ between us.
And this communication is the foundation for the expectation on both sides.
When I am analyzing the new accounts or the accounts that are not working, I first calculate the average % conversion from clicks to purchases in their ad account for the last 30 days.
If I see more than 1000 clicks to their website, then I can already see a little of what is going on and my analysis can already tell me what can be the possible cause of the performance.
Is it the creativity, the offer, the audience, or something else?
I will give you an example here:
One of our clients wants the CPA at $25-30 for the product that costs $50 on their website.
Based on lots of campaign tests, we see that the average CPA we can get no matter what type of ad creatives and formats we test is $56 on average.
The average CPC is $1.56.
When I calculate the % of conversion compared to clicks, I see it is 2.8%.
How do I calculate this?
I sum the number of conversions by 100 and divide by the number of clicks sent to the offer.
So it means for 100 link clicks less than 3 people will buy their product.
So $158 divided by 3 people is $56, and that is what they see as the average CPA in their account.
Now to make their offer to work under their KPI, their average CPA needs to be 2x cheaper. 🙂
So how to achieve this?
As their creatives are very engaging (lots of likes and comments), we know the creatives are not the issue.
As their targeted country is the US, we know that CPC $15.6 on average is very standard and that it is hard to get any lower for this type of audience.
So creatives and audiences are out.
What is still in?
The offer and the data that is missing in FB analytics.
As we see in their website that around 20% of conversions are missing and FB is their main traffic source, we know that we need to get 30% better conversion on their landing page to help this client to be profitable.
So the first step is to explain to the customer that 20% of data on average is missing so he/she knows that the actual CPA is lower than what they see in the FB manager.
The second step is to suggest to them to work on a better offer and a better product page.
And that is crucial!
Usually, this is the breaker in our performance and then we can say how good we are!
And what should they do?
We suggest they create a bundle offer that can increase the AOV so that they can pay more for the cost of FB. (Mark will be very happy when they read this right?)
If their offer was one product for the $50 sale price, we suggest then making a specific landing page where they present buy 2 and get 1 free package for $99.
With this, they can maybe then afford to have $56 CPA in FB, and with 20% data missing that would be around $40-45.
Can this be profitable for them?
I guess still no, but if they increase the conversion on their website by 1-2%, this can be a huge spike.
Their average conversion will then drop to around $20-25.
And this will probably be very profitable for them, especially if they add on top of that some custom add-on, like a product upsell or cross-sale.
***
I hope you see the thinking behind this so you understand how important it is to know the right KPI you’re following in your FB manager.
At the end of the day, the metrics don’t lie.
And you need to know exactly how to calculate your metrics and measure them correctly.
It will help you to sell more at the right costs of Facebook ads, so you can achieve the profitability you deserve. 🙂
Heads up fellow Google Advertisers / Media Buyers!
The platform is updating its systems to prepare for the Smart Shopping to Performance Max transition.
Google announced that they will automatically transition existing smart shopping campaigns into Performance Max campaigns in July to September of this year. Standard campaigns will be transitioned automatically in August to September 2022.
Google Ads will be offering a tool for advertisers that wants to transition their current shopping campaigns to Performance Max ahead of the given months.
Google is launching a “one-click” self-service tool for advertisers that would like to transition their smart shopping campaigns or standard campaigns ahead of the mentioned months above.
The tool will be available for Smart Shopping campaigns starting in April, with support for standard campaigns starting in June this year.
Based on beta testing, advertisers who upgrade Smart Shopping campaigns to Performance Max see an average increase of 12% in conversion value at the same or better return on ad spend (ROAS), according to Google (results may vary).
Advertisers can use the tool to transition specific shopping campaigns, or all of them at once. Learnings and data from existing campaigns will be used in the new Performance Max campaign.
This is a significant change in how smart Shopping and standard shopping campaigns work. Advertisers that don’t want to transition those campaigns over to Performance Max should begin exploring other options, as these campaign types will be gone by the end of September 2022.
It may take a while to test out your own shopping campaigns that transitioned with the self-service tool once it’s available.
Once existing Smart Shopping and Standard shopping campaigns are transitioned to Performance Max, advertisers can no longer be able to create new shopping campaigns that we are used to. This transition process is scheduled to conclude by the end of September this year.
Google also announced last December 2021 that beginning on 15th of February 2022, all existing and future smart shopping campaigns will use a shared budget type. The change will not have any impact on performance and the campaigns will continue to run like a standard, non-shared campaign budget.
See Google Announcement regarding Shopping Campaigns Transition to Performance Max Campaign here See Google Announcement regarding Smart Shopping Shared budgethere
A lot has been said about how ads should tell stories, but there’s also a lot of storytelling happening in the actual process of making an ad.
When we think of customers, we don’t think of heroes in their own epic tales, but perceiving them as such can actually help you find a way into their consciousness and, hopefully, into their wallets.
Here, we’ll take you through the steps you need to create a customer avatar, and how you could possibly use it in developing your ads.
Build your customer
The concept of a hero’s journey has become as legendary as the myths that follow its structure, but in terms of advertising, it’s used to enhance our understanding of our customer and their path to purchase. And as with any hero’s journey, it starts with a hero.
Your hero is your consumer—or at least, a personification of the common attributes of your product target market. This entails a process of translating data into story. Using whatever information you have about your audience and painting a character based on it. It even helps if you give this persona a name!
Like any hero, your customer has goals and things that they value. Likewise, they also face challenges and obstacles in achieving their goals. Reflecting on what these things are will help you get into your customer’s headspace. Doing so will help you find the best way to appeal to them–through their wants and needs.
Build the conflict
As with any hero’s journey, there should be conflict. But instead of a three-headed dragon or an enchanting witch, the conflict that your customer will face are the objections they may have in purchasing your product. Why would your customer hesitate? What kind of competition would steer your customer away from you? What would hold your customer back from making that purchase?
It’s a lot of negative thinking and self-criticism on your part, but doing so will actually help you make a more solid argument to sell your wares.
Build the sell
All of this pre-work is done towards the goal of answering the question, “how do we sell the product?” After building our customer avatar, getting into their mindset, and preparing for the objections they might have, we take all of these things into consideration and build a sell–an angle or messaging that we feel would best appeal to our customer.
This could be either an emotional appeal or a functional one. Better if both. What kind of feelings do we want to feel through our product? Why would the product make the best sense for them?
Think of this as the climax of your customer’s hero’s journey: the will they-won’t they part of the tale.
And of course, we all hope for a happy ending for you and your customer.
Today I’m gonna share with you some of the main key points you need to bear in mind in order to create a good landing page:
Good offer
Your offer is the most important part and when working on it, remember to stack value. It’s also crucial to have a killer headline together with the offer. A headline is where everything begins — interest, attention, and understanding. It’s what compels a visitor to stay and learn more about what you’re offering, or not.
Urgency
Once you have decided which offer you’re gonna use, you must add urgency. Urgency is the reason why people buy now and is critical to converting cold traffic. You can do this by adding a stock counter or countdown timer below your CTA. When crafting the button’s copy, use words that drive and inspire your visitors to take a specific action. To create a sense of urgency, it is recommended to employ strong command verbs and words that provoke emotion and a reason for audiences to take advantage of the action.
Product
If you are working on the product page, it is crucial to demonstrate to your potential customers exactly how your product works. From a conversion perspective, this is to let the customer know exactly what they’re buying.
You also need to showcase the product’s benefits and the potential customers why your product is so good and why they need to buy it. Why do they need your product? What makes it great? Does it solve a problem? How will it help them?
Reviews
Video reviews, product testimonials, etc, are a huge conversion leverage point. Incentivize user reviews by offering a discount or freebie post-purchase. You can also use all of this UGC for your ads.
Trust Signals
A powerful tool implemented by effective landing pages is trust badges. Trust badges often refer to the logos of well-known brands you’ve worked within the past, certain endorsements and recognitions you’ve received, groups and coalitions you are a member of, etc. They serve as endorsements of your trustworthiness and skill.
Frequently Asked Questions
Your customer should have no questions left to ask once they go through your landing page/sales page. Someone will not buy if they are unsure about something so we want to give them 100% certainty in the product so include a FAQ section that answers all the little detailed questions customers may have.
Contact Us
Adding the phone number and the address will build a little more trust as they know they can call a number for support if needed and that the business has a physical location.
Another great assets are to add the Instagram feed to show more social proof of customers using your products and social media icons linked to the accounts so that the customers can easily share your page or product with their friends.
Keep your Landing Page Simple
Be sure to maintain a clean page with obvious, natural navigation. A good landing page provides all the necessary information needed to encourage visitors to convert, but nothing extra. Too much info can overwhelm visitors, so keep it simple and provide only the essential information that will guide visitors down the funnel.
A/B test to maximize conversion opportunities
Now that your landing page has all the essential elements, it’s time to A/B test the copy, visuals, design, and CTA. Review the performance metrics for each page to know what you can adjust to reach your optimal conversion rate. Don’t forget, though, to only test one landing page element at a time to see which made the difference.
Everything is marketing, and marketing is for every business. We are all a part of a marketing circle consciously or unconsciously. Marketing never stops, it keeps going up and down, creating a circle of opportunities – including both failures and successes. This routine keeps speeding up and slowing down, rotating for every kind of business.
Do you have a marketing plan for your brand? Where does it stand in the marketing circle?
Let’s break down the marketing circle in 3 main phases:
Phase 1: “New Moon”
This is the stage when you launch your brand/project/business and kick off with primary marketing activities, which vary from brand to brand, but mainly cover awareness campaigns.
We have implemented a dedicated awareness campaign for one of our clients, by launching a set of ads which highlighted their brand story, the benefits and the value of their products. Awareness campaigns also include google ads and SEO to ensure you are at the right place in the matrix of eCommerce.
Phase 2: “Half Moon”
This is when you have already established your brand, executed some marketing activities, that already bring results your way – engagement and conversion.
This is the boiling point when we test both prospecting and retargeting campaigns, mixed with email marketing strategies, and social media boosts and activities. Having them corporated all together is the key. Nowadays, all your channels are working in favor of one another.
Phase 3: “Full Moon”
When your marketing works to the full potential of your business, and you are on the peak reaping the fruits of your efforts.
Being at this stage, doesn’t mean you settle. You take a breath, do the analyses, check the reports and keep the retargeting activities rolling, which include advertising campaigns, newsletters, and a consistent social media presence. This is also the stage where you can involve influencer marketing and create even more hype about your brand.
After all these phases, it turns out that you have completed a marketing circle; you have strategically moved from A to Z. But what happens after?
This may sound strange to you, but the after is the start. The ending is the beginning. You are basically starting over again. You are in the phase of New Moon, again – this time growing your audience, broadening the horizon. You may even implement the same marketing strategies, just with a twist based on the new audience you want to attract. To generate more leads, include contests, quizzes and giveaways in your marketing circle. This is a great way to entertain and engage your audience.
For the 2nd circle of the 2nd phase, you can create lookalike campaigns that worked well before. And when you reach the 3rd phase, you will again reap the fruits of your efforts.
You may call this deja vu, we call this marketing circle. There are 2 things that will help you keep this circle going; the 1st one is called consistency, and the 2nd is people – your team, or other professionals, because the human factor is the primary source of any success.
And if you have reached here, here is a note for you: keep up the work and let the good times roll!
Today I’ve decided to discuss a topic that is a bit outside of the regular topics I usually talk about, but I thought that it could be interesting for anybody who’s considering hiring an agency to run their advertising.
Here at DimNiko, we have a qualifying form that our potential clients must fill out before hopping on a call with us, so we can understand their current performance and strategy and have a better picture of their marketing before jumping on a call with them.
However, there are certain questions that must be discussed with any potential client in that first call, here are some:
What are their main KPIs. This is obvious, right? Well, let me tell you, not every business owner is aware of their own KPIs. Some clients might not know their client’s lifetime, and many other important metrics that will help them make a decision on their target goals.
Who’s their target audience. If you have a business you should be well aware of your target persona, what do they like, how they behave, demographics, interests.. The better you know your target audience, the better will be your conversion rate, as you can adjust your advertising based on it.
What is your main business goal. The situation in which some companies come to us can differ very much from each other. Some clients are in a great position to start scaling and that’s what they need help with. Others are at a point where they need help to make the campaigns profitable, or they need help with the content.. It is important to be well aware of what your target is when you hire an agency.
What is the main obstacle when it comes to reaching that target. If you have a clear picture of what your goal or target is, you should also be able to understand what is stopping you from getting there. If you know this, it will be much easier to fix it and get closer to your goals.
If you have taken on the decision of hiring an agency to run your advertising, it is extremely important to be well aware of where your business is standing at the exact moment, what your current performance is, what are your goals, how do you want to get there and what do you need help with.
This will make the process so much smoother and faster, and with some professional help, you will be able to reach your goals sooner.
If you have any questions about any of the above or if you’re interested in working with us to grow your eCommerce brand, find out if we’re the right fit for you!
How essential smaller social media networks like TikTok are to remain highly competitive 2022 and how it can complement your Facebook ad performance.
One thing all media buyers can agree on is that especially with Facebook and Google, we’ve seen a steady and consistent rise in the costs associated with running ads on these big networks.
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook and Google are essential for acquiring new customers and staying relevant. These platforms have matured to a level that will take years for platforms such as TikTok and Pinterest to reach. But this is why we see a lot of opportunity with these platforms as well.
So in this piece, I’m going to give you 3 reasons and tips on how to decrease your overall CPM on your Facebook Ads and how you can use platforms such as TikTok to complement these changes. And why these 3 different topics can get you highly competitive for 2022.
Facebook Ads Timing & Relevance
Let’s start with some of the essential changes you need to make in order to increase your performance on Facebook.
Facebook Ads Manager provides you with metrics such as your Quality ranking and Ad Relevance score. When you provide your customers with quality and engaging content on your ads, Facebook will reward you with lower ad costs as it takes a lot less to create engagement on your ads. There are some cases where a conversation can be started on your ad, responding to negative comments, etc.
How do you do this?
The number one thing to do first, is to test the new ads you are rolling out and understand what type of content really drives engagement on your ads alone. Be it the creative or the copy and test with both until you begin to see strong results. Don’t be afraid to go completely outside of the box as this is basically what you will need to do on TikTok as well and we’ll get to that.
This is also where timing comes into play. The timing is not only just the time of day/week that you are pushing your ads. But the whole mindset and reason why your potential customers should be buying at the exact time they are seeing your ads. Using weight loss supplements as an example; it’s the start of the year, everyone is on holiday and new year’s resolutions are on most people’s minds.
Here you can create somewhat controversial ads about letting loose and indulging in the holiday spirit and packing on a few extra pounds to create a conversation in the comments by asking a question right before or after your CTA. This has the potential to drive some negative comments, funny reactions, or just a conversation, in general, depending obviously on how well you execute the creatives, and how well you place and target your audiences. This leads me to…
TikTok Audiences vs Facebook Audiences
Here’s where we get into the importance of using both platforms. It is important to understand that TikTok and Facebook are two completely different types of platforms and that people use them for different reasons. You can use this to your advantage by understanding how to use Tiktok. I’m personally not someone that typically uses TikTok but for these exact reasons, I started using it.
I would rather categorize TikTok more as an entertainment platform, people want to be entertained and if they aren’t, you will see little to zero engagement on both the social media site and advertising side. TikTok has a beautiful algorithm that can work really well if you know how to manipulate it.
To some it up as short as possible, your content gets shown to a small number of people within a certain circle once you post, if it does well it starts to expand your content to a wider circle of people incrementally to the point where, if it does well, can go super-viral at a rapid rate. You can technically show off your product to millions of people without it costing a cent.
The same applies to your ads with TikTok. The type of content and the quality and relevance of your ads have a direct impact on your performance, way more than Facebook ads do. This is why you need to understand the type of audiences you are showing your ads to, beyond just the segmented interest targeting.
The number one “motto” for TikTok ads is: “Don’t make ads, make Tik Toks”. It’s super important that the ads that you are pushing on TikTok are actual Tiktoks. It might sound like a daunting task to undertake, but the payoff can be priceless. The audience base on TikTok is there to look at TikTok and as soon as they smell an ad they will swipe and move on to the next one without thinking twice.
Using TikTok to compliment your Facebook ads and vise versa
You might be wondering what your Facebook Relevance score has to do with your TikTok ads.
Since TikTok is cheap to run, the sheer amount of traffic you get in from the platform can actually start cluttering your retargeting audiences which caused a bit of a problem initially. Since TikTok has a much younger audience base, a lot of them still use Instagram for their social media needs which is where all that traffic started diverting to.
We started seeing a decline in the frequency with our retargeting campaign but also a drop in our click-through rate, engagement, and conversion rate which is why we started investigating the correlation between the two platforms, as this campaign performed well for about a year.
As we were getting more and more traffic from TikTok, this is where we decided to start implementing creative changes in order to start getting better results. Our Instagram placements started delivering a lot more ads to the platform, and our demographic started balancing out towards a younger audience, mainly on Instagram.
We started running Instagram and Facebook placements in separate campaigns or separate ad sets within the same campaigns and adjusted budgets accordingly. Essentially running and pushing our TikToks on Instagram and running these ads through mainly stories and reels. Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube basically stole the idea from TikTok by introducing stories, reels, and shorts.
I believe platforms like TikTok have a ton of potential to run ads, even stand-alone. But the need to diversify your traffic is essential to stay ahead of the game in 2022. And if you are an older veteran of Facebook ads, you know what type of potential lies within these smaller social media platforms.
It is important to understand and study how your audience and traffic are behaving across all the platforms and your website. The method we implemented above might be as simple as we experienced with this specific brand, and there is still a lot of testing that needs to be done, but from what we can see we are moving in the right direction.
