Tag: Quintin

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. 

Read More: Where to Get Ideas for Your Ad Creatives

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. 

Running Facebook ads can be confusing. Especially with all the new implementations and regulations in tracking customer behavior.

Most inexperienced media buyers rely on their skills. A little bit of luck trying to find new and existing audiences that give consistent results. If it doesn’t work, they think they are doing it wrong, which isn’t the fact in a lot of cases.

From the first touchpoint, many variables come to entice customers to buy. It all impacts their behavior. But I want to focus on the ad itself. It’s the first and last thing a prospecting customer sees before they land on the page.

Read More: What To Do When Running Ads on a New Ad Account

Create prominent and simple CTA

It’s essential to be clear and direct with the intention of your ad. If you want to sell something, “BUY NOW” is perfect. If you’re going to generate a Lead, “SIGN UP” works like a charm.

Direct response marketing means having your prospects take explicit action. Make it as simple as possible. Ensure that your potential customers don’t waste their time thinking.

Use your description!

I’ve seen ads that don’t take advantage of the description. I’ve been guilty of this in the past. The description allows you to clear up any confusion that customers may have. It should be short, simple, and sweet. If your specific product has free shipping, make it clear here.

The description gives you a significant advantage over your competitors. Small steps can add a lot of value to your ad.

Listen to your customers.

As mentioned above, customers may have objections even before they land on your page. It’s something to focus on a lot when creating new ads.
So how do you address these objections?

Include it into your ad copy, creative, and, as mentioned above, in your description. Irrelevant comments hurt the audiences in the middle funnel.

Once we started addressing this, the performance improved. We started getting better quality engagement with our ads.

Creative Formatting for Placements

I’ve seen tons of ads that are not optimized for the placements. Not only the dimensions but the length of videos and ad copies. Especially the ones I see on story placements.

I know it is a lot of work having to design a creative for each placement, but it is worth it.

What about Instagram, Stories, and Audience Network? It’s essential to keep in mind each placement and adjust it to the order. Add what you’re missing out on your creative or in your ad copy.

Your ads should have an LTV!

The whole point of setting up a good sales funnel is to have a customer journey. In an ideal world, all your ads are top-of-funnel that go straight to conversion. It isn’t impossible, but you need good sales to funnel to fuel your ad account in most cases.

Here’s why you need to look at your funnels as an LTV cycle. Long-term planning for your creative strategy is so important. Customers need some convincing to convert at the end. That’s why we put so much effort into creating the perfect funnels, landing pages, email flows, and ads. It all should work together in conjunction. For example, giving a discount on the first touchpoint might give you good initial sales. But it takes away the power from the rest of the customer journey.

Design ads with the end goal in mind as well. We want them to convert at the beginning. It’s essential to give little by little with each touchpoint as they move along the funnel. It can come in many forms without the need to cut profits.

Consider customer journey in your ads. It’s essential to understand the customer journey for compelling creatives.

The Facebook advertising environment is competitive. It’s essential to have basic principles down to the tee. Less is sometimes more. Improving how you plan your creative strategy can make a difference.

It might seem like a lot of work to do on your own, as you gain more insight into what works, it becomes easier. You can focus more on scaling your account.

But this only works if you have the right agency partnered with you! 🤝

And that’s a wrap!

There is always room for improvement when it comes to optimizing your ad account, it’s a law that’s written in the algorithm of the Facebook ads manager. 

With the recent changes of iOS14 and all the struggles that came with it, it’s easy to just blame everything on iOS14 and wait for a miracle to happen to increase your revenue and performance. 

Since we launched the supplement brand about 6 months before writing this piece, we have been on a steady path of growth and customer acquisition within this period, ideally, this shouldn’t stop. 

Read More: Why Scaling Back On Your Ad Spend Can Actually Help You Scale

Throughout this time we managed to get a good understanding of the customer behavior and trends weekly and we were able to build a solid strategy with the marketing dynamics.

Typically with the customers, we see that we see a huge drop in sales and conversion rate every second week of the month relative to the payday cycle. This is usually because people don’t have money to spare, at least with our customer base. 

We understand that our demographic likes to spend money as soon as they get it which is why we typically see a spike at around the 15th of every month and the last week when payday hits. The first week of the month was based on some educated guessing, they settled all their bills and have a little extra left to ‘treat’ themselves. 

Typically we lose a lot of our margin in the second week of the month since we don’t usually scale down the account and the ads keep on spending, which eats away our margins. 

To combat this, we implemented a few changes to our strategy and added some new tactics in our marketing and advertising strategy to get those sales up and keep all the numbers green. 

Here’s what we did.

1. New Creatives

I can’t stress enough how important creatives are. I have written a few posts about how you can test creatives, this was back when Facebook was still performing relatively normal, but it still applies.

I think there are a lot of times one neglects the creatives, I am sometimes guilty of this as well, but the results speak for themselves. As soon as we refresh our creatives and angles, we see a big improvement in both conversion rate and overall ad performance. 

We dived deep into the comments of previous ads, the reviews, and the typical questions customers have surrounding the product. Based on the information we gathered, we did more research on the types of questions and found new pressure points. 

We used this to create new angles for the ad copies and implemented them with the actual creatives. We were able to do this all with free content found on Canva, which means you don’t have an excuse not to do it as well

2. Landing Page Updates

We used this “slow period” to focus on updating the landing page, by adding fresh content, updating the reviews on the product images, and just giving the website a little overhaul. 

We already built the page to be optimal for conversions but as I mentioned above, there is also room for improvement even if it’s minor, we started seeing an increase in our conversion rate.

3. Diversify Your Product Offers & Ads

We decided as well to start implementing dedicated campaigns to our lower down the line products since we focus and scale our flagship offers and products. 

We did just as much work with our lower down the line products regarding research, creatives, and ad angles to start focusing on these products just as much as the flagship products.

Since we had to reduce ad spend during the second week of the month for our main campaigns, we were able to diversify the budget and run multiple campaigns at the same time with different offers and stabilize sales. 

The overall AOV was lower but we were able to maintain a steady stream of sales. 

4. Push An Exciting Offer 

This might sound very generic, but hear me out. 

During the slower week of the month, we implement a new offer to the customers and added it to our email marketing campaigns on all the social media channels and ads as well. 

With the previous offers, we typically implemented a new bundle on offer, ran a buy one get one free offer, or added a free product with orders above a certain value, free shipping, etc. 

We decided to try something a little different; since customers don’t really have money to spend we decided to implement a discount offer with the pair of cheapest products, but with an overall lower average order value. 

We priced it just under the free shipping point, which means customers can either add something to their cart (increasing the AOV) or will have to pay to ship themselves, reducing our costs. 

With this, we managed to reduce our ad spend overall for the month and actually increase our revenue since the margin on the lower-priced product is higher. 

A lot more customers started buying compared to previous months. We ran the offer for a little bit longer than we typically do, but to keep it exclusive, you have to remove it, which we did.

5. Be Prepared To Scale!

After implementing these changes and updates to the account, ad account strategy, website, and creatives, we weren’t too focused on the account during the second week of the month and created a lot of new creatives. 

This left us ready to scale the account in the fourth week, and we did! We used the second and third weeks to test which angles and creatives performed the best, which prepared us for the big week.

We already know which of the new stuff works, when buying behavior is lower, when it’s higher they should be able to perform even better in theory. As I am writing this piece we are currently in this fourth week and so far this strategy has paid off well. 

Focusing on the smaller things has already given us a big step up in the strategy of the brand and we will continue to test and tweak until we have the perfect recipe. 

Sometimes you can do more with less

But this only works if you have the right agency partnered with you!

If you are spending over $500 a day and you want to scale your brand

Book a call below: https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

A couple of months ago we launched an Ecom store in South Africa selling supplements. 

Our target audience wanted to buy, but lacked the confidence to follow through with their purchase. 

This has drastically impacted our overall conversion rate over the past few months

It made it impossible to gain stability and predict what will happen from one week to the next. 

Our conversion rate would jump from anywhere from 0.2% to 3% and back to under 1% without us touching the ads or the website. 

Our campaigns had to run on autopilot in order to test this theory. We noticed that our CTR is really high overall compared to accounts we’ve seen. 

Typically you would see well converting campaigns getting 1.5% CTR that would run stable. 

With the South African market almost seems backwards, our CTR on our ads are averaging more than 3%, so how are our ads not converting?

To add a little pain during Q1, the retail market suffers a massive sales slump since families are stocking up on school supplies, paying the annual school fees and shifting their priority towards the essentials. 

Through the past few months we found out through customer enquiries, emails and calling them that it just came down to about three main factors affecting our overall performance. It comes to the conversion rate; trust, knowledge and timing. 

Read More: This is What We’ve Learned from Launching a Brand New E-Commerce Brand and Store in Late 2020!

Trust

In an up and coming industry building trust with your customers is the hardest thing to achieve. 

Most of the feedback we received from past customers was:

• Some customers were scammed
• Packages took over a month to arrive
• Customer service was appalling since the industry hasn’t taken online shopping seriously yet 

So how did we start building trust with our customers?  

We made sure to have daily communication with our customers, via WhatsApp & Email. We followed up on their experience and improved on our service each day.  

The customers that converted had a good experience and will always come back making the LTV a lot more valuable. 

Knowledge 

This is one of the hardest challenges we have been facing recently. 

Since it’s customers’ first time buying online, they have no idea how to use it. 

I personally had to go on a one hour call walking a customer through the online purchasing process. In the end, it was worth it, but this example sums up how serious it actually was. 

This was an unexpected problem, since internationally, online shopping is a second nature. It’s the most convenient way to shop. 

Our current solution is to build a very detailed “how-to” page walking the customers through each and every step. 

Even how to add your banking details since we see the biggest drop off at checkout. 

Timing 

The timing of the month is our saving grace at the moment. There are two pay cycles throughout each month, mid month and end of the month. 

Most of the country still has a set pay day at the end of the month and this is the period where we see a 3%+ conversion rate. 

We scale our ads up during this period in order to catch as many customers as possible. 

During the slow periods of the months where the conversion rate is too unpredictable we shift our focus on the customer journey and improve that since we know the ads do work. 

This has created a big thinking shift for me since everything we do that affects the ad performance is done outside of Media Buying. 

How does a quiz fit into all of this? 

Quiz Campaign

The reason why I mentioned the quiz is that this was a very good method we were testing in order to generate leads. 

We ended up getting conversions through the lead campaign which was a bit strange. 

We decided to launch a quiz conversion campaign and actually started seeing very good results. 

We were still generating cheap leads with better quality traffic and the campaign was basically paying for itself. 

As the quiz campaign actually started optimizing on its own we saw a lot more stable performance from the conversion rate on the website. 

I believe this was due to the interactive nature of the quiz where more “experienced” customers were pulling through to the website. 

We have concluded the test for now while we run our other test. 

Overall, it was positive to see during this period. We received better quality conversions and captured good data to make improvements. 

It is an interesting project to be part of. 

The methods that we learn from this project can be implemented with our clients strategies as well.

But this only works if you have the right agency partnered with you!

If you are spending over $500 a day and you want to scale your brand

Book a call below:

https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

And that’s a wrap! 

I’m Quintin, Media Buyer at DimNiko 

Where do you start and how do you listen to what your audience is actually saying? And how can you give them what they want?

To put in context, this only covers minor adjustments we did in order to optimize the website, landing page and creatives. This is based on initial testing of campaigns and the product. 

Did you know you can extract direct information just based on the comments on your ads? 

Take Time to Read The Comments

Well we’ve done this and it worked really well with kicking off the brand. We’ve recently launched a supplement brand and within the first day we weren’t getting any conversions from the campaigns.

We started looking at the comments on the ads to figure out what is going on. In fact the problem was right there. The top question overall being asked was “how do I buy?”. Keep in mind this is a country that doesn’t have a ton of experience in com shopping.

We started replying to comments and some sales actually came through. After this the concept was proven and we adjusted the landing page with information on literally a step by step guide on how to shop through Shopify. 

After this on the creatives itself, we added the click here to buy options to the image as well. Another point came across in the comments was that most of the prospecting customers were asking what the price is. This is a bit silly since you want to get them on your website and convert.

Read More: Striking Emotion to Bring in 2MM Revenue

Test Creatives

We decided to add a price to the creatives as well and launched the campaign. 

This made a night and day difference on the ad performance, within the first day we received a ton of sales and we reached our goal for breaking at least even with testing the ad and actually made a little profit.

The weird thing that we started seeing was that the campaigns started underperforming as they continued to run, this might be due to creative fatigue and comments going unanswered. 

The CPC’s on these campaigns were really low and we received a ton of engagement and it started getting hard to respond to all the emails and comments. 

Read More: 5 Best Practices for Ecommerce Facebook Ad Creatives

This is where we decided now is the time to expand and grow in order to be able to work with these customers in an efficient way. 

The only way you can make this happen is to bring someone onboard to handle customer queries and run the social media pages. 

From here we can start focusing our attention on running the ads on Facebook. There is still some research that needs to be done in order to have a scalable concept, what we’ve learned is that you can’t scale right from the start, especially within a market that tends to spend $100 total per day.

The art in the form is to learn your target customer behaviour, know where they are in line with online shopping and the learning curve for them to make the purchase. 

But it comes to show that sometimes listening to your customers and adding a few pointers on a creative can be the difference between ROAs 1.0 and ROAs 10.0.  

And this only works if you have the right agency partnered with you!

If you are spending over $500 a day and you want to scale your brand

Book a call below:

https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

And that’s a wrap! 

I’m Quintin, Media Buyer at DimNiko 

As we all know 2020 was a crazy year for online shopping due to the pandemic. The pandemic has allowed a lot of people to consider selling and buying online. With all the lockdowns happening around the world, consumers where left with no other choice to satisfy their wants and needs through online shopping. 

The pandemic has accelerated years worth of growth in the commerce space in just a couple of months and 2021 is going to be an even more unpredictable year compared to 2020. Through experience and knowledge we can build the following assumption of what we can expect to seen in eCommerce marketing throughout 2021.

Fierce Competition For The Market 

Due to big retail brands and stores that had to adapt to selling online, we can expect to see that the overall CPA (cost per acquisition) is going to be higher than average compared to previous years. We are already seeing this at the end of Q4 in 2020 and this will continue to be the trend in 2021.  

This is due to already existing stores and brands that had to start selling online since the start of the pandemic. These companies have established branding and followings that help accelerate their position in the online space normally dominated by SME’s. 

A combination of higher budgets and bigger margins will allow these companies to start dominating the ad space such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc. These companies are equipped with advanced customer service experience and the ability to provide a better service compared to your average eCommerce store. 

Read More: How to Keep the Sales Momentum Going Through 2021

Overall Consumer Behaviour Change

If you have run any ads through the 2020 year, you will know that it had been difficult to control the volatility of the Facebook Ads Campaigns. Overall consumers have changed the way they shop online. 

As a standard, eCommerce stores mainly focused on what you would consider as luxury goods items and eCommerce store have become custom to this consumer behaviour, and the Facebook Ads Algorithm as well. 

For 2021 we can expect that consumers will adjust to purchase more essential goods and services from eCommerce stores such as groceries, health and home products. This leads back to the first trend as well. 

This is mainly the reason why we will see more retail stores moving into the eCommerce and Facebook ads space. Consumer behaviour will change with this as well since they will be more inclined to purchase goods for the space they spend the most of their time, which will be their homes.

Read More: What Facebook Changes Do We Expect to See in 2021

A Focus On Customer Retention 

As mentioned in the first trend, eCommerce stores will be focusing more on running Retention campaigns as customer acquisition costs sky rocketed through Q4 for 2020 and what we can expect to see for 2021. 

The main focus for established online brands will be to retain their customers through exploring new channels and funding this through their retention efforts. This push towards retention will only be a band aid for a larger existing problem for 2021. 

A good model we can see is eCommerce stores introducing loyalty points for coming back to the stores. This marketing strategy will mainly be seen implemented through other channels such as native advertising, email marketing etc. 

Overall the new marketing trends in 2021 will be extremely different from what you see from data from pre Covid-19. We believe that the volatility of the Facebook Ads campaigns will settle down for the most part since the algorithm has had enough time to gather enough data.

Facebook Ads Media Buyers know how to read these changes and adjust their campaign strategies in order to stay as profitable as possible during volatility of campaign performance and it’s imperative to be able to do this for your eCommerce store as well. 

But This only works if you have the right agency partnered with you!

If you are spending over $500 a day and you want to scale your brand.

Book a call below, to have the best of the best work on your brand.

https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

And that’s a wrap! 

I’m Quintin, Media Buyer at DimNiko

You’ve probably heard about a lot of success stories about people launching a successful brand in 2020

This is 100% true, a lot of brands that we’ve seen and currently work with have only started in early 2020 as a side project that became successful throughout the year. 

The 2020 Ecommerce Rush

In April 2020 there was a huge spike of new advertisers and new brands that took advantage of the e-com rush.

The direct translation for this event is basically a gold rush and it was at this point where many brands succeeded and failed. 

The reason why we see that some brands failed was due to scaling too fast without being able to support themselves in the back end, which is why the mighty have failed. 

The brands that were able to succeed at the end of the day took their time to set up their infrastructure to be able to benefit from the scaling rush. 

Most of the brands don’t have the knowledge of running Facebook ads at the scale they are currently at, which is why an agency such as ours gets approached.

But what if you missed the initial 2020 rush and you want to launch a new brand in late 2020?

It’s possible, and might be a good time to start since in late 2020 we’re approaching Black Friday and Cyber Monday. 

How does a person approach this then?

Here are a few key areas you should look out for and implement before kicking off your advertising. 

1. Product & Logistics 

Personally I wouldn’t recommend starting a Dropshipping Brand, these fail most of the time and are hard to manage with everything from Product Quality to Shipping. 

Having a good product at your disposal is a great way to manage product quality and making sure you have a real product you can put your name behind.

The logistics behind it an effective way to manage customer expectations and speedy delivery times. Both these aspects prepare you for the following point. 

2. Perception of experience.

This point goes hand in hand with your product quality and logistic management with your brand. 

It establishes your brand before customers could even think about the age of your company.

We mentioned in a previous article “How having a large number of likes on your page can have a negative impact on marketing performance.”

It is important to build a following, not too big, but a big enough following with real people in order to have the perception of experience for your brand. 

Recently consumers have become more vigilant about pages with fake followers. Establishing your brand provides you with the opportunity to have the authority to sell products online without worrying about “how legitimate” you look. 

At the end of the day, you want your brand to look like it’s been lived in, ask a few friends or colleagues to provide you with some UGC and reviews.

They’ll always be happy to help. 

3. Backdate Organic Facebook Posts

This is a great way to add to the perception of the experience to your brand.

Currently you are able to backdate your Facebook posts.

Adding these post to you pages and boosting the posts is a great way to gaining social proof to your Facebook page. 

4. Prepare for Kick-Off. 

Here’s where the right account strategy comes into play with you ad accounts. 

Setting up a couple of view content campaigns get your website active and your pixel warm and collecting data. 

Launching with the view content campaigns with post engagement campaigns targeting the post id’s. This will build social proof on your new ads, obviously and you can start collecting some customer feedback like that as well. 

At the end of the day, the most important factor that puts yourself in front of your competition is to be prepared for scaling, in order to keep up with your upcoming demand. 

What really ads value to your brand is that perception of experience since you can’t really “cheat” the system. 

These few steps will be able to push you in the right direction and you can start launching your campaigns and prepare for the final push for Q4.

And this only works if you have the right agency partnered with you!

If you are spending over $500 a day and you want to scale your brand

Book a call below:

https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

And that’s a wrap! 

I’m Quintin, Media Buyer at DimNiko 

Black Friday & Cyber Monday, the top buzz words for Q4 for store owners, media buyers and consumers.

The first time the term Black Friday was used was due to a financial crisis for the US. gold and cash market back in 1869 on September 24th.

It’s a little ironic since we are currently in sort of the same situation with the global economy due to the crazy ear that 2020 has been.

The story of the term Black Friday has a lot of myths surrounding it, but the main story that stuck according to history.com is the following.

“The result was the “red to black” concept of the holiday mentioned earlier, and the notion that the day after Thanksgiving marked the occasion when America’s stores finally turned a profit.”

This retail tradition has morphed into a 4 day shopping bonanza over a weekend that also spawned the day of Cyber Monday.

This tradition mainly applied to retail stores and customers had to get early to the stores really early in the morning in order to benefit from the major discounts.

This has changed a lot since the dawn of E-Commerce and especially this year, it’s going to be one to remember.

Due to the impact on consumer behavior from Covid-19, most predictions show that this might be one of the biggest e-commerce events of the decade.

Consumers have gotten more comfortable with online shopping since they were basically forced to take on that learning curve.

This also means that the Black Friday and Cyber Monday ad space is going to be highly competitive.

So here’s 8 steps you can follow to prepare for Black Friday & Cyber Monday.

Before you can prepare your ad account, you have to prepare your website.

Load test your website

Making sure that your website can handle the amount of traffic coming through on these days is extremely important.

Run speed and optimization tests in order to find areas where you can improve site speed since, slow website = slow sales.

Test your purchase procedure and UI (user interface) regularly in order to be 100% sure it is working properly and is easy to navigate.

Prepare Your Black Friday & Cyber Monday Landing Page

Using a custom landing page for these two events are crucial to stand out from your competitors, these have to be striking while also being user friendly.

The page has to be optimized to be able catch customers and crab their attention and have them make the purchase decision as quick as possible.

Now you can start preparing your ad account

Urgency & Relevance Creatives

This is the most important touch point for your customers. The creative strategy you implement should create urgency for your customers.

This first contact of your creatives should only show and mention exactly what the product name is, the percentage discount and a benefit of the product.

Test Your New Black Friday and Cyber Monday Creatives

Black Friday and Cyber Monday creatives need to be eye catching and creative.

Since these days are time sensitive it is important to test your creatives for the campaigns early on and sending them through reviews before Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

This will allow you to identify problems before the big day and address any problems that might come up with the review process.

Read More: Are You Really Testing Creatives On Facebook Or Is It Luck Of The Draw?

Brand Awareness & Reach Campaigns to Build Anticipation

Running a few brand awareness campaigns and reach campaigns are a great way to prepare you prospecting customers for the up and coming Big Day.

This campaign should land on your Black Friday & Cyber Monday landing pages in order to collect the customer data.

Get The Data From the Previous Year.

Even though consumer behaviour has changed for 2020, this is a good starting point for your campaigns to kick-off you initial campaigns.

Using lookalikes, similar interests and creatives from successful campaigns will allow you to hit the ground running.

Read More: Why You Should Utilize Your Lookalike Audience

Bigger Discounts For Returning Customers

Even though you have converted these customers prior to Q4 period, preparing retention campaigns with larger discounts is an easy way to retain customers and get cheap conversions

Campaign Structure & Audience

You campaign structure should still follow the guidelines for having a well functioning sales funnel including top funnel, middle funnel and bottom funnel & retention

With this set-up your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns should only use audiences that are relevant to this exact period.

Your Top Funnel will look standard & excluding customers from the relevant period of engagement based on when you launched your brand awareness and reach campaigns.

Your Middle Funnel will target engagers from the brand awareness and reach campaigns.

Your Bottom Funnel Campaigns will target users from the brand awareness and reach campaigns that landed on your custom landing pages.

Here you can provide extra discounts for people that added to cart, or initiated checkout etc. with special discounts to incentivize them to complete their purchase.

Your retention campaigns will provide previous customers and email subscribers with special discounts to award them for supporting your business.

Most E-Commerce owners believe that with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, all you need is a big discount in order to have success.

But this couldn’t be less true. Competition is extremely high and everyone is fighting for the same ad space.

Having a clear understanding of your customer behavior and planning and exact strategy for Black Friday and Cyber Monday is crucial to the success of your campaigns

If this is something you might be struggling with and if you are spending over $500 a day and you want to scale your brand.

Book a call below, to have the best of the best work on your brand.

https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

And that’s a wrap!

I’m Quintin, Media Buyer at DimNiko

Retargeting campaigns depend on 4 key factors that determine the success of the campaign.

But first, why is there a need for retargeting campaigns?

Why Do You Need Retargeting Campaigns?

It might be obvious, but retargeting is a very powerful funnel, since you already know that a potential customer has made the journey to your store.

Creating retargeting campaigns could be a delicate process since you don’t want to spam your customers to the point where they lose interest in you products. Setting up retargeting campaigns is the “easy” part. As a basis you want to target your typical add to cart, initiated checkout, time spent on site, etc.

There are a lot to choose from and testing is important. An effective retargeting campaign does not entirely depend on having just the right campaign structure.

It’s about understanding your customers.

Here are 4 key factors that determine a successful campaign include, understanding your customer journey, the creative angle, understanding your product and budget.

1. Understanding Your Customer’s Journey.

When you create your website, you have a pretty good idea of how you want your customers to behave on your website. You either want them to land and go straight to purchase or have them spend some time on the website and engage with your page.

Using tools such as Google Analytics will give you great insight on what your customers are doing with your website. If you know how to use Google Analytics as it is intended to be used, it allows you to track your customers’ journey in great detail.

Setting up a campaign structure based on the drop of points of your customers are a great way to customize your creatives for specific personalized ads.

2. Creative Angle

The creative angles of your ads are by far the most important.

As an example, you decide to set-up a campaign structure for add to cart abandoners. Having creatives that nudge users back to their cart with a personalized message such as “Did you forget something?” or “You left something in your cart” is a great way to get them back to our store.

These creatives should include links that lead direct to the add to cart page or checkout page, depending on which audience you target.

We have seen quite a few retargeting campaigns that have a very standard ad for their retargeting campaign, which might be more suitable for a prospecting campaign.

Implementing customer reviews and UGC are great ways to target users that haven’t added cart but have interacted with your website such as view content, time spent on site users etc.

Customers are already interested, you just need to nudge them a little.

Read More: 5 Best Practices for Ecommerce Facebook Ad Creatives

3. Understanding your product

Understanding your product is important, there are two ways to take this to your advantage.

With prospecting campaigns you will need to know how frequently your customers will need to return to your store.

Is your product a one time purchase or does your customer need it every three months? Understanding this will allow you to exclude the right purchase period not only from your retargeting campaign, but all your campaigns.

Ideally you would want to have a separate retention campaign, but if your budget is tight, this might be a good way to score some extra purchases.

4. Campaign Budget

This might be the most important factor for your retargeting campaigns.

As I mentioned above, you don’t want to spam your customers. The balance of your budget structure is considerably important and depends on your prospecting campaign structure.

Your budget should be balanced, your prospecting campaigns need to feed your retargeting campaigns. Looking at key metrics such as Frequency on your ads manager will indicate if your campaign structure is out of balance.

It might be hard to keep your cool, since you might see the campaign is doing great, and you want to scale.

Having a budget that’s too high for retargeting can bring you quick results, but for a long term strategy it could be disastrous.

When you are able to scale your prospecting campaigns, you are able to scale your retargeting campaigns.

Retargeting campaigns is a powerful funnel in your ads manager.

Understanding that retargeting doesn’t solely depend on what you target, but how you target will bring you a stable and successful campaign.

Read More: Budget Distribution Between The Funnel Stage

Utilizing different tools such as Google analytics and understanding the metrics from your ads manager is essential to build a successful retargeting campaign.

If you are spending over $500 a day and you want to scale your brand.

Book a call below, to have the best of the best work on your brand.

https://dimniko.com/msp-apply

And that’s a wrap!

I’m Quintin, Media Buyer at DimNiko