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Taking a closer look at social media ad spending

Taking a closer look at social media ad spending

There are a number of reasons why some professionals and businesses shouldn’t spend a lot of money on social media ads; starting with limited budget and the ROI behind social media ads, which may not meet your needs or help you stay in business.

Social media’s number one value, year after year (just check out Social Media Examiner’s 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report) is helping professionals and businesses to increase visibility.  Since visibility doesn’t necessarily mean monetary return, businesses on a limited budget must thoroughly evaluate their ad spending on any of the social media platforms they are using.  This counts for public figures, authors, and any type of professional or person using social media.

No matter what you do or the type of business you run, here are some things to keep in mind and help you make a decision on whether or not you should invest in social media advertisement.

Facebook is decreasing organic reach, which means less of the people that follow your Facebook page are seeing your posts.

This seems to be getting worse year after year.  In fact in this year’s Social Media Examiner’s 2017 Social Media Marketing Industry Report finds that 95% of marketers either don’t know or have seen a decline in Facebook News Feed exposure over the last 12 months.  If you are counting on Facebook for your exposure, then you will want to look into advertisement spending, however keep in mind that spending those dollars doesn’t mean monetary return.

If your biggest objective for using Facebook is to increase sales, you want to keep in mind what type of service and/or product you are selling.  How accessible is it to your clients, meaning budget friendly or a big investment, and the time your specific target audience’s buyer journey lasts.  This information can help you create more realistic expectations of what you will see following ad spending.

Twitter and/or LinkedIn ad spending also have their considerations. 

While LinkedIn is known for successful B2B lead generation and client acquisition, it is quite expensive.  If you plan on spending with LinkedIn it’s advisable that you calculate how many clients you want or need to close in order to make up for your investment and see a return.  If you are a business with budget that will allow this type of investment then you can test it out and see how it works out for you.

The same thought process goes for Twitter, the only difference being that Twitter is not as expensive as LinkedIn, is also great for B2C, and is one of the social networks that hasn’t reduced organic reach to try and push businesses to spend on ads (Twitter has tweaked their algorithm, but for now, unlike what Facebook is doing, the changes seem to be based on showing Twitter users more of what they’re interacting with and not limiting what they see from the Twitter accounts they choose to follow).

These are only some of the considerations you should keep in mind when you’re considering using social media beyond an organic strategy.  If you’re a business that has money to invest then making this decision will be a no brainer; and at the end of the year, you can evaluate how your social media ad spending went.  If you’re limited in the budget you have however, then consider the above before investing and ensure your goals can be met by the social media platform you choose to advertise on.

Are you having trouble deciding whether or not to invest in social media ads?  What are you exploring to make your decision?

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Key considerations when choosing online marketing automation tools

Key considerations when choosing online marketing automation tools

Knowing when to use online marketing automation and what mistakes to avoid are not the only things to get you going with the process, without overwhelming you.  You also want to make sure you don’t get lost in the array of online marketing automation tools out there.  Depending on who you talk to and where you’re getting your online marketing information, you will see one of two things:

Either the same tools over and over again -or- an arsenal of different tools that will keep you wondering which tool is the best for you.

As an online marketer, I use a set of tools for different marketing tasks and activities (as mentioned in Online marketing automation for your email and social media activities post, Hootsuite is one of them and Zoho is another).  Some online marketing automation tools I use because they were presented to me by trusted colleagues, others because of clients who want them or have them in their toolkit, and still others I found on my own and decided based on my needs.

When deciding on my own what online marketing automation tools I wanted to use I considered three things:

  1. The ease of use in using the tool
  2. Long-term goals and how the tool plays a role in helping to succeed in reaching those goal
  3. The reliability of the tool

These three things are important because they will help you use these tools in a way that is helpful to you and not in a way that makes online marketing more difficult or tedious.

The first key, ease of use, is of the utmost importance since you’ll be using the tool.  You want to make sure you’re comfortable with the platform you’re using and that it doesn’t keep you super busy in trying to learn how to use it.

Some tools are a bit harder to navigate depending on your thought process and what makes sense to you in how you move around on the backend dashboard of a program.  You want to look for tools that are user-friendly.  From experience though, some tools that are presented as user-friendly aren’t as intuitive as they make it seem.

An example is Mailchimp when you set up recurring campaigns.  Before understanding fully how it worked, I felt somewhat confused and had to run a couple test runs before figuring out their system.  Another tool is Thrive Themes, particularly their Content Builder tool.  Even though it is supposed to easily integrate opt-in forms from an email platform such as Mailchimp, before it became clear to me how to do this, I set up an opt-in form with HTML code.  Only after talking to colleagues was I able to understand that before setting up my opt-in form I needed to connect my Mailchimp account with an API.  Once that was done, then the process went much smoother.

The slight confusion I experienced is based on what my brain finds intuitive and how I navigate a dashboard of course; for others, the same process with the same tools might be quite simple and straightforward.  It is because of our unique traits that you want to test run the backend of a tool before deciding to use it or not.  Product reviews are helpful, but you should still test an online marketing automation tool or at least get a demo to see how it works in practice and what the backend looks like.  This will give you a clear idea of how easy or not it will be for you to personally use the tool.

For long-term goals, this is important because you don’t want to end up with a high number of tools that you have to switch around to get things done.  Having a ton of online marketing automation tools is time consuming and thanks to the available tools out there, it’s unnecessary to get overwhelmed by online marketing options.

A perfect example is if you plan on having multiple email marketing campaigns in the future that go out for a diverse clientele from multiple industries.  In this case, it’s ideal to build your list in a platform that allows you to keep track of your lists in an easy and organized way.  Usually, you’ll be looking for a CRM (customer relationship management) to organize your contacts so whatever email marketing platform you pick, make sure it can integrate seamlessly with your CRM or pick an email marketing platform that has a CRM that meets your needs.

When it comes to the reliability of the tool, it means you want to pick tools that won’t disappear on you or that are trending at the moment, but may not be as good as other pre-existing tools.  Some ways you can identify reliability is the years the company has been in business, the number of other online marketing applications they’re compatible with (for example email marketing tools with a CRM tool or a landing page tool), and the continuous updates to improve the tool that the company has been applying in time.

Even though the years the company has been in business might not be indicative of reliability as much as one could hope, it is at least indicative of a company doing their best to stay in business.  This is important because if you start building your online marketing automation activities with a tool that ceases to exist all of a sudden, you’ll find yourself frantically looking for a substitute or you’ll find yourself without that content and system you put so much effort in organizing.  This has happened to a client of mine before.  They built a series of landing pages, great landing pages, with a tool that after a couple years shut down and we could no longer use those landing pages.

There are no guarantees of course, but with a little in-depth research you can get a pretty good idea of the lifespan of the tool and if it a good fit for what you need.

No matter what online marketing automation tools you choose to use, there will probably be a learning curve, especially if you’re not a tech savvy person; but if you use these three considerations in the decision making process, you’ll be able to find what works for you and avoid online marketing mistakes that could slow you down in a significant way.

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Online marketing automation for your email and social media activities

Online marketing automation for your email and social media activities

We’ve talked about what mistakes you should avoid when it comes to online marketing automation, now let’s talk about when you should use online marketing automation.

Before we get into the when, let’s explore the why.

  • The biggest benefit from online marketing automation is being able to establish a consistent online presence to build your relationships and share helpful information with the community you serve through your business or project.

Consistency is key to everything you do and being that time is limited, automation can help you achieve this goal.  As for the areas you want to focus on when looking into online marketing automation, they are email and social media content.

Setting up your email is helpful to get you going with building a list of those people who want to follow your blog or your announcements.  There are different ways you can set this up.  If you want to keep it simple at first, start by picking an email marketing platform like Mailchimp.

Mailchimp is very user-friendly when it comes to connecting a subscription form on your website and updating it with templates.  I use Zoho for now, but I’ve chosen it for the CRM (customer relationship management) option they have.  I use Mailchimp too, but because it doesn’t have a CRM option, I am not inclined to use it as my main email marketing tool.  Also, Zoho isn’t as user-friendly as Mailchimp, so if you can’t really spend time learning how to use a new platform, you should consider starting your email marketing through Mailchimp or other similar email marketing tool (another renown one is ConstantContact).

Another nice thing about Mailchimp is that they’ve recently integrated a Facebook ads feature, so eventually you could use it to set up Facebook ads.  Since, Mailchimp is widely used they keep adding to the marketing applications you can integrate when using it (more to come on the topic).  For a quick comparison of Mailchimp vs Constant Contact you can go here.

For your social media content, I like Hootsuite, but there are other options (here’s a view of 9 alternatives to Hootsuite).  In using Hootsuite, I’m able to schedule my social content while also tracking my social channel activities and conversations.  It’s free up to 3 social networks, but with limited features.  However, when you’re first starting, small implementations of your social activities are easier to get going with than trying to do a lot at once.

If you want to be active on only one social network, so let’s say Facebook.  Facebook has a scheduling feature within your page options.  Twitter and other social networks like LinkedIn don’t have scheduling potential within them so you’d have to share manually.

To keep it simple I’m not diving into a full on exploration of each of these options; but in time I will, with separate blog posts dedicated to those specific marketing areas.  In the meantime, what’s important for you to take away from this blog post is that you want to start being consistently active in one of these two areas: email marketing and/or social media marketing.

Thanks to online marketing automation tools you can start with email and social media marketing, without having to put in too much time and without giving up quality.  It’s like keeping in touch with friends and family, you consistently reach out to them to say hello or ask how their day went or share something interesting you’ve read recently.

What challenges are you facing with email marketing or your social media marketing activities?  Let me know so that I can help 🙂