avoid online marketing overload

May 24, 2017 By Maria Florio

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?

May 7, 2017 By Maria Florio

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:

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

April 20, 2017 By Maria Florio

A helpful checklist to avoid online marketing overload

When it comes to online marketing there are so many considerations for you to make and so much information around that it makes it especially hard to avoid feeling overwhelmed, and unfocused on your next steps.

With this in mind (and as a side note to the recent online marketing blogs on automation), I wanted to share a couple tips on what you can do to stay focused. A checklist, if you will, to avoid feeling overwhelmed with your online marketing while being able to stay on track with the goals you set.

Use helpful online marketing sources relevant to your priority goals

Patience is a virtue, as the saying goes, and it’s applicable to every marketer and business owner out there. When it comes to information that can help you with your online marketing, there’s an abundance.

If you try reading every interesting article that ends up in your inbox or that you see on Twitter or Facebook, you’ll end up reading all day. You’ll also end up finding another article that will lead you to another article and then another, and so on.

If you’re going to get anywhere with your online marketing efforts, you need to focus on reading articles that talk about your most important implementation actions first.

So, for example, if you have decided that you want to grow your subscriber list to implement a new email marketing campaign, there’s no need for you to read about social media marketing ads just yet.

As a way to help you stay on track, here’s a five item checklist that I’ve found most useful for myself (professionally), and for clients that I’ve consulted with for their online marketing needs.

Checklist items

Read articles that give you answers and steps to what you are looking to do tomorrow or next week or in the first quarter of a new year.
If you don’t have a list of online marketing goals by priority, make one. Even if it’s just bullet points, make your list as soon as possible. Organize them by priority based on what goals you want to achieve first with your online marketing.
If you can set a timeframe for each activity based on how long you think it will take you to set all the pieces in motion; this can really help you stay focused because you have a deadline. However, there are some people that don’t do well with deadlines. If it has to deter you from reaching your goals, don’t set any times; just action steps that you know you need to take in order for you to have that specific online marketing activity going.
When you find an online marketing article that talks about something you’re interested in doing in the future with your online marketing efforts, save the article/link in a bookmark or excel sheet; somewhere that you know you’ll easily locate when you’re ready to move to this item.
If you catch yourself feeling a bit down because it feels like it’s taking forever to get one of your online marketing strategy components going, remember that Rome wasn’t built in a day (as the expression goes). You have to give yourself the time to understand what you’re doing completely so that you can implement it effectively.

Hopefully these pointers (which are guidelines that you should adapt over time to fit you, as only you can know exactly how you focus best on things) can bring you to limit your reading to those online marketing articles that you need sooner than later. Not only will this avoid information overload, but it will also allow you to grasp an in-depth understanding of what you’re doing. This process and gained knowledge will prepare you for your next online marketing focus activity.

What types of challenges are you facing with online marketing overload and prioritization that I can help with?