Facebook’s 20% Text Rule on Images has Changed

If you have struggled with the strict 20% rule regarding the amount of text advertisers can have on their Facebook Ads, you will be relieved to know that Facebook has rolled out a change to this policy. Although don’t be surprised that if you want more text you will pay more.

Previously you could only have 20% of your ad covered with text. Facebook has admitted that Advertisers have found the 20% rule confusing and has decided to roll out a new policy so that your ads will no longer be rejected for having too much text. However, the more text in your image, you can expect less reach and higher costs.
Images will no longer be broken up into a 5×5 grid. Going forward, Facebook breaks down text density into four categories:

  • OK
  • Low
  • Medium
  • High

With the 20% rule, an advertiser who used a grid tool on their images would always know where their image falls (more or less than 20%) and therefore if it would be approved or not. Now it’s a matter of Facebook determining whether the amount of text is OK, Low, Medium or High.

Facebook's updated grid tool so that you can upload your images and get immediate feedback on where they determine text density falls.  If you create your ads in Power Editor, you will be given a warning that lets you know if the amount of text in your image may limit distribution.

Examples of the four text density categories:

Image Text: OK

Facebook still prefers little or no text in an image.
facebook example of ok amount of text

 

Image Text: Low

These ads are considered to have moderate text. Each of these ads have most of their copy in the text box, but there's still some copy directly on the images in each of them.
facebook example of low amount of text

 

Image Text: Medium

facebook example of medium amount of text

 

Image Text: High

While this ad will get approved, Facebook will severely restrict its reach and charge high costs.

facebook example of large amount of text

 

In summary, although the policy has changed, Facebook still prefers little or no text and if you want maximum reach you would be best to adhere to this.

At Cre8ive we implement and manage Facebook and Instagram Advertising campaigns for clients. If you would like to know more please email.

 


Ten Steps to Effective Facebook Marketing

Worldwide, there are over 1.86 billion monthly active Facebook users.

This platform offers more than just a way to stay in touch with friends and family; it is an essential item in the marketing toolbox. Facebook allows your business to be available to people on a trusted, popular platform, where prospects can see “real” people interacting with your brand. This is the foundation for you to build stronger relationships with them. Facebook often changes the rules and your audience changes their minds so what works today may not work tomorrow. You need to stay on top of the game by keeping up-to-date with the latest trends. Cre8ive has created a handy Facebook reference check sheet with the top ten points that every organisation should implement.

Need to know more? Through our training arm, Get Social, Cre8ive offers one-on-one Facebook Training for businesses - specifically tailored to your business or organisation. We can assist if you need help with maximising the Facebook tools, what to post and when to post, how to source ideas, how to advertise on Facebook, legal requirements and more! We will do an initial evaluation and audit of your page and go over the recommendations with you. Call Philippa 03 474 1075 to find out more or Email

Cre8ive's Facebook Guide

 

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“Relaxing the Rules” at The Fortune Theatre over the School Holidays

One of our clients has a new initiative and a first for Dunedin, which we think is fantastic.

It’s difficult for any parent to occupy busy minds over the school holidays, let alone those with learning difficulties. During the April school holidays however, there is an exciting treat to keep the kids entertained!

The Fortune Theatre is holding a ‘relaxed performance’ of their April school holiday play ‘Little Red Riding Hood.’ This new initiative is aimed at making theatre accessible to individuals with Autism and other sensitivity issues.

Bob King, General Manager of the Fortune Theatre, says “We’re pleased to be hosting a relaxed performance on 24 April for those on the autism spectrum, sensory and communication disorders or learning difficulties.”

“We want to welcome an audience who would benefit from a more relaxed, safe environment, including those for whom the regular theatre experience can be a challenge.”

People with disabilities, especially children and their families, can find it virtually impossible to be comfortable in a theatre environment, especially when required to be quiet in their seat for the duration of the entire show.

A Relaxed Performance is a stage production differing from the usual theatre show. The show is performed in a friendly, supportive environment including a reduction in loud noises, the house lights remain on and the children can roam around the theatre and sit where they like.

The Fortune Theatre envisages the Relaxed Performances to become part of their standard routine during the school holiday programme.

These school holiday performances run from Saturday 22 April through to 29 April, 11am and 2pm daily except ANZAC day where it’s just the 2pm performance and no show on Sunday 23 April.

This kiwi version of Little Red Riding Hood features Grandma, Red and the dastardly Big Bad Wolf… sure to delight the young and the young at heart. Red is a daring young girl with an active imagination that keeps getting her into trouble. In the end she will discover that she can’t wait around to be rescued, and must use her own talents to escape from the wolf.

You can book tickets online or pop into the Box Office at the Fortune Theatre.


Write Better Press Releases With Our Guide

Press releases are a major part of your PR efforts. Before you sit down to write a press release read over these key tips and use the worksheet as a guide to ensure all critical information is included.

Press Release Tips

Start Strong
You only have a matter of seconds to grab your readers’ attention, so you want to capture it with a strong opening. Your headline, summary and first paragraph should clarify your news. The rest of your release should provide the detail.

Write Professionally
If your release contains hype, slang, excessive exclamation points or typos, chances are it will be viewed as an advertisement rather than a news release, which may hurt credibility. Or worse, a media outlet may pick up your release and publish without modification, opening any sloppy writing to a larger audience.

Limit Jargon
The best way to communicate is to speak plainly using ordinary language. Using an abundance of technical language and jargon limits your reading audience.

Make sure your Release is Informational and Timely
Think about your audience. Will someone else find your story interesting? Answer this question, “Why should anyone care?” Your release ideally will contain pertinent information that highlights something new or unusual, and provides useful information to your audience.

Avoid Clichés and Stick to the Facts
Avoid phrases like “customers save money” or “great customer service” to announce or describe. Focus on the aspects of your announcement that truly set you apart from everyone else. Avoid fluff, embellishments, hype and exaggerations.

Pick an Angle
Make sure that your release has a good hook. Tying your information to current events, recent studies, trends and social issues brings relevance, urgency and importance to your message.

Illustrate the Solution
Use real examples to illustrate how your organisation solved a problem. Identify the problem and why your solution is the right solution.

Include Great Visuals
We are in a visual revolution - it is vital to provide relevant and stunning images to back up your release. As the majority of people skim read, providing an image that supports your copy will enhance the chances that they remember something about your article or, even better, act on it.

Be Concise
News search engines sometimes reject news releases with overly long headlines, excessive lists and high overall word counts. Eliminate unnecessary adjectives, flowery language or redundant expressions such as “added bonus” or “first time ever.”

Proofread
Once written, print it and proofread it off-line. Edit and proofread again. Then pass it onto a colleague with a fresh pair of eyes to proofread again. We often miss our own errors.

Press Release Worksheet Questions

  • What is the news being announced?
  • What is the goal of this announcement?
  • What date is this announcement being made?
  • Why did you launch this product/service/event? Are there any statistics or data that will help make the case for why this is needed?
  • What is the most unique benefit of this news to audience?
  • What desire does it fill or problem does it solve? Why does anyone care? How is it different, better, new, innovative?
  • Is there a call to action? How does this prospective customer find out more? Do they call a phone number, go to a website, visit your booth, etc? (this will be used as a last sentence in the body of the press release)
  • Who can be quoted in the release to bring in a relevant viewpoint? Always get accurate information and sign‑off authorisation from anyone quoted.
  • What publications or other media do you want to release this to?
  • What type of tailored angle should you take in each release to get the editor’s attention.

Build a Strong Brand

Your Brand is the most important starting point for any organisation and a strong brand is one of your key marketing assets. A brand is more than the graphical component, the logo. Being recognised and trusted gives consumers a feeling of confidence in the products or services you provide.

When creating or reviewing your Brand you should ensure that it not only creates a point of difference between your organisation and your competitors but that it is more desirable. Ask yourself what is the value of a pair of Nike trainers without the brand? How does your perception change?

Therefore, if a brand results from perceptions in people’s minds your organisation should aim to generate, influence and control these perceptions to help performance. Any organisation can benefit enormously by developing a brand that presents the company as distinctive, trusted, exciting, reliable or whichever attributes are appropriate to your organisation. Greenpeace, for example, conjures up feelings of an ethical, trustworthy, environment-caring advocate.

If Coca-Cola were to lose all of its production-related assets in a disaster, the company would survive. By contrast, if all consumers were to have a sudden lapse of memory and forget everything related to Coca-Cola, the company would go out of business.

Coca-Cola Executive

Aspects to Consider When Developing a Strong Brand:

  • Distinctive – your logo needs to be unique
  • Likable – you want your target market to feel a positive affinity towards your brand
  • Meaningful – you should stand for something (and this is where your positioning statement can help)
  • Memorable – designed to leave a lasting impression that resonates with your target market and is easily recognisable. The Nike swoosh viewed on its own is immediately associated with the Nike brand.
  • Timeless – avoid falling for the trap of a logo that is ‘trendy’: you don’t want to be re-inventing every few years.

Defining Your Brand

If you’re thinking about how to re-brand your business, its products or services, or if you want to assess where your brand stands at present, there are four key aspects you should consider:

  1. The big idea – what lies at the heart of your company?
  2. Values – what do you believe in?
  3. Vision – where are you going?
  4. Personality – how do you want to come across?

Brand Development is Changing

The digital revolution has completely transformed the balance of control - the power has switched from the Brand to the consumer. The consumer's voice has become louder and much more public. Consumers can publish their experience of a brand and compare it with the experience of others. The ability of a brand to respond to this can have a profound affect on the way they are perceived. In order to progress in this fast-paced online world, your Brand must be nimble employing intelligent use of design, advertising, social customer service, corporate culture and so on to continually benefit the organisation.

Greenpeace effectively uses clever digital marketing to move some of the large corporate giants into more sustainable practices through public pressure. For example, when it came to Asia Pulp & Paper, a large multi-national unknown to most consumers, Greenpeace looked downstream to find a purchaser of the company’s paper that might be more concerned about its brand image. It chose Mattel — specifically, one of the company’s most iconic toys, Barbie — which was being packaged with cardboard traced to virgin forests. The campaign, called “Barbie, It’s Over,” portrayed Ken, Barbie’s longtime beau, kicking her to the curb because, as he put it, “I don’t date girls who are into deforestation.”

Mattel reached out to Asia Pulp & Paper, and while it was a relatively small customer, the paper company got the message as it really affected peoples’ perception of APP.

Ken finds some hard truths about Barbie from Greenpeace on Vimeo.

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HTTPS Now a Must for Websites

Google wants everything on the web to be travelling over a secure channel. That’s why from January 2017, your Chrome browser will flag un-encrypted websites as insecure, displaying a red “x” over a padlock in the URL bar.

With this upcoming change in Chrome, Google makes it clear that all sites should all be encrypted, in other words, should be served over HTTPS, which is essentially a secure layer on top of the usual HTTP web protocol.

“The goal is to clearly display to web users that
HTTP provides no data security.”

HTTP has been used to carry the information passed back and forth between you and the websites you visit. However, using HTTP is like sending a postcard, anyone who handles it can see what's written on it. The solution to this is to use HTTPS instead, which wraps the insecure HTTP connection in a secure encrypted stream called SSL (Secure Socket Layer).

Enabling SSL on your website is like putting the postcard in a safe with a secret combination known only to you and the website you're visiting. This means that anyone in the middle that is handling your data can only pass it on, they cannot read it. In order for this to work the website must be able to verify its identity, which is what an SSL Certificate does.

This isn't the first time that Google has taken steps to encourage site owners to switch to HTTPS. Two years ago, Google made some changes to its search engine algorithm to rank websites that use encrypted HTTPS connections higher in search results.

HTTPS will provide the following advantages:

HTTPS will provide the following advantages:
  • Security to all websites and pages regardless of content
  • Search engine optimisation benefits on Google (help with higher rankings)
  • Mitigate known vulnerabilities such as SSLstrip and Firesheep
  • Provide browser user privacy
  • Higher trust indication with a green lock icon

 

With proper installation of an SSL certificate, the “not secure” warning will disappear and be replaced by a green lock icon, assuring web visitors that your site is secure.

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How Cre8ive More than Doubled a Client’s Revenue in only a Year

Client: Airport Parking Provider

Business Type: Short or long term airport parking

Client Brief:
An Airport Parking Provider offering short and long-term airport parking for cars and large vehicles. Prior to Cre8ive’s involvement, the Provider had a template website and no online booking system. They engaged Cre8ive to develop and design their website, expand their customer reach and increase the number of bookings.

Our Solution:

  • Create a customised website with a 24/7 online booking system and Google Analytics setup for comprehensive monitoring
  • Develop a Google AdWords campaign targeting searches for “car parking” and “campervan parking” to maximise their capacity
  • Ensure correct geotargeting to not waste budget on irrelevant audiences
  • To carefully craft numerous text ads along with 175 selectively chosen keywords and negative keywords
  • Add ad extensions to increase online traffic on their Booking, Rates and Location pages
  • Tailor ads to both desktop and mobile formats to target customers on specific devices
  • Establish goals and e-commerce tracking

Outstanding Results:
The client was very satisfied with their easy-to-manage booking system, requiring less hands-on time for them. Our targeted campaign has reached up to an incredible 12.5% click-through rate. To put this in perspective, Google’s average click-through rate on AdWords paid search ads is only 2%. With an average ad position of 1.4, our Airport Parking Provider Ads are predominantly displayed at the top of search results.

Comparing the year prior to the Google AdWords campaign in place, their total revenue significantly increased by 123%!

If you want Cre8ive to take on the challenge of increasing your business by managing your Google AdWords account - learn more about our Google AdWords management services or get our FREE Google Adwords guide.  Get in touch with us today for your free estimate. Call 03 474 1075.

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What NZ Can Learn From Switzerland to Encourage More Chinese Tourists

With the booming Chinese economy and Chinese tourism on the rise, tourist industries across the world are scrambling to find innovative ways to appeal to this significant market.

TrekkSoft recently interviewed Simon Bosshart, the Director of Global Accounts and the Director for Asia Pacific for Switzerland Tourism, and revealed important lessons to be learned from Switzerland’s tourist industry. According to Bosshart, “The Chinese are what we call highlight customers.” Meaning, “they prefer going to well-known cities and visiting famous attractions; and aren't as keen to discover hidden gems like the Europeans.” Regardless of that, Bosshart says “the Chinese are extremely curious and are willing to learn about a new destination” and that they are “also a lot less active in terms of outdoor sports.

Given this information, many would assume Swiss cities would be an unlikely destination for Chinese tourists, considering it’s a small and scenic country buried in the Alps. However, due to a few changes in the tourism industry over the last 10 years and their plans to improve in the coming years, Switzerland has made significant progress in appealing to Chinese tourists and is expected to continue to do so.

Bosshart divulged that the first and most important change they made was to get individual businesses online since the “growing trend towards online business and online booking facilities” has proved to be favourable for Swiss tourist companies. With most businesses online now, it is easier for people from across the world to find and book a service. To raise their profile even more, businesses can promote themselves on Chinese social media platforms like Weibo, QZone and Tencent QQ. Research has shown that this can be a tourist company’s most valuable tool since China has the largest population in the world that uses social media – about 600 million (as of 2015). Advertising your website on platforms such as these, especially when your website is translated into Mandarin, can be extremely beneficial to attracting the Chinese tourist.

Another strategy Bosshart is encouraging Switzerland to take, is to work together as a destination, to drive larger visitor numbers. Bosshart recommends doing this by bundling services together and distributing it on one specific channel. For example, when most travellers make their first attempt at skiing, they could first go to a tourism office to learn about it. But then there’s the questions of where find to the right equipment, the best prices, what type of ski pass to get and how to find the right ski instructor. By bundling these services together and making a variety of package deals, the process is simplified and tourists will be more likely to book a skiing trip.

Dunedin-Otago-Peninsula
Monarch Wildlife boat seen here with the lighthouse at Royal Albatross Colony.

To boost business popularity amongst Chinese tourists, it is also advised that you market yourself to appear as a well-known company since “Chinese customers also value big brand names and prestige.” Offering luxury add-ons to a package trip might be worth considering.

To tailor a package deal to the Chinese market, the tourist industry might want to combine activities with premium features or add-ons. Dunedin’s Otago Peninsula is a great example of where tourist operators could work together to provide a high-end tourist experience catered specially to the Chinese market. For example, a helicopter flight to start the journey landing on the Otago Peninsula, exclusive tours of the Royal Albatross Colony, Historic Fort Taiaroa and a private viewing of the Little Blue Penguins. Rather than a bus, a fleet of luxury classic cars could transport the visitors to ideal viewing spots before being taken to New Zealand’s only castle for an exclusive tourism experience. To complete the trip, a 3 course dining experience at Glenfalloch Gardens & Restaurant, showcasing fresh, local produce.

Another tip from Bosshart is rather than changing your business to accommodate the majority of Chinese tourists, it is more useful to focus on specific markets since the Chinese market is so large. For instance, although Chinese tourists are known to travel in large groups, Swiss companies have stayed true to their ways and continued to specialise in small group activities. As a result, they are more likely to secure a booking with those 30-35% of Chinese travellers who prefer free, independent travel.

Finding a way to be unique from other tourist companies and regions is a proven marketing strategy. From a tourist’s perspective, subtle differences in products and services can often seem too similar to differentiate, which can leave them confused about which to choose. This is why it is essential for businesses to highlight their specialties. Ask yourself, “What does my activity or destination have that is different from others?” If you can’t easily answer this question, you may want to rethink your marketing strategy.

Bosshart says Switzerland’s tourism industry, specifically among the Chinese Market, has grown and is enroute to more successful seasons.

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Understanding Facebook’s Newsfeed

Our Director, Philippa Crick, did a presentation to the tourism group Dunedin Host at the end of May, on how tourism businesses can use social media better for improved Return of Investment.
Watch this short clip from the presentation, that explains more about how the Newsfeed works in Facebook.

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