Philippa Crick, Author at Cre8ive Marketing | Page 7 of 11 Archive

12 Social Media Tips for Christmas Promotion

Posted on Tuesday, November 10th, 2015 at 1:04 pm.

As the countdown to Christmas is on, now is the perfect time to really ramp up your social media marketing efforts with the goal to see a spike in revenue with our 12 social media tips for Christmas promotion.

1. Establish your Goals
  How can you measure your success if you don't know what you want to achieve? Examples of goals might be to increase sales, increase volume of website traffic or have more newsletter sign ups. Use website statistics such as Google Analytics and Facebook Insights to measure the effectiveness of your campaign.
2. Create a Content Calendar
  Reduce stress and errors by preparing in advance your content and when it will go live.
  Begin with key dates, special offers and events you may have planned etc. There is no right or wrong answer as to when to post or how much to post but establishing a regular cadence that your audience can come to rely on is a great start. However in saying that, an indication for Students is not to post on Friday/Saturday as they don't tend to be on Facebook as much then.
3. Try Facebook advertising
  Did you know that only 2% of your fans will see your posts on Facebook? As a low cost way to increase your audience reach you should experiment with Facebook ads.
  This highly targeted form of advertising is an ideal way to ensure important posts are seen by your fans or others in your target market.
  Each ad you create, you can choose how much you want to bid to have your ad shown to your target audience as well as the option between cost per click (CPC) or cost per 1000 impressions (CPM). Budget control is completely at your discretion.
  To give you an idea of what you might pay, Statista reports that in Q3 of 2014, ecommerce businesses saw an average cost per click of $US 0.49 on Facebook.
4. Don't forget Twitter
  If your target market uses Twitter, then it will be just as important as Facebook for building an engaged audience.Zaggora, a fitness wear brand, held a contest on Twitter for Christmas. They asked followers to post a hilarious photo showing off their Christmas gifts.
  Entry criteria was simple: use the #zaggora hashtag to enter. The winner received a selection of Zaggora fitness clothes. It was a very simple yet successful campaign for them, increasing their brand and product visibility.
  
  Last year there were over 282 million Tweets from around the world about holiday shopping. The Twitter Business Blog contains some interesting stats for the upcoming holiday season:
  
  of Twitter users are likely to purchase something from a small business they follow on Twitter
  
  of Twitter users are likely to Tweet about their holiday purchases
  
  of Twitter users are planning to use Twitter for holiday shopping

1. Follow the 80/20 Rule  of social media posting
  Ensure that 80% of your tweets/posts drive interaction and offer value to your followers. The other 20% use for direct offers or ‘selling’ type messages. Facebook is cracking down on 'overly promotional' organic posts so if you post too often "Buy now", "Join now", "Sale on now" and so on, less and less of your fans will see these messages. Read our article about overly promotional posts.
2. Get Creative with your Imagery
  Attract interest by creating customised Christmas cover images/backgrounds/post images for each social media platform.

Give Tips for Christmas that are tailored to your audience
Try to focus on providing some genuinely helpful information such as weather forecasts, gift ideas, travel tips and Christmas recipes. Find a way to tie these themes into your business and promoting your product and how it can be used during the festive season.See this example from Thermomix, which produces a multi-function kitchen aid, where they created a festive drink to promote their product without actually mentioning it or any reference to purchasing.
Respond Rapidly
Gone are the days of getting back to your clients in 24 hours. Today you’ve got to make every effort to get back to them within 1-2 hours - this applies not just to email but to social media messages as well.
Different demographic groups use different social media platforms
Adjust your posts/tweets and imagery for each individual platform and target market. What works in Facebook may not work in Twitter.
Run a contest
Creating a contest is a great way to engage your audience and generate content on your social media site; incentivise your target market to sign up to your database by offering a prize or deal.
Create a Facebook App
To make your e-mail audience bigger, create a Facebook App and encourage your visitors to sign up there. You can also promote special deals and offers through this tool.
Drive Traffic
Most important of all, use Social Media to drive traffic to your website. When posting or tweeting include a link back to your website, when relevant.

If you need assistance with your social media marketing whether it be planning content ideas or Christmas imagery, please call  03 474 1075 or email Philippa.

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Google Recommendations for SEO

Posted on Monday, September 7th, 2015 at 12:13 am.

Written by Philippa Crick

Google recommends the following to get better rankings in their search engine:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
Don’t deceive your users.
Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
Make sure that your <title> elements and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate. Eg when uploading an image of a skirt include words to describe it such as “a knee-length, navy skirt made from velvet”
Use keywords to create descriptive title tags.

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What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Posted on Monday, September 7th, 2015 at 12:01 am.

Written by Philippa Crick

Digital marketing is critical to business these days. When customers are looking to purchase their initial search will be an online one. Search engine optimisation is essential for customers to find your organisation, which is the art and science of getting your website ranking high in web searches. An SEO strategy is critical for websites. This is the process of improving the quality and volume of online traffic driven to a website by search engines. Basically, the earlier and more frequently a site appears in search results, the more visitors it will receive.

Watch our short video that covers understanding the SEO basics.

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Facebook Advertising: Should You Boost or Promote?

Posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2015 at 11:41 am.

Written by Philippa Crick

With Facebook organic reach on the decline businesses must seriously consider paying for their posts to appear in the news feeds of their fans. Don’t pay for every post however, choose the best ones. What are the options?

Boosting a post is the most straightforward option.
When you’re publishing your post you can simply choose to boost by clicking the ‘Boost Post’ button in the lower right corner of your post. Boosting posts is the quickest and easiest way to increase the reach of posts that need to be seen soon, for example latest news and links with rich media like photos or videos.

After you click ‘boost’ you then have the option of “People who like your page and their friends” or “People you choose through targeting.”

One problem with choosing the first option is that your fans’ friends may not be interested in your business and may not be located in the area you want to target. Which means you may be wasting your budget by paying for your post to appear in their news feed.

If your goal is to engage your current fans, don’t choose the first option. You’re better off using a promoted post and choosing that the ad only go to your community. However, if you’ve already boosted a post to fans and their friends, you can still change your audience. Just go to your Ads Manager and turn off the segment of the ad that goes out to friends of fans.

If your goal is to drive some targeted traffic to your website, or reach a new audience, then choose the second audience option ‘People you choose through targeting’.

When you boost a post, the ad results show up in your Facebook Ads Manager where you can access the results and run more detailed reports.

Tips for Which Content to Boost
Make sure you only promote your own content and direct traffic back to your website, not someone else’s.

Select content that’s helpful for your audience. Highlighting sales messages from time to time is acceptable but primarily choose content that will be of value for your audience.

Content that should definitely be promoted is where you harvest email addresses. If you’re offering something for free with an opt-in, definitely promote that content so you can transfer as many fans to your email list as possible.

It’s important to note that Facebook has guidelines about images only having ‘20% text on photos’. If your post has a link in it and the link pulls in a photo that has too much text, you won’t be able to boost or promote it.

Promoting a Facebook Post
This is achieved via the Facebook Ads Manager and gives you more options when it comes to targeting, budget and bidding options. For example, this method allows more options regarding the audience you want to reach, and allows you to pay per click or set a daily limit. The results are also shown in Ads Manager. On the downside, setting up a promoted post takes more time and requires some forward planning.

To promote a post, go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/create/ and select Page Post Engagement. Use the drop-down menus to choose the page and the exact post you want to promote.

You will see the ‘Offer Claims’ use this option if you want to promote some kind of deal. With one of our clients, Back in Motion, we offered 50% off massage for new clients and this method worked well – over 75 people ‘claimed the offer’ where they received an email. (Facebook generated an automatic email with information we provided).

So it is better to boost or promote?
It really depends on the type of post and timing. Many marketers use the boost post option because it’s easy and accessible. This doesn’t necessarily make it the best option to reach the perfect audience however. If you have the time and you have a really great piece of content you want to push, promoted posts should be employed first as it allows more control over who sees your ad and how you pay for it.

If you would like help setting up an advert or campaign, call 03 474 1075 or email cre8ive@cre8ive.co.nz

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Be Wise with your Facebook Cover Image

Posted on Saturday, August 29th, 2015 at 11:18 am.

Written by Philippa Crick

Few tactics are as effective at conveying a brand personality and encouraging engagement on social media as a carefully selected image. In this fast-paced-scroll world of social media, the visual images are the first thing your audience sees and it might be the one thing they remember.

In the two Facebook cover images shown below, which cafe would you frequent? I imagine within less than a second you will have made your mind up about which you prefer based on the image the cafes have chosen to represent themselves.

This example below shows how the owners have so much to say they have simply put EVERYTHING onto their cover image which has effectively made it impossible to take anything in. Keep your message simple and use the description tool to add extra copy in.

To optimise your social presence, you must ensure that the images you’re using to represent your brand are high quality and the best fit for the various networks. To help, we’ve outlined the best image sizes for Facebook (desktop and mobile) and image type.

Your Facebook Page’s profile picture:
Displays at 160 x 160 pixels on computers, 140 x 140 pixels on smartphones and 50 x 50 pixels on most feature phones.
However, the image must be at least 180 x 180 pixels. Your image will be cropped to fit a square.
Ideally we recommend using your logo here or part of your logo that is easily identifiable. Businesses often make the mistake of inserting an image that works on a desktop on the actual Facebook page but in the fan’s newsfeed it becomes unidentifiable.

Your Facebook Page’s cover photo:
– Displays at 851 pixels wide by 315 pixels high on computers
– 640 pixels wide by 360 pixels high on smartphones.
– Doesn’t display on feature phones.
Ideally you want to achieve a fast load so supply the file as an sRGB JPG file that’s 851 pixels wide, 315 pixels tall and less than 100 kilobytes.
For profile pictures and cover photos that display your logo or text, you may get a better result by using a PNG file.

See our handy reference visual below which indicates the areas that aren’t visible in mobile views. Remember to keep all critical information out of these areas.

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12 Key Factors to Creating Successful Websites

Posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2015 at 10:55 pm.

Written by Philippa Crick

The majority of businesses today have a website but how well is it working? Is it drawing in new business and helping to retain existing customers? When potential clients want to research products or services they go online. If the business website does not adequately reflect the quality of your company, then you risk losing revenue opportunities and credibility in the marketplace.
When you are considering building a new site or reviewing an existing website there are some key factors you should include in your process.

1. Website Strategy – you should have a plan for your site, i.e., what are your goals? What are the keywords you want to target? What will be the layout? Get other staff members involved in the planning stage as they may highlight factors you haven’t considered.

2. Define your audience (target market) and listen to them. Tailor your website to appeal to them and find out what your customers want from your site and give it to them. Remember, it’s not about what the company or board think are important but what your customers think is important.

4. Online Research – look at your prospective online competition. What are they doing? What can you learn from others here and overseas and those in different industries? You should always keep a close eye on your competition for new technologies, keywords and new ways to communicate.

5. Make sure you have a well-designed site – this is subjective but there are some golden rules that will always apply: simple, clean and elegant.

6. Protect your brand – make sure your brand is prominently displayed and consistent everywhere it appears on the site. Also, your Brand personality must be on your website. This is where you look at your colours, your typography and all the traits of your brand, to ensure a consistent presentation through your site.

7. A user should be able to easily find what they are looking for. Try not to fill your web pages with unnecessary data – just makes it harder to locate the relevant information amongst the clutter and you end up making your visitor work – eventually they will leave and go to your competition.

8. The content should be current and relevant – allocate a maintenance budget or resources to ensure the site is regularly updated. The content should also have correct spelling, free from typos and grammatical errors.

9. Regularly check your website (customer’s point-of-view) and consider a professional evaluation from time-to-time.

10. Tie in social media intelligently – it shouldn’t dominate your website but it definitely needs to be easily found.

11. Consider how mobile devices – ipads, tablets and smartphones will be able to view your site – ask your web developer if you have a Responsive Design.

12. Promote your website on all marketing material and make use of the Google tools such as Google My Business.

And remember, a website is NEVER finished. A ‘buy it and forget it’ approach just doesn’t work anymore. You have to be constantly updating, refining and optimising. If you’re not keeping pace, you could be losing customers to more dynamic sites.
For further help you can take a look at the website strategy diagram or email philippa@cre8ive.co.nz for assistance.

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Which words in Email Subject lines drive the best response?

Posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2015 at 11:35 am.

Written by Philippa Crick

Who ever complains that they don’t receive enough emails? Email overload is a reality in today’s fast-paced environment. Nearly everyone’s inbox is bombarded with email communications, all of which are competing for the recipient’s time and attention.

To filter out unnecessary messages, most people spend just a fraction of a second evaluating email subject lines. If the subject line doesn’t immediately capture their attention, they move on to the next message in their inbox. It becomes extremely clear that your subject line may be your first and only chance at enticing your recipient to open your email.

The team at Smart Insights did some research into which words seem to drive the best responses and assigned a quality score – which was derived from a combination of response metrics, time-decayed results, and external factors. It’s called the Phrasee Score™. Scores range from 1 to 100. The higher the score the more reliably a phrase drives response.

The key findings for the top 5 and bottom 5 words are as follows:

Action words
These are call-to-action phrases that are intended to elicit a specific behavior.