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Facebook Fan Pages for Business

admin • May 3, 2011 • Comments (0)

Should you use one?

In a previous post I mentioned how you need to look at what copy you are writing in your Facebook ads to improve click through. As we are typically dealing with browsers rather than buyers trying to get a sale directly from an ad might be a tall order. So the best step is to get clicks, and preferably ‘Likes’ to your page and then sell later.

So the question is should you have one? I would say its certainly easier for ‘sexy’ products where prospects can get enthused, even excited over your product/service as opposed to an offering which doesn’t invoke much enthusiasm to build fans but its another marketing channel your business cannot afford to overlook. You can put offers on your fan page to entice prospects and, most importantly, build a relationship.

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When writing good copy isn’t relevant…

admin • May 3, 2011 • Comments (0)

OK I thought there wouldn’t be an occasion to discard everything you have learned about good copywriting but I may have just found it. I have dipped my toe in the water of Facebook advertising before and like many others have found it extremely difficult to monetize offers.

What I had done in these instances is taken years of writing good google adwords advertisements and used that as the basis of generating Facebook ads. However when you think about it there is a fundamental difference from a Facebook user to a google searcher. One is (or you can determine) actively looking for information or to buy a product or solve a problem and the other is simply looking to hook up with friends and share their feelings/thoughts etc. The bottom line is this, you have no idea if they are looking to buy your product or service.

So you need to re-think your ads, you might not be able to sell them on your product or service but you might be able to get them to ‘Like’ your page which is setup specifically to promote your product or service. Once they are a fan you can then build that relationship and monetise later. The key here is, and my initial testing has found that you can significantly boost your click through rates, create a fan base and drive down your cost per clicks.

If you are seriously looking to do facebook advertising please get in touch here.

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Don’t waste space (or time)

admin • April 21, 2011 • Comments (0)

I was watching some advertisements on television the other night and one popped up for Dyson vacuum cleaners. It started with the line ‘the new Dyson vacuum cleaner is designed to make cleaning easier’. Now that statement struck me as odd for several reasons. First the ‘statin’ the bleedin’ obvious’ comment springs to mind. Secondly, its a little patronising, does anyone seriously think its designed to maker cleaning harder? Of course not and finally theres why even waste valuable airtime making this statement in the first place.

Which brings me onto my point, dont waste precious ad space, regardless of media pointing out things that

a) Your prospect already knows
b) Does little to add any real benefit to your prospect

Remember you have to capture attention in the blink of an eye, you do this with benefit oriented, relevant headlines, not with fluff!

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Customer Lifetime Value Tool

admin • April 13, 2011 • Comments (0)

Need a quick and easy way to check just how much each and every customer is worth to your business? The free version of my DataIntelligence tool gives you quick and easy basic metrics to determine what your average customer LTV actually is. You can download it here.

Free Customer Lifetime Value Calculator

DataIntelligence Free

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The Problem with Affiliate Marketing

admin • March 2, 2011 • Comments (0)

Affiliate Marketing is a great way to generate a passive income. Having done the initial work to determine what needs are in the marketplace, what product can fulfil that need you can embark on a campaign to drive traffic to the offer and collect a commission for each item sold.

Sounds simple? Well there are people making money with affiliate marketing but there is one issue that many newcomers don’t factor in. The conversion rate of the landing page. You may well be getting a good click through rate from your site or your advertisement but once your prospect lands on the affiliate site they may not buy because that site isn’t compelling enough for them to buy.

I joined one affiliate site sent 136 prospects to the offer from Facebook pay per click and not one sale! The issue here is that I cant do anything about the landing page!

So what do you do? Well you could look at free traffic using SEO to get prospects to your offer, or, you can look at what other affiliates are promoting to check the commerciality of any offers. One tool I use is keywordspy. This allows you to see what ads and keywords are being bidded on in Google PPC for a specific keyword.

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Calculating Customer Lifetime Value

admin • March 1, 2011 • Comments (0)

So what is ‘customer lifetime value’ (CLV) and why should you measure it?

Customer Lifetime Value is an extremely important metric that any size of business should be using to allow them to grow the business effectively. Why? Because in a nutshell it allows you to determine what you can spend to acquire a new customer and still remain profitable.

Imagine if you knew that every new customer cost you £100 to acquire but they were actually worth £200 to your business. You would keep spending that £100 over and over to grow the business.

Sounds straightfoward but many businesses don’t measure this or perhaps are not sure how to.

Firstly you need to determine your cost of acquiring a new customer. Now sadly this is where alot of systems fail, staggeringly many CRM systems, the very things that should be measuring this metric don’t! You need to track each channel you are marketing in and how many leads each channel generates. If you know your spend on a campaign and the number of customers it has produced then you have your starting point.

Now you need to calculate the total spend a customer makes over their ‘lifetime’. Now again this isn’t that straight-forward as how do you determine a customer that is dead from one that is live? Well you can use another metric called ‘latency’. Latency is the amount of time between each customer purchase. If you get an average for all customers you can roughly predict those that will buy again and this that won’t. (I’ll cover latency and customer retention in another post)

Once you have your ‘average’ customer lifetime value and your current customer acquisition cost you can now determine if there are funds to enable you to increase your marketing spend. Many marketers use these metrics to actually lose money or break even on the initial sale to boost customer conversions as they know they can recover this cost on the ‘back-end’ by selling higher value items. This is also known as ‘moving the free line’.

 

 

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Are you Measuring the Effectiveness of your Campaigns?

admin • February 9, 2011 • Comments (0)

There has been a huge uptake in customer relationship management (CRM) systems over the last couple of years. All businesses from small to large have been clamouring to select, buy and implement CRM as it is seen as a ‘must-have’. But I wonder, how many businesses have actually measured their return on that investment? How is your CRM system delivering benefit not just in operational process but in additional sales and new customers? Sure your CRM will tell you how many leads have been won, the status of those leads, which salesperson brought in that lead. It will also tell you how many and the potential value of any opportunities arising from that lead. But of course the real crux of the matter is you need to measure/test/refine/repeat the effectiveness of your campaigns.

And there lies the problem, whilst most CRM systems on the market allow you to create a campaign against a list of customers it is the segmentation of your customers that falls down. Why? because even if you do have an integrated CRM and financials system the chances are you cannot create what I would term as dynamic campaigns. I had this very request a few weeks ago from a Sage CRM customer. “We want to be able to create a campaign based around customers who have bought product x”. Can the system do it? No! Can it be made do it? Absolutely. Here are 4 examples, from hundreds of possible, dynamic campaigns you could be using (but probably won’t be);

  • Customers who bought product x
  • Customers who have spent more than (or less than) x pounds, dollars, euros
  • Customers who have bought within the last 180 days but not within the last 90 days
  • Customers who have only bought once from you

So the key is getting at your financials data and using it to create customer segments that are meaningful (and hopefully responsive!) to an offer in the campaign.

 

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Facebook Pay-per-click

admin • January 20, 2011 • Comments (0)

As I have been doing Google Adwords Pay per click (PPC) I thought it was time to start at looking at PPC on the Facebook platform. Why? Well first off I know that some niches are extremely competitive now on Google so looking at another channel I wanted to see how effective Facebook is.

Whilst I typically work in the ‘offline’ sector, i.e. marketing for real bricks and mortar businesses I typically ‘battle-test’ strategies and techniques using online products. The common consensus at the moment seems to be that Facebook has plenty of eyeballs but alot more ‘spiers’ than ‘buyers’.

The big difference is that Facebook ads are ‘contextual’ as opposed to ‘search’. What I mean is that with Google a prospect has actually typed in a keyword or phrase so there is a good chance they a looking for a solution to a problem and a good chance they are looking to spend money to solve that problem. Facebook ads on the other hand appear when the demographics you have specified match the user that is currently on Facebook. The issue is you have no idea where they are in the buying cycle, or if they are looking to buy at all.

However, if you have a product or service which targets a tight demographic it could be a useful channel to add to your current marketing efforts. I will cover Facebook again and specifically what you can do to lower your cost per click.

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What is a cost-effective Email Marketing Solution?

admin • January 5, 2011 • Comments (0)

This is from an original post I made way back in April 2008 on my technology blog but its still as valid today.

The flippent answer would be one that generates a definative and repeatable return on investment! There is going to be a cost for any email marketing, whether it be the design of the layout of the email if you need to make it look enticing, or using a third party service which charges a subscription fee. Before you do anything though consider;

  • How targetted are the prospects on the list?
  • How well written is the copy? Are you starting with a compelling, benefit oriented headline?
  • How compelling is the actual offer?

Always remember to do small scale tests first. if you have a list of 10,000 prospects why not come up with two different emails (same offer, different copy in the email) and send email A to 100, and B to another 100 and compare the results.

If you are going to use a third party service then check they offer costs on a ‘per subscriber’ and not ‘per email’ basis. If you are being charged per subscriber it means you can email the list several times for no additional cost. One great service which does that and offers a whole lot more besides is mailchimp.

 

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