Marketers Will See An Increase in Social Media Spending This Year (Study)
According to a poll from Effie Worldwide and Mashable, a overwhelming number of marketers consider social media to be an integral part of their marketing strategy this year. Over 70% plan to increase their social media budget by more then 10% as results are showing favorable returns.
The poll was given to a group of ad agency executives and marketers from firms such as Bank of America, Colgate-Palmolive and Mini USA, among others in February, also found that the primary social media goal is to increase Facebook “Likes”. It has become a household term that the social media giant has managed to sneak into just about everything.
Speaking on behalf of themselves and their clients, group members reported that social networking would take 11.9% of their overall budget this year compared with 13% for TV. That figure should be taken with a grain of salt, however, since $68.7 billion was spent on all TV advertising last year, compared to just $26 billion for Internet advertising, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau.
Much of that spending will go toward trying to find new Facebook fans, which 35% of respondents said is their main goal in 2011. “Increase our presence on mobile” was number two on that list, coming in at 22%.
Other findings
- Brands that were cited for “effectively getting their message across via social media” include Old Spice(chosen by 15%), Pepsi (8%), Starbucks (7%) and Ford (6%).
- 50% of respondents said they use a mix of in-house and agency to handle social media outreach.
- 80% said they were planning iPad-based advertising and/or an iPad-based app this year, while 20% said they were “not planning much” of either.
- 87% said social media was “important” or “very important” to achieving their biggest marketing goal this year.
Source: Mashable
Are you worried about your organic rankings?
Every time you come online do you check your organic rankings? Do Google algorithm changes put you into a panic?
If you are implementing SEO properly you should never have to worry about any such changes. The problem is most people are cheating their way to the top and when Google decides to roll out an improvement, their sites drop off dramatically. I’m going to explain 5 simple ‘rules’ that will help ease the pain of algorithm changes.
It’s definitely worth it to do things the right way the first time. It will save you time and money and the only way you will go is up.
1. Build a site that is worth visiting
Would you visit it? and gain value? Is it easy to navigate? Is it cluttered? These are huge! Put some effort into the design and layout of your site, it’s not all about what Google Bots see.
2. Make sure your code is search engine friendly
Review and research the proper format for titles, descriptions, content, alt tags and contextual links. Build it properly but don’t over due it. Search engine crawlers know a bad site when they see it.
3. Make it easy to convert visitors
Whats the main ‘goal’ of the site. It is for visitors to find your contact information? Is it to display information? Is it to build a community. Figure out the ‘goal’ and design around it. It should be the easiest part on the site to find and navigate to within seconds of landing on your site. The worst thing that could happen is a part of your site doesn’t work properly so test and test again.
4. Build links properly
I’m talking about external links that point toward your site. Be in control and acquire only high quality links. If visitors came from a site that already gave them a bad taste in their mouth, they probably are already turned off by your content before they get there, same with search engines. Write meaningful articles with high value content and give them a reason to click the links. A few hundred high quality links are far better then a thousand spammy ones.
5. Update your site regularly
Keep your site up to date. Posting new, fresh, original content pleases both visitors and search engines. Avoid sales pitches and have interesting and valuable information.
This may seem like a lot of work but if your serious about your site surviving and growing you’ll do it. Trust me, investing time early on will pay off later. Search engines can make and break websites so make sure your’s isn’t the one breaking.
Heavily inspired by: seodiva.net
“Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act” or simply S.3386
President Obama just signed into law a new bill that could change the way internet marketing is run. Depending on how it is enforced, many marketers online today are considered criminals. Theoretically this bill was put into place to protect the consumer from Acai Weight Loss and Make Money Online re-bill sites. These types of site have gotten a lot of press because it was hard for any of them to be prosecuted. Check out these hi-lights though, it appears that many honest, well honester, marketers have gotten trapped too.
- The bill expressly prohibits data transfer of any consumer financial information for the purpose of billing a 3rd party transaction. For post-transaction upsells, billing information has to be re-collected. Ouch.
- The bill requires material terms of all negative option offers to be disclosed prior to the collection of consumer billing information.
- The bill includes references to credit, debit, AND bank account information (meaning that the ACH and check 21 billers in the industry are no longer off the hook.)
Many online sites run on a business strategy of upsells. Their initial product might just break even or even lose them money, but the upsells are where the real money is. The majority of products on Clickbank run by this strategy. It’s unknown how the FTC will enforce this bill, especially with marketers located outside the US but we can expect to see some changes in the future.
Creating a Great Facebook Ad
When Facebook first introduced their advertising program, marketers all over the Internet were ecstatic. Facebook introduced targeting on such a large scale that no one had seen before. Advertisers were able to target where people lived, their age, sex, relationship status, interests, and place of work. These were great tools and Facebook already had a huge population at that time to take advantage of.
In order for Facebook to be successful for your business, you need to know how to construct an attractive ad that produces the right kind of traffic for your specific site. A great place to start is to read the Facebook Advertising Guidelines. You’ll never get an ad created if you don’t follow these rules. Each ad that is created is carefully analyzed by a Facebook employee before it is allowed to be shown to the masses. Your style or category of site might not even be allowed on Facebook at all, so reading this might save you a lot of time.
Creating an successful ad may seem like a tough thing to do, but just think of it this way. Create an ad that you would like to click. Make it interesting and true to the content of the page it sends people. If the ad is misleading you will just be wasting your money on useless traffic. Study your target market, find their interests and view it from their eyes. Hard work while creating the ad will almost always pay off in the end.
Setting Up the Ad Campaign
Facebook has great tool available that allows their service to meat your budget, whatever it is. I recommend taking it slow at first to see what works best for you. Here is an example of an ad on Facebook and it’s specific targeting. It was created to advertise a skateboarding eBook.
As you can see, each ad consists of a title, image and a short description. There is no limited to the number of ads you can run under one campaign so it’s best to create many. Make each one just a little different, maybe a different title or image. The trick is to see which one has the highest clicks or CTR (click through rate). The more effective the ad, the higher the CTR will be. Here is an example of the above campaigns statistics after being run for a few days.
Campaign Stats
3,746 clicks
1,505,202 impressions
0.249% CTR
.08 average click
$301.14 spent
This particular ad managed to attract 3,746 clicks at an average cost of $0.08 per click. The ad was displayed 1,505,202 times which means the CTR was 0.249%. Facebook ads tend to have a lower CTR then other PPC (pay per click) services but you tend to get a higher quality of traffic. In this case, the advertiser spent just over $300 and in turn, 3,746 people visited their site.
To determine if the ad is profitable we have to look at the goal of the ad. Your goal might simply be to raise awareness of your site or maybe you have a service you would like to sell. This ad was promoting an eBook on skateboarding and below is the sales resulting from this ad.
Total Revenue: 330.27
From the revenue received, this ad produced a profit of around $30. This might not seem like much but each campaign can be scaled up or down for more of less clicks. For every dollar that was spent on this ad, an average of 110% came back as profit. If they were to spend $1000 you could expect somewhere around $100 in profit.
If you apply this logic to another type of business, say web design like ours. Each of those customers may have cost us 90% of the money we made, but their business is bound to provide us with more from referrals and visitors of their sites. Viewing a visitor as just a sales number is not always the full story.
Once you have a profitable ad, analyse it and figure out what makes it work. Tweak it more and more to see how big of profit margin you can achieve.
For a great resource on Facebook Ads and news, check out 4 Hour Affiliate.