How Digital Marketers Can fight Facebook Ads inflation
Jun 27, 2018
10 min read
After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has been trying to regain credibility amongst their users ever since. Dropping the gauntlet on brands, they decided to marginally reduce the visibility of branded content on news feeds and favour posts from friends and family instead. This was done to reduce the time people spend on Facebook, but made each moment spent on the platform more valuable and engaging at the same time. Less time spent on Facebook usually results in people seeing fewer ads. And with fewer ad impressions, ad pricing is bound to rise with every brand advertising on the platform. Currently, that is exactly what’s happening with Facebook. With their news feed running out of space for more ads, increasing the price of ad impressions is the next best thing to do to keep the dollars coming in.
Almost 72% of marketers actively run Facebook Ads for engaging their current and building new audiences. When it comes to social media marketing, It indeed is the best way to gain some serious online exposure for businesses. So much that some business owners rely solely on Facebook Ads to make sales. But after the update, advertisers will now have to pay twice as much for an ad to gain the same level of exposure as it used to before and still may not get satisfactory results.
So, what’s next for marketers?
Understanding the new algorithm can help you greatly in preparing yourself to make your advertising efforts work on the platform. Also, you can make use of some other methods to rise above the noise and get seen. Let’s look into some of them -
Aim for active engagement
In the wake of this new algorithm, Facebook ranks those posts first in the news feed which are high on active interactions. Active interaction is when your users share and comment on your post. On the other hand, passive interactions are likes and click-throughs.
Understanding this will help you re-access your entire facebook marketing strategy and develop the kind of content that would garner a ton of active interactions.
And providing relevant content that is of some value to your fans is the number one factor that can get you those. Getting these signals early also determines your place in the news feed. Get them early and your post will soon be at the top.
Make use of Influencers and Facebook Groups
The new Facebook algorithm downranks branded content. One simple way to get around that is by teaming up with authoritative influencers in your industry. Or you can create a ‘Facebook Group’ for your brand and share updates on that group to stand out from the clutter in news feeds. On top of that, Facebook is working on enhancing the features it provides to marketers for both the above mentioned ways.
Let’s talk about influencer content first. It’s a proven fact that people trust influencer content more than what brands have to say about themselves. So, bringing some nice influencers on your side won't hurt you a bit. But how do you find them? Apparently, Facebook is working on their own influencer search engine tool to foster relationships between brands and influencers and will soon roll out globally.
Another way to game this new algorithm update is by creating an open group of your brand and publish content there to gain quick engagements as group members usually receive a notification when there is some activity in a group. Moreover, marketers now have an option to place a pixel in their groups as well that would help them track in-group activity, information on user growth and engagements with their website.
Switch to Instagram
After the Facebook algo-update, many marketers switched to the next best thing - Instagram, for all their advertising purposes.
Instagram boasts some of the highest user engagement numbers when compared to any other social media platform out there and you can definitely use it to your advantage. According to me, the Facebook Ad’s declining impressions issue is not going to go away anytime soon. As more brands flock to Facebook for building their own audiences, the ad space will only get more cluttered in the time to come.
So, exploring other advertising options for your brand other that Facebook seems like the next best thing to do to tackle the issues its been facing lately and Instagram is currently the next best thing out there for you if you are looking to get a great ROI on your advertisement spend.
So, how are you coping up with Facebook’s declining organic reach and reduced ad impressions? Let us know in the comments.
Key tips for Direct To Consumer Brands to enhance Customer Retention and CRM
High customer retention can be very beneficial for direct-to-consumer brands. It can dramatically boost their customer acquisition and sales. However, a company can gain a high revenue or sales with a smaller customer base too. So, they don't necessarily have to expand their client base. Direct-to-consumer brands can have a relatively smaller audience base, but they may have dedicated customers who frequently purchase goods and services from them. You may have come across the fact that reaching out to existing customers is way easier and cost-effective than acquiring new ones. Well, client acquisition is a costly process that requires a lavish amount of marketing spend. Source: Pexels On the other hand, having repeat customers can allow your brand to earn more, get more customers via word of mouth, increase the credibility of its products, and much more. DTC businesses are known for their personalized services, and consumers love that! According to a study, 77% of the customers choose brands that offer a personalized experience or service. Another study highlighted how 75% of the customers trust purchase recommendations when those suggestions are personalized as per their needs. The American multinational corporation "Nike" followed a strategy to increase their personalization within their offerings. They wanted to strengthen their customer relationship and wanted to make better-localized inventory/demand predictions. According to their annual report of 2019, their direct sales were increased by 35%. The direct business channel had outperformed all the other channels; it contributed 32% to Nike's total annual revenue. Thus, DTC sales were quite critical for Nike's future growth. However, this was not possible without effective CRM tactics and client retention strategies. As a DTC brand, your business should be aware of such techniques as they help you grow your business massively. Let’s look into the essential tips to help your DTC brand boost its customer retention and CRM. Tips For DTC Businesses To Improve Their Customer Retention And CRM 1. Direct To Consumer BrandsShould Measure Some Key Metrics To improve your customer relations and client retention, you need to measure your metrics. To analyze your metrics, you need to collect an ample amount of consumer data. It will help you in understanding the true impact of your business. There are a few standard metrics that you should analyze, like your brand's repeat purchase rate. What is the retention rate on your bring-back campaigns? What is the return rate on your email campaigns, discount offers, etc.? Has your Average Order Value or AOV increased? Are there any specific months where your sales rise? Are you tracking your profitability? What kind of CLV or average customer lifecycle does your brand have? You must evaluate these figures to know the present state of your business. These figures will help your team fine-tune its customer retention tactics. 2. Ensure A Consistent And Custom User Engagement Not all first-time purchasers return to a DTC store; the reason might be a lack of trust, interest, or relevance. Hence, when a new customer places an order, your company should present a post-sales campaign to encourage repeat sales. In this way, the customer will interact with your brand more than once. It will induce credibility, trust, and relevance. If you can customize these campaigns according to various customer personas, then you can maximize your sales. We have mentioned some campaigns that you can tailor according to consumer persona. User data-based campaigns One of the most effective ways to send personalized messages to your consumers is by using consumer data. You can develop targeted campaigns based on their activities that trigger their purchase decisions. For instance, to reduce cart abandonment rates, you can send personalized email campaigns that offer a 5-10% discount on the same day. Consumer history-based campaigns A great way to use consumer data to boost customer retention is by using their data from previous purchase history. For example, if a consumer buys a gaming PC, you can target them with a game controller that enables them to elevate their gaming experience. You can advertise the gaming controller via re-engagement email or push notification. Use other channels to uplift customer retention Today, consumers are always on the internet and access the internet through various mediums. They don't like to wait and repel irrelevant messages. Thus, a DTC brand needs to engage its customers on the most active channels. Once they do that, they can ease out communication and reduce any form of delay. So look for active channels through which you can boost engagement. 3. DTC Businesses Should Explore New Digital Channels One area where several DTC brands fail to impress their audiences is real-life customer experiences. If your brand offers cosmetics, sportswear, eyewear, tea, etc., you might struggle to deliver a real-life customer experience. However, many DTC businesses are generating more revenues via online platforms than their brick-and-mortar retail stores nowadays. With O2O commerce, offline, physical stores can allow their consumers to shop directly from their homes. Source: Unsplash Another great marketing strategy for the DTC brand is conversational commerce. Today, businesses use Whatsapp, Facebook messenger, etc., to interact with their consumers. The cross-platform instant messaging app "Whatsapp" has 2 billion monthly active users, which offers features like "Whatsapp for business." Therefore, direct-to-consumer companies can use these apps for interaction where their customers spend most of their time. 4. Encourage Customers To Place Reorders Your business can leverage omnichannel marketing strategies to encourage customers to make repeat orders. You must use omnichannel marketing strategies if your products are perishable. Perishable products include coffee beans, tea leaves, food items, sport or health supplements, etc. These products have a limited shelf life, due to which you get the opportunity to encourage them to buy from your brand if they want to restock their supply. All proactive DTC brands use customized campaigns to trigger purchase emotions among their customers. You may have seen DTC brands sending a 15-day reminder or a one-week reminder to remind their customers to refill their supplies before it ends. Source: Unsplash 5. Be Data-Driven, Test Your Campaigns! While doubling your efforts on various types of marketing campaigns, you must not ignore the effectiveness of these campaigns. To judge that, you need to evaluate them through a testing process. When you incorporate a testing phase, you will eliminate intuition-led tactics and derive data-driven strategies. Even if you want to enhance your repeat purchase rate via email marketing or push notification, you need to test them to get the best results. Successful DTC businesses a/b test their campaigns to analyze which type of campaign is most appealing to their customers. During the testing phase, you can add customer funnels to figure out areas that act as a point of friction. You can then eliminate those areas to get your desired results. For instance, a low CTR rate in an email campaign may signify that a customer isn't satisfied with your content or email design. Takeaways To deduce customer retention to its simplest form, we can say that it's all about making a customer's shopping experience more engaging or enjoyable. All Direct to Consumer brands should focus on making their clients feel valued. The strategies mentioned above can help your brand achieve a high customer retention rate and a better customer relationship. If you are a DTC brand looking to uplift its growth, ROI, customer retention, or client acquisition, get in touch with our experts to know more! ...
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Why Google Tag Manager Can Improve Your Site’s Conversion Rates
Needless to say, digital marketing has at least one thing vaguely defined: a good content. What can qualify as a good content? We have had surveys that took the length of the content as a parameter while others relied on the emphasis of visuals, more data to gain more user attention. However, there is still no sure-shot formula that can explain what a good, successful content is. Even through web analytics, the ideal content parameters have not emerged. It is hard both for marketers as well as industry influencers to determine what content can yield you better in terms of traffic acquisition, conversion, tendency to get viral, etc. Where are our metrics failing? Maybe the key to exploring this can be found in the way we treat our metrics. We certainly keep a check on Page Views, Bounce Rates , and other stuff, but then do they give you the complete picture, if at all? Not Tracking Content Interaction While the Page Views and Bounce Rates do tell you about the user’s behavior on the page, but the crucial information about the user’s interaction with the web page is missing. Did the user read the whole page, did he scroll below to check more, and did he share the content after he scrolled to the bottom or was it shared just after a 2 sec glance? Such information can reveal to us about the impact content generated on the audience and how to convert impressed visitors into future customers. Unless you know how the user interacted with your web page, you can’t do much about improving the user experience either. Google Tag Manager Your business can perform better when it can extract accurate data from your website. Instead of deploying each tag to measure the activity log and keep a track of such crucial website data, you can use Google Tags to make things work simpler and quicker. Google Tags are snippets of website codes, generally in JavaScript, to track the visitor behavior and understand the efficiency of your site. Adding tags and setting up campaigns will work only when it is efficiently managed. While redundant or incorrectly applied tags hamper the site performance and result in duplicate costs or missing data, it is a very time-consuming task for IT team to add or modify tags. Image: SourceHaving a tag manager such as Google Tag Manager can help you create multiple tags that can be managed single-handedly without incurring any delay in time. Define your triggers and get the most up-to-date tag configuration whenever someone visits your site. Apart from monitoring custom activities, Tags can: Minimize Coding Errors Since manual tagging can be difficult and time-taking for any team, Google Tag Manager will help you condense the tags in a manageable form. No more worrying about improperly applied or duplicate tags: your data is secure, and the costs are optimized. Decrease Load Times Your page loads slow due to several factors, one of them is having a lot of individual tags inserted in the web pages. Wouldn't it be helpful if you could replace all the tags with one or two line of code? That is what GTM does. Loading code asynchronously, GTM deploys the application that is relevant to the visitor and the page. This feature reduces the page loading time and boosts the performance of the site. As per a study by Aberdeen Group, even a second's delay in site's response can lower the conversion rate up to seven percents. When your code is streamlined, and no individual tags offer resistance in page loading, your site can bring more visitors and can have better conversion rates. Ever changing digital marketing business requires you to keep your site relevant. While analytics tools like Google Analytics are helpful in extracting the data accurately, factors like deployment delay and site's performance are often dubious under GA. Also, sometimes one may forget to add a Google Analytics event to a critical form submission, or there might be errors in changing a key configuration setting. With a strong tool like Google Tag Manager, things can become more seamless, thereby allowing the marketers access to a larger range of information resources. Working perfectly on both desktop sites as well as mobile apps, this can reduce the manual effort and increase both the preciseness of website data and the performance of the site. ...
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How Do Google Reviews Mean Business For Family Lawyers?
With everything moving online, people have gained access to a giant pool of reviews and ratings related to the type of service they will choose, and you can say the same thing about the family lawyer business. Nowadays, customers are trying to make more informed decisions, especially when working with a legal expert like a family lawyer. They are doing so by reading reviews and ratings given to a specific family lawyer. Reviews related to cars and mobile phones have become very common, so you should never be surprised if your potential clients check your reviews before confirming their final family lawyer. And with 92% of the searches being made on Google, it has become the most important place for improving your reviews. So, in this blog post, we will walk you through the importance, working, and benefits of Google reviews for a better family lawyer business. Google Reviews: The Most Crucial aspect of Your Online Reputation In recent years, we have witnessed a rise in the need for Google reviews among family lawyer firms. Nowadays, it has become necessary as more than 54.9% of the customers check reviews before choosing any product or service. Lawyers have understood the Importance of Digital Presence With time, family lawyers have understood the importance of podcasts, working with family law marketing firms, online advertising, and official websites. Thus the concept of having good reviews has become more familiar among them. Family lawyers now know that just having satisfied customers is not enough. They have understood that making a business successful requires you to inform the world about their client satisfaction. Even the trust for reviews is increasing as nowadays, around 79% of customers admit that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Source: Pexels The Three Important Factors of Google Reviews Just because you have understood the importance of Google reviews doesn’t mean that you should just ask your current and previous clients to start posting reviews. First, you have to understand the three critical factors of Google reviews before working with any family law marketing firm. Quality Any Google review has three essential components; average star rating from all the reviews, star rating from every review, and people’s comments. The most prominently displayed part of the Google review is the average star rating, and to have a better average star rating, most of the reviews should be four to five stars. Quantity The quantity of Google reviews shows many customers have spent time reviewing your services. But don’t be afraid of poor reviews as it is impossible to maintain a 100% customer satisfaction rate. If you have 50 good reviews, then 2 of the bad reviews will be watered down. Recency You can never feel good about a company whose recent review was posted two years ago, and therefore, you must take care of the recency of Google reviews as well. Recency is an essential aspect of the family law digital marketing approach, and the same concept is used in the case of Google reviews as well. Google reviews surpass testimonials in terms of trustworthiness Almost all the family lawyers with good family law digital marketing planning have testimonials on their official website. That is a great approach, and you can keep using testimonials to showcase clients’ experience with your service. But the people checking the testimonials have already found your website. Therefore, you also need to take care of people who haven’t visited your website yet and are still looking for ways to authenticate the quality of service. It is where you can use the power of Google reviews. With Google reviews, you can influence potential clients who haven’t visited your website yet and then use the testimonials and all other aspects of your website to keep them there. That is how an ideal family law digital marketing plan should work. Different ways to gather more Google reviews Begin at the first meeting You should let the clients know the importance of 5-star reviews and ratings at the first consultation. You should also let them know that the 5-star reviews act as a validation of the service you are going to offer. Ask for feedback before the case is closed Never wait for the case to be closed before asking for reviews. It is necessary because many clients don’t find posting reviews once the service is over. During the case, the clients are more interested in interacting with the firm, and therefore, their chances of posting a review are more. Source: Pexels Conclusion The best time to ask for reviews from the clients is when you have done something great for them and when they are pleased with your service. So, always try to strike when the iron is hot instead of when everything has been completed. Personal recommendations have transformed into Google reviews because of the influx of the internet. People have started trusting these reviews instead of considering them as a scam. You have better chances of attracting more potential clients from simple Google search to your website through better reviews. Saffron Edge's marketing team can help you verify your business on Search, Maps, and other Google services. We offer online reputation management services to legal firms that enable them to showcase their online identity, authority, and expertise. It allows them to convert more leads and win more clients. ...
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