A call to action, or CTA for short, is a digital marketing term that refers to a prompt that invites users to take a specific action, such as clicking a button or entering their email addresses into an online field.
Call to action buttons can be found in every type of digital marketing campaign, including email campaigns, PPC ads, social media marketing campaigns, and even SMS text campaigns. In indirect forms of digital marketing, like blogs, you will also find CTAs such as invitations to leave comments below a blog article and social media posts that ask followers to “like, share, and follow.”
Common examples of CTAs include:
● Sign Up
● Subscribe
● Learn More
● Get Started
Call to action buttons help to guide potential customers through the buying journey. When you place smartly worded CTAs strategically across your online platforms, you can increase the CTR, or click through rate, of your campaign while simultaneously reducing the bounce rate. In short, CTAs improve conversions and boost revenue, results that every business owner should want.
Are you eager to incorporate effective CTAs into your digital marketing campaigns? Skip the article and contact FTx 360 right now! Or you can…
…read on to learn about the different types of CTA buttons you can use in your digital marketing campaigns to convert curious visitors into paying customers.
This type of CTA works best for businesses that sell software as a service, but can also benefit any company that offers subscription packages. According to GrooveHQ.com, offering a free trial can increase conversions by 328%. If you’re trying to sell a product or service that’s especially complex or “niche,” and your brand isn’t well known, then offering prospective buyers a free trial should set their mind at ease and generate positive word-of-mouth marketing in the interim. Once the free trial period has concluded, users will be all the more inclined to sign up for a paid subscription.
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You can use a Free Trial CTA on your website landing page, in a paid social media advertisement, or anywhere in-between. But you’ll first need to decide whether the free trial should be for 30 days or 14 days. It’s also a good idea to include a feedback survey towards the end of the free trial period.
Remember, the purpose of the free trial is to convince users to purchase the product or service, so aim to offer them just enough days to get them hooked. Then, be sure to keep an eye on the conversion rate of free trial users who end up purchasing the product or service after the trial has concluded. If users aren’t converting into customers, you’ll need to evaluate both the cost of the item and its perceived usability based on the feedback surveys.
When you state the greatest benefit of your product or service, your call to action will be all the more powerful. This type of CTA—the “Obvious Benefit” CTA—can be used to make a strong argument to consumers. For example, consumers might not automatically know that your product ordinarily costs thousands of dollars. By including the regular retail value as part of your CTA strategy, you can effectively convince people to buy the item at its current discounted price. You can use two buttons, or a blurb and a button, when designing your Obvious Benefit CTA, like we’ve done here:
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As you can see, the first line of the CTA states the obvious benefit of having a high-speed website. The second line of the CTA, which is the clickable button, clearly states what the visitor will receive once they click, namely their website speed will be analyzed. Obvious benefit CTAs are ideal for your email marketing campaigns, as opposed to paid social media campaigns, because email recipients are qualified leads, generally speaking, who will be more likely to click. Also, emails allow for a greater opportunity to make a structured argument to your readers.
The main thing to watch out for when using Obvious Benefit CTAs is the CTR. If your CTA click through rate is unusually low, it could be the result of convoluted or confusing verbiage used in the call to action itself. Are you trying to use a statistic to convince people to click? Make sure the statistic and its correlating point are crystal clear.
Social Proof CTAs are all about proving how popular your brand, products, and services already are, in order to convince consumers that they should give your business a try. In order to pull off using social proof in your CTAs, you’ll first have to gather data about your brand. What can you brag about? Do you have over ten thousand WordPress blog subscribers? Have you just surpassed fifty thousand YouTube followers? Whatever milestones you’ve reached as a business can be leveraged to develop a strong CTA. Just make sure that you aren’t embellishing your stats.
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It should come as no surprise that Social Proof CTAs work really well on social media. Try building a positive customer review into your Instagram CTA, or include the latest industry award your brand received in your next Facebook lead generation CTA. Even if your company is new and you haven’t garnered a ton of “social proof” yet, you can still leverage one of your recent achievements to create a powerful CTA, especially if you use video for your social post or ad.
Yes, video. Right now, social media video content far surpasses photo and image content when it comes to increasing engagement. When using video, you don’t need to write out your social proof in your caption. Instead, you can directly tell your audience why your brand is awesome and what you can do for them. For example, run an Instagram & Facebook ad campaign featuring a video where you tell viewers, “We’re the first organic vitamin company to obtain USP certification for ingredient purity and potency!”
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Are you looking for an affordable digital marketing agency to handle all of your marketing campaigns, including custom lead generation strategies that utilize the CTAs we covered in this article? FTx 360 offers social media marketing and email marketing services that include campaign handlings and marketing automation to simplify your life and change the way you do business. Contact us to learn more.
The restaurant industry is chock-full of competition. In order to stand out and succeed, restaurateurs must provide diners with delicious meals and impeccable service, and that’s not all.
Restaurants must also provide diners with convenience, community, and conversation.
In other words, today’s diners expect to have an excellent experience, from the moment they decide to dine at your restaurant to the moment they sign the bill, and beyond.
They want ordering and dining options that are convenient. They want to feel welcome when they dine-in, and when they post photos of their meals on social media, they want to feel like they’re part of a community. Whether ordering delivery from home, picking their orders up from the curb, or meeting their friends at your restaurant, your customers are going to want to talk about their experiences online, in either a positive or negative light.
If you’re only offering food and beverages at your restaurant, you’re missing out. But the good news is that providing your diners with so much more than just a menu isn’t beyond your reach.
Give your diners an excellent all around customer experience by implementing these 5 powerful restaurant marketing strategies that are designed to help you retain loyal customers and increase revenue.
Mobile apps spell convenience, plain and simple. Does your restaurant offer customers a mobile app with ordering and payment options? This is not to be confused with a responsive web design that functions smoothly on smartphones, though it wouldn’t hurt to make sure your site is responsive. If you haven’t launched a mobile app for your restaurant, consider investing in a white-label app.
Here are some reasons to provide your customers with a mobile app:
● Consumers prefer in-app ordering above any other online ordering method
● Restaurant mobile apps help to increase customer loyalty
● A mobile app is a digital marketing tool that will give you direct access to your customers
Successfully marketing your restaurant can be tricky due to the fact that you’re not aiming to target a nationwide or worldwide audience. Quite the opposite, in fact, your goal as a restaurateur is to draw a local crowd of customers to your business. Using the hashtag #foodie on Instagram and maintaining a recipe blog are actually not going to cut it. Instead, focus your marketing locally by enhancing your Google My Business page. Add the Bookings feature to your GMB page, and enable the Check In feature on your social media pages.
Increase local SEO by incorporating the following ideas:
● NAP optimization is as simple as adding your Name, Address, and Phone Number to your business website
● Plug local SEO into your website content and GMB description to rank as high as possible on SERP
● Use geo-targeting in any social media advertisements you plan on running
Customer loyalty rewards programs have long since been proven to be one of the most effective marketing strategies for increasing customer retention and boosting sales. For restaurants, loyalty programs can be especially beneficial because they incentivize diners to try new menu items, increase order sizes, and return more frequently. You’ll want to choose a loyalty platform that comes with a mobile app and integrates with your online ordering system. We recommend the Loyal~n~Save platform.
Loyalty programs benefit both diners and restaurants in the following ways:
● Restaurant loyalty members dine 20% more often and spend 20% more per visit
● A loyalty program is a powerful marketing tools that enables you to launch email marketing campaigns, SMS text campaigns, and in-app push notification campaigns
● Loyalty programs include built-in CRM that will help you maximize the personalization of your marketing campaigns
It’s almost as though certain social media platforms were made for restaurant marketing. They say that experiencing a tasty meal begins with drinking in the sight of the food. You can give your diners a virtual taste of all that your restaurant has to offer by posting high quality photos of your dishes on Instagram and Facebook. An even better marketing idea is to include videos on Facebook Live, Instagram Stories, and YouTube that feature your chefs and cooks preparing your most popular meal items.
Consider the following your high-quality action plan:
● Encourage your customers to post photos of their meals on social media to increase word-of-mouth marketing
● Add your best photos and videos to your Google My Business page, and thank your online reviewers who do the same
● Include high-quality photos in your email marketing campaigns
Consumers rely on customer reviews to help them make purchasing decisions. Unlike other types of businesses, restaurants face extreme challenges because they must provide excellent food and outstanding service. A perky waitress is not going to make up for a bland dish, for example, which means that one subpar aspect of a customer’s dining experience can lead to a low-star review. Restaurants are held to such a high standard, in fact, that you would be remiss to overlook the importance of online reputation management and marketing. Even if you receive a poor customer review, there’s a lot you can do to correct it both publicly and privately.
Guard your online reputation in these ways:
● Respond to all reviews, both positive and negative, but avoid using autoresponders
● Strategically use loss leaders, such as a free dish or drink, to reward positive reviewers with surprise-and-delight and to assuage unhappy diners who left negative reviews
● Hire an online reputation management and marketing agency to leverage positive reviews and mitigate negative ones
FTx 360 offers unique, sure-shot marketing techniques for restaurants that are designed to attract and retain customers while spreading brand awareness locally across social media platforms and Google.
Our digital marketing services include website design & development, eCommerce solutions, content writing & marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, and other creative services that will transform your restaurant business into a growing enterprise.
Contact our marketing team to get started.
Have your eCommerce sales plateaued? Have they dropped off altogether? What if your eCommerce sales are barely increasing?
There’s actually a lot you can do to drive online traffic to your website and boost eCommerce sales. We’re talking about digital marketing. Implementing the right digital marketing strategy can effectively increase the number of shoppers who visit your website as well as increase the number of sales transactions that occur daily.
You might be thinking, what is “the right digital marketing strategy” exactly?
The answer to that question is tricky, and could depend on the nature of your business and your target audience. For example, if you own a B2B company, then the strategies you use to target potential customers will be different than if you own a B2C retail store.
That being said, there are a handful of digital marketing strategies that will deliver powerful results regardless of your industry or market.
Here are five marketing tips and ideas for your eCommerce site to help you drive website traffic, turn visitors into customers, and increase revenue.
Your eCommerce website visitors will not be able to touch, examine, or handle the products you’re selling, which is why the visuals you provide on your site are so important. Even if you’re selling SaaS or other services on your website, we recommend that you enhance the visuals as much as possible. What do we mean by that?
Instead of merely using a few product photos, include many high-res photos and a zoom-in function that visitors can use to examine the product in question. If possible, use 3D images of your products as well, and integrate “turning and rotating” capabilities so that shoppers can get a 360° view of the items you’re selling.
Try including a video tutorial or virtual tour of your SaaS, if applicable. When potential customers are able to watch a video demonstration of how your cloud-based software interface works, they will gain a better impression of the platform and be more likely to subscribe, enroll, or buy.
Digital marketers know that it’s far easier to retain an interested customer than it is to interest a brand-new one in shopping for the first time. This fact is true for both brick-and-mortar retailers and eCommerce websites, which is why all types of businesses dedicate a substantiation portion of their marketing efforts to targeting their existing customer base.
Your eCommerce site should have built-in features that enable shoppers to create their own secure accounts. These accounts should also have a Wish List feature that shoppers can use to “save” items to their Wish Lists. You can design personalized email marketing campaigns to remind customers about their Wish List items.
This marketing idea works best when the Wish List reminder emails contain detailed, relevant information. For example, don’t just remind a recipient that they never bought the sneakers on their Wish List. Instead, include customer reviews of those sneakers, offer the recipient a “buy this product now” discount code, or provide them with another incentive that will reward them for acting fast.
User-generated content is any digital content that is created by users, consumers, and “regular people” and not by a company or brand. User-generated content is typically found on social media platforms, but you can also find UGC across the internet. For example, a Google My Business customer review can be considered a type of UGC.
User-generated content that features your products or services is a form of word-of-mouth marketing. When business owners like you recycle user-generated content on their own platforms, it has the same effect. UGC tends to resonate with consumers. Consumers trust the opinions of other shoppers far more than they trust traditional advertising claims, which is why you should definitely incorporate UGC into your marketing strategy.
Try turning five-star customer reviews into social media posts. Retweet and repost UGC that features your products or services. Partner with social media influencers and ask them to post “unboxing” videos that feature them opening your products and using them in such a way that inspires their social followers to try your brand.
In an article we published earlier this month called How to Set Up an Instagram & Facebook Shop, we discussed the importance of why eCommerce retailers should set up Shops on both of these social platforms, and you should definitely check out the article when you have time. The biggest point we made was that when eCommerce retailers decide not to set up social media “shops,” they actually miss out on a lot of sales.
You’re probably thinking that you don’t need mini-eCommerce shops on social media when you already have the real-deal i.e. a fully-functioning, responsive, mobile-friendly eCommerce website. We get it. But we’re here to tell you that, nope, you’re wrong #sorrynotsorry. For today’s consumer, convenience is everything, which means that unfortunately, your Instagram visitors might not be willing to navigate out of the IG app just to shop on your eCommerce site.
The marketing possibilities that will result from having an Instagram and Facebook Shop are endless. Once your Shop is functioning, you can tag specific Shop items within your social posts, Stories, and even in the description boxes of your Facebook Live broadcasts.
Our final marketing tip today will help consumers emotionally connect with your brand, which is necessary if you want to gain and retain loyal eCommerce customers. Feature your company’s values in your marketing campaigns. In other words, we recommend that, first and foremost, you advertise what you stand for. Once you convey to your audience your brand’s ethos, then you can suggest relevant products that they might be interested in buying.
Of course, not all of your marketing campaigns and social media posts need to be focused on the issues that your brand cares about, but a portion of them should be. This will benefit your sales, too, because while the sneakers that you sell might not be a “conversation starter,” the social issues that you care about certainly will be.
The more comments, likes, and engagement your social media posts accumulate, the faster brand awareness will spread online. And the resulting brand recognition will attract website visitors and increase eCommerce sales.
Do you need help marketing your eCommerce website? FTx 360 offers a full suite of eCommerce site development and marketing services that can help drive online traffic to your website and convert visitors into customers that return to shop time and again.
Our web designers work with scalable, easy-to-use eCommerce platforms such as Shopify, Magento, and BigCommerce. Allow our skilled experts to revamp your site to optimize conversion rates.
If your website already functions beautifully, but your conversion rate is low, consider trying our digital marketing services:
● Organic SEO—Our affordable SEO services will insert targeted, relevant keywords into your website content to generate organic, refined, and consistent eCommerce traffic.
● Local SEO—Our local SEO services can optimize your web pages according to the location or locations that you want to rank in to drive organic traffic.
● Social Media Marketing—Our social media specialists can design and implement outstanding social media marketing campaigns for your company that will attract users, convert followers into customers, and turn customers into brand ambassadors.
● Product Copy Creation—Our creative content writers can produce accurate, SEO-friendly descriptions for your products and services that will engage your website visitors and boost your sales.
● Payment Gateway Integration—Our webmasters can integrate the leading payment gateways into your eCommerce site so that you can provide your online shoppers with multiple payment options and secure transactions.
Contact our marketing specialists to learn more about how FTx 360 can help you stand out within your industry, retain customers, and plan for long-term success.
Automation is the process of replacing manual, human tasks with technologies. Setting up an online auto-debit to pay for a monthly bill is an example of automation. Instead of having to remember to pay that particular bill every month and going through the online process of electronically submitting a payment, you instead set up an auto-debit, and the online banking platform will handle the work of paying the bill on time every month.
Saving time and effort, and reducing human errors, are just some of the benefits of using automation.
Your marketing tasks can also be automated to save you time and effort, and reduce human errors. Marketing automation is defined as any technology that manages the digital marketing processes you ordinarily handle by hand. Marketing automation utilizes artificial intelligence to a degree, as well as machine-learning strategies, and can streamline multifunctional, omni-channel campaigns for you.
Implementing marketing automation at your business enables you to interact with potential customers as well as loyal customers across email, web, social media, SMS text message, and any other method you would like.
Nowadays, automating your digital marketing is typically done via a marketing automation platform.
Any online platform that offers marketing automation in the form of Software as a Service, or SaaS, is considered a marketing automation platform. These platforms provide marketers with the tools to upload, organize, and schedule all of their digital marketing content and campaigns, including automating social media posts, blog article posts, and email marketing campaigns. Marketing automation platforms also integrate with content management systems (CMS) and customer relationship management (CRM) software to centralize all marketing into one software solution.
In this article, we are going to focus on the two most popular forms of marketing automation that business owners like you can benefit from using, which are social media marketing automation and email marketing automation.
If you’ve already done your research and know all about marketing automation, and would like to discover the marketing automation solutions offered by FTx 360, we invite you to sign up for a free 30 day trial with our agency. You will only be asked to supply your business name, email address, business location, and telephone number. No payment information is required and there are absolutely no strings attached to this incredible offer.
Social media automation refers to automating various aspects of your social media marketing, which can include automating the publication of your posts, automating your responding comments, and automating the lead generation aspects of your social media advertisements, if applicable.
By automating certain aspects of your social media marketing, you can grow your business and optimize ROI while saving time. Social media marketing automation can also effectively support your efforts to spread brand awareness, engage potential customers, and gain social followers, all of which help promote your business.
Though there are indisputable benefits of using social media automation, many marketers believe that automating your social media marketing defeats the purpose and beauty of social media in the first place. Simply put, these marketers feel that social media marketing automation is actually anti-social, because it involves replacing human interactions with machine-programmed actions.
The social media marketing specialists at FTx 360 both agree and disagree. Yes, the beauty of social media is that social platforms enable users to socially interact with each other. But the fact of the matter is that if you want to post multiple times a day and every post generates a ton of engagement, you will not be able to keep up with interacting with every single follower. That’s just the way it goes.
You can greatly alleviate the amount of manual attention you give your social media accounts by automating your posts. This way, your social media posts will automatically publish. If you schedule your automatic posts days, weeks, and months in advance, it can free you up to spend your “social” time manually replying to comments and quickly tending to any customer service messages that come into your DMs.
To provide deeper insight regarding your social media content, we would like to introduce you to the 5-3-2 Rule. Any of the content categories we propose below can be automated. Then, as your social followers comment, reply, and interact with your posts, you can engage them further by responding.
This social media posting rule can be used as a content guideline. The types of posts you make should be diverse and surprising so that your followers remain engaged. For every 10 social posts you publish, here is the content ratio breakdown you can schedule:
● 5 out of 10 social posts should consist of relevant, shared content from third parties
● 3 out of 10 social posts should consist of original content with the exclusion of hard sales pitches
● 2 out of 10 social posts should consist of personal, opinionated, or ruminative content that humanizes your brand to help followers relate to you
As you can see, there is virtually no emphasis on using social media to make hard sales pitches to your audience. And equally important, about half of your social media posts should be shared links from other websites. That being said, you can schedule just about all of these social posts ahead of time using a social media scheduling calendar like the one that can be found on our resources web page.
Our resources web page also includes a free download of our Marketing Automation Playbook, a how-to ebook that will help you discover all the ways in which marketing automation can help you capture more leads, convert leads into customers, and increase revenue.
Whoops, we didn’t mean to digress. We just really love our social media scheduling calendar…
Another aspect of your social media posting schedule that you can automate is sharing your latest blog articles.
We all know that maintaining a blog is an excellent way to generate new SEO and attract new web visitors to your website or eCommerce site. You can maximize your business blog’s engagement factor and digital virality by posting the article links to Facebook, Twitter, and other relevant social media platforms.
Best of all, you don’t have to do this manually. Rather than copying and pasting the URL links of each blog article to your social media accounts as articles are published online, instead you can automate this process by linking your RSS blog feed to the social media accounts that you want those articles to appear on.
Depending on the blogging platform you’re using, connecting your blog feed to social media should be fast and easy. Just be sure to run a few tests to check the formatting and make certain that the article web links auto-generate the blog information that you want to appear in the social media post. Ideally, you want the article’s headline and primary image with a few lead-in sentences from the article to appear in the post itself. That way, your social followers will be intrigued, click on the link, and read the full article on your business blog. If the headline and image are thought provoking, you may discover that your social followers begin commenting right away, even before they read the article!
Automating your email marketing campaigns is by far the most popular form of automation. All digital marketers use email automation. There are many different types of email automation that you can implement, which we will cover in a moment.
First, we want to make the point that manually and personally sending out emails is ideal, but impractical. If your business is brand-new, you might be able to get away with manually sending every email and you might even love it, but composing a personal email every time simply isn’t scalable. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to implement email automation for certain workflows, and that’s okay. You can still retain as much personalization in your emails if you follow our advice.
The most helpful email automation campaigns to set up include:
● Abandoned Shopping Cart Emails
● Welcome Emails to New Subscribers
● Subscription Email Newsletters
● Promotional Emails
● Lead Magnet Onboarding Emails
● Re-Engagement Emails (After a Recipient Hasn’t Engaged for 3 – 6 Months)
By automating some or all of the above mentioned email campaigns, you can save a ton of time and effort, and that’s not all. You will also provide your visitors, customers, and subscribers with the professionalism they expect. You see, most people really enjoy receiving automated emails because these emails provide them with valuable content without the added pressure that usually comes with receiving a personalized email from a business owner.
Just remember to always include a CTA in your automated emails, no matter the reason for the email.
Then, the further along the sales funnel or customer journey someone gets, the more personalization you can give them. In fact, at a certain point in the customer journey, automation is no longer appropriate, so you should take customers out of the automation channel and email them directly to authentically engage them.
Are you convinced that using marketing automation to support your social media and email marketing campaigns will benefit your business? Good!
But how will you know which marketing automation platform to sign up for? That’s a great question. Not all marketing automation platforms are created equal or priced the same, which is why our digital marketing specialists put together a helpful research check-list you can reference while you shop around.
If, for some reason, you cannot find answers to these questions on a marketing automation provider’s website, then we strongly encourage you to call the provider and speak to a sales representative. Do not assume that the platform will meet your business needs and sign a contract before you know what features and services will and will not be included.
● What is the minimum licensing fee?
● What services are included for the minimum fee?
● How many contacts can you have for the base rate?
● What are the tiered rates and the number of contacts you can have for each tier?
● What is the minimum license period?
● Can you auto pay in monthly installments or do you have to pay for a full year up front?
● Have other businesses like yours used and loved the platform?
● Does the platform offer user training? Is training free, or does it come at an additional cost?
FTx 360 can automate your marketing activities across multiple channels. Our marketing automation services include platform selection & setup, and automation strategy & integration with your website or eCommerce store.
Our developers can assess and select the best APT platform for your unique digital marketing needs, and implement appropriate sales software such as HubSpot, SharpSpring, Salesforce, or Marketo on your business website for you. For custom efficiency, we use focused targeting, lead generation & management, and customer segmentation to keep your sales funnel organized and your leads converting. The right email marketing campaigns will be segmented, personalized, and automated when you partner with our marketing specialists.
Automation is the future of digital marketing, and with FTx 360’s automated campaign handlings your business will always be a step ahead of the competition. Contact us today to learn more.
Your Facebook marketing strategies have the power to either grow your brand quickly or waste your time. You don’t want to be pouring your time and energy into using marketing strategies on Facebook that are destined to fail, which means that your top priority should be to research the strategies that will work and avoid the ones that won’t.
You’ve come to the right place. The social media marketing specialists at FTx 360 have done the research for you. Based on market trends and first-hand experience, our Facebook marketing experts have put together a helpful list of Do’s & Don’ts to ensure that the time and energy you spend on Facebook will not only grow your brand quickly but also increase your bottom line.
In this article, you’ll also learn about the different Facebook Business Manager administrative roles that you can assign to your employees. And finally, we will wrap up the article by laying out five key marketing areas to be mindful of as you create, schedule, and manage your Facebook marketing.
The vast majority of Facebook users not only log onto the social platform daily, they basically live on it, and no, we aren’t using hyperbole. Most people who have a Facebook account keep the site open on their desktop or laptop computer all day long so that they can scroll through their feed whenever they feel like it. They also keep their smartphones nearby and as soon as a push notification from Facebook pops up, guess what they do? They swipe into the app to check out the alert.
All this is to say that if you use Facebook correctly, you will have the full attention of your audience. But first things first, be sure that you aren’t guilty of any of these self-sabotaging “don’ts.”
If you didn’t know, yes, it’s possible to purchase Facebook Page “likes” and even post “likes.” Years ago, when Facebook instilled an algorithm to identify and promote Pages with the most “likes,” a ton of ethically-questionable companies began selling “likes” to any business that would buy. The concept seemed logical. Purchase 1,000 or 20,000 Facebook “likes” from a company, then real people will discover and like your Page, and business revenue will increase, right? Except that’s not what happens. Because the “likes” are from fake accounts or bots, organic engagement never results. Plus, real Facebook users can tell. The fact of the matter is that the more fake “likes” you have, the lower your organic reach and post engagement will be.
This is extremely important, especially for businesses that are using Facebook to increase their overall revenue. Just because your marketing goal is to convert followers into paying customers doesn’t mean that 100% of your Facebook posts, ads, and Stories should be promotional. In other words, don’t use Facebook to constantly push your products or services. If you do, you’ll only end up losing your audience as followers “unfollow” you, “mute” you for 30 days, or block you altogether.
How many hashtags should you use in a typical Facebook post? Honestly, we don’t have a straight answer. The goalposts keep moving. For the longest time, the “no more than 30 hashtags” rule was applicable. We even advised ways to tuck hashtags beneath an attention-grabbing caption or post them into the first comment, and for a while that was sound advice. However, as of writing this article, it looks like including as few as five hashtags is ideal, and if you want to follow the hashtag trend, you should work them into your caption sentences instead of listing them out below the caption.
There’s a fine line between using an attention-grabbing heading and one that’s obviously click-bait. A basic rule of thumb to live by is to be honest and avoid exaggerating. Now, there are two kinds of headings you will use. When you share a web page link, a headline will automatically generate from the third-party’s website. In this instance, make sure the web page you’re sharing is appropriate for your brand and relevant to your audience. The other kind of heading is the one you compose yourself, which could have to do with an upcoming promotion or a business milestone. Just be sure to caption the information honestly rather than exaggerating the content with a shocking headline.
Eventually, you could receive a negative comment or customer review on your Facebook Page. How you respond is extremely important. The last thing you want to do is come across sounding callous, defensive, or downright argumentative. Do not argue with customers, followers, and visitors on your Facebook Page in view of the public. Even responding with an explanation could run the risk of being perceived as argumentative. Instead, reply promptly with a professional-sounding invitation for them to call, DM, or email your company. For all customer service complaints, just remember, it’s best to handle the matter privately.
Facebook Shops are growing in popularity due in large part to the fact that customers love the convenience of having the option to buy goods directly on Facebook. No brand should overlook the importance of setting up a Facebook Shop, but strangely, a lot of eCommerce retailers are guilty of this. Many eCommerce retailers assume that Facebook users will click their website button and willingly navigate out of the Facebook app in order to shop on their website. Don’t make this mistake. As a matter of fact, Facebook users are becoming less and less willing to navigate out of Facebook just to shop. Even if you have an eCommerce site, you should set up a Facebook Shop.
Now that you understand what not to do on Facebook, you probably want to learn about what you should do to capture the attention of your audience, grow your followers, and convert users, visitors, and followers into loyal customers. In a nutshell, you need to focus on presenting a clear brand image to your social media followers, which includes using a distinct voice to communicate with your followers and personally relate to your audience. If you’re using Facebook to gain B2B clients, make sure every post looks and sounds polished and professional. Are you a pet retailer? Punch up your posts with as much personality as possible! You get the idea…
Without further ado, here’s our list of must-do’s!
Once upon a time, business owners created Facebook Pages to promote websites and it worked. People found those businesses on Facebook and then visited their websites. Nowadays, Facebook Pages actually function like their own little business websites, which means that you’re going to want to encourage inbound traffic to your Page. You can do this by using your business website to promote your Facebook Page. Include clickable Facebook icons on every page of your website. You should also display your actual Facebook Page content feed on at least one page of your site. Even if website visitors only hop over to Facebook to “like” your Page, it’ll be worth it.
We can’t overstate the benefits of using Facebook Live and we wish more business owners would get into the habit of regularly broadcasting branded messages using this innovative Facebook feature. Facebook Live enables you to livestream events, lessons, performances, lectures, or anything you like. Viewers can watch the live broadcast from their smartphones, computers, or connected TV, and they can also react, share, and comment in real-time. We encourage business owners to use Facebook Live to broadcast 3 to 5-minute messages to build brand awareness. Branded messages can address your company’s mission, purpose, and goals.
Facebook users expect to receive a response within 30 minutes when they send a Direct Message, especially if they’re using DM to reach customer service due to an issue. For this reason, it’s extremely important to respond quickly to any Facebook DMs you receive. In fact, if you’re slow to respond, you could lose sales. We also recommend that you respond quickly to the comments under your Facebook posts as well, even if it’s simply to acknowledge a kind comment or answer a question. As an added bonus, the faster you respond, the higher Facebook will elevate your Page.
What is “compelling content”? The answer to this question will depend on who your audience includes. That being said, any post that provokes engagement will be compelling. Use your Facebook posts to ask questions. Questions naturally provoke responses because followers will feel compelled to answer them. You can also use CTAs in your posts, offer valuable information, embed a survey or pole, or post an evocative image. The trick here is to remember that the goal of the post is to start a conversation, which means that when your followers begin to comment, be sure to respond and keep the engagement going.
Not all of your Facebook posts have to be original content that you’ve created. In fact, your followers will appreciate gaining insights into your opinions and perspective on relevant topics, which is why it’s a good idea to share articles and links to other relevant websites. By sharing interesting, relevant information with your followers, you can spark engagement and start conversations in the comments. Also, be sure to share the links to any blog articles that you’ve written within a few hours of publishing. This will help pull traffic to your blog and also trigger conversations about the article itself.
The more pictures, photos, and videos you use in your Facebook posts, the better. People love social media in general because it’s highly visual. Be mindful of how your posts will appear in the average user’s Facebook feed. Try to find ways to ensure your posts are eye-catching and impossible to “scroll by.” You want your followers to stop scrolling when they see your posts, and using dynamic photos, stunning pictures, and attention-grabbing videos can help. This rule also applies to any Facebook ads you run, and remember, you can always use paid “boosts” to promote your most popular posts.
One of the most beneficial aspects of marketing your brand on Facebook is that you can split the marketing workload between multiple people thanks to Facebook Business Manager. Instead of handling 100% of your Facebook marketing yourself, you can assign roles to your employees.
There are many administrative roles that you can set within Facebook Business Manager, which include:
● Admin: Can manage all aspects of the Page. They can publish and send Messenger messages as the Page, respond to and delete comments on the Page, post from Instagram to Facebook, create ads, see who created a post or comment, view insights, and assign Page roles. If an Instagram account is connected to the Page, they can respond to and delete comments, send Direct Messages, sync business contact info and create ads.
● Editor: Can publish content and send Messenger messages as the Page, respond to and delete comments on the Page, create ads, see who created a post or comment, post from Instagram to Facebook, and view insights. If an Instagram account is connected to the Page, they can respond to and delete comments, send Direct Messages, sync business contact info and create ads.
● Moderator: Can send Messenger messages as the Page, respond to and delete comments on the Page, create ads, see who created a post or comment, and view insights. If an Instagram account is connected to the Page, they can respond to Instagram comments, send Direct Messages and create ads.
● Advertiser: Can create ads, see who created a post or comment, and view insights. If an Instagram account is connected to the Page, they can create ads.
● Analyst: Can see which admin created a post or comment and view insights.
As you can see, each Facebook administrative role defined above has a different level of access and responsibility. Admins have full access to the Facebook Business Page, and can create ads, view insights, respond to comments, and send Direct Messages. Whereas Analysts have the least amount of access and can only create posts, comment on posts, and view insights.
APPLY THE DO’S & DON’TS TO YOUR FACEBOOK MARKETING STRATEGY
Let’s assume you understand the do’s and don’ts of Facebook marketing, and you’re committed to applying the do’s. You’ve even hired a few trustworthy and passionate helpers to manage your Facebook Page. There are a few more strategizing steps you’ll need to address before your Facebook Page will be ready to roll like a well-oiled machine. These steps involve understanding who your audience is, how to communicate with them, and figuring out when they want to hear from you.
Once you know all that, the content that your entire team creates, schedules, and manages will spark user engagement and help you gain enthusiastic followers who turn into customers.
You can easily identify who your Facebook audience is by checking out the demographics of your CRM software. If you’ve had your Facebook Page for a while, you can also use the insights feature within Facebook Business Manager to understand the types of followers who engage with your Page.
You can take identifying your audience one step further by developing key buyer personas for your brand. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer that’s based on your own market research as well as the real data you collect about your existing customers from your CRM.
The simplest way to leverage the audience insights you’ve compiled is to use the demographic information when you place your next Facebook ad. The best digital marketing campaign will target the right audience and you can only do this if you accurately leverage your audience insights, build a targeted marketing strategy, and run ads that spark engagement.
The key to success is planning ahead, and using your Facebook Page to help every area of your business succeed is no different. We strongly suggest that you use a social media content calendar like this one, which you can download and start using today, to keep your posts organized.
It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that as a social platform, Facebook has peak hours and dark hours. That being said, your specific audience might be the most active on Facebook on certain days, or within certain windows of time on certain days. For example, if your target audience is comprised of nightclub owners, then the best days and times to reach them is probably from dusk until dawn Friday and Saturday nights. You get the idea, just be sure to research the best days and times to post on Facebook to reach your niche audience.
Would you rather partner with a digital marketing agency for all of your Facebook and social media campaigns? FTx 360 could be the right firm for you. Our social media marketing specialists have created and launched impactful marketing campaigns for businesses from all industries. From redesigning your company logo to rebranding your Facebook Business Page, we do it all and aim to please! Contact us to learn more about what FTx 360 can do for you.
The digital marketing specialists at FTx 360 publish a lot of content each month in the form of blog articles. These articles are designed to help business owners like you implement effective digital marketing strategies that benefit their brands.
In case you missed them, the informative marketing articles we posted this month were:
● What’s New on Instagram in 2021
● 6 Back to School Campaign Ideas
● Utilizing Social Media for Your Business
● Marketing Strategies for Pet Companies
● 5 Ways to Improve eCommerce Customer Experience
● How to Plan a Marketing Budget
You can click to read any of these full, original articles to learn in-depth information about the specific digital marketing topic listed above. Otherwise, check out the summaries of each article below.
Instagram has not stopped evolving since it was launched over a decade ago. Today, Instagram users can shop, video chat, watch IGTV channels, and engage with other users on the platform in countless ways. Businesses can advertise and interact with potential customers, all while building their brand and social media presence.
Instagram has launched many improvements throughout the first half of 2021, and more features are yet to arrive as summer turns to autumn later this year. There are upwards of twenty Instagram updates, upgrades, improvements, and new feature launches to watch out for in 2021—far too many to cover in one article. So, we focused our first August article on the following five new Instagram features that are most relevant to your business account:
● Messenger API Update
● Professional Dashboard
● Option to Hide “Likes”
● Suggested Posts
● Interactive Stickers for Stories
This back-to-school season, retailers like you want to deliver a marketing campaign that actually resonates with consumers. Your current customers, as well as potential ones, aren’t interested in hearing about your products and services unless your campaign messages speak to them personally and address their wants, needs, interests, and pain points.
Though it may seem counterintuitive to place your products and services in the background of your ads, this adjustment will help you convert consumers into paying customers. Your promotional content and messages should focus on personalization with the aim of conveying relevant offers that speak to the unique needs of each shopper.
With that in mind, try one, some, or all of these back-to-school campaign ideas:
● Email Marketing Campaigns
● Google Pay-Per-Click Ad Campaigns
● Facebook & Instagram Ad Campaigns
● SMS Text Message Marketing Campaigns
● Responsive Web Design Landing Page Campaigns
● Referral Code Campaigns
Integrating social media into your business strategy will afford your brand countless benefits, including helping you to spread brand awareness, expand your customer base, encourage online engagement with your brand, and increase the virality of your business.
Social media is such a powerful tool for business growth, in fact, that you don’t have to use every platform under the sun. Simply maintaining accounts on one or two social platforms will be enough to support your business needs and social media goals.
But how can you specifically utilize social media for your business? In our third August article, we suggested the following strategies:
● Schedule Organic Posts on Social
● Provide Customer Service Options on Social
● Run Sponsored Content on Social
● Cross-Promote Your Social Media Accounts
● Alter Your Social Content for Different Platforms
If you run a pet company, you understand that the love pet parents have for their furry friends is boundless. Pet parents delight in doting on their dogs and cats, taking photos of their pets, and connecting with other pet lovers online.
You can also connect with pet lovers online, boost your brand, and build your customer base, which is what this FTx 360 article was all about. To summarize, here are the best marketing strategies for pet companies that you can start using today:
● Create Educational Posts About Products
● Make Sure Posts Sound Personal and Not Promotional
● Ask Customers to Leave Reviews on Facebook
● Create Carousel Posts to Increase Viewing Time
● Launch a “Caption This!” Challenge to Boost Engagement
● Use “Insta Grid” as Tiles to Create a Bigger Picture
● Use Branded, Trending, and Location-Based Hashtags
● Encourage ReTweeting to Get the Word Out
● Tweet Photos of Adorable, Adoptable Dogs
● Create Grooming How-To Videos Featuring Your Customers’ Pets
● Use “Before & Afters” in Your Pet Care Tutorials
● Feature a Series on How To Register Pets as Service Dogs & Emotional Support Animals
● Cover Relevant Health Topics & Common Pet Health Issues
● Publish Articles Featuring Your Customers’ Pets
● Include a Newsletter Subscription Sign-Up Button
Customer experiences culminate in either satisfaction or disappointment. The result that ultimately follows is either increased business revenue or dismal eCommerce sales. Customer experience, or CX, is that critical.
You want your customers to have positive experiences when engaging with your brand online, but you might not necessarily understand what eCommerce elements will contribute to providing your website visitors with such an excellent customer experience that they successfully complete the online checkout process.
In this original article, we supplied in-depth steps and went into detail about the following five strategies you can implement to improve your eCommerce site’s customer experience.
● Offer Personalized Website Navigation
● Provide Customized Browsing Experiences
● Feature Customer Reviews & Testimonials
● Enhance the Checkout Process
● Build Brand Affinity with Valuable Content
There’s no alternative to getting serious about professionally marketing your business online, but what if you have no idea where to start?
Should you hire an in-house marketing team? Should you outsource your digital marketing to an agency? Most importantly, what is it really going to cost to launch digital marketing campaigns that successfully expand your customer base, retain loyal customers, build brand presence, increase revenue, and ultimately deliver a worthwhile return on investment?
If these critical questions have crossed your mind, then you’ve come to the right place.
In the full article, we went over how you can plan a marketing budget that will work for your brand. We strongly suggest you check out the original blog post if you want to specifically learn about:
● Why You Need a Marketing Budget
● How To Plan Your Marketing Budget
● Specific Digital Marketing Campaigns to Fund
● The Benefits of Hiring In-house Marketers ss. Working with a Marketing Agency
● How to Determine Your Overall Marketing Budget
A/B Testing, also called Split Testing, is a digital marketing method that uses two different versions of a single campaign to determine which content version performs better in terms of increasing social engagement and improving conversion rates online.
One version of the campaign content, called the A group, is the “control,” and the other version of the campaign content represents the B group, which contains the variation content. Testing different campaign content in this manner can inform a marketer like you which campaign version we should focus on and invest our marketing budget in.
In the world of digital marketing, the desired result is usually conversion, whether it be converting website visitors to newsletter subscribers, newsletter recipients to monthly subscription customers, or monthly subscription customers to brand ambassadors who use word-of-mouth marketing to successfully refer their friends and family to sign up for monthly subscription packages. You get the idea.
The use of A / B Testing can help you achieve tangible business goals, such as:
● Increasing Website Traffic
● Increasing Conversion Rates
● Lowering Bounce Rates
● Lowering Cart Abandonment
Our full article went over the steps you can follow if you want to ensure the best A / B Test results. To summarize, those steps are:
● Identify the Problem
● Identify Your Goal
● Pick One Variable to Test
● Create the Control Campaign (Test A) and the Challenger Campaign (Test B)
● Split Your Sample Groups Equally & Randomly
● Monitor the Results Throughout the Test But Do Not Alter Anything
One of the most powerful marketing tools you have is your website. Whether you have a B2B website, a B2C eCommerce site, or an SaaS platform that’s meant to target both B2B and B2C consumer groups, your website should be designed to pull in web traffic and keep visitors engaged long enough to do business with you.
Older, outdated websites simply won’t serve your digital marketing needs, and you’re probably aware of that. But what you might not be aware of is that your website could be outdated even if it isn’t that old.
In our final August article, we laid out how you can determine whether or not your website is up to date, and we also included the measures you can take right now to update your website if you determine that it’s outdated. But in summary, here’s what your business website or eCommerce site must include in order for it to be considered up to date by today’s standards:
● A Responsive Web Design
● A Call to Action On Every Web Page
● Fast Website Speed & Easy Site Usability
● Social Media Integration
● An Active Blog
Are you interested in partnering with a digital marketing agency? FTx 360 offers a wide array of digital marketing services at affordable costs. Whether you need web design & development, eCommerce marketing services, social media marketing, content marketing, blog articles and blog management, organic and local SEO, email marketing, marketing automation, PPC marketing, or reputation management—we do it all and love every minute of it! Contact us to learn more about what FTx 360 can do for your business and brand!
A/B Testing, also called Split Testing, is a digital marketing method that uses two different versions of a single campaign to determine which content version performs better in terms of increasing social engagement and improving conversion rates online.
One version of the campaign content, called the A group, is the “control,” and the other version of the campaign content represents the B group, which contains the variation content.
Testing differing campaign content in this manner can inform a marketer like you or me which campaign version we should focus on and invest our marketing budget in.
A/B Testing is most often used for email marketing content and social media ad campaign content, but of course it can be used to test any digital content campaigns you wish.
An example of using A / B Testing in a non-marketing scenario would look something like this:
A 4th grader named Tommy has a hypothesis that a plant that receives adequate sunlight will grow faster and appear healthier than a plant that does not have access to sunlight. In order to test his hypothesis, Tommy buys two plants of the same species and size. The plants have been potted with the same soil. He places one potted plant on the windowsill where there is direct sunlight. He places the other potted plant in his closet where sunlight will not reach it. Every day for two weeks, he waters both plants with exactly five ounces of water.
The result that he discovers confirms his hypothesis. At the end of two weeks, the plant which received adequate sunlight grew significantly and now appears healthy with bright green leaves and flowering buds. By contrast, the plant which was kept in his dark closet looks nearly dead.
Since the only differentiating variable between the windowsill plant and the closet plant was the presence or lack of sunlight, Tommy is able to confidently conclude that plants that receive adequate sunlight will grow faster and appear healthier than plants that are deprived of sunlight.
Sure, this example might seem overly simplistic, but the big takeaway that you understand from the A / B Testing of the two plants is that with the exception of sunlight every single variable was the same, i.e. the species of the plants, the quality of the soil, the amount of water used daily, and even the indoor air quality. The only difference between the A plant and the B plant was the sunlight variable.
In the world of digital marketing, an example of an A / B Test could look something like this:
As an adult who waxes nostalgic for the career he almost had in horticulture, Tommy now works as a digital marketer, has an overwhelming mortgage, and often contemplates whether he should yank his children out of public school. He also has a hypothesis—the email marketing campaign that he’s about to launch, which includes a paid subscription sign-up CTA, will perform better if the email includes an incentive offer associated with purchasing the subscription.
The goal of the email marketing campaign is to convert recipients into paid subscribers, and Tommy needs as many new paying subscribers as he can get, because he has that mortgage and those kids to think about….
So, he creates a copy of his email campaign, naming the copy “Test B” and naming the original “Test A.” The only difference between the two email campaigns is that the A Test (original) does not contain an incentive offer, whereas the B Test includes an incentive offer.
Tommy composes a sentence regarding the CTA incentive offer, which happens to be a free ebook download, and plugs the sentence into the B Test email template. Concerning the B Test email, anyone who signs up for a paid subscription will have access to a download link to receive the free ebook.
He launches both email campaigns, the A Test and the B Test, and waits… for two weeks.
Low and behold, at the end of the trial period, Tommy checks the performance of his A Test versus his B Test, and discovers that the B Test, which contained the free ebook incentive, resulted in almost 300% more paid subscription sign-ups than the A Test.
Tommy determines he will enroll his children in the nearby Montessori school that he passes every morning on his way into the office.
As the two examples demonstrated, A / B Testing is a scientific method that’s used to compare two different variables for the purpose of determining which variable will perform better and yield a desired result.
In the world of digital marketing, the desired result is usually conversion, whether it be converting website visitors to newsletter subscribers, newsletter recipients to monthly subscription customers, or monthly subscription customers to brand ambassadors who use word-of-mouth marketing to successfully refer their friends and family to sign up for monthly subscription packages. You get the idea.
A / B Testing is also used in digital advertising campaigns that appear on Facebook & Instagram, Google AdWords, and other online platforms.
A / B variables can be as simplistic as the color of a CTA button, or as complex as whether the CTA is a lead generation form versus a Shop Now button.
When used to compare digital marketing advertisement versions, the A / B Testing stage can last a few weeks to a few months, and the investments for both test campaigns tend to be low. Then, once the marketer ascertains which test campaign performs better, the failing test is pulled down and a large financial investment is then pumped into the winning campaign.
Using an A / B Test to compare two different options that could be used for one campaign variable will yield the clearest results. Meaning, when all campaign elements are identical except for one, you can conclude that if one campaign performs better than the other, it is because of the different variable.
For this reason, A / B Testing works best when only one variable, or campaign element, has two versions representing the A and the B. The results of the sunlight vs. darkness test told Tommy to “use” sunlight if he wants his plants to “perform” well. The results of the incentive offer vs. no incentive offer told Tommy to “use” incentive offers in his email campaigns if he wants the campaign to “perform” better, i.e. to successfully convert recipients into paying subscribers.
That being said, there is another form of A / B Testing that compares many different campaign elements between the A Test and the B Test. This form of A / B Testing is called “multivariate A / B Testing.” When this complex version of A / B Testing is implemented, it can be harder to pinpoint which specific variable or variables performed better.
For instance, let’s say you run a multivariate A / B Test for a website landing page. The goal of the landing page is to generate leads. In order to generate leads, the landing page uses a CTA incentive, which is a “locked” webinar. In order to unlock and watch the webinar, the visitor must complete the CTA. Both landing pages are identical except for the following variables:
● The Design Layout
● The CTA
● The Content Font Size & Color
The A Test uses a design layout that does not match the brand’s logo or website. The CTA is an email opt-in form. The landing page content uses an extremely large, purple font.
The B Test uses a design layout that so closely resembles a major competitor that it’s inevitable this thing is going to wind up in court. The CTA is a “Tweet This Now” button, and the landing page content uses a red, moderately-sized, cursive font.
A few weeks, or perhaps a few months go by, then the performance results are analyzed.
Did the A Test generate more email leads? Or did the B Test render more Tweets? How would a Tweet even generate a viable lead in the first place??? (Bonus points if you caught that critical error!) Which landing page succeeded?
As it turns out, Test B had more Tweets than Test A had emails… but what does that mean?
The data is, for lack of a better term, a pile of confusion.
Does this mean you should avoid launching multivariate A / B Tests? Not necessarily. If you have experience analyzing A / B Test data and feel confident you’ll be able to differentiate the performance results of many competing variables at once, then multivariate A / B Testing could potentially provide you with a wealth of valuable insights that help you launch an extremely successful campaign.
In fact, the following are the pros to launching multivariate A / B Tests:
● Provides valuable insights regarding the interactions between multiple content elements
● Provides granular data regarding which campaign elements positively or negatively impact performance results
● Enables marketers to compare many versions of a campaign, not just two, and conclude which one will have maximum impact overall
But multivariate A / B Testing also comes with cons:
● Can be highly complex and might require an expert to conduct an analysis of the resulting data
● Requires significantly more traffic than a normal A / B Test in order to render statistically valuable results
● Too many campaign variable combinations could cause the results to be too difficult to interpret, rendering the entire test and its associated costs a waste of time and money
If you want to launch a multivariate A / B Test but don’t want to go it alone, then give us a call. The marketing specialists at FTx 360 will make sure your test campaigns result in performance data you’ll be able to analyze easily… and yes, we’ll analyze the data for you, too!
So, you’re ready to get down to business and devise a digital marketing A / B Test. You’ve done your research and you’re already excited about improving one or many areas of your business. You envision achieving tangible business goals as a result of using A / B Testing, such as:
● Increasing Website Traffic
● Increasing Conversion Rates
● Lowering Bounce Rates
● Lowering Cart Abandonment
Here are the steps you should follow if you want to ensure the best A / B Test results.
Why do you want to launch an A / B Test in the first place? Have you launched a blog that isn’t getting any web traffic? Have you noticed that your Facebook “Shop Now” native ad hasn’t resulted in higher eCommerce sales? Do you suspect the subject lines of your email marketing campaigns are the reason your emails aren’t being opened? Before you can solve the problem, and before you will know how to solve the problem, you first must identify what the problem is.
Once you’ve identified the problem, you can identify the goal you’d like to accomplish using A / B Testing. The more specific your goal is, the easier it will be for you to reach it. For example, if your promotional emails aren’t being opened at an acceptable rate, you’ll want to make note of the current open rate and then decide what the goal open rate should be. Meaning, if the current email open rate for your promotional campaigns averages 8%, you might set an open rate goal of 16%. This is a tangible goal that you will be able to compare your campaign data with easily.
As we covered in this article, if you’re new to A / B Testing, then you should start with testing only one variable, or campaign element, as opposed to testing multiple variables at once. The precise variable you decide to test, however, should relate to both the problem and the goal you’ve identified. For instance, if the problem you’re facing is a low open rate on your email campaigns and you’ve set a goal of doubling the open rate, the only variables that pertain to your problem are the email subject line and the email lead-in description that appears in recipients’ inboxes. Those two variables are what your recipients can see, and based on what they see, they will either open your email or delete it. Choose to test only one of those variables. Let’s say, the email subject line.
This step is straightforward, but will be the most time consuming. It’s time to actually create the two email campaigns and set them up in your email automation software. Make sure that both tests are clearly labeled and that the different subject lines appear perfectly. Hopefully, you’ve spent adequate time researching how to write email subject lines that increase the chances of recipients opening them.
While splitting your sample groups might not always apply to the particular A / B Test you’re running, let’s take a look at this step anyway since it’s relevant to an email marketing campaign A / B Test. In this instance, you obviously can’t send two emails to the same recipient list, so you’ll need to create two recipient “groups.” The two groups should contain a cross-section of your subscribers that includes all demographics. Meaning, both groups should contain all ages, both genders, both new and old subscribers, both high-spending and low-spending customers, and so on. This is opposed to one group containing loyal, high-spending, mature subscribers and another group containing new, low-spending subscribers, which would skew the results.
Once you launch your A / B Test email campaign, automating that the A Test goes to one group while the B Test goes to the other group, you can kick back and allow an appropriate amount of time to go by. Depending on the nature of the A / B Test, you may want to let a few weeks or a few months pass. In the case of our email campaign, waiting a full week will be enough. The main point here is that while your tests are running, you can monitor the evolving results, but do not alter your campaigns.
After an appropriate amount of time has passed, you can analyze the performance of the A Test versus the B Test. Compare the results of each test to the goal you set for yourself at the onset of your campaign. Which test performed better? If so, how much better? Did either test meet or exceed your goal? Simply put, whichever test performed better is the one you should invest in moving forward.
FTx 360 can handle your campaigns and implement A / B Testing you can trust. Contact us now to get started or to learn more about what our digital marketing specialists can do for your business.
If you run a pet company, you understand that the love pet parents have for their furry friends is boundless. Pet parents delight in doting on their dogs and cats, taking photos of their pets, and connecting with other pet lovers online.
You can also connect with pet lovers online, boost your brand, and build your customer base. We’ve put together the best marketing strategies for pet companies that you can start using today.
As a pet supply store owner, your day-to-day operations revolve around assisting customers, stocking inventory, and making sure your prices are competitive. You might not be thinking about your brand’s online presence because it might not be immediately obvious how online consumer awareness about your brand could impact your business sales. Or perhaps you’ve ruled out social media marketing, having assumed you don’t have the time, money, or patience to deal with an additional hassle.
Lucky for you, getting into the swing of maintaining a Facebook business page doesn’t have to be a hassle and it doesn’t have to cost you a dime unless you use paid advertisements, which isn’t even necessary when you’re first starting out. By simply creating a Facebook business page that includes your store location and contact information, you can increase sales at your pet supply store. But how? The fact of the matter is that Facebook is a local search engine in its own right; one that’s on par with Google, in fact, and you should treat it like one.
Thanks to Facebook Graph Search and the fact that Facebook added a keyword search function as well as hashtags, having a Facebook business page is as valuable as having a Google My Business page. If you only have time to maintain one social media account, it has to be Facebook.
If you’re exceedingly busy, how can you get the most out of your Facebook business page while dedicating as little time as possible to posting? Here are three tips to focus on to get your page up and running on all cylinders.
Share your pet industry knowledge by posting expert tips that both educate and inform Facebook users about your experience-based insights, recommendations, and anecdotes. By creating educational posts about your products, you will subtly and effectively imply that your pet supply store is the best place to find the products you’re featuring on Facebook.
We really can’t stress this enough—sounding salesy will backfire. Your Facebook posts shouldn’t look or sound like advertisements. Frankly, Facebook advertisements that actually work don’t look or sound like advertisements. Instead, aim to present personal-sounding posts that focus on pet-parent lifestyles, the joys of having dogs and cats, and other pet-loving messages that only gently suggest your products belong in the overall picture.
Creating Facebook posts where you remind customers to leave reviews on your Facebook page is a good habit to get into. Depending on the privacy levels of your Facebook followers, you can actually tag their handles as you respond to their comments and thank them individually for their business. If it’s clear that a follower has recently shopped at your location, make a Facebook post just for them that asks them to post a customer review on your page.
Instagram offers its users a magnitude of personal entertainment, but personal socializing is no longer the primary reason people scroll through Instagram. Today, there are more than 25 million business profiles on Instagram. Instagram paid advertisements have the power to pull in more revenue, on average, than most traditional advertising campaigns. For pet retailers, Instagram can be an excellent tool to introduce your brand to users, engage with customers, and showcase your products, services, and pets for sale.
That being said, maintaining a personal Instagram account is not going to cut it in terms of marketing your pet retail business on social. So, make sure to switch your account to a “Professional Account,” which will make posting, commenting, DMing, and advertising far easier.
The trick to making Instagram work for you is to focus on the quality of your content first and foremost. Yes, posting regularly plays an important role, too, but Instagram values—and rewards—quality over quantity any day. And you’ll want to post a variety of content media, such as photos, videos, and graphics, on both your business profile and in your Instagram stories to increase interaction with your followers. Once you get the hang of this rudimentary, immediate form of interaction, you can try stepping up your Insta-game by using “Live,” a feature that broadcasts video content to your followers to watch and comment on in real-time.
If this sounds complicated, don’t get discouraged. You don’t have to use the most advanced Instagram features straight out of the gate. Instead, try the following content ideas.
Carousel posts are single Instagram posts that include up to 10 photos that users can swipe through. Instagram carousel posts are one of the most versatile marketing tools you can use on Instagram, which is why we’re mentioning them first. The longer a user is engaged with a post, the higher Instagram will rank the post. When posts rank high, Instagram will recommend them to users. By virtue of the fact that swiping through ten photos takes more time than scrolling past one, Instagram carousel can help your posts rank higher so that Instagram starts recommending them.
For those of you who are unfamiliar, a “caption this” challenge is when you post a photo that depicts a curious, humorous, or downright puzzling scene and ask your followers to caption the photo to help bring clarity to what’s being depicted. Posts featuring dogs and cats interacting in funny ways are excellent “caption this” subjects. As your followers caption the post photo in the comments section, you can respond to increase social engagement.
Post presentation is everything on Instagram. When users visit your Instagram business profile, they will either click the follow button or bounce away from your profile based on the initial impression your profile delivers. Using an Instagram layout template such as Insta Grid’s “Puzzle” can help you make an excellent first impression. With this particular layout, Instagram will “chop” a single photo into six posts so that once all six posts are published, all of the posts’ “puzzle pieces” form a larger, complete picture.
Animal shelters are busy organizations. Often staffed by volunteers, animal shelters and rescue organizations are pressed for time, have limited resources, and tend to be solely focused on the important objective of placing rescued pets into loving households. If you own and operate an animal shelter, you may not believe that marketing on social media can benefit your business in terms of assisting the pet adoption process. But this isn’t the case when it comes to the social site, Twitter.
Twitter has evolved a great deal since it first came on the scene over a decade ago. Today, Twitter users can post photos, share articles, and even include calls-to-action, or CTAs, in the footers of their posts. Though Twitter will always have a character limit—which means you’ll have to be short, sweet, and to the point in every post—the fact that you can include hashtags makes Twitter the ideal platform to connect rescue animals with prospective pet parents.
Twitter can even help your business to go one step further than marketing the adoption options at your animal shelter. Using relevant hashtags and location check-ins, you can recruit volunteers, build your list of foster homes, promote fundraisers, and connect with other animal rescue groups in your area, such as non-profit veterinarians that will neuter and spay your incoming feral animals from off the street.
Experiment with the following Twitter tips as part of your outreach strategy and before long, you’ll consider Twitter an invaluable tool in your adoption toolkit.
It takes a bit of research and a lot of creativity but using hashtags in your Twitter posts to get the word out about your upcoming animal adoption events is a must. Aim to include about 5 hashtags in each post, and use a combination of trending hashtags, location-based hashtags, and one of your branded hashtags. For example, #petadoption, #adoptdontshop, #petsofinstagram, #yourcityandstate, #youranimalsheltername will be more than enough hashtags to get the word out on social and get potential pet parents to your event.
Another excellent habit to get into—from time to time, try quoting one of your previous Tweets with the caption “ReTweet if you agree!” This Twitter strategy can increase engagement, build awareness about an animal rescue issue, and encourage conversations. You can also reward followers for retweeting your Tweets by offering a discount on your pet adoption fee with proof of a retweet.
Without a doubt, the most advantageous reason to use Twitter to market your animal shelter is that Tweeting photos of your adorable, adoptable dogs and cats will help you place them in homes. Unlike featuring rescue dogs and cats on your website, which can be cumbersome for web visitors to share, a Tweet is fast and easy to share on Twitter. A single post about a recently rescued dog, for example, can get retweeted exponentially in a matter of seconds.
People love watching pet videos on the internet. On Facebook and Instagram, short videos of adorable animals result in higher engagement rates than videos featuring other content. But YouTube has changed the game for pet and animal video content. As a video streaming social site that offers a multitude of video lengths, YouTube has become the home of a wide variety of pet video categories, from short DIY videos featuring pet care tips to reality TV shows about dog trainers, cat psychics, and horse whisperers.
For any pet care company that’s considering launching a YouTube channel, the undertaking will have its challenges, and once you get into the swing of things, you will notice obvious pros and cons. Firstly, understand that this is a crowded space. There’s a lot of pet content on YouTube. But if your business objective is to establish your brand as an authority within the pet care industry for the purposes of gaining local customers, marketing your pet care business on YouTube should bring you more benefits than drawbacks.
Offering viewers quality videos is hands-down the most important aspect of using YouTube to market your pet care company. This means using a professional-grade camera and the best lighting and sound equipment you can afford. You don’t need to aim to produce Oscar-award-winning content, but you should be prepared to meet YouTube’s standards of visual and audio quality if you want to convert viewers into customers. Posting regularly is equally important, and of course, being sure to put out content that pet parents want and need will be tantamount to your channel’s success.
Let’s say you have a camera, enough natural light, a decent lavalier microphone, and a brave employee who’s willing to be on camera… What are you actually going to shoot? Here are some content ideas to get you started.
If you’re just starting out on YouTube, producing 3 to 5-minute videos rather than long-form content is a reasonable goal that you’ll be able to manage. How-to videos will never go out of style on YouTube, which is why we recommend you aim to produce a series of short videos on how to groom dogs, cats, and even exotics. The viral potential of a chinchilla grooming how-to, for example, is immeasurable.
Another excellent short-form video content idea is to use “before & after” transformations of dogs, cats, and exotics. By using the time-lapse feature of your camera, you can show a complete makeover from a muddy puppy to a cleaned-up pup in a matter of 60 seconds. Include real-time footage of basic pet care, too, and present certain grooming steps in a tutorial format so that your video is both entertaining and helpful.
People greatly appreciate getting step-by-step assistance when they’re trying to accomplish a task that they know is over their heads. If you have any expertise concerning the paperwork and protocol of registering a pet as a service dog or emotional support animal, then offering viewers a detailed how-to on the subject is a must. Nowadays, more and more people have a real need for emotional support animals, but registering an appropriate animal through the proper channels can be intimidating. You will definitely boost your brand if you post videos on this subject.
Veterinarians are as important to pet parents as pet supply stores. Though pet parents may not take their dogs and cats to the vet as frequently as they pick up pet food, pet care products, and pet toys from their preferred retailer, the relationships they have with their pets’ veterinarians are no less valuable.
As a local business that provides in-person services, veterinarians must carefully geo-target their digital marketing efforts. Creating and maintaining a Google My Business page is a must. When you create a GMB listing, your veterinarian business and its location will appear on Google Maps, which means that anyone who is using Google to find a vet for their pet will see your business’s page, along with your website and other contact information, and get in touch.
You can enhance your online visibility by launching a blog on your veterinarian website and regularly posting each blog article’s URL to your Google My Business page. For example, if you publish one blog article per week, simply use the published article’s URL to create a Google My Business post. The content will automatically populate on your GMB page, and best of all, Google will assess the article’s SEO and elevate your GMB page accordingly.
Sounds easy enough, but what if you’ve never written a blog before? Where should you start? What should you write about? How can you get the most out of launching and maintaining a blog? Here are some pointers to start you off in the right direction.
When a pet parent realizes their furry friend isn’t feeling well, the internet is the first expert they consult. In other words, people use Google to diagnose potential pet problems even before they pick up the phone to make an appointment with their vet. By covering relevant health topics and common pet health issues on your veterinarian business blog, you can drive website traffic and influence local pet parents to choose your business the next time their pet is sick or injured.
Of course, you’ll need to get permission from your customers first, but featuring the dogs and cats of your real-life customers in your blog articles can do wonders for increasing online engagement and marketing your pet company. This community-building strategy will help other customers feel connected to your clinic, especially if you include a comments section beneath your blog articles where pet parents can discuss the topics at hand.
Including CTAs at the bottom of your blog articles is a must, and one of the most important CTAs to include is a newsletter subscription sign-up button. By collecting your readers’ email addresses in this fashion, you can let them know every time a new blog article is published, which can spark immediate web traffic and online engagement.
We barely scratched the surface in terms of the marketing strategies that can build your pet company’s brand online, but hopefully, this article has given you some ideas to market your business. If you’d prefer the social media experts at FTx 360 to handle marketing your pet business, feel free to contact us anytime. We offer pet shop website design and development, social media campaign handling, and content creation that’s based on pet industry market research. Grow your social audience and provide your customers with the pet information they want most.
In 2021, social media has gone way beyond digitally connecting friends online and providing a place for them to socialize.
Social media platforms are in large part providing businesses with secondary, virtual, operational hubs.
Take Facebook for example. Within this single social media platform, a company can promote products, maintain an eCommerce store, and handle customer service inquiries, all while posting regularly and engaging with followers.
If you’re a business owner who isn’t using social media as an extension of your everyday operations, you’re missing out on a major business opportunity that has the potential to expand your customer base and increase overall revenue.
Integrating social media into your business strategy will afford your brand countless benefits, including:
● Social media can spread brand awareness
● Social media can expand your customer base
● Social media can encourage online engagement
● Social media can increase the virality of your brand
Social media is such a powerful tool for business growth, in fact, that you don’t have to use every platform under the sun. Simply maintaining accounts on one or two social platforms will be enough to support your business needs and social media goals.
If you need help determining the best social platforms for your company, we recommend that you take a moment to read our prior article, Which Social Media Platforms Are Right For Your Business?
If you’re already clear on which social platforms will best serve your business needs, it’s time to get even clearer on how you can use those social platforms to grow your business, which will be the focus of this article.
Before you can really get started utilizing social media for your business, be sure to complete the following actions so that your social accounts are ready for action:
● Fill out your social profile(s) with your company’s telephone number, email address, and other contact information, and be sure to include a concise description of your business.
● For your Instagram account, add to the description box any affiliated IG account handles your company has, such as your customer service and help desk accounts; and be sure to add your branded hashtags as well, if applicable.
● For your Twitter account, keep your bio short and personable, and don’t forget to include your website and the Twitter handles of your affiliated accounts, if applicable.
● For your LinkedIn account, connect your business profile page to your website blog, if applicable, so that published blogs automatically post to your page.
Once you have all of your social media accounts set up, the next critical step is to add social media icons to your website, email signature, newsletter footer, and any other digital marketing tool your company uses. These social media icons should have clickable links that will direct users to your social media account.
Are your bases covered? If so, let’s dive into the specifics of what you can do to make the most out of your social media accounts.
You will experience far more engagement and social success if you regularly and consistently publish posts on your social media accounts, as opposed to only publishing posts ad hoc when the mood strikes you. Business profiles that consistently post twice a week end up generating more valuable social interactions than businesses that post three times during a single day and then fail to post for eight consecutive days. Adhering to a realistic posting schedule should be your first step towards effectively utilizing social media for your business. We recommend that you specifically integrate the following types of social posts into your organic posting schedule:
● Products & Services Posts that Use “Tags”—1x per week
● Contest or Giveaway Promotions—2x per year
● Posts with Hashtags that Target Your Audience & Location—1x per week
In addition to these specialized posts, be sure to develop a consistent posting schedule that features the kind of content and conversation starters that best represent your brand.
This social posting idea only relates to Facebook & Instagram, or any social platform that offers an in-app eCommerce store. Assuming you have set up your business’s social accounts as well as in-app eCommerce, the biggest benefit of using product tagging in your posts is that the click-through rates of your posts will increase, which will help you gain visibility and increase direct sales.
When a social media contest or giveaway is executed properly, it’s a powerful way to build immediate social engagement and long-term followers. Social users might not automatically know that your brand exists, but by including the right hashtags in your social contest, social users will quickly find out exactly who you are!
Did you know that every social media post has the potential to target your audience? By including specific hashtags you can help to target the audience you want. Location tagging can also help draw in the right audience, especially if your business has a brick-and-mortar location.
Businesses that use social media to the fullest provide their social visitors and followers with the option to shop directly on their platforms, ask questions, and leave comments. In other words, these savvy businesses provide customer service to their social visitors. Directly within the platforms, customer service representatives can respond to questions and concerns, as well as shift public customer service conversations into private DMs when it will best serve the customer. By providing social media users with customer service avenues on social platforms, businesses are able to meet customers where they are, which ultimately results in better customer satisfaction. Here are three tips you can use when integrating customer service into your social accounts:
● Amp Up the Human Connection by Being Personable & Humble
● Carefully Compose Any Auto Replies You Set Up
● Use Direct Message CTAs at the Bottom of Your Social Responses
The most important tip we can give you when it comes to integrating customer service avenues into your social accounts is to designate a real-life employee to manage the interactions and responses in a timely fashion.
The days of generic auto-replies are long gone, but unfortunately, a lot of businesses still use these canned, antiquated responses when it comes to social media. Yes, Facebook, Instagram, and other social platforms provide you with auto-reply templates that can be used in your DMs and Chat Messages, but unless a real-life person is overseeing them, it could backfire badly.
If your staff is really pressed for time, then compose FAQ responses that they can choose from, and remember, as time-consuming as it may be to personally respond to every social question, comment, and DM, replying with personality and humility will get you a lot further in terms of building customer relationships than letting a chatbot spew out nonsense replies.
As your customer service representatives monitor your social accounts for the purposes of responding to user questions, comments, and concerns, they will need the option of shifting the conversation from the public feed to a private DM, or Direct Message. This option is now available. Your customer service reps can include a DM link to the bottom of their responding comments when interacting with users on social.
For as little as $20 per day, you can run sponsored content on Facebook & Instagram for a fixed duration of time and see a massive ROI. “Sponsored content” is a type of native advertising that is available to marketers on Facebook & Instagram. Chances are, you’ve seen more than your fair share of sponsored content on these joined platforms, and you may have even formed opinions about why they work. By placing sponsored content ads, you can target your niche demographic within a location radius, which means that your promotional advertisement will definitely reach your ideal customers. There’s really no downside to running sponsored content on the social media platforms Facebook & Instagram, especially if you run your ad for a limited time and with a specific business goal in mind. We recommend using sponsored content to promote “social only” discounts and to collect email addresses for your loyalty program, newsletter, and other marketing needs. But above all else, respect Facebook’s new “Personal Attributes” policy or your ad will never see the light of day.
● Obey Facebook’s “Personal Attributes” Policy or Perish!
● Offer “Social Only” Promotions
● Use Lead Generation CTAs
Let’s take a look at the specifics of these three pointers:
The Facebook Personal Attributes Policy was recently added to the list of “prohibited content” that Facebook restricts. If you’re going to run any kind of ad on Facebook, we strongly recommend that you become intimate with this policy. In essence, Facebook’s advertising policy prohibits the use of mentioning the “personal attributes” of the viewer, including but not limited to their ethnicity, sexual orientation, religious beliefs, and the list goes on. Think you can type the words “you,” “your,” “you’re,” and “other” in your ads? Think again… and read the policy.
A great way to generate, track, and analyze social engagement is to run a sponsored ad that features a discount or deal that’s only available to social users on social media. Exclusivity has long remained a strong promoting factor when it comes to successful sales campaigns, so by making an upcoming sale exclusively available on social media, you can gain followers, increase engagement, and boost sales, all in one fell swoop.
This type of sponsored content is the gift that keeps on giving. By launching a lead generation sponsored content campaign, you can collect email addresses that can be used indefinitely, even after your ad stops running. Just be sure to correctly insert your web-based privacy policy into the backend of the lead generation form. A fast workaround, if you don’t have a privacy policy published on your website, is to create one using Google Docs, set the “share” to “anyone on the internet with this link can view” and plug the Google Doc URL into the lead generation form… or call the marketing experts at FTx 360 and we’ll handle it for you.
One of the easiest ways to organically grow your social media followers and get the word out about your brand is to occasionally remind your followers that they can find your brand on other social media platforms. An effective way to cross-pollinate your audiences is to highlight the variety of content your other channels provide. For example, if you primarily manage Twitter and YouTube accounts, you can interest your Twitter followers in checking out your YouTube channel by highlighting the long-form video content you’re offering exclusively on YouTube. By providing different content on different platforms, which will be the focus of the next section of this article, you will give your followers a reason to follow you on every platform you use for your business. Apply the following tips to your cross-promotional goals:
● Use a Content Scheduling Calendar
● Expand Your Online Presence
● Make Trending Topics the Focus of Certain Posts
In addition to applying the specific tips we just listed, be sure to use social media to network with non-competing businesses and brands. By building your own professional network on social media, you can cross-promote with other brands to reach their audiences and vice versa.
Planning the publication of daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly social media marketing posts can be daunting, which is why we strongly recommend you use a content scheduling calendar, like this one offered by FTx 360—2021 Content Schedule Calendar. By relying on a content calendar to organize your social posts, you can take the guesswork out of planning, which will bring you one step closer to reaching your marketing goals.
Using multiple social platforms has the power to expand the online presence of your brand, so long as you don’t spread yourself too thin in the process. As we mentioned at the beginning of this article, pick only one or two social platforms to focus on and be sure that you’re offering unique content on each one. The more you interact on social media and the more you include your social handles in your emails, newsletters, and other digital correspondence, the quicker you’ll get the word out about your brand online.
If you’re struggling with a bit of writer’s block in terms of trying to figure out what type of content to post, try incorporating topical, timely, trending conversations into your scheduled posts. Depending on what’s going on in the world, what’s popular in the media, and what’s recently gone viral on social media, make a post about it! There’s only one caveat: do your best to stay away from controversial topics such as politics and religion.
As we mentioned in the last section of this article, offering different content on different platforms is one of the smartest social media marketing moves you can make. One of the biggest mistakes that businesses make when managing accounts on multiple social platforms is repeating identical content on every channel. Think about it, if the content you present is the same across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, why in the world would a single individual need to follow all of your accounts? They certainly won’t benefit from it if they do. Just because every Facebook post you publish could automatically post to Instagram, doesn’t mean you should actually use this function. Instead, tailor your content for each platform, or better yet, publish unique content on every platform account you manage. As you do, bear these rules of thumb in mind:
● Maximize the Visual & Minimize the Text
● Use Social Media Optimization Strategies
● Prioritize Building Relationships Over Gaining Followers
Before we take a closer look at each of these, we want to take a moment to emphasize that every social post you publish could and should feel like the start of a personal conversation with your followers. Inviting each follower into what feels like a personalized, one-on-one conversation will yield the greatest customer-relationship-building results.
Speaking in broad terms, all social media platforms are more visual than readable. Meaning, social posts that feature photos and videos perform much better than posts that only feature written text. Even Twitter, which has always been text-centric, has incorporated photos, GIFs, polls, surveys, and graphs to help users add visual elements. This is why we recommend that you amplify the visuals of your social posts and streamline your captions.
Social media optimization simply refers to using your social media networks to manage and grow your business’s online presence. There are specific ways you can accomplish this as part of your overall digital marketing strategy. Key optimization tactics include using social media to direct visitors to your website, promoting the eCommerce offerings of your social account to convert followers into customers, and integrating lead generation forms into your promos and ads to collect valuable customer information that you can leverage in your future email marketing and / or SMS text message campaigns.
The final piece of advice that we’ll leave you with is to not be so hard on yourself when it comes to growth on social media. Social media automatically places a very high premium on followers, and there’s a user perception that social accounts with millions of followers are “better” than social accounts with only hundreds. The reality, however, couldn’t be further from the truth. Rather than obsess over gaining followers and trying to attain thousands of followers as if doing so will give your brand clout, instead we recommend that you focus on building genuine relationships with your social followers, even if you only have one hundred. Remember, not every follower you have on social media will be your customer, but every relationship you build on social media with a follower will produce a customer for life.
Have you hesitated to look for a digital marketing agency to handle all of your social media and market your brand online? Have you assumed you wouldn’t be able to afford management services or a marketing specialist to develop your next social media marketing campaign? What if we told you that FTx 360 can work within any budget to create a stunning online campaign that influences people to love your brand? For more information about the social media marketing services at FTx 360 and how our team can benefit your bottom line without breaking the bank, contact us today.
Yes, it’s August, but it isn’t too late to strategize and market your back-to-school promotional campaigns.
If the very thought of spearheading your own back-to-school marketing campaign overwhelms you, give us a call at FTx 360. Our marketing strategists can work with just about any budget and no campaign timeline is too short.
For those of you who are ready to tackle your own back-to-school marketing, this article is packed with the best advertising strategy tips to help you market your back-to-school sales, drive website and in-store traffic, and gain appreciative customers who will keep shopping with you into winter and next year.
This back-to-school season, you want to deliver a marketing campaign that actually resonates with consumers. Your current customers, as well as potential ones, aren’t interested in hearing about your products and services unless your campaign messages speak to them personally and address their wants, needs, interests, and pain points.
Though it may seem counterintuitive to place your products and services in the background of your ads, this adjustment will help you convert consumers into paying customers. Your promotional content and messages should focus on personalization with the aim of conveying relevant offers that speak to the unique needs of each shopper.
Rather than use salesy ads that feature products with discounted prices in a straightforward manner, instead, highlight the relevancy of your products and convey how your products will make your customers’ lives easier.
If it’s not immediately clear to you why some of your products would be relevant to certain segments of your shoppers but not others, then it’s time to dig into your CRM software data. Your CRM data—or Customer Relationship Management data which is associated with your online or in-store POS—contains the purchase histories of all of your customers along with other insightful data. By grouping your customers into segments, you will be able to identify the products, services, preferences, spending thresholds, and interests of each segment. Once you understand your customers’ pain points and know what they like, want, and need, you can speak to them in a manner that will seem personal to them, using “the three Ts of relevancy.”
Rather than present your product in a straightforward manner within your back-to-school marketing campaigns, instead, present your shoppers with a topic that’s relevant to one of their pain points. By addressing a specific topic, providing information on that topic that’s relevant to your shoppers, and presenting your product as the solution to the topic at hand, your marketing campaigns will resonate with shoppers.
For example, rather than post a photo of a notebook with a “60% off” sticker on social media, which is as uncreative as it gets, instead, feature this shocking fact in your social post:
“Students that use a pen and paper to take notes in class are 62% more likely to remember lessons in the long term than students who use laptops.” —Princeton University Study
That’s a conversation starter right there! As the social media conversation takes off in the comments section under your post, a byproduct will be that parents, students, and teachers rush off to purchase notebooks before they’re sold out… at your store.
In terms of marketing products and services that consumers need right now, promoting back-to-school offers during the back-to-school season is ideal timing, obviously. But we recommend that retailers go the extra mile by researching the return date for your local public schools, private schools, colleges, and universities.
Public schools tend to open earlier than private ones, for example, which means the back-to-school season in your region could begin in late July and extend through September.
To amplify personalization, you could launch different digital back-to-school promotional campaigns for each educational institution using school-specific social media hashtags, for instance. A little research will go a long way in this regard.
The third and final “T” of the 3 Ts of Relevancy has to do with the type of promotional marketing campaign you deliver to your customers. Our quote above states, “This is the format I prefer!” What we’re referring to here are the campaign delivery methods. Not all of your shoppers are going to want to hear about your back-to-school sale via email newsletter, but a lot of them will.
The next sections of this article will focus on the various campaign formats you can use to reach your current customers as well as new ones. This is where personalization is key, however. If you want shoppers to act on your back-to-school sale, you have to deliver your campaigns in the formats they want. You might discover that certain segments of your customers want one format while others want a different format. As a result, you might need to launch back-to-school campaigns in multiple formats, and that’s okay.
These are the most common promotional campaign delivery format methods:
● Email Marketing Campaigns
● Google PPC Ad Campaigns
● Facebook & Instagram Ad Campaigns
● SMS Text Message Campaigns
● Responsive Web Design Landing Page Campaigns
● Referral Code Campaigns
Let’s take a look at how you can use each one.
EMAIL MARKETING CAMPAIGN
Never overlook the promotional power of an email marketing campaign. Why are email campaigns so effective? Because the recipients have already agreed to receive emails from you. In fact, you can bet that emails are their preferred format in terms of hearing from you. Anyone who signed up for your email newsletter or supplied you with their email address to enroll in your loyalty program wants to hear from you via email!
Using personalization to promote the most relevant back-to-school items to your segmented email recipients, consider launching a campaign similar to this one we composed for a pet supply store:
Subject Line: A Back-to-School Bundle Just for You, [FIRST NAME]
Email: Get Fluffy ready for back-to-school season with these hand-picked items bundled just for your furry friend and you!
Relevant Product Bundle: Cat calming treats, an assemble-yourself cat tree, and a cat-themed adult coloring book
When it comes to finding the best back-to-school deals in town, a lot of consumers rely on Google to find stores near them. If you have yet to set up a Google My Business account, or don’t understand why you should, we’ve written an entire article on the subject, Making the Most Out of Google My Business, which will guide you through the process. Once you’ve set up your Google My Business account, Google’s geographically specific algorithms will start recommending your business in location-based search results. Then, link your Google AdWords ad to your GMB Page.
The best Google AdWords campaigns are attention-grabbing and hook the viewer right away. Bear in mind the 3 Ts of Relevancy when composing your PPC AdWords content, like we’ve done for this fitness center:
Web Page Title: Sara Dance Center | Last Chance to Join for $1
Web Page Description: Professional ballroom dance competitor-turned-instructor, Maria, is looking for 10 dedicated students to whip into shape this back-to-school season at the low cost of $1. Click to find out how you can participate in Maria’s 30-day Salsa program hosted by Sara Dance Center!
Taking photos of the kids on the first day of school and sharing them on Facebook and Instagram has become an annual ritual for most parents, and the back-to-school fun doesn’t stop there. In fact, parents and students alike use Facebook and Instagram to find deals on school supplies as well as search for apparel, accessories, and fashion styling inspiration. Running an ad campaign on Facebook and Instagram is a good idea for both brick-and-mortar retailers and eCommerce shops. Just remember that when you create your back-to-school ad campaign in Facebook Business Manager, use detailed targeting so that your paid ad isn’t wasted on the wrong users.
The most important aspect of any social media ad campaign is the Call-to-Action button you include. Don’t even think about running an ad without a CTA. It won’t be worth your time, money, or effort. In our humble opinion, the most valuable CTA you can include is a lead generator. Check out this example we put together for one of our restaurant clients who wanted to enroll customers into their loyalty rewards program:
Headline: Students’ Specials for Back-to-School
Description: This August and September, [RESTAURANT] is offering swag and sandwiches to students who sign up for our customer loyalty rewards program. Power through the long academic year with meals from [RESTAURANT]. Click the Sign-Up button below to claim your loyalty swag and sandwich, and start saving!
Call-to-Action Button: “Sign Up”
Lead Generator Fields: “First Name” & “Email Address”
Everyone loves text messages. In fact, most Americans prefer texting rather than calling when it comes to relaying quick messages. The average text message open rate is 99%, and 96% of all text messages are opened within 15 minutes. In terms of marketing, those are dream statistics. While you would never want to text your customers too frequently, choosing to contact them via SMS text message during one or two special times of the year is appropriate. One of those special times of the year should be back-to-school season since it’s second only to Christmas.
Launching an SMS text message campaign to market your back-to-school sale will only work if you’ve collected your customers’ cell phone numbers, and to be honest, this marketing campaign method works best for professional services businesses like salons, spas, and barbershops. If you run a professional service business, try an SMS back-to-school campaign idea like this one we launched for our beauty salon client:
Text Message: Want to be featured in our back-to-school lookbook? Revamp your look for a fraction of the price this August & September at [SALON NAME]! We’re offering 90% off to anyone who wants to model in our future social media marketing! Reply with ‘BOOK ME’ to reserve your appointment now!
Landing pages can be used for a variety of marketing reasons to pull in customers, but they all serve one major purpose—to convert website visitors into customers who complete the entire buyer’s journey. More often than not, a landing page will offer visitors a special gift, such as a free download, ebook, webinar signup, free trial, or exclusive access to products and services. Landing pages are unique in this sense because they don’t directly market products to visitors. Instead, they trigger instant engagement by featuring a form, survey, quiz, virtual tour, or some other personalized interaction. In terms of marketing your back-to-school sale, you can think of a landing page as an interactive step that motivates website visitors to buy your products. The trick with using landing pages as part of your back-to-school marketing campaigns is to make sure you have a responsive web design in place that displays properly on all devices.
As we mentioned, landing pages can be used in a variety of ways to promote your back-to-school sale, and a whole host of different kinds of businesses use them. Here’s an example of a back-to-school landing page we put together for one of our clients that runs an academic tutoring business:
Web Page Header: There’s only one thing you need to know… you’ll never stop learning.
Content: Take control of your learning by working on the skills you choose at your own pace with our online courses for students of all levels. Sharpen your skills with over 1,000 interactive exercises. Math, science, algebra, biology, computer programming, history, art, grammar & spelling, economics…
Start learning now.
Students receive free online classes and one-on-one online tutoring throughout September 31st. Interested in tutoring? There’s a form for that as well!
(Include two forms, one for parents & students to sign up and another for tutors.)
A referral campaign, or a “refer-a-friend” campaign, is a marketing strategy that retailers use to incentivize their existing customers to recommend their store and products to friends, family, and acquaintances. Typically, referral programs of this nature will reward their customers for making successful referrals and also reward the people they successfully refer. Often a discount code is used, i.e. a referral code. Launching a referral code campaign is a great strategy for brick-and-mortar retailers who want to boost back-to-school sales, and this campaign idea is also effective for eCommerce retailers.
The fun thing about this back-to-school campaign idea is that you can deliver your referral code offer to your customers any way you—and they—would like. You can send out an email marketing campaign or SMS text message marketing campaign that promotes your back-to-school referral code, place a Facebook & Instagram ad, reword your Google My Business Page to promote your referral code, and link to a new landing page that also has the referral code. The sky is really the limit when it comes to using referral codes as part of your back-to-school marketing. Check out what we did for our health & wellness client recently:
Hook: Give $5, Get $5
Headline: Help your friends feel their best while back at school
Body: Loving your health supplements and wellness products from [RETAILER]? Share the love with your friends, family, and fellow students! We’ll give them $5 off to support their wellbeing if they use your unique referral code! And we’ll give you $5 off your next order, too! Enter your email address to receive a unique referral code and start spreading the love!
Now that we’ve laid out six back-to-school marketing campaign ideas all you need to do is come up with personalized content and launch your campaigns! But what if you need help with the graphic design and layout of your campaigns?
Attention-grabbing advertisements are an integral aspect of any solid retail marketing strategy. Whether you have a brick-and-mortar store or an eCommerce shop—or perhaps both—your offline and online presence must be strong if you want to expand your reach, drive traffic, and convert first-time visitors into returning customers.
In order to help retailers do just that, our sister company, FTx, has developed user-friendly graphic design software. This software, AdPro, can be used anytime at no charge. That’s right, it’s free! This software was engineered to deliver professional results. Regardless of your skill level, the advertisements you can build will look amazing and can be used for all of your marketing, promotional, and social media campaigns.
Best of all, free AdPro comes with a full library of industry-specific templates and holiday themes, including back-to-school templates and themes!
Interested in working with a digital marketing agency to handle your promotional campaigns this back-to-school season and beyond? FTx 360 can work within any budget. Our experienced social media and email marketers can handle your campaigns, target your audience, and help take your business to the next level. Contact us today to get started.
"Marketing is enthusiasm transferred to the customer."
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