How to Build an Audience with Each Online Broadcast

Six Ways to Build an Audience with Each Online Broadcast

 

The number of people exposed to your online broadcast can skyrocket exponentially within a single session. The key is to know exactly what you need to do to make that happen. If you believe you can achieve that goal without an effective strategy working behind the scenes, you are sadly mistaken. Here are several effective methods to consider when developing your action plan:


Send Detailed Log-in Info
When sending invitations and announcements to promote your broadcast session, do not forget to send a detailed explanation of how to log into the session when the time comes. Think about how many audience members you are losing simply because they were not able to log into the session for one reason or another. Perhaps a technical issue arose that they could not resolve in time.

On the other hand, they may not have any idea how to access your online broadcasting session. One in five people in the United States make video calls, according to Mashable. However, that means there is still quite a few people that will need to be walked through the process step-by-step.

Scheduling your online video broadcasting session with companies like BlueJeans allows you to send this detailed information automatically with each invitation.


Offer a Valuable Incentive
More people will attend your broadcasting sessions if they have already received something of value from you. By offering a valuable incentive in exchange for reserving a seat in your online session, you will attract a considerable amount of attention and generate buzz for your business. The incentive does not need to be an expensive prize or gift. Focus on providing valuable information that is related to your brand and target market, according to Social Media Examiner.

For instance, offering informative eBooks, free consultations and/or a popular how-to article should do the trick. Focus on moderation when it comes to giving away information free, especially if you have a collection of lengthy, informational products on sale. Otherwise, you could be giving up quite a few sales opportunities along the way.


Offer a Referral Incentive
In addition to offering incentives for registering for the session, consider offering another incentive for referrals and recommendations. For instance, offering an impressive discount on your products and/or services for a specific number of referrals could pay off in a big way for your company over time.

You can also establish a customer loyalty program that rewards your attendees for continuously referring people to your broadcasting sessions – opening many different doors of opportunities. Think about it. If you get 10 attendees to refer your session to three people each, that is a total of 40 people (including the original group of 10). This type of growth will play a key role in the exponential growth of your broadcast audience.


Promote Each Session Weeks in Advance
Do not wait until the last minute to start promoting your online broadcast session. Planning and promoting your session weeks in advance will increase the chances of your attendees placing your event on their calendars.

Keep in mind that there is a big difference between a last-minute reminder and a last-minute announcement. Companies like BlueJeans allow you to schedule and send reminders to your prospective attendees leading up to the big day of your online video broadcasting session. You can also use other means of communication to keep in contact with your prospective attendees before and after the session – including social media and e-mail correspondence.


Engage New Viewers Immediately
Get your new viewers engaged in the discussion immediately. It may seem insignificant, but acknowledging their presence within the broadcast can do wonders for your session attendance rate and overall engagement. Keep an eye on your viewer list throughout the duration of the session, because you never know who may join at unexpected moments. Allowing them to introduce themselves can also help you in another big way when it comes to marketing your sessions.

Another suggestion is to offer a survey for each attendee to complete after signing into the session. This type of feedback can provide you with their contact information – including their name, address and e-mail address. They may not feel like talking a lot during the session, but you will still have the pertinent information necessary to contact them long after the session ends.


Analyze Your Marketing Methods
You might be wasting time and money on ineffective marketing methods for your online broadcast. The best way to determine what works and what does not is to pay attention to the results. One of the quickest ways to gather information is to find out how your viewers discovered your session in the first place – especially your newest attendees.

You can even turn this into an icebreaking conversation at the start of the session to engage your viewers right away, according to MakeUseOf.com. Pay attention to any emerging trends and target those marketing methods specifically. For instance, if a substantial number of people heard about your session via social media, perhaps you should take a closer look at investing more in those channels.

Custom Business Cards

15% Off!

Why All Businesses Need to Be on Instagram

 

To Tweet or to Instagram? That is the question.
For more and more people, though, the answer seems to be “to Instagram.”

In October of 2014, Twitter reported having more than 284 million active monthly users and more than 70 million videos and photos shared daily – up from 60 million in March of 2014.
That was compared to Twitter’s 232 million users at around the same time. With those numbers in mind, it seems evident that Instagram is pulling ahead as the leader of the social media pack, making it an essential part of every marketing scheme.

Read on to learn more about how the photo-sharing Supergiant is dominating the market right now and why your business needs to be on it.


The Rise of Instagram
Just nine months after Instagram reported hitting the 200 million user milestone, it pulled ahead of Twitter on Dec. 10, 2014. This is incredibly impressive considering that Instagram began as the brain child of two friends – Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger. Launched on Oct. 6, 2010, Instagram sought to reform the social sharing world through the use of images (a picture is worth 1,000 words, after all).

In a rush of traffic that is unheard of for most startups on the market, Instagram took off. Roughly 25,000 users joined the service on its first day of availability and, since the launch coincided with the release of the shiny new iPhone 4 — whose camera was finally good enough to spell certain death for separate point-and-shoot devices and whose presence made the iOS base large enough to provide the network that a service like Instagram needed to take off like a runaway stagecoach — it’s pretty safe to say that part of Instagram’s immediate success was due to being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time.

Within three months, Instagram boasted one million users. Over the next several months that number continued to multiply, hitting 10 million at what seemed like the speed of light. Another aspect that made it unique among the start-ups of the time is that Instagram spent virtually no money on advertising – everything Instagram was experiencing was organic growth.
In light of the huge influx of users, co-founder Mike Krieger was forced to carry his laptop everywhere he went in case the site went down under the massive user demand – which it never did because he whipped that puppy out in bars, at dinner or still soapy from the shower to head off any problems before they began. It’s possible, in fact, that this is one of the things that set Instagram apart from Twitter in the early days – Instagram never went down like Twitter did during the famous “Fail Whale” episodes – periods where the site went down and displayed an icon of a cheery beluga being lifted from the depths from happy Twitter birds – hardly enough to sooth angry Twitter users yelling at their screens.

1. 

All those impromptu laptop sessions paid off, however, and the service kept getting better and better. When teen heartthrob Justin Bieber joined the service in 2011 (fun fact – when you Google Bieber’s name, his Instagram account is the first result to pop up – before even his official website or his Twitter account), the site saw a literal uptick in users. The first Bieber photo drew about 50 followers a minute and one comment every 10 seconds immediately after it was posted. Ironically, Bieber also Tweeted the Instagram photo out, inadvertently using Twitter to drive users to Instagram.

After the Biebs jumped onboard, the site continued to grow and the founding duo gained celebrity and stuck true to their motives – they kept their app simple in contrast to sites like Facebook, which made complicated desktop apps in order to extend their service to mobile users. The dynamic Instagram duo also refused to change the essential skeleton of the app even as user numbers exploded. The team’s dedication to their original structure paid off, too. When the app launched on Android, it drew more than one million users in a short 24 hours and in 2012, when Facebook purchased Instagram for a whopping $1 billion, it seemed to many tech experts the only thing Facebook could do to keep its budding rival from usurping it from the throne entirely.


Why Instagram Rules All
Although Facebook is still the most popular social media site in the world – boasting upward of 1.15 billion monthly users, Instagram has a unique seat in the social media parlor. This is due to the following things:

• Instagram encourages creativity. What’s more, the service makes creativity simple without putting many limits on what users can and cannot do. While Twitter has historically featured a strict character limit (which might be on its way out, according to some) Instagram has never put any limits on its users aside from banning obviously explicit or inappropriate content. The site has simply offered a platform for users to share photos, apply cool filters, find content they love and interact with people they admire. It’s truly that simple.
• Instagram is intimate. Again – a picture is worth 1,000 words. It’s one of the oldest sayings in the book and, more and more, it seems to be true. While Twitter offers a unique microblogging service that allows users to share tweets with followers, it isn’t as focused as Instagram, which only offers photos. Although many people adore Twitter, Instagram is different. Instagram is, in a word, more intimate. Where else can you get a peek of Taylor Swift’s scrunchy-faced cat or Herschel Supply’s newest back-to-school lookbook?
• Instagram upped its authentication process for a better user experience. Have you ever searched Instagram for a celebrity you love only to be misled by a profile boasting 15 followers and claiming to be Kim K’s “private” account? Well, thanks to Instagram’s new “verified account” feature, you’ll be free from this trouble from here on out. In addition to cutting back on spam Instagram accounts, which have historically been one of the largest user complaints about the service, the new account verification badges will help users find people they genuinely want to follow – be it a celebrity or a musician. The verification badges began showing up on the accounts of celebrities in 2014 and appear as a small blue checkmark next to the account user’s name, as seen here on Katy Perry’s Instagram account:

In contrast, decreasing spam has been a large problem for Twitter, which has reported that nearly 10 percent of its users are spam accounts.

• Instagram focuses on visual content. Although most other social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Google+ all offer visual content options, nobody (except Pinterest, maybe, which approaches it from a different angle) focuses exclusively on visual content quite so much. When you think of it this way, Instagram’s viral growth makes perfect sense. Visual content has been the most rapid area of growth in social media for years now – in fact, including a photo in a social media post increases the likelihood that the post will be clicked by 18 percent. In light of Instagram’s domination of the field, other services are hurrying to catch up – Twitter is focusing on its Vine short-video offering, for example. As it stands now, though, Instagram users are interacting with posts on the site at a huge 18 times the rate they do Facebook posts — yet another statistic that proves Instagram is a serious force to be reckoned with in the social media market.

Another not-to-be-overlooked part of Instagram’s visual dominance is the quality of the photos Instagram offers. Thanks to the quality of the cameras on today’s smartphones and the filters within the Instagram apps (many of which were designed by professional photographers such as Cole Rise, who created the Rise filter), Instagram’s image quality has gotten to be something that approaches that of DSLR images. Thanks to the app’s attention to detail and dedication to bringing the everyday Joe a powerful art platform, Instagram has made it possible for people without the resources to attend photography school to produce surprisingly beautiful outcomes. What’s more, these people can also gain an audience of their own and become an audience for other people’s work.

• Instagram allows access. We all have our cell phones in our pockets all the time. Imagine if you could look through the phone photos of your favorite musician or public figure – how incredible would that be? What kind of cool, personal moments would that allow you to access? That’s essentially exactly what Instagram does and may be one of the main reasons the service has taken off. Instagram, in many ways, is a window into the private worlds of other people, and a powerful one at that. Understandably so, users have always been eager to engage with it.

The Future of Instagram

As it stands now, industry leaders are predicting that Instagram will only continue to get bigger. The app is experiencing huge demand from the advertising market and exponential rise in users on a monthly basis. While Twitter certainly has its place in the social media royal family, it’s clear that Instagram has offered users a unique experience that has helped it pull ahead of Twitter and carve out its own position in the social media universe.

Although it’s hard to say what the future will hold for Instagram, it seems safe to assume that the skeleton of this beloved service will stay the same while the features it offers just keep getting better and better.

Business Cards

20% Off All Orders!

French Linen Business Card Template (White)

Pearl Finish Business Cards

White Linen Business Cards

Photo Business Cards (Platinum Finish)

Gold Finish Business Card

Iridescent Pearl Finish Business Card (Style

The Common Habits of a Successful Entrepreneur

 

 

Entrepreneurs have innovative minds; they create and find revenue streams, which are largely based on their passion. Entrepreneurs are not the same as small business owners though they can start from that level. However, they advance in their business by adopting strategies like franchising.
Entrepreneurs do not just dream of building and working for themselves but creating pathways, which can be duplicated by others. There are some habits they possess which make them unique in both personality and their entrepreneurship undertakings. Here are a few of the common habits successful entrepreneurs display.


They are early risers
While you may be successful when you are night owl, in most cases, you will find that entrepreneurs rise early. It is easy to train yourself to be an early riser. However, it may come with some unwanted effects like hygiene and sleep routine issues. Nonetheless, it is worth making the effort for the sake of your business to get an early start to the day.


Entrepreneurs are not afraid of taking risks
The road to success as an entrepreneur comes with risks. Unless you confront the fear of investing, you might not excel. These people take calculated risks which dreamers may not be able to do. While dreaming is part of being an entrepreneur, you can’t stop there. You have to take your dream to the next level and make it real. You cannot keep on fantasizing without taking actions— it means you will never realize your dream.


Successful entrepreneurs match passion with industry
You may acquire a degree in particular subject, but it remains irrelevant to your success. For example, if you studied English and linguistics and started a SEO firm, which creates you millions per year, it means that you have matched your passion for the Internet with money making.


Critically evaluate their strengths and weakness
Weakness should not be seen as downfall to success. You can address your weakness and make them your strengths. Ensure you constantly work on strengths and make improvements on them. Successful entrepreneurs have no time for humility and they don’t bury their heads in the sand when confronted with situations.


Make it a priority to make money
There is a difference between a dreamer and an entrepreneur. If you cannot prioritize making money, then you won’t make it as an entrepreneur. Don’t just strive to have a decent income but something that makes you live your dream.


Work well with people
To succeed as an entrepreneur, you will need to be personable and value customers’ input. You will also need to work well with others — an ideal tool that can facilitate this is learning and acquiring good communication skills. You need to constantly improve your relationship with others.


They know how to cope and face rejection
While pursuing your entrepreneurship goals, you will meet hurdles that you need to jump. You will be rejected by investors, partners, and people you need to network with. However, such setbacks are simply a part of doing business and you cannot allow them to get you down. Be tough and realize rejection is a part of learning that can make you stronger and more focused than before.

Conclusion
It takes perseverance, risk taking and ability to see opportunities where others cannot to succeed as an entrepreneur. You cannot live your dream without a lot of hard work. If you go that extra mile you are sure to be a success.

Custom Business Cards

20% Off

How To Use Twitter’s New Tools to Reach More Readers

 

Twitter has recently been going through a variety of changes; some features have been lost, while others have been added. The most immediate development for the little blue bird landed by way of Twitter’s developer conference, Flight, where it was announced that the company is set to launch its new Collections API feature.

According to Twitter, Collections “is an editable group of Tweets hand-selected by a Twitter user or programmatically managed via collection APIs. Each collection is public and has its own page on twitter.com, making it easy to share and embed in your website and apps.” The tool essentially “turns multiple Tweets into a single story.”

The new API is an individual component to an “ecosystem” of tools already utilized by Moments that allows developers, publishers, and everyone else to easily locate and publish a series of tweets. Other tools contained within this ecosystem include TweetDeck and the newly launched Curator tool.
Curator is a feature that allows individuals to locate tweets they would like to use and construct as a story. The element includes 20 different filters to assist in locating pertinent tweets to be arranged as the user sees fit. From there, simply enter the URL or collection ID into publish.twitter.com to receive an embeddable code. Drop that into your website or app and everything is ready to go. Any updates to the collection will automatically be added to the flow in the embedded story. Additionally, much like Tweet embeds, text colors and backgrounds are customizable to create a more consistent and personalized appearance.

Previously, in order to publish stories, users had to manually manage various Tweet IDs and personally embed them into a site one-by-one. This is no longer the case. As Twitter senior product manager Mollie Vandor points out: “At any time, you can update your collection of Tweets (from any tool that supports the Collections API) and it will automatically update your site or app. There’s no additional embed code, updates of your website, or need to re-submit your apps to the app stores needed.”

Twitter also announced that it has partnered with Wayin, Spredfast, DataMinr, Flowics, and ScribbleLive to help them develop their own versions of curation tools. The best part of all of this is that if you begin work on one tool and choose to switch to another, users can continue to build collections seamlessly.

Piled on to all of these other fantastic storytelling features, Twitter also disclosed in its Flight announcements blog post that a new grid layout is to be introduced for image and video abundant stories. These grids are set to be editable at any time, allowing for additional components to be added or removed, and the grid will dynamically refresh with the new layout.

All of these elements that Twitter has introduced will not only provide a more captivating and dynamic storytelling experience, they will help to engage entirely new audiences outside of the Twitter platform. As Twitter product manager Michael Ducker explained, “You might be a witness to a breaking news event, and only have a dozen followers, but an embedded tweet can help the world see the story from your eyes. The embedded tweet is the modern day pullquote.”

While Twitter may already engage more than 300 million users across the globe, it seeks to reach exponentially more people with the use of these tools. Twitter claims that embedded tweets currently reach more than a billion people across the globe each month, even if these folks are not actually on the Twitter platform itself; the use of these tools is vital to Twitter’s growth.

With these new resources at hand, an endless amount of companies and brands can now leverage their websites and apps in more meaningful ways to reach new audiences and gain an influx of followers on social. Even those with smaller followings on Twitter are likely to gain additional pull with the application of these new features.

For many businesses, storytelling is an irreplaceable tool for gaining and retaining an audience. With the myriad of storytelling resources Twitter has just unveiled, many brands (including Twitter themselves) are poised in a unique position of becoming a real-time resource for information and a highly captivating venue to provide audiences a story surrounding any brand or niche. Establish how this content can enrich your websites UX and put the tools you now have to work; you are likely to see the benefits in your site traffic as well as social following.

Custom Business Cards

20% Off

How to Manage Your Inventory Across Multiple Online Channels

 

 

Selling on more than one online channel can open up to retailers a whole new world of opportunities. Amazon, eBay (and the international versions of these marketplaces), and your own personal Web store, usually created with a provider like Shopify, Magento, or WooCommerce, is the most common combination retailers use. But there are loads of other niche marketplaces out there too, like Etsy for homemade crafts and vintage knick-knacks, and Yumbles for artisan foods.

There are plenty of benefits when it comes to selling on more than one channel:

• The main motivator for a retailer adopting any kind of strategy is always going to be increasing profit, usually by increasing sales. Selling on multiple channels offers a variety of different engagement points for customers to make purchases, and increases the convenience of sales, boosting profit as a result.
• Being listed on more than one channel is great for SEO and helps customers find retailers better. It’s also great for reaching a wider audience – someone who’s your target customer who shops on Etsy for example might not think of looking on Amazon, so listing on Etsy could bring in those customers you’re missing out on.
• Amazon and eBay do a lot of the legwork for you by drawing in customers, while you can still use your own website to work on branding and personality.
Managing inventory is always going to be a chore and a struggle as a retailer, but as soon as you expand from one channel to many, you’re going to find it’s even more difficult. Luckily, there are options out there for retailers who are selling on more than one sales channel and are slowly feeling the burn. One such way is the use of an inventory management software that syncs sales across those multiple sales channels.
Syncing your inventory across sales channels helps you:
• Save time that you would usually spend updating stock and inventory numbers
• Save time on manually inputting data into your accounting software
• Avoid human error that occurs from inputting data manually
• Avoid accidentally selling products that you don’t have in stock (overselling).
• View your stock and inventory data in real-time.

Problem:
Keeping inventory levels up-to-date can be a particularly overwhelming task for retailers. Having too many items out of out of stock, showing incorrect stock levels, and selling outdated or expired items on a retail website can negatively affect your business and often results in a loss of customers and damage to your reputation.

Solution:
With inventory management software that syncs stock across multiple channels, retailers get real-time insights into all the quickest moving stock and the slow moving products on each online store so that they can make the correct adjustments and keep their stock levels optimal and their costs down. You will no longer need to have multiple softwares to help you fulfill your customers’ orders and expectations. Multi-channel software allows you to receive goods into your store electronically and avoid selling more products than you have in stock.

Problem:
A multi-channel retailer’s aims are to deliver the correct goods at the right time, to the right location, in the correct amount and in the right quality. Of course this means their orders have to be attributed to the correct warehouse and then fulfilled in a manner that is efficient and time conscious. Also, each order will involve multiple steps managed by different teams across various stations throughout their warehouses, so there’s a lot of opportunity for human error.

Solution:
This is where a warehouse management system comes in handy and enhances the multi-channel solution. It gives retailers sophisticated functionality and multiple sales options to reduce their warehouse operations and their fulfillment costs, manage orders across their multiple warehouse locations as well as dropshipping partners and store locations, streamlines management of products and inventory, helping them improve their delivery times.

Problem:
In most companies, stock is the greatest asset on the balance sheet, which means that planning, forecasting, and managing inventory will determine how profitable you’ll be. Inaccurate forecasting produces backorders, which can result in unsatisfied customers – and can also turn away potential new ones. Keeping this kind of data accurate is hard enough for retailers selling on just one channel, and it gets more and more difficult for those who are using more than one channel.

Solution:
Most multi-channel softwares (the good ones, anyway) will have a reporting tool that works out sales reports and forecasting for you, saving you time and making your life a lot easier. This also eliminates the need for you to combine data from separate systems because it’s all one place.

Selling across multiple channels can massively benefit retailers by creating more sales opportunities and resulting in an increase in profits. It sounds complicated, but it really is worth the effort, and with the software available today, retailers can breeze through their inventory management whether they’re selling on one channel or ten.

Business Cards

20% Off All Orders!

French Linen Business Card Template (White)

Pearl Finish Business Cards

White Linen Business Cards

Photo Business Cards (Platinum Finish)

Gold Finish Business Card

Iridescent Pearl Finish Business Card (Style

Facebook Marketing is Changing —Here’s What Small Businesses Can Do To Stay In The Game

 

Facebook is always trying to change things up to make itself more profitable. The year 2015 has seen changes to the News Feed, which affects the way that companies conduct Facebook marketing campaigns via their Facebook Pages. The new changes are probably affecting your marketing campaign plans so, to help you adjust, here are a few of the most common questions and their solutions.

Question 1: What is Facebook changing about its News Feed?
You have likely noticed Page posts are not showing up in News Feeds anymore. It is very rare that you see a Page post in a News Feed these days unless it is very popular and/or trending in some way. As a result, the level of engagement with your Facebook Page has probably gone down. Facebook is trying to remove the overly promotional elements to help improve the News Feed and associated user experience.

“As part of our ongoing survey that asked thousands upon thousands of people how they felt about their News Feeds,” Facebook said. “Many people said they wanted to see far more stories from their friends and their Pages, and far less promotional content.”

Facebook has listed three of the traits it found to be overly promotional
• Posts that use the same content as seen in adverts;
• Posts that only exist to make people buy stuff or install apps;
• Posts asking people to enter promotions without any real context.

Your organic distribution is going to decrease because of the new News Feed rules, which means you will need to switch to Facebook advertising if you want to push your products, services, brands or websites. If your Facebook Page is a big part of your marketing strategy, then it is time to re-evaluate your plans.

Question 2: What do the Facebook News feed changes going to mean to businesses that cannot afford to spend money on Facebook advertising?
Economics suggests that more people are going to use Facebook advertising now, which is going to push up the price if you want to appear in prominent positions on the website. If you do not have the budget to risk on Facebook advertising, then here is what you should do:

1. Evaluate your current marketing strategy and continue to create content that people will want to look at on Facebook. If the content is engaging, then people will still visit your Facebook Page even if it is not featured on news feeds.

2. Make sure you use the correct link format when you post any links on your Facebook Page, and do not bury them in photo captions.

3. Keep testing your marketing strategies on Facebook to see how your engagement is being affected. Do not post general comments such as greeting for the season. Post things that are specific to your niche and see how the results differ.

4. Post your videos and images onto Instagram and then cross-post them to Facebook.
5. The social media content calendar is very handy and helpful if you want to organize your posts on Facebook.

Question 3: What should I do if my business has a small advertising budget and is able to spare some for Facebook advertising?
Facebook advertising does have functions that accommodate people with small budgets. Your business will not be placed as prominently as those with bigger budgets will, but that doesn’t mean your campaign will be completely lacking in potential. For example, if you were to target your adverts to a very small and tight group, you may have more success achieving a convertible level of prominence. A business that has a smaller advertising budget may use Facebook boost posts to target their posts at their preferred audience.

Facebook marketing tips to help improve your reach
Know your audience on Facebook
You are supposed to know your target audience anyway, but if you want to succeed with Facebook advertising, you need to know your general demographic information and you need to gather as much information as possible to target your customers more tightly so that you need not spend as much money.

Avoid trying to sell on Facebook
Facebook is reacting to sales-driven posts by making them less prominent. Trying to get people’s attention and educate them about your brand is OK, but Facebook will work against you if you are trying to make sales, and if you are trying to pull people off of Facebook.

Post some of your best content on Facebook
This may seem like silly advice, since your content is more permanent and valuable on your website, however, there is nothing stopping you from posting your best content on Facebook and then waiting a few weeks for it to be forgotten before posting it in your website. Followed content and content that is doing well on other social media networks may help improve its exposure on Facebook.

Allow your employees the chance to go on your Facebook page
Have your employees visit your Facebook page and click likes, make comments and share things with their own profiles. These likes and engagement elements will help make your content more prominent. However, spam likes, shares and comments will have your content disregarded.

Respond to people
Do not respond to the trolls or people being negative. They are not the silent majority, so do not worry about them. Respond to the people that ask real questions or make good comments. Especially respond to the funny ones because you want them to return and keep adding good stuff to your page.

Custom Business Cards

20% Off

Five Different Ways to Target Audiences Through Facebook Advertising

 

Over the last few years, Facebook advertising has proved itself to be a powerful platform for businesses of all sizes to generate leads, grow its audience and increase sales.

When businesses use Facebook advertising properly, the results can be a game-changer.

In early days, the platform was relatively simple. There were fewer advertising options, fewer advertisers and the low competition levels meant that generating great results was cheap and easy. These days, there are literally hundreds of different ways to run a single ad campaign. With increased competition and increased costs as a result, it is also more difficult to get a good result without a little technical know-how.


How to Get Facebook Advertising Results in 2015
To run a successful Facebook ad campaign in 2015, you need to be aware of:

• The short- and long-term goals you want to achieve.
• What ad-type or objective best fits your goals. Essentially, this is all about the kind of action you want your audience to take. Some of the ad objectives you can choose from include boosting your posts, promoting your page, sending people to your website, getting website conversions, app installs/engagement, offers, event attendance, and more.
• The kinds of images and copy that will appeal to your audience.
• Who your audience are and how you will target them.

Once you have an understanding of these factors and start implementing them, you will be ideally positioned to run Facebook ads that work well and generate a good return on investment.


Facebook Audience Targeting
In this article, we are going to be talking specifically about five different options currently available for targeting your audience on Facebook. Some of these options are relatively new to the platform or have been around for awhile but are underutilized by most advertisers.

Often, it is worth testing an ad campaign on several different audiences to try and improve your return on investment. A lower cost per action (sign up, like, click, sale) means that you will get more bang for your advertising buck.

Here are our five different audience targeting methods for Facebook advertising…

1. Website Custom Audiences
Quite simply, website custom audiences allow you to target users with Facebook advertising who have been to your website previously. This is extremely powerful, because you gain access to a highly relevant audience. This could allow you to do a “follow up” campaign that targets people who may have visited your site, but clicked away before they took any action.

To start collecting this kind of audience, you will first need to install a tracking pixel on your site (Facebook will provide you with one). This will tag any website visitors with a tracking cookie so that Facebook will know that they’ve visited you and they can receive your advertising.

2. E-mail List Custom Audiences
If you already have an e-mail database, chances are that some of those e-mails have been used to create Facebook accounts. You can upload a spreadsheet with your e-mails and use this to generate an e-mail list custom audience in Facebook’s advertising manager. Once you have done that, Facebook will try to match these e-mails with accounts. Each matched e-mail will add an audience member to your list that you can target with Facebook ads.

This is a great opportunity to reinvigorate an older database, increase the number of touch-points, or perhaps convert some members of your fan-base into Facebook-likers.

3. Lookalike Audiences
If you’ve spent a lot of time building up a relevant audience on your existing Facebook page through amazing content, this audience type will be very useful for you. In Facebook’s advertising manager, you can generate a “lookalike audience” for your page. Quite simply, this means that Facebook will find other users on Facebook with similar demographic qualities, likes and activities to your existing fan-base.

This can be a very cost-effective way to advertise, with an instantly available, highly relevant audience at your fingertips.

4. Employment Targeting
If your business targets people in a specific industry (especially if you’re B2B), Facebook advertising can work really well for you. It is actually possible to target people by their job title, employer and industry. Of course, this is limited by the accuracy of the information people provide Facebook with (not everyone is comfortable putting their employment details on their Facebook profile), but for the most part, it can work really well.

Although occupation targeting has been around for quite some time, many businesses that should be using it, aren’t! If this feature is relevant to your business, you should be testing it.

5. Behavioral Targeting
You may be interested in targeting your audience based on things they are doing or have done recently. Facebook collects a lot of information about its users (like it or not), which can be annoying as a user, but fantastic as an advertiser.

You can target users based on their digital activities (games they play, event creation, online spending, etc.), what device they are using, places they have recently travelled to (thanks to checking in on Facebook), and events in their life (things like getting engaged, married, new job, babies, etc).
Many businesses will find that different types of events could trigger a need for their products or services, making this type of audience targeting highly relevant for certain promotions.

The array of advertising and audience targeting options available on Facebook is incredible – and growing all the time. This list includes just a few of your options. If you’re keen to do some further reading, Jon Loomer provides even more information about Facebook ad targeting on his blog and is an excellent information source in this area. Aaron Zakowski also has some creative approaches to audience targeting on his blog about Facebook Custom Audiences.

At the end of the day, keeping up-to-date on your different advertising options is essential when you are using a platform that changes constantly. This will ensure that your ads are the best-targeted, generate the most return, and help to grow your business further. If you haven’t already, start testing out some of the above audience types with your next ad campaign and watch your results improve.

Business Cards

20% Off All Orders!

French Linen Business Card Template (White)

Pearl Finish Business Cards

White Linen Business Cards

Photo Business Cards (Platinum Finish)

Gold Finish Business Card

Iridescent Pearl Finish Business Card (Style