Current Issues in Marketing Strategy

The Facebook Events application is one of the most powerful advertising tool available and is provided at no cost to the user. It allows you the flexibility to advertise events to both your existing Facebook fan base, whilst also advertising externally and attracting new users to ‘attend’ your event and ‘fan’ you page.

Why is it so powerful?

The events application spreads events virally. When a users clicks the ‘attending’ button, this message is syndicated through their news feeds to their friends and colleges. As social groups are generally homogenous the ‘pickup rate’ is extremely high and we often find that the money spent attracting one attendee actually leads to 2 or 3 friends joining them. The viral aspect continues to perpetuate as those friends that also click ‘attending’ further the event through their news feeds and so the ball keeps rolling.

A perfect illustration of this was RMIT Alumni who advertised a cocktail event in London through Facebook events. In previous years they had advertised in traditional placements and received a handful of people joining them. This year they received over 50 old Alumni join them for a quiet drink, a number that is sure to grow in years to come.

A few tips for effective event pages

Setting up an event page is easy, but making it an attractive event that people wish to attend requires strategy. Be sure to choose a really catchy title, subtitle and photo. These three fields are the only ones seen in “Requests” when you invite your friends (and they invite their friends). The small greeting you can include goes out in the email notification, so that’s important too.

Congruent with this, writing 100 – 200 words of copy explaining the event is about the optimal amount of text. Don’t get weighed down trying to explain everything, leave links through to supporting parts of your website, they’ll read on if they are interested.

Advertising units to promote the site

To promote the events to people outside of your existing fan base, run of network advertising units are cheap and effective. These advertising units allow you to target specific consumers in your target geographic and demographic areas on a cost per click basis. Ad units, as shown below, including an ‘RSVP’ button with which users can choose to ‘attend’ events immediately. These ad units are extremely effective in promoting events at low cost.

What to notice

The ad is clear, to the point and allows the user to ‘RSVP’ at their will.

Costs only apply if users choose to click or interact with the advertising unit, all branding exposures without clicks are free.

There are heaps of great SEO link building tips out there, one my favorites uses the old school Ven diagram to analyse what your competitors are doing and copy them. Incoming links are extremely important in improving your websites ranking across the major search engines. They acts as a vote of confidence that you are a reputable website and encourages Google to give you a high rank for any given search term. It's a simple concept, but how do you go about achieving a great SEO link building strategy to outrank your competitors?

This trick / tool is called competitor trolling and I use a website called Venny. Simply go to open site explorer and type in your URL, along with your competitors (separately). You should be looking for the 'linking domains' tab for the websites that you providing incoming links. Download these and open in excel, extracting the actual URL's., you need do is plonk them into Venny.

Venny is super easy to use. Name each company and copy+paste the respective URL's into the box below. The system automatically shows the link cross over across all competition in a simple Ven diagram. From here you can click on the areas of the diagram you want to explore and this will generate a list of URL's that you should chase to link to your website.

Why go after competitor links?

Link building is tough work, so why not copy what others are doing as well as adding your own flare to it. This is the quickest, most efficient way to generate a thorough link profile, and comes with the added knowledge that it's working for them, so it must work for you.

This is my favorite SEO link building tip, if you need help e-mail me josh.straw84@gmail.com

Continuing this series about the power of retargeting, today we are looking at another much under-utilised retargeting strategy, social retargeting. Ask most marketers and they will tell you that retargeting is used to bring people back to the website, or publicise a deal to your users who have previously been exposed to your brand and whilst this is right, there is so much more you can do. Social retargeting refers to the art of using your retargeting cookies to bring people into your social media network, continuing to converse with them through a multitude of channels.

Google retargeting (they call it remarketing) is an extremely powerful tool, continuing a conversation with consumers that have previously visited your website, either reminding them to complete an action, or using it for burst marketing opportunities. The structure of how you apply retarketing tags on-site dictates the strategic options you can utilise to generate positive marketing outcomes.

Click through rate is a strange metric, most conducive to generating large profits for the advertising networks than anything else. I’m sure everyone reading this has had to explain ‘what is a good click through rate’ only to see the clients eye’s glaze over almost disbelievingly. Whilst CTR is a very soft measure of anything, one thing is for sure, a higher click through rate means cheaper click costs.

It’s something I have spent a lot of time testing across a number of networks, and generally ‘quality ads’ are classified as having the highest propensity to generate a reaction from a viewer. To start with let me explain the obvious. An effective ad is one that generates an outcome for the advertiser, not the network. I remember a ski chalet in New Zealand that I represented. We use to put the price in the ads to stop people clicking on the ads unless they were serious about purchase. What this meant was a very low CTR, but an enormous conversion rate. Needless to say this was the very opposite of what the networks believe in.

This being said, for most clients, click through rate is quite important, particularly against larger budgets where a $0.05 saving per click can mean tens of thousands of extra users brought through to the site. So as an advertiser we should always be planning tactics for generating higher attraction rate, a problem the Go Daddy marketing team have never been faced with.

What can drive up the CTR?
I’m sure most reading this will skip right down to this section, the strategy of CTR, and I’ll apologize in advance, there are no one solution fits all answers. The three pieces of advice I would give you are:

1.) Make sure your ads are different to the competition
2.) Run bonus offers to improve the value offer
3.) Create time urgency “Enrolment closes in 3 days”

Josh Strawczynski’s Opinion
Click through rate is an unusual measurement of advertising efficiency, particularly when you look at Google and the fact that they track CTR against blind historical benchmarks. The simple solution is try to be different, stand out from the crowd and don’t let your client engage a creative agency to do your job for you.

Tracking phone calls generated from your website advertising has long been the missing link in the online advertisers tracking metrics and with consumers so drawn to picking up the phone many advertisers simply don't know how to account for it other than a vague feeling of more or less calls on any given day. Today I wanted to discuss a little trick of mine that has helped both small and large clients to track their online conversion rates by advertising channel and measure exactly how many phone calls an given advertising channel has generated.

Dynamic phone number tracking has been generated by a number of telco's, but one that my company is directly related to have surpassed all others by integrating their results with Google analytics. In fact so effective have they been that Google Australia uses them to display how to track incoming calls to their clientele. The best part of the deal is that it won't cost you a cent more than a traditional 1300 number and for small business we are talking about less than $100 a month including phone call costs. So what is the advantage?

The advantage is quite simple, at the end of any given month you can tell exactly how many phone calls your Adwords generated, how many came from Facebook, and eDM or any other advertising channel you have used. You can then work backwards to integrate these results with your online metrics to unearth the exact cost per acquisition for each advertising channel and better optimise your spend accordingly. The data is so sophisticated you can even see what a user typed into Google prior to making the phone call.

For those technically minded people, the way it works is actually pretty simple. There is a little bit of java script that sits around the phone number on your website, this reads the source of any given user (Adwords, Facebook, Yahoo) and chooses which 1300 number to display, so you have a unique phone number displayed for each entrance source the user could have come from and therefore you know which channel has generated calls. This is integrated into your Google analytics and can even be set to record the phone call.

It is a terrific system and I highly recommend you include it into your online and offline advertising to effectively track phone calls from every advertising medium, filtering the results back into your strategic marketing plan and overall marketing mix.

If you are interested in knowing more please contact me and I will be happy to take you through dynamic phone number tracking and set you up with an account free of charge. Just call Josh on 0402 844 409