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Feb 17, 2015 8:00:00 AM

How To Solve The Biggest Problems With Facebook Advertising

Until recently, one of the biggest frustrations with Facebookadvertising has been the inabilityfor advertisers to effectively measure the ROI ofadvertising campaigns. In fact, brands have been crying out for data to help them measure campaigns and justify their ad spend for years.

Late last year, Facebook answered those cries withthe launch of theiradvertising platform, Atlas, which was designed to improve how marketers target and measure their online advertisements.

Advertisers are excited about the potential of Atlas, as it opens up two new and extremely powerful capabilities for digital advertisers: a solution to the ‘cookie problem; and the ability to target consumers on mobile devices.

Let’s look at these two possibilities in a little more detail:

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Jan 22, 2015 8:00:00 AM

5 Critical Signs You Need Help With Your Facebook Advertising Campaign

Are your Facebook advertising campaigns producing the ROI you want? If not it’s time to look at your advertising strategy. Some companies are rewarded with low-cost leads and healthy profits from their Facebook campaigns, while others simply fail.

There are some common mistakes made by facebook advertisers that are preventingthem from getting the results they want. Consider these five points before embarking on your next campaign:

1. Not having a Goal

When you create a Facebook ad, the first thing to ascertain is what your objective is.
Each Facebook ad should have a specific, measurable goal, and you need to know what metrics you will use to measure your success with that goal.

By focusing on “cost per” metrics, you can improve the effectiveness of you campaign without increasing the ad spend.

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Jan 13, 2015 9:24:00 AM

5 Horrible Mistakes You're Making With Facebook Advertising

Facebook can be a powerful way to target potential and current customers, track the ROI of your campaigns down to the penny, and grow your business’ influence. Despite this, brands are making the same few mistakes over and over again when it comes to their Facebook advertising.

Here are five of the most common reasons campaigns fail and how to avoid them.

1. Poor targeting

There is no excuse for poor targeting, as Facebook makes it easy to narrow down your target audience by age, gender and interests, so you can literally tailor your promotion to only reach those who are actually interested in what you have to offer.

2. You’re not noticeable

Your advert is one of hundreds of messages on the viewer’s screen and they will skim over most of the content until something catches their attention. You therefore need to make sure that it’s your advert they’re looking at.Your ad needs a clear image under an attention-grabbing headline,accompanied by engaging copy. Keep the copy short so Facebook doesn’t truncate it, and use a relevant image that is noticeable in the mini right-hand images.

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Dec 30, 2014 8:00:00 AM

Facebook Relaunches Cross Network Ad Platform Atlas

Advertisers' fascination with cookies has long past. Every advertiser knows deep down that a cookie is a blunt instrument and its limitations are woefully apparent when dealing with cross-channel campaigns. Unfortunately, cookies are the best way to track the effectiveness of online campaigns. That is, until Facebook announced the relaunch of their cross-network ad platform, Atlas.

With Atlas, Facebook are attempting to take on Google on its home turf — display advertising. How? Aside from dispensing with cookies, Atlas purports to bridge the gap between the offline and online advertising worlds by linking the real-world interactions of customers to their Facebook profiles.

Here’s how it works. When a user logs in to Facebook or uses their Facebook credentials to log in to other websites, the network installs cookies to track their activities on the website. But cookies alone are not effective enough, and they don't work on mobile, which is becoming the preferred online shopping platform for consumers. To navigate the problem, Atlas combines cookies with demographic information to help advertiser’sbetter target their audience.

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Dec 26, 2014 7:30:00 AM

Winning Political Votes With Social Media

The rules of advertising have changed drastically in recent years, due tothe significant growth of social media. It has become the online advertising strategy du jour for organizations in every industry, but one area we have see the effects of this prevail more and more in recent years is politics.

The tech-savvy campaign that Barack Obama’s aides unveiled six years ago is a case in point. It was historically significant for two reasons; not only was Obama the first African American to be elected president, but he was also the first presidential candidate to effectively use social media as a major campaign strategy. Obama created an environment of transparency never before experienced in American politics.

His strategy? Personalized tweets; Facebook updates, and his very own YouTube channel.

The Obama campaign reached 5 million supporters on 15 different social Networks, and by November 2008, he had approximately 2.5 million Facebook supporters, 115,000 Twitter followers, and 50 million viewers of his YouTube channel.

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Nov 11, 2014 8:38:00 AM

Exciting Social Media Sites To Keep An Eye On

As avid marketers, you’ll be familiar with the usual social media suspects - Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and LinkedIn. You will have most likely experimented with at least one of them as part of your digital marketing strategy and seen varying degrees of success.

However, there are some exciting social media kids on the block, many of which are unfamiliar to online marketers, and yet they possess great business potential.

While you obviously can’t be on all of them, here are a few thatmight fit into your social media campaigns.

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Oct 7, 2014 7:30:00 AM

Facebook Advertising: 10 Top Tips To Nail Your Next Campaign

Ignore the gurus - advertising is deceptively simple. It’s about creating the right messages and putting it in front of the right people. But there’s a knack to enjoying effective Facebook advertisingFirst, why target Facebook advertising? Well, it’s the third most popular website in the world (after Google and YouTube), which makes Facebook advertising extremely powerful for businesses.

With this social media platform, we’re talking about well over 1 billion users – that’s a lot of potential leads. But while the concept of advertising is straightforward, here are 10 top tips to make sure your digital messages cut through the clutter.

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Sep 9, 2014 10:30:00 AM

LinkedIn: The Content Platform of the Future?

Most people think that LinkedIn is just a digital repository for resumes, but the site, which now boasts over 300 million members, is slowly repositioning its business around content marketing, to make the site morebusiness-friendly and relevant for social media lead generation and B2B marketing.

As part of its strategy, the company launched two new products earlier this year, in an effort to assist businesses with their content marketing efforts.

Content Marketing Score (CMS)

The Content Marketing Score is an analytics tool that provides users with insight into the impact of both their paid and organic LinkedIn activity.

Content-marketing scores are calculated by dividing the number of LinkedIn users who've engaged with a brand's content (via sponsored updates, company pages, LinkedIn Groups, employee updates and influencer posts) in the past month by the target audience of users who have been active in that monthly period. The number is then multiplied by 1 million.

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Sep 8, 2014 10:30:00 AM

Using Selfies As A Marketing Tool

The Internet is often captivated by a craze and one such craze that’s taken off in recent years is that of the ‘selfie’. Named as Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year in 2013, many people thought that the selfie was a passing trend, but it seems to be here to stay.

Over the past two years, a growing number of companies have been leveraging the power of the selfie to benefit their marketing efforts. In January 2013, 13 brands used selfies in their Facebook campaigns and by December, that number had increased to 207. On Twitter, the number started at 252 and grew to more than 780.

Successful Selfie Campaigns

Some brands have seen great success with selfie campaigns, reporting increases in user engagement and sales.

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Sep 3, 2014 7:00:00 AM

ALS Ice Bucket Challenge: What Marketers Can Learn

In recent months, social networking sites have been bombarded with videos of celebrities and the general publicthrowing buckets of ice water on themselvesin the name of ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis) research.After an icy soaking, participants make a small online donation and nominate three people to undertake the challenge within 24 hours.

The perfect mix of social media, celebrity engagement and philanthropy – the Ice Bucket Challenge has becomea viral phenomenon. According to Facebook, between the period of June 1 and August 17, over 28 million people commented on, or liked a post about the challengeand 2.4 million videos were shared across the site.

To date, the campaign has secured donations of over $31.5 million forALS, compared to $1.9 million over the same time period last year.

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