General Marketing

How To Make Ads That Stop the Scroll On Facebook and Instagram

Categories Digital Marketing, General Marketing, Paid Social Media MarketingLeave a Comment on How To Make Ads That Stop the Scroll On Facebook and Instagram

One of your main priorities as an advertiser is to prevent people from scrolling past whatever you want to show them. There is obviously no chance that individuals will engage with your marketing materials through likes, comments, shares, and so on, unless people actually stop to take a look at what it is you have to tell them. Your creative material, your copywriting, and your purpose is here key to ensure make a relevant audience stop op and engage.

Consider it for a moment. People are undoubtedly browsing Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., while they walk down the street or while engaging in other activities. Out attention span has become worse than that of a goldfish.. So, how can we as marketers grab people’s’ attention when their attention spans have become so extremely limited?

Here are 8 strategies that have worked well for me in order to make your advertising perform.

1. Using a Variety of Colours

On every feed, a wide range of colors will stand out. Although your brand might be minimalist by nature, or very limited in general when it comes to colours and the overall visual expression, there’s most often a way to fit a range of colours into the advertising without making it off-brand. Having standard, medium quality marketing material with no edge will most likely not make your audience stop nowadays.

2. High Contrast Photos

You may boost the contrast of any photo by 20-30% to instantly attract more attention to your ads. This strategy goes hand in hand with the more extreme colour selection in the content you create. The main point is really to make your material stand out compared to the average content out there.

3. Strong product focus

If you are differentiating your brand by having a selection of products that truly stand out, then make sure to showcase those products very clearly in your advertising. Combine it with some interesting colour varieties that fit into your brand, and make sure it’s of high contrast, then you will most likely make more people stop and actually engage with the content. Think of Apple. They tresure their design position more than anything, which is why the small nitty gritty details of all their products are shows very clearly in all their advertising material. When they promote their Apple Watch as an example, they might use some lifestyle images where they showcase it on people doing sports, etc., but their main content that they advertise will always be very high quality, close-up product shots – often composed through renderings, and showcased through video content.

4. Use of Spacing

If you want your items to be noticed, make sure there is adequate spacing around them, almost putting your products on a “pedestal”. Apple are once again world-class when it comes to portraying products in this way, and so are brands like Bang & Olufsen and Nike. If you think about it, the content they usually push – especially the product focused content – is never busy in its nature.

5. Power in The First 2 Seconds

When using video material in once advertising, it is of utmost important that the first 2-3 seconds (and even the first second) are super captivating and eye catching. Again, peoples attention span is very limited, so the more intriguing the first second of your video is, the larger the chance that you will make a user stop in his / her feed. If you have a master ad, or a couple of videos that you know are of good quality, then it is very worthwhile to make various versions of those videos, where you simply change the first 1-3 seconds from video to video, allowing you to make a proper A/B split test on which beginnings work the best.

6. Thumbnail

This point goes hand in hand with the aforementioned point. The thumbnail of a video is essentially what you see before the first second of the video is activated. Facebook videos are powerful, but some argue that the thumbnail is even more important. So make sure that you together with the first seconds of your video material also test out different thumbnails to evaluate if some perform better than others.

7. Symmetry

We humans are accustomed to viewing things in a vertical and horizontal perspective. Playing with the angles of photographs and aspects of your advertising may pique people’s interest in your material. Make sure that whatever you portray is aesthetically pleasing to look at – and this does also go very much hand in hand with point 4.

8. Happy Individuals

According to several studies, smiling individuals boost the appeal of your products / services considerably. We are naturally drawn to people who are happy, so take advantage of this fact in your marketing campaigns. I’ve personally not tested this at a great extent, but it’s indeed worthwhile to give it a shot.

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and the like are highly visual platforms! With the aforementioned ideas, you can with a higher likelihood promote your products or services successfully. These suggestion can for many seem basic, but they should ensure that people will stop scrolling on their feed and click on your ads. You need to make your brand stick out in the abundance of content which is available on all social platforms nowadays, and the aforementioned 8 points can help you realise that.

An Overview of the Most Important Channels for Digital Marketing

Categories Digital Marketing, General Marketing1 Comment on An Overview of the Most Important Channels for Digital Marketing

When it comes to ecommerce success, there’s a lot more to it than simply opening an online shop. Merchants must advertise their websites in order to attract visitors and, as a result, generate sales.

This is where digital marketing enters the picture. Digital marketing is a fantastic way to boost awareness of your brand and items, win back trust from customers, and encourage them to visit your online shop in order to make a purchase—and return again in the future for more goods.

When utilized intelligently, digital marketing is an extremely effective instrument for ecommerce companies. Start with a plan rather than spreading yourself thin and attempting all the channels at once. Consider your company’s objectives, budget, and target audience. Let’s look at how you can use digital marketing to promote your online business.

What is digital marketing, and how does it work?

Digital marketing is the process of advertising a brand, product, or service using either paid or unpaid online media. The practice of digital marketing covers the promotion of your ecommerce business across various internet platforms.

Brands don’t have to be the ones spearheading the message, as savvy internet businesses allow their consumers to speak for them. So, if a consumer posts an excellent review of your product or makes a positive social media remark about your company, these are all examples of digital marketing.

More than three-quarters of businesses use marketing campaigns to promote their brands on a regular basis. The most frequent marketing objectives for these firms are increased brand recognition, sales, interaction, leads, and money—all of which can be reached through intelligent digital marketing.

Creating a digital marketing strategy is fairly simple.

A comprehensive digital marketing strategy covers a variety of platforms. In general, the majority of businesses use a mix of social media advertising (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, etc.), E-mail marketing, search engine marketing (SEM), search engine optimization (SEO), affiliate marketing and PR. The channels that are most effective for your company are determined by where your target audience hangs out, how much money you have to spend, and what business goals you want to accomplish.

Let’s take a look at how you may use some of the most popular and effective digital marketing channels to promote your online business.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing is an excellent technique to interact with existing customers and develop connections with new ones. The term “social media” refers to all of the platforms that are available, including Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok as well as niche sites like Twitch. The following are some of the most important social media sites to explore:

  • Facebook, with its 2.3 billion monthly active users
  • Instagram, with 1 billion monthly active users
  • TikTok, with more than 650 million users
  • Twitter, which has 206 million daily active users
  • Snapchat, with a total of more than 520 million active users
  • Pinterest, which reaches more than 450 million monthly active users

You may use each of these networks to create organic social media posts. Organic social media messages are postings on your company’s (or brand’s) profile(s) that aren’t paid advertisements. With organic updates, skewing more toward interesting content is usually a good idea. Unfollowing may be triggered if there are too many self-promotional

However, with organic postings, your reach and interaction are entirely reliant on algorithms. You should therefore use paid social media advertising to increase the number of people who see your social media content and guarantee more views and engagements. Each of the major platforms offers its own ad space in which you can purchase ads, and advertising is more or less the only way to facilitate scalable growth nowadays, as most social media platforms have limited the organic reach of business accounts substantially in the past years.

Email marketing

Email is a popular digital communication mechanism that people utilize to connect with each other and businesses. According to the Forrester Analytics: Email Marketing Forecast, 2018 To 2023 (US), email usage is increasing. More and more individuals are willing to sign up for businesses’ marketing emails, according to 96 percent of those aged 12 years and older.

Email is also a powerful tool for reaching out to people of all ages. In fact, email is preferred by more online users between the ages of 12 and 17 than Snapchat and Facebook.

You may deploy email to convey a mix of promotional and non-salesy material—newsletters with useful information on how to utilize your goods, special discounts for your email subscribers, early announcements, and access to special sales.

Build customer profiles and segment your list with email marketing software to craft personalized emails. Make sure to read the article which I’ve previously published about the best e-mail software solutions which are available at the moment.

Search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO)

The goal of search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) is to improve your website’s visibility and findability in online search engines. Paid methods are referred to as SEM, while organic, or non-paid, strategies are called SEO.

According to a study, internet firms will capture 35% of all traffic and 33% of the entire revenue through search engine result pages (SERPs). While there are many different search engines available on a global scale, Google has by far the most dominance due to its enormous market share. However, other engines like Bing and Yahoo do also have a decent global present.

You can use the Google Ads dashboard (Google Adwords) to run pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements in your targeted locations for keywords relevant to your goal. Depending on your objectives and keyword competitiveness, you may have a different budgets from one campaign to another. The most prominent Google placement are their Shopping placement, search, and display.

Content marketing

Content marketing is the practice of creating and/or curating content to promote your company. For some, content marketing takes the form of a blog. In reality, more than half of marketers use blogs in their digital marketing mix. Content is an important part of growing client loyalty, increasing brand recognition, boosting SEO rankings, and gaining authority in your chosen

Marketing automation

The term “marketing automation” refers to the use of technology to establish a sequence of rules that cause automated actions from your marketing solutions. Marketing automation might be restricted to a single platform or include integration across various technologies. For example, the Shopify App Store offers several marketing automation applications that you may install on your ecommerce site.

You may also use Shopify’s dashboard to start marketing automation campaigns. The post-purchase automation is one example of a marketing automation that most ecommerce businesses can use. You may utilize post-purchase communication as a method to nurture customer relationships and cross-sell other items, depending on your product and purchase, using personalized recommendations.

Remarketing

Remarketing, also known as behavioral retargeting, is a form of advertising that targets people who have previously engaged with your company’s brand. You may create retargeted marketing campaigns that are informed and tailored to your audience’s previous actions.

Consider this scenario: You’ve launched a collection of sunglasses for your store eyewear webstore. A few months later, you collaborated with another designer on a new sunglass design. You can remarket to the people who bought your first drop and show them that they already have an interest in what you’re offering.

6 Marketing Channels That Brands Use to Grow Their Business in China

Categories Digital Marketing, E-Commerce, E-Commerce in Asia, General MarketingLeave a Comment on 6 Marketing Channels That Brands Use to Grow Their Business in China

China is the largest e-commerce market in the world, and it has been a challenge for many Western brands to enter this market. Creating an E-Commerce presence in China is close to impossible without using their national server infrastructure (or completely migrating to T-Mall or one of the other major marketplaces in the country), and traditional Western marketing channels (e.g., Facebook, Google, etc.) are likewise blocked by the Chinese government, meaning that there are mainly national marketing channels available for western brands to use in order to advertise their products and/or services. However, when it comes to reach in search engines and social media, China’s search engines and social networks are among the largest in the world. In this article I’ll go over six of these channels which include Weibo, Baidu, WeChat (which also serves as an e-commerce platform), Little Red Book and other social media sites like Tudou.

1. Weibo

Weibo is the most popular microblogging site in China with over 500 million monthly active users! Brands can create accounts on Weibo where they share information about themselves through posting articles or videos from time to time. These posts usually contain links back to the brand’s official website. It also got a live video streaming feature, as well as its own version of the wildly popular Instagram Stories function.

Weibo, like its Western counterpart, originally restricted postings to 140 characters, but this restriction has since been lifted. (Except for reposts and remarks.)

Sina Weibo was founded in 2009 as “Sina Weibo,” before being rebranded as simply “Weibo” in 2014. The website has grown to be one of China’s most popular social media sites since its inception with more than half a billion users.

With such a huge audience on the platform, it should be clear why Weibo is so desirable for marketers, especially those outside of China seeking to break into the market.

Brands can similarly to Western social media platforms both grow organically and through paid activities – and as always, the paid activities will allow you to accelerate your brand growth. Here’s three reasons why Weibo’s advertising platform is good to use:

1.1 Extensive audience targeting

Weibo allows you to target your campaign to a variety of different demographic groups in order to fine-tune and direct your marketing. Brands can currently target Weibo users through the following characteristics:

  • Age, gender, and location
  • Interest areas
  • Device
  • Competitor brands
  • Specific followers

1.2. Ideal entry point to promote in the Chinese market

Weibo is a tremendous platform from which to begin marketing in China. With so many users, Weibo provides a wonderful entry point for any business interested in breaking into the Chinese market. Because advertising on Weibo is relatively inexpensive, businesses may test the water before committing to larger efforts.

1.3. Can help brands grow organic as well as paid

As mentioned before, Weibo is similar to Twitter, Facebook or Instagram in that it isn’t only used for sponsored marketing. In reality, much of the brand’s growth may be organic. Paid advertising might lead to a larger Weibo following, which can help reduce the need for paid channels on the long term when there’s a stronger pull for your product and/or service.

2. Baidu

In China, Google has a relatively minor market share of less than 3%. The search engine environment in this country differs significantly from that in most Western countries, with several key players such as Baidu, Sogou, Haosou, and Shenma. Baidu is without a doubt the first stop for most businesses looking to conduct search marketing campaigns in China, as it is by far the largest search engine in the country with more than 500 million active monthly users. So it makes sense that most companies would want to make sure they have their ads running on this platform.

When looking for a brand on Baidu, the content which appears is similar to that on Google, meaning it includes websites, news articles, blogs about the company with links back to the brand’s homepage where visitors can purchase goods or services offered, and the like. Baidu is therefore a channels which – just like Google and Yahoo – should be used to optimise a brands SEO presence, as well as advertising through paid search, display and shopping strategies.

However, one thing which is fundamentally different to how things are in the Western world from a search behaviour point of view is that consumers in China usually don’t use search engines when they have an actual purchase intent – at this stage, they search directly in one of the country’s large marketplaces (T-Mall, Taobao or JD.com). The same is quite similar in the United States, where close to 70% of consumers now start their shopping journey on Amazon as opposed to Google.

3. WeChat

WeChat is one of China’s most popular messaging apps with over 900 million monthly active users. The app can be used for many things including sending pictures or videos from device to device; it also has a feature where retailers can create mini stores on the app so customers can browse through items before they purchase anything.

The WeChat advertising platform, which is operated by Tencent, enables businesses to promote ads on consumers’ timelines or at the bottom of WeChat Official Account stories. Companies which advertise through WeChat can use the ads to grow their WeChat Official Account followers, increase their brand awareness, drive traffic to their websites, increase conversions, and generate app downloads.

There are three main WeChat ad types:

  • WeChat Moments Advertising
  • WeChat banner ads
  • WeChat Key Opinion Leader ads

4. Little Red Book

Little Red Book is China’s most popular lifestyle website where users can buy clothing or find beauty tips, but it was originally created exclusively for female consumers so gender equality issues have been discussed on LRB’s platforms from time to time.

5. Tudou

Tudou is China’s largest video site where users can upload videos on topics from cooking recipes to DIY tutorials or even music performances. Brands can pay a fee to have ads placed within the videos that are uploaded by other users or they may be able to sponsor content created by celebrities on the app too! Videos uploaded by other users are available for brands to sponsor, but companies must have an expensive advertising budget in order for this tactic will be worth it. Tencent Video is also one of China’s most popular video sites, but Youku would be better suited as its target demographic skews towards older audiences than Tudou

6. Youku

The only two national advertising options left would be Youku and Tencent Video where companies could hope to advertise their content if they had a large budget or wanted to reach out to a younger audience.