All posts by Shaad Hamid

Shaad Hamid is an experienced SEO, PPC and social media consultant, blogger, and citizen journalist who is passionate about online marketing. Get in touch with Shaad on the social networks below:

The real value of internet marketing is in the ease of setting up analytics by communication channel, measuring performance of campaigns and thereby directing/redirecting valuable marketing budget toward campaigns that yield higher return. Therefore, setting clear marketing KPIs is crucial before implementing any online marketing activity.

It must be reiterated that executing marketing campaigns in any channel is a tactic, perhaps one of several tactics that a marketing manager or director might include. Other online and offline channel tactics might include SEO, Google Adwords, Microsoft adCenter, email marketing, newspaper and magazine ads, radio and television ads, brochure distribution and leaflet drops etc.. It is important to recognise that Facebook ads is a channel in which we undertake tactics to sell things. Hence, think of your KPIs as what you want to accomplish and the relevant tactics as how you undertake your marketing activities to achieve these KPIs.

Continuing from my previous post, 11 tips for a better Facebook ad campaign, I thought I’d share with you some simple yet powerful tactics to outsmart your competitors and reach out to your target audience. Facebook offers some incredible targeting options, so here are my five top tips to get the most out of these features.

#1 Targeting your competitors’ fans

There has never been a more fertile hunting ground for systematically picking off competitors’ customers and fans than Facebook ads. At the time of writing, there are no legal limitations in targeting users who express positive or negative interests in other companies’ protected brands. I doubt that this frontier mentality will last legally; but meanwhile, you can certainly get it while it’s hot!

As with selling any service, selling SEO services is an extremely challenging task. Here are my observations of two opposite ends of the spectrum of what SEO consultants often experience with selling SEO services.

Give me a two day optimisation strategy

We’ll often get contacted with the following, “We want a two day web optimisation strategy implemented.” Many neophyte consultants lick their lips and pounce on the ‘opportunity’ with alacrity. They start shooting off proposals, buffing up their hallowed methodology, and more.

A more sane, measured and customer-serving response to the request for a two day optimisation precess is, “Why?”

That always stops people in their tracks. “Why do you want a two day strategy implementation for your website and how do you know that’s the right thing for you?”

As I have found out the hard way, Facebook ad production is extremely labour-intensive. Therefore it is imperative that you incorporate an effective ad production workflow to best utilise your time. Here are eleven tips I’ve been able to come up with over the past few months.

Understanding the account structure 

In the Facebook Ads hierarchy, ‘account’ is the highest-level object. Every account is associated with a specific user’s Facebook account. Campaigns are the second tier that sit under the account level. Unlike in Google Adwords where ads are held within ad groups, campaigns hold ads within Facebook. It’s at the campaign level that daily budgets are assigned. Each campaign can hold any number of ads. Every ad is self-contained, including targeting elements, ad creative, bids, and time-scales. There is no requirement for ads in any campaign to be related in any way. However, it’s best practice to tightly theme each campaign with relevant and similar ads as it would make reporting and managing budgets so much easier.

Step 1 – get your target demographic right

Begin by making a list of demographic segments you want to target or make sure you are clear about who your client wants you to target. It’s always handy to ask your client to describe exactly who their target consumer is. This should be your first step in setting up your Facebook advertising campaign.

E.g. targeting list:

  • Females, age 18-30, who like Kim Kardashian and live in Orlando.
  • Males, age 25 and older, engaged or in a relationship, and interested in weddings or honeymooning.

Sometime last month, my friends and I did what most people do on a Friday night. Yes, we went out to blow off some steam and in the process, popped in to Pizza Hut to grab something to eat. The problem was, we probably dropped by at a bad time. The waitress seemed like she’d be anywhere in the world except serving at our table. Don’t get me wrong, my friends and I weren’t expecting 5-star treatment, but is a little courtesy or even a smile too much to ask for? Like most people who simply wouldn’t bother to complain about how rude the waitress was, we just grit our teeth and left as soon as we could. Fast forward to the next morning and one of my friends suggested that we go to a local restaurant named Joe’s, located in Oxford’s Summertown (isn’t that the best ever name for a town?) so we paid them a visit.

From the moment we entered the restaurant, we were made to feel welcome. The food was absolutely divine, their attention to detail was impeccable and their service was amazing. In fact, their receipt had a handwritten ‘thank you’ along with a smiley face on it!

joe's receipt

Apologies for the low quality mobile phone image.

It’s amazing how little effort can make a customer happy. Having enjoyed the food and the service, I felt I must run to the top of a hill and announce to everyone that these guys are amazing and that all my friends should check them out too; or at least the modern method of doing so, which is to tweet about them or to mention them on Facebook. Unfortunately I couldn’t tag them in my tweets or Facebook status as they didn’t have a presence on Twitter and Facebook. So here I was, a satisfied customer, looking to give this restaurant a big ‘thumbs up’ and a recommendation to my friends about how awesome they are, but with no natural channel to do so. So I thought I should compile a list of quick and easy ways small businesses can help customers become their advocates. (Please note that Joe’s, to their credit, have now set up a Facebook page).

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There are many misconceptions about the kind of skills and traits you need in order to find a job within the Search Engine and Social Media Marketing Industry (hereinafter referred to as ‘SE & SMM Industry’). In order to dispel most of these misconceptions and to provide a guide-like resource to anyone looking to make their first step into the world of search and social, I have listed eight tips that would keep you in good stead in your job search including how to answer the dreaded “what prior experience do you have in Search and Social Media Marketing?” question.

For at least five years, digital advertisers have been declaring that the year of the mobile is finally here. But it’s becoming obvious to even the most cautious of marketers that mobile is finally an effective platform. A mobile phone is no longer simply a portable version of a landline. For a vast number of people it’s a way of sending pictures, streaming video, storing music, browsing the web and reading the news. That’s why more marketers than ever before are trying to harness handsets as an advertising platform. Here’s why your company should be among them.

In what seems to me to be a bid to prove to marketers that advertising with Facebook can produce great results, Facebook have rolled out a new ‘Page Insights’ dashboard which provide metrics on user engagement. They intend to delete all data from your old insights page on the 15th of February 2012 and will stop collecting data on the 15th of December 2011.

The new dashboard looks like this:

In addition to ‘total likes’, you can now view the number of friends that your fans have, thereby giving you an estimate of your total reach.

 

Flowing water

This post was written as a response to a direct request from @mitchholt. Apologies for the delay, but we thought it’s better 2 months late than never!

Website architecture is an important part of the overall search engine optimisation strategy. There is a large volume of literature covering the importance of website architecture with two separate perspectives, both of which are extremely important for effective website optimisation. The first perspective is focused on the user and the user requirements; the other is focused on the search engine bots and the flow of ‘link juice’ (I will explain what link juice is and its role in SEO below). As a webmaster it is imperative that you get them both spot-on. Anecdotal evidence shows that there is a direct correlation between the two. When the user experience improves, so does the distribution of ‘link juice’ and vice versa. In this post I will be focusing primarily on the flow of ‘link juice’ and how you could use your website architecture to accomplish this.

When social media marketers ran Facebook campaigns that were aimed at driving traffic toward their websites, they had to resort to tools such as Google Analytics in order to measure success or failure of their Facebook campaigns. However, a nifty new addition to the Facebook arsenal is the ‘insights for domains’ feature which has been introduced with minimum fanfare by Facebook. I strongly believe that if you run Facebook campaigns for your website then this is a ‘must have’ tool in order to monitor and optimise your Facebook content consumption.

We tested it out on our website for a couple of months and the information we have been able to gather has not only been extremely insightful, but also helped make better decisions regarding social media marketing strategies and tactics when running Facebook campaigns. This is indeed a phenomenal development, and one that we thought should be elaborated.

Getting started

In order to set up insights for websites, you will need to associate your website with a Facebook page or app that you manage. Go to http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and click on the green button that reads “insights for your website”.

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