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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.

New Facebook Page Developments

The ‘new’ timeline layout that Facebook users have recently had to get used to is now being rolled out to Facebook Pages too. Along with new real-time Facebook insights, brands really have an opportunity to develop their Facebook marketing strategy and create added value for users. The new timeline for brands will automatically update to all pages on 30th March 2012. Some innovative brands have already adopted this new layout and are beginning to utilise it to their advantage. I’m going to present some ideas on how you as a brand can take advantage of the new features on your Facebook page.

Let’s look at the new features:

Cover Photo

Brands now have more than a thumbnail image to express their identity. The large cover photo is the first thing that people will see on your page, so it is essential that it represents the brand values. It can’t contain information that references purchases, prices, liking the page, contact information or contain a call to action. Use a strong image that clearly depicts what the brand is about. Harley Davidson have done a great job with their cover photo:  it clearly represents their brand, their iconic bikes and the open road. Another good example is Starbucks Coffee.

About Drapers Ecommerce 2012

Yesterday saw the annual Drapers Ecommerce Conference at America Square, London, a truly star studded event where some of the hottest brands in fashion this year (including My-Wardrobe, Reiss and Boohoo) came together to talk and discuss the changing dynamics of the World Wide Web, with 5 exciting agendas on the table:

  • Internationalisation of Ecommerce
  • Analysing the Ever-Changing Customer
  • Fall in “like” with Tweeting
  • From Browsing to Buying
  • Cross Channel Marketing

Top 32 Tweets

The event caused quite the stir on Twitter and gave some useful insight into the conference. Here are the 32 Tweets I found most useful from the event in:

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!

St. Valentine’s Day has become one of the biggest events in the retail calendar. Second only to Christmas, it is a huge money maker for brands, with 32% of gifts being bought online. In America, it is expected that a whopping $3.5billion will be spent on jewellery alone. Men are the biggest spenders, buying all sorts of gifts for their loved ones, from flowers, to chocolates, to dinners out and weekends away – and they are more likely than women to buy elaborate gifts. With such huge revenue opportunities, ask yourself… how well did your brand perform and what can be done to improve performance for next year?

1.       Planning

People start searching for Valentine’s Day gifts around mid-January, with momentum picking up pace at the beginning of February. The biggest sales days are the 5th and 6th of February, with the week running up to the 14th February characterised by frenzied and frantic last-minute gift buying. This means brands have to get their thinking cap on and start planning well in advance. Think about what worked well the previous year and act on it. The earlier you start, the wider the audience you will reach.

February calendar with 14th highlighted with heart

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.

My Foursquare Experience so far…

Like many other people over the past few months I have been using Foursquare quite a bit, as shown below.  I have knocked up quite a few mayorships and badges, but sadly I have already found it very monotonous and not at all engaging.

 

To be fair, Foursquare is great at the beginning with collecting the badges, stealing mayorships, getting those “Foursquare specials” and “Sharing with your friends”.  Well the last two I did not experience; working in Paddington I would presume that businesses would be flocking with specials, but sadly not, and in terms of sharing with friends I have none (on Foursquare). With myself not experiencing two of the most important factors of Foursquare, this has sadly hindered now a relationship with the platform (for now).  In what I have found is a similar occurrence to Google+, the number of “real people” on there (and active users within the UK) is, I would imagine, not staggering.

The recent integration of social and search at Google marks a huge change in how information on the internet will be presented to us. When a logged in user now performs a search, they will be given two types of search results: the anonymous search results that we are all used to and personal search results, which are generated from information shared within that user’s network of Google+ circles. This new platform presents a major marketing opportunity for brands and it requires a developed strategy just like other social media platforms. It would be daft for brands to consider Google+ as just another fad, and, in the same breadth that brands define strategies for Facebook and Twitter, the same now needs to be done for Google+.

While it is apparent that Google+ is not yet fully developed, it would appear a good time for brands to set up their Google+ page, start uploading regular content and playing about with the different features on Google+. What should you as a brand be doing now?

1. Grow Your Circles

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Like most people, SEO practitioners reflect on the past year and attempt to improve their skills in the new year.

If you haven’t made up your mind what exactly you want to change in the coming year, check out these suggestions for 30 SEO resolutions for 2012 that draw on modern industry best practices and growing trends.

In recent months, Google has made a distinct effort to publicly communicate the small changes they have been making to their algorithms.  In a bid to appear more transparent, Google has published monthly updates on its blog with regard to these changes. With special attention on these updates, and taking into consideration yesterday’s big social search announcement, this post ponders the signals being sent to us around Google Image Search.

The first mention of these subtle changes came in November, when Google cited one change as:

  • “Retiring a signal in Image search: As the web evolves, we often revisit signals that we launched in the past that no longer appear to have a significant impact. In this case, we decided to retire a signal in Image Search related to images that had references from multiple documents on the web.” It would appear that by Google is trying to reduce issues of duplicate content by making sure the same image doesn’t appear twice.

It was during this month that Google also rolled out the +1 button to Image search. Its social media offering opens up to integrate photos, allowing +1 users to highlight favourite images. This marks the start of a personalised web experience and reinforces the growing sentiment that social and search are becoming increasingly intertwined.

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