How To Stay Up To Date With Facebook Marketing

Facebook's announcement that it was testing real-time ad targeting made waves across our industry. At this point, any major change in Facebook's advertising practices could lead more than a few marketers to rewrite their social media strategy, shift their assets and reshape their budgets.

What most people didn't know is that Facebook announces changes and updates to its ad platform on a nearly weekly basis. Granted, not all of these announcements are on par with real-time targeting; that one's a potential game changer. But smaller updates do impact how brands deliver their ads. For example, Facebook will soon roll out a feature that lets advertisers target their ads to specific tabs within its ecosystem. It's not exactly groundbreaking, but it affects targeting strategy and where ads are seen.

Facebook is still young compared to tried and true ad channels like search and banners, so evolution is still a given. With that in mind, it's in every marketer's best interest to keep up to date with the changes so you can take full advantage of every update and addition.

Stay in touch with your agency and vendor partners. 
Trying to stay on top of everything Facebook related is a full-time gig. Luckily, the agency or vendor you use employs someone to do just this sort of job. Keep the lines of communication open and ask for periodic updates. The real-time targeting announcement likely led to more than a few frenzied brand marketers calling their "social media experts" asking about the implications.

You don't have to be one of them. Stay in close contact with the people running your social campaigns and ask if there's anything new that might affect your campaigns or strategy. Request biweekly or monthly email updates. Not every detail is life-changing information, but it's good to stay in the loop.

The Facebook ad team is making a concerted effort to release updates to its Ads API Tool Vendors first, so that this group of vendors can integrate new advetising capabilities and educate the market before the story appears in the press or becomes available in the Facebook advertising marketplace.

Facebook's ads API is still in beta, and as a result, access is limited to just 18 companies. But these companies are the true Facebook insiders with access that others don't have. If you want to stay up to date, it makes sense to turn to them.

Read up.
Even if you're regularly discussing potential platform changes with your agency contact, you need to proactively learn about Facebook on your own. This doesn't mean scrolling through your friends' updates when you should be working. There are plenty of news outlets providing updates and analysis of the latest Facebook marketing tools on a daily basis.

Facebook itself has a Developers' Wiki that's a great resource for anyone running an application within the social network, but it's very tech-specific and might be over the head of the average brand marketer.

In addition to Ad Age, there are blogs specializing solely in Facebook minutia. Inside Facebook covers the platform from a developer and advertiser perspective, while the similar All Facebook is a great resource on marketing news and the companies involved in Facebook marketing, complete with tutorials Mashable, a social media blog, offers breaking news and analysis on the latest happenings in Facebook and all other social media.

Test, test, test. 
By now you know that Facebook is constantly updating its advertising capabilities, so you should build change into your strategy. Once you're up to speed on the latest Facebook updates, the only way to truly understand what makes sense for your campaign is to test.

You don't need to utilize every new feature to run successful campaigns, and trying to do so would stretch you thin. Instead, test, study the results and then apply them. That's basic marketing strategy, and it shouldn't be forgotten on a new platform. Real-time capabilities or targeting specific tabs within Facebook may not give your campaign any sort of boost. Instead, you may find more success targeting certain interest segments and demographics that are totally outside the box. We've seen some surprising correlations between people who buy specific products and the other interests they share. As you strategize about what works for your brand, don't leave out good old trial and error. For more information on Social Media Marketing contact Chicago based Marketing and Advertising Agency, Montari Brooklyn at 312-204-7253 or www.MontariBrooklyn.com

Article Source - http://m.adage.com/article?articleSection=digitalnext&articleSectionName=DigitalNext&articleid=http%3A%2F%2Fadage.com%2Fdigitalnext%2Fpost%3Farticle_id%3D227422

4 Ways To Get Consumers Talking About Your Small Business

Small businesses are in a unique position to truly benefit from customer reviews.  Chains are pretty well locked into their branding and there tends to be very little differentiation city-to-city and state-to-state.  They will build reputations for being consistent and predictable, but rarely break through to extraordinary.  However, small businesses are unencumbered by these expectations; small businesses have the opportunity to make a name for themselves as something really special.  Soliciting customer feedback can play a crucial role in building this reputation.  Here are 4 things to keep in mind as you encourage your own customers to review your business.
 

1)  Incentivize.  Give your customers a reason to review your business or service.  Offer them a coupon or discount off their next purchase if they go to Yelp, Citysearch or EZlocal and leave a review. 

2)  Link your business profiles on your own website.  Don't count on customers tracking down your listing on Yelp, InsiderPages or EZlocal.  Add links to your website for each profile and further encourage customers to go leave reviews. 

3)  Encourage a constant stream of reviews.  Keep the reviews trickling in, this serves two important purposes.  First, it looks better.  If you are visiting a profile whose reviews are all clustered around 3 or 4 dates, it looks questionable, a little bit planned and spammy.  A constant stream of reviews spread across all dates looks much better and will build more trust with potential customers.  

Secondly, a constant review stream will add up in the long run.  Make no mistake, review count matters so always keep that stream trickling in, it will add up and pay dividends, especially if your competitors are only making sporadic pushes for reviews.

4) Don't discourage bad reviews.  We don't live in a perfect world and no one expects your business to bat 1.000.  In fact, if your business has nothing but 5-star reviews across the board it might strike consumers as a bit suspect, is anybody that perfect?  Also, negative reviews offer a golden opportunity for you to prove yourself, to go above and beyond. The Consumerist actually has an entire category dedicated to incidences where businesses stepped up and made things right after something went wrong.  

The strength of small businesses often lies in customer service and attention to detail.  If a bad review falls on your doorstep, rejoice—you have a chance to showcase your talents and turn a negative review into a positive experience, something they will be impressed with and tell their friends about.  This word of mouth will prove to be incredibly valuable to your business.

For more information on growing your business clientele and marketing. Please contact the Montari Brooklyn Team at 1-855-We-Sale-U or visit www.MontariBrooklyn.com


 

10 Reason Why People Leave Your Website and Don't Come Back!

There are a variety of reasons why a website does is not popular with audiences or search engines. Most oftentimes website owners are not really aware of all of the possibilities that could slow down the growth of their website and audience over a period of time.



Here are the top reasons audiences find your your website Un-popular:

1. Too many Google Ads: Trying to monetize your site is perfectly fine, but covering the entire homepage with Google ads is not going to make you successful.

2. Poor Load Time: You don’t want your audience to sit there for a minute because the load time of your website is very slow. They will leave.

3. Poor Graphics: Your graphics need to appeal to your audience and if yours do not you might get people leaving your website fairly quickly.

4. Confusing Layout: Your website needs to lead your traffic down a path and a confusing layout might turn them off or really confuse them.

5. Poor Navigation: Your website navigation should be laid out thoroughly and in a fashion that is not confusing to your audience.

6. Too Much SEO: Nobody wants to view a website that has more links than content so make sure that it is first readable by your audience before you SEO it to death.

7. No Blog: Believe it or not there are certain people that will not engage with your website if it doesn’t have a blog.

8. Lack of Contact Info: Visible contact info is something that allows website visitors to feel warm and fuzzy in order to make further contact with your company.

9. Broken Links: Always make sure that the links on your website are working and not broken. People really don’t like clicking on links that lead them to nowhere.

10. Lack of Information: Your website should have the proper information to answer any of your website visitor’s questions. A lack of information could cause them to go elsewhere.

Make sure that you go through your website with a fine toothed comb and clean up any of these Website Building 101 concerns that sometimes plague website owners from growing their business well into the future. Make sure your  website is user - friendly.

MARKETING SOFTWARE CAN NOT THINK FOR YOUR BUSINESS

Here are some things marketing software products can’t do:

Software Can’t Think
In some cases software can think but when it comes down to making an educated business decision; how is a software program really going to pan out? As a business you need to put yourself in the shoes of your audience when making any marketing decisions and no software program is going to be able to do that.

Social Means Being Social
Automating everything on the social level is not going to create that warm and fuzzy feeling with your audience. Automation software is not going to engage in conversation or reply to others. You might come across something really great that you want to retweet. Automation software is not going to put that thought together and proceed with that action.

Social Customization
I have seen titles show up very strangely on certain platforms in which social bookmarking automation tools have been used. If there was a human submitting individually to each they could fix a title or character that is showing up in a funky way. Automation software is not going to do that for you or put the thought together that it should be done.

Search engine marketing is all about thinking where your audience is hanging out and trying to create inbound traffic streams that simply require a human being to be there in order to make marketing related decisions. No search marketing campaign can be put on autopilot by a software program and expect to see good quality business results. As a business you need to make the time to provide the human element if you want to be successful online.

As the old saying goes "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself or hire a professional". Call Montari Brooklyn Marketing and Advertising at 1-855-We-Sale-U, for an educational complimentary marketing analysis.

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