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Some Advantages: Facebook Advertising vs. Google AdWords

February 7, 2011 By martinnormark Leave a Comment

You might already be using paid advertising services like Google AdWords? Do you think the price per click you pay is reasonable? What do you think of the price now, compared to when you started using Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is the grand old man in terms of Pay Per Click advertising. These days, it is not a question of whether or not you’re going to use Google AdWords – it has sort of become the norm. The status quo of advertising online. Because of that, it has become a rather mediocre, but solid way of marketing. You should not expect the big bang for a buck, but it’s entirely possible to generate a solid stream of traffic coming into your site, and keep an acceptable conversion rate.

Facebook Ads, on the other hand, is the new kid on the block. It’s the natural refresh of Pay Per Click advertising. With the social breeze of Facebook, ad targeting has reached a whole new level, you can leverage social proof even more right there in you ads, and most importantly the price per click can get extremely low compared to Google AdWords.

Facebook Ads are very different from Google AdWords

image thumb1 Some Advantages: Facebook Advertising vs. Google AdWords

Since users on Facebook are not performing a search to trigger your ads, but are shown multiple ads at random, they’re more likely to get annoyed, and some people will get annoyed. Some people are very aggressive towards ads, so what happens when they get a close button right there with the ad?

Some people will inevitably report your ads!

This feedback feature is more importantly used by Facebook to rate your ads. During the initial 48 hours of your campaign, Facebook will monitor your Click Through Rate (CTR) and the feedback very closely. As they’re only interested in quality ads, you will pay a lower price having quality ads. To kick start your campaign, you should start off with a bid that is in the region of what Facebook recommends. You could try to go for a little higher bid and start lowering it after 24 hours. The goal is to get as many clicks as possible, so that Facebook can see that you have a quality ad.

Another different thing you see in this screenshot is the social proof aspect. At the bottom it says that Brian Jensen played this. I can see right there, that one of my friends have already played it and that’s a strong message to send.

Try Facebook’s targeting features

Because the nature of Facebook is to tell your friends who you are, where you live, what you’re doing, what you like and so on, it gives advertisers an extremely detailed targeting method. You can basically target based on sex, age, location, work, education, relationship status, interests, what pages they’re connected to, what pages their friends are connected to. There’s no limit.

A small idea would be to extract your best converting demographics and showing ads exclusively for them. Go as far into details as specifying age within a range of 2-3 years, as well as targeting an exact city as location.

Google AdWords don’t give you all these possibilities, so this should be one of the reasons to use Facebook Ads more and more.

Images are extremely important on Facebook

I recently watched Jeremy Schoemaker’s excellent soup to nuts guide on Facebook Advertising, and he points out that images is by far the most important aspect of Facebook Ads. Be sure to have several images to test, based on Click Through Rate (CTR).

Before you begin

As PPC Hero points out in their 10 Tips for Advertising on Facebook, it is very important that you familiarize yourself with the advertising guidelines on Facebook, as they’re very strict. Also familiarize yourself with the overall advertising platform that they provide, both the interface, targeting and so on. The Guide to Facebook Ads would be a good place to start, and can also be used on a daily basis.

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: ,

How big is my target audience? Use Facebook Ads to find out! It’s free.

August 24, 2010 By martinnormark 1 Comment

If you ever wonder how many people are actually in your target audience, Facebook has a very useful tool that can help you find out.

Say your target audience is men and women between 20 and 35 years old living in Spain. What you do is, you go to Facebook, sign in and go to the Facebook Ads section.

Go click the ‘Create an Ad’ button. Now you just have enter some random data to the form, in order to continue:

image thumb How big is my target audience? Use Facebook Ads to find out! It’s free.

As soon as you click ‘Continue’, step 2 becomes visible. That step is called ‘Targeting’, and here you’ll find the magic number that you’re looking for. Take a look at the ‘Estimated Reach’ value, shown on the right:

image thumb1 How big is my target audience? Use Facebook Ads to find out! It’s free.

Estimated Reach is just above six million people. At the bottom of this section, you’ll find even more options to add to your criteria. You can filter by relationship status, job, education, interests and much more. This is of course dependent on the details users on Facebook chose to add to their profile.

Try Facebook Ads – it’s cheap!

If you are not using Facebook Ads already today, you’re really missing out! It is by far the cheapest Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing available today, and it still maintains an enormous reach! I just read the latest blog entry from the Social Media Examiner called 7 Facebook Marketing Tips From World’s Top Pros. Tip #2 on that list, is to “Try Really Inexpensive Facebook Ads”:

“The best ‘bang for the buck’ in Internet marketing today is Facebook advertising. The targeting options are limitless and surprisingly inexpensive for businesses of all sizes. Facebook advertising can help marketers of all kinds get insights into how different demographic groups respond—and for a fraction of the cost of other alternatives,” said Chris Treadaway, co-author of Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day.

Seriously, try it. I’ve seen an online store get 400+ clicks per day at an average Cost Per Click (CPC) of $0.16!

Filed Under: Marketing Tagged With: ,

Dealing with barriers to enter

January 1, 2010 By martinnormark Leave a Comment

Happy New Year!

One thing I generally don’t like when speaking with others about entrepreneurship, is the illusion a lot of people have that you have to have something brand new that has never been seen before to succeed. This is a big misunderstanding, and I even think that most times it’s an advantage to have competitors. If you have competitors people already know what your product is. You don’t have to teach them about that and create a demand for your product.

Competitors will also keep you awake. You have to keep moving all the time, to avoid getting shot.

I recently read an article by Joel Spolsky, called Strategy Letter III: Let Me Go Back!

As Joel writes, there’s nothing wrong with competition:

There’s nothing wrong with being in a market that has established competition. In fact, even if your product is radically new, like eBay, you probably have competition: garage sales! Don’t stress too much. If your product is better in some way, you actually have a pretty good chance of getting people to switch. But you have to think strategically about it, and thinking strategically means thinking one step beyond the obvious

Joel talks about his experience from working on the Microsoft Excel team when Lotus 123 was leading the market for spreadsheets. The single thing that really caught my attention was his list of barriers to enter. Not barriers to entry, which is something very different.

As Joel writes:

The only strategy in getting people to switch to your product is to eliminate barriers. Imagine that it’s 1991. The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You’re the product manager for Microsoft Excel. Ask yourself: what are the barriers to switching? What keeps users from becoming Excel customers tomorrow?

And then he provides a list of barriers along with solutions that they needed to get right in order to succeed. And we all know where Lotus 123 is now.

Barrier

Solution

1. They have to know about Excel and know that it’s better

Advertise Excel, send out demo disks, and tour the country showing it off

2. They have to buy Excel

Offer a special discount for former 123 users to switch to Excel

3. They have to buy Windows to run Excel

Make a runtime version of Windows which ships free with Excel

4. They have to convert their existing spreadsheets from 123 to Excel

Give Excel the capability to read 123 spreadsheets

5. They have to rewrite their keyboard macros which won’t run in Excel

Give Excel the capability to run 123 macros

6. They have to learn a new user interface

Give Excel the ability to understand Lotus keystrokes, in case you were used to the old way of doing things

7. They need a faster computer with more memory

Wait for Moore’s law to solve the problem of computer power

That got me thinking about barriers to enter in regard to E-commerce software.

Barriers existing shop owners have when switching E-commerce software:

Barrier

Solution

Having to manually enter existing data

Make it easy to import data.

Fear of losing existing URLs in search engines

Match old URLs with new URLs, so that a 301 permanent redirect is done to ensure search engine positions.

Having to learn a new product/UI

Have in-UI help for every feature. Use question marks with un-familiar input fields with a tool tip that explains in detail. Have a read more link in tool tip, if a more extensive explanation is required.

Fear of having to renew existing merchant account and payment gateways

Add support for merchant accounts and payment gateways as needed.

Fear of losing expensive SSL certificates

It is possible to export and import those. Explain!

Fear of losing domain names

Communicate up front that this is not the case. All domains are supported.

Fear of losing existing e-mail lists

It is possible to import. We keep it safe in our database.
   

And I hope I’m not done yet.

Think about yourself, and count how many times you’ve actually contacted a company when having questions about their product or services that are not adequately answered on their website. My count is definitely very low, and I think that is simply because we all know that no matter what you’ve found online, there’s another website that offers the same thing. So we just hit the back button to see the search results page and click the next result.

Same thing for users online

Have you thought this way about your own business? Imagine all the small details that people could be worried about. If your product is somewhat complex, there are probably a million questions you have to answer immediately.

It’ll gain you trust, and as a user you’d feel happy about visiting a website or store where you, yourself, found all the answers to your questions you had and decided to buy.

You have to make users happy, and you can do that by making them feel in control.

Filed Under: Marketing, Software

Do not hide problems

July 26, 2009 By martinnormark Leave a Comment

To have a open comunication whit the media and press is one of the best ways to get free media time.

 

Normally companies always want to teel about all the good things they can do for people.When theres something wrong people normally hide and stay away from the press.

I belive you shall tell everything, even when things are going very wrong.

If you can get time in the televison and make a clear point out to people that you are aware of this issue and you are handling it the best you can. Then you will get more credit then the one that’s hiding

Its even better if you can give people some extra info that suprises them and maybe also the media..

Think in theese lanes and you will get a good mediasucces

Think offensive. Even when things are going downhill

Filed Under: Marketing

Connecting your E-commerce to Twitter

March 12, 2009 By martinnormark Leave a Comment

I’m addicted to Twitter. I use it every single day, from my laptop, my work PC, my phone – everywhere. For me it works as a way to stay updated on a certain topic – for me that topic is software development. As the one-and-only Milkshake developer, I want to receive the latest news about software development technologies as soon as possible.

During the last year or two, businesses, politicians and celebrities use Twitter. A local coffee shop doubled its clientele using Twitter. Barack Obama has an astonishing 325.000+ followers, and it is believed that his use of social media – including Twitter – made him able to connect with people and win the election. Dell made $1 million on Twitter advertising last year. And what did they spend? Nothing! $0. Twitter is free! It has loads of users, and if you take a look at their growth rate they will outperform even Facebook…

One of the benefits of using Twitter, as opposed to newsletters or blog posts, is that a Tweet is only 140 characters. The recipient can read and make a decision about an offer, in a matter of seconds.

Another benefit of using Twitter, is that you can be confident that your Tweets will reach its destinations. As of now, users of Twitter don’t have spam filtering. Of course they can chose to Un-follow you on Twitter, but that’s your own fault if they chose to do that.

So how would we like Milkshake to be connected to Twitter? Our customers must have an easy way to do the following tasks in regard to Twitter:

  1. Publish a Tweet when a new product is either created, has changed price, has a new picture or a new variant
  2. Publish product pictures using TwitPic
  3. Publish a special time-limited offer, as a Twitter-only offer, but also as a “global” offer, along with a picture using TwitPic
  4. Publish a product review when a customer submits one
  5. Link customers to their Twitter profile
  6. Publish order status notifications as a direct message to the customer
  7. Get a brief overview of what people on Twitter are saying about the company or its products
  8. Track traffic from Twitter. See how many sign up to newsletter, place an order or something else

The last task is very important. As one of our core values of Milkshake, the ability to get insight and take action immediately whether it being marketing, pricing or product inventory, will enable you to sell more as a Milkshake customer.

Twitter is working hard to figure out how to avoid spam. So don’t make your followers feel you’re spamming! Give them something for free all the time. Post some great links that are relevant to your customers. Comment on new stuff in your industry. Follow your followers, and enter short discussions. Then every once in a while, send your followers a time limited special offer. Interact first, sell second – as Seth Godin finished his blog post about The Panhandler’s secret.

Linking your customers to their Twitter profile

As with newsletters, Twitter is also about getting people to “sign up” for your Tweets so they can get your updates. If you post interesting stuff, people will start following you, but you can also do something to make them follow you. When a user sign up for your newsletter, you can use the e-mail address to see if this user is already on Twitter. If the user is present on Twitter, you can immediately ask the user to follow you. Or you can send an e-mail telling about what kind of stuff you post on Twitter, and why anyone should follow you.

Filed Under: Marketing

Top 10 E-commerce Startup Mistakes you want to avoid

January 11, 2009 By martinnormark Leave a Comment

Taking up a new challenge is always going to involve some initial mistakes. In the world of business, this will cost you money. So you have to make sure that 1) Reduce the amounts of mistakes, and 2) Make sure not to make the same mistakes again.

I’ve already touched the importance of Web Analyticsfor E-commerce sites. My main point there was, you should be able to get insight and take action immediately! It is the most important thing about running a business online!

I was surfing the Internet this evening, and came across a great blog about E-commerce. I found a specific post that I really like: Top 10 E-commerce Startup Mistakes.

I think these tips are really great. There’s obviously a lot more out there, but these are some of the most frequently mistakes made, and some of the worse.

Filed Under: E-commerce, Marketing, Startups

The perfect name

January 5, 2009 By martinnormark Leave a Comment

What is the perfect product-name?

The last few days I have been searching the Internet for the Perfect name.

Windows, Apple, Google all great names but who came up whit these.

Did the light strike them and they just found out in a second, or was I necessary for them to do some homework before naming these products.

I god friend came up whit the name Milkshake. I believe it’s a great product name that describe both the company we would like to start up and the product it self.

Also if we are building on in the future a Milkshake contains a lot of ingredient.

Filed Under: Marketing