Digital Media Audiences & Advertising

What do we know that has changed in digital media audiences for 2018? There are many numbers being crunched but here are 10 facts you may want to consider when it comes to your 2018 Marketing Plan.

1. Facebook still offers the most digital advertising choices when it comes to targeting your market and reach people where they hang out while at the same time letting you determine the action you want users to make.
2. Facebook is an aging market with many younger users (under 20) limiting their time on the platform while graying Americans are increasing in number there and are learning to navigate it to keep in touch with relatives and friends.
3. Instagram has moved from a completely younger market to a market that is reaching a wider spread of Americans under 35. However, Facebook still has the numbers and since Facebook owns Instagram you can buy ads there on both.
4. Snapchat is the preferred platform for users that are younger than 25.
5. Stats show that digital advertising for social media continues to climb and the platforms are getting more sophisticated in terms of targeting the viewer.  Facebook by far received the lions share of digital marketing money on social media.
6. Pinterest still is the most Direct Response Social Media platform & delivers twice the average purchase price. 97% of Pinterest Users have purchased from a pin.
7. Youtube still offers the most potential as a platform for Corporate America as it is still untapped by over 88% of American companies who could have a 24/7 station.
8. Facebook, Pinterest and Instagram now have Buy Now platforms that allow you to go directly from an ad to a shopping cart or landing page for a one click purchase.
9. Facebook has added advertising options that allow Facebook ads to optimize based on a click to a landing page including prioritizing clicks of visitors who linger.
10. Facebook and Instagram offer lead ads as part of their advertising platforms enabling companies to get more measurable results—even if they are not retail.
11. Google Adwords, continue to be unrivaled in terms of keyword search and delivering people actively making a purchasing decision. So if you are not using search in your advertising plan you are missing people who are purchasing now.

For more information on what you can do to enhance your digital marketing plan, contact us at Tailor-Made Advertising and request our media planning worksheet to review some options for your marketing goals.

Liz Harsch is a media planner and trainer for small business owners with Constant Contact, SCORE, SBDC, SBA, Cities and MWD and County outreach partners, APICS plus many Chambers of Commerce since 2008.  She owns Tailor-Made Advertising in Torrance, California and provides marketing,  training and consulting to identify marketing and media alternatives for business owners. She can be reached at 310-791-6300 or by email at liz@adteamla.com. You can also view her workshop schedule here.

11/2 Moreno Valley- FREE Rock Your Holiday Email Marketing Plan

Join our FREE Marketing Workshop on Wed, 11/02 Learn how to use Email Templates, Social Media and Holiday Deadlines to Grow Your Business at the Moreno Valley Conference Center 9-11am. Register:http://bit.ly/112email

8/3 Join me in Manhattan Beach to plan your online marketing strategy and learn about social media that sells including @Instagram and @pinterest!

Join me, SBDC and #ConstantContact for 2 Workshops in one night this Wednesday, 8/3/16 at the Manhattan Beach Library from 6-8pm. Get details at http://bit.ly/83socialIn the first workshop, I will review online social media tools and those that sell including @facebook, @pinterest and @instagram and others. In the second hour, I will provide a planning worksheet and we will plan your next online campaigns with tips on the best way to set goals, promote your campaigns and measure your results. If you own a business, you should come. Get ready to rock the second half of your year with some new strategies and tools. Register today:http://bit.ly/83social .

11/18 Social Media Marketing That Sells Workshop @SBDC Hawthorne

FREE Workshop Wed 11/18 @SBDC Hawthorne #SocialMedia That Sells http://bit.ly/1118social Tips #BlackFriday #CyberMonday #GivingTuesday #ShopSmall.  There is still time to plan your Holiday Promotions but these events start next week. So make some time to come to SBDC El Camino in Hawthorne for a FREE Social Media Sells Plus Instagram Workshop designed to help you focus on your sales goals using online tools that work for getting sales accomplished. There are effective methods that use free online tools to help you spread the word about your sales events tied into national promotions like Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, Cyber Monday and Giving Tuesday.  These events are highly public and there are ways to put the focus on your small business and expand your reach when you tie your promotions into theirs.  Learn to increase your reach beyond your customer and lead list to get your message boosted to a wider audience that matches your target market. Get tips when you join us this Wednesday November 18, in Hawthorne. Limited seating so register today!

 

5 Tips To Grow your Business from #OneCon2015!

Although, I don’t have the time, I always take at lease one 3-day training break. Because when you step away from your business to educate yourself it always pays back in time and cost savings and growth achieved. A good workshop should increase your revenue and save you time and money. In last 3 days, I have learned about many new online tools and best practices from advertising to project management. And you are going to benefit from this knowledge as I give you a few of the highlights. But I know from past experience that if I don’t implement some of these ideas in the next 30 days, I should hire someone who can. Otherwise the time spent is wasted. Here are few tips I learned at #OneCon2015 an annual convention provided to me by #ConstantContact2015.

Tip 1: It is important that you understand your business model and review how it is working. Doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome (growth) is insanity. So ask yourself where you want your organization to go and when, and then figure out how you are going to achieve it by changing your marketing plan.

Tip 2: Create a lead or contact flow funnel and identify the steps in follow up and sales execution. It is not enough to collect cards or get calls, it is key that you have a program in place to ensure follow up and multiple contacts.

Tip 3: Identify what you are doing best. There may be services that you do not really make money on but that you use in order to service existing customers. The question is do you have to do that? In many cases you do not even know what those services really cost you but it is key you figure that out.

Tip 4: Track your time and the time of your team. If you are not tracking your time and your team’s time you could be charging the wrong rate for your services or products. You need to know the cost in order to set a smart price or you will literally be working yourself out of business.

Tip 5: Are their clients or customers that you need to fire? This is a tricky one but when you provide service to people who are not a good match for your product or service, you may be making a bad name for yourself.

Join my Grow Your Business Webinar on 10/14

 

Author Liz Harsch is a marketing consultant, Email Marketer and Authorized Local Expert presenting Workshops for Constant Contact, SCORE, SBDC, Metropolitan Water District, multiple Chambers of Commerce, The City of Los Angeles and other Organizations. If you are interested in getting help for your marketing plan or your marketing projects, Email us at tmade.mkt@verizon.net.  

For more information about Liz or Tailor-Made Advertising, visit them online at tailormadeadvertising.com. Or sign up to get her monthly tips for small business owners and management.   To schedule Liz Harsch as a speaker on Traditional and Online Marketing, Social Media, Analytics or Email Marketing for your organization, Email beth@adteamla.com or contact us at 310-791-6300.

3 Steps to facebook Posts that Achieve Your Goals!

So you are spending a lot of time on facebook trying to keep in touch with your customers and getting them to talk about your business or non-profit to their friends. But at the end of the day you are not getting your time back in sales or donations. You know something is wrong but you are not sure how to figure out what.  Let’s figure it out starting today.

What Do You Want People To Do?

Step 1: What were you trying to do on facebook? The answer to how to make it work for your company is to set some goal that you can achieve. Typically there are different types of posts you can do on facebook:

1. Links (which are designed to move people from your facebook page to your website, event page or shopping cart).
2. Images (which are designed to get people to like your post or your product pictures).
3. Testimonials (which are designed to get your customers to post reviews on your page and hopefully their friends are following them)
4. Videos (which are designed to get your fans or visitors to review and learn something about your business and your brand).
5. Sweepstakes or Content Download posts (designed to get you more contacts for your newsletter or to connect to your facebook page).

Step 2: Not all of these posts work the same so it is important to decide what results you are looking for before you plan and post and repost. Remember, if you have 30 “likes” or more, you can see your facebook insights and that will provide you with lots of feedback on how your posts are working. Make sure you are checking your results.

Step 3: In addition, when you figure out what posts are working best, add paid facebook advertising. You can select the goal you are trying to achieve and facebook will recommend the best format for your ad monies based on your goals.   You can also review the posts you have done lately that are accomplishing your goal and amp up your results by boosting those posts with some paid ad money that is targeted to match your customer demographics.

Author Liz Harsch is a marketing consultant, Email Marketer and Authorized Local Expert presenting Workshops for Constant Contact, SCORE, SBDC, Metropolitan Water District, multiple Chambers of Commerce, The City of Los Angeles and other Organizations. If you are interested in getting help for your marketing plan or your marketing projects, Email us at tmade.mkt@verizon.net.  

For more information about Liz or Tailor-Made Advertising, visit them online at tailormadeadvertising.com. Or sign up to get her monthly tips for small business owners and management.   To schedule Liz Harsch as a speaker on Traditional and Online Marketing, Social Media, Analytics or Email Marketing for your organization, Email beth@adteamla.com or contact us at 310-791-6300.

#Social Media Example: NY Mag, Bill Cosby & #TheEmptyChair

Whether you are in agreement or not with the New Yorker Magazine cover that prompted a national conversation using the hashtag #TheEmptyChair campaign, you cannot disagree that the use of traditional media plus online media and social platforms drove the success of the public relations outreach.  This example demonstrates how imagery with social media efforts delivered more impact than daily news reports could.

So how does this story impact your business? For starters they did not rely heavily on copy as the picture encapsulated the story (look at all those women). The image’s impact created a social media frenzy and the hashtags #theemptychair was featured prominently from #facebook to #pinterest, #tumblr and #instagram. Beyond that the story spread throughout the network of their fans, friends and contacts and then was picked up by bloggers (like me), newspapers, magazines and social media curation sites. By adding hashtags# the stories spread even further by connecting the topic and then connecting this story with the topic of sexual assault which was already in the news due to the out of hand number of assaults on campuses in America.

#TheEmptyChair conversations went on to be shown on YouTube and other #SocialMedia.

So it started with an image and then led to a hashtag #theemptychair and that connected all social media and online posts to the other conversations, including the publication and other social media accounts. Followers could then retweet, repost and share what impacted them most about the story and their network of friends and contacts would be exposed to the story.

Then if you visit that conversation (in this case #theemptychair) you will find all the conversations that reference that hashtag or images for it — all in one place, and you can also check it out on search engines to see images, stories, content that were offshoots of the original story. As a follower or viewer you can choose to keep in the loop and see where the conversation goes. Along the way if you comment or post, your logo, comment and other images are referenced so that people following that conversation can connect with people who share their ideas (thus expanding your reach and area of influence).

So suppose you own a gardening business and you want to tap into a trending hashtag and or conversation on drought resistant plants. You can search twitter or google and grab those stories that are trending for that topic and you can include or insert your company into that conversation by retweeting or reposting the hashtags and social media feeds and then commenting some gardening solutions and offer folks to see some drought resistant solutions you have installed and a suggestion they get your gardening newsletter monthly or follow your feed on #pinterest, #twitter, #tumblr, #facebook or #instagram.

NY Magazine Tumblr Account kept the conversation going and helps you use content from their blog

By media mixing, social media expands your reach and sometimes it can start a conversation and provide a beacon on how to follow that conversation. In addition people can message you to find out more about whatever peaked their curiosity or add their private conversation to the platform with just the owner of the hashtag or the page for the platform. You can choose to continue to broadcast your message to your contacts or you can expand your area of influence by connecting with others outside your contacts using tools like those used in this example.

Author Liz Harsch is a marketing consultant, Email Marketer and Authorized Local Expert presenting Workshops for Constant Contact, SCORE, SBDC, Metropolitan Water District, multiple Chambers of Commerce, The City of Los Angeles and other Organizations. If you are interested in getting help for your marketing plan or your marketing projects, Email us at tmade.mkt@verizon.net.  

For more information about Liz or Tailor-Made Advertising, visit them online at tailormadeadvertising.com. Or sign up to get her monthly tips for small business owners and management.   To schedule Liz Harsch as a speaker on Traditional and Online Marketing, Social Media, Analytics or Email Marketing for your organization, Email beth@adteamla.com or contact us at 310-791-6300.

Join me on 7/23 in Hawthorne #SBDC to learn Social Media Timesaver Tips

Join me on 7/23 in Hawthorne #SBDC to learn Social Media Timesavers make the most of your #social media time, info: http://bit.ly/723socialsbdc . You will learn tips and tools to use to get more done on social media and where to find quick content for your efforts. Get details at this link: http://bit.ly/723socialsbdc .

Buy Now Social Media Ads Now Testing

Buy Now ads are in testing for Twitter and Facebook and coming soon.  Capitalizing on the immediate gratification benefits of mobile searching and the “one click” temptation of getting what you want, social networks are competing to be the first to create and maximize ads using stored credit card information or programs like apple pay and paypal. The simplicity and speed is projected to be a real temptation as the offers will typically be limited in the time they are available and therefore hard to ignore.

How will they work? Picture yourself searching for an item and then seeing that it will be on sale for one more hour. Would you be tempted to click on it and make that purchase? One of the keys to the success of the ads will be limiting the time the offer is good for and keeping the offer unique or hard to shop so that it is irresistable for a limited time. Think a Groupon but only available for a few minutes or hours.

While Pinterest hasn’t started “buy now” buttons just yet, it certainly has been active in driving e-commerce sales. It recently partnered with Shopify to make purchases even easier for users and further drive sales for its 100,000-plus merchants. Since June 2014, when users repin products, important information like real-time pricing and stock level for that item go along with it. Pinners even get notifications if their items drop in price.

Buy now ads are expected to revolutionize the way mobile users shop by making it super simple to make a purchase based on a limited timed offer and a number of impressions. Learn more about mobile marketing and online promotions and campaigns at my next class in Hawthorne on January 21 at the SBDC or visit my website for a full list to register for one of my Free Social Media & Email Marketing Classes.  Pinterest is the number one direct response social media platform and Wednesday, February 4th in Costa Mesa and hands-on laptop bootcamps for help developing your next Promotion. It doesn’t matter what your business is, we can find a way to design your next promotion or event effectively to accomplish your goals. Interested in using Constant Contact to grow your business? Click here to get started integrating your marketing tools today.

Liz Harsch, has been helping small and medium sized businesses make the most of their marketing investments since 1988. Her company, Tailor-Made Advertising is an Authorized SCORE workshop presenter and an awarded Constant Contact Email Marketer and Authorized Local Expert presenting Workshops for Constant Contact, SCORE, SBDC, Metropolitan Water District, multiple Chambers of Commerce, The City of Los Angeles and other Organizations. If you are interested in a quote or more information on a mobile website email us at tmade.mkt@verizon.net.  For more information about Liz or Tailor-Made Advertising, visit tailormadeadvertising.com. To schedule Liz Harsch as a speaker on Traditional and Online Marketing, Social Media, Analytics or Email Marketing for your organization, Email us at tmade.mkt@verizon.net or call us at 310-791-6300.

Promotions That Drive Actions 10/2014

It starts with an idea.. a way to get your customers to come to your event or sale and to get them to spend money at a time when they are not as likely to do so. So you think of a something…a discount, an open house…a fundraiser. Now what? Here are a few tips on making your next promotion or event more successful. It is all about your plan and that is all about specifics.

Effective promotions start with honest and creative planning

Like our page, download a FREE Social Media Guide

There are lot’s of ways to get people excited about your promotion, but the key is to get your goal met and not just to fill the room or showroom.  Before you plan your event, try jotting down a few things about your goals so that you can find the best solution.

• What do you want the public to do? – Clarity of a goal helps it get achieved. Be specific how much do you need to accomplish for the promotion or event to meet your goals? What action do you need the participants to take that would be the most helpful?
• Set realistic goals. Unless you are doing something dramatically different or segment marketing with a new list or increasing the budget, you cannot expect to double or triple your normal results. So set your goal higher than in the past but keep it proportionate to what you are investing in time and effort as well as investments.

• Determine how to measure results– Is it sales dollars, units moved, seats filled or funds raised or website views? Determine what you hope to get out of it and agree on the best way to measure your results.

• What is a reasonable time period to accomplish your goal?– It takes time and typically the longer you have to plan the better the result of the promotion. However giving the public too much time to respond can also be the kiss of death.  A two day sale often does far better than a one week sale. There is something about deadlines that makes us procrastinate when they are not imminent.

• Put some money into your efforts–  You really can’t get something for nothing. So if you really want to see improvement, you have to be willing to spend some money or add something new to the pot. If you don’t have cash, consider enhancing your list with a partner’s cross promotion. Online ads are targeted and can be very reasonable.  For a facebook campaign, consider adding some money for paid ads. Add Google adwords or YouTube campaigns to get views on your videos. Once you set the goal, it is easier to f0cus on the delivery.

• Social Share Your Promotions – People love an event or promotion and the better they like them, the more they sell their friends on joining them in the glory. Make sure your ads, invitations and communications have a social share bar so that people who receive the notifications and invites can click a button and share it with their friends, connections and other social media sites.

• Post, tweet, link & share —Use your own social media pages to show your connections and their friends what is going on. Show the turn out, photos, the goals you are trying to reach and keep them updated on your progress. Invite people to review you.  The more exciting it seems, the more people will get involved, if you can keep the posts interesting and fun.  Ask your fans to share your promotion with their friends. If you don’t ask, they might not think of it on their own.

• Beef up the fun factor—As Mary Poppins said, for every job that must be done there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap, the job’s a game! Gaming and apps are taking over the advertising industry and many people are finding ways to make promotions and events be the next best thing. Think about your business and see what you can do to make your next promotion or event the most fun yet! It can be as simple as photos and posting them, but get your customers involved.

Want to learn more? Come to my Social Media & Email Marketing Classes  and hands-on laptop bootcamps for help developing your next Promotion. It doesn’t matter what your business is, we can find a way to design your next promotion or event effectively to accomplish your goals. Interested in using Constant Contact to grow your business? Click here to get started integrating your marketing tools today.

Liz Harsch, has been helping small and medium sized businesses make the most of their marketing investments since 1988. Her company, Tailor-Made Advertising is an Authorized SCORE workshop presenter and an awarded Constant Contact Email Marketer and Authorized Local Expert presenting Workshops for Constant Contact, SCORE, SBDC, Metropolitan Water District, multiple Chambers of Commerce, The City of Los Angeles and other Organizations. If you are interested in a quote or more information on a mobile website email us at tmade.mkt@verizon.net.  For more information about Liz or Tailor-Made Advertising, visit tailormadeadvertising.com. To schedule Liz Harsch as a speaker on Traditional and Online Marketing, Social Media, Analytics or Email Marketing for your organization, Email us at tmade.mkt@verizon.net or call us at 310-791-6300.