Archive for the ‘Business & Marketing’ Category

This week’s lesson on crafting a good Facebook ad is to make sure that your image matches your sales copy. Take a look at this advert from Hunt Bike Wheels.

This ad is just confusing because it’s talking about disc wheels, but the wheels in the photo are clearly not disc wheels.

Compare it to this disc wheel from Planet X:

You’ll notice that this one looks like a disc.

Now, you could argue that I have misunderstood, and they’re actually talking about wheels with brake discs on them. Which, from the look of their website, which features a lot of wheels with brake discs on them, is probably the case.

But there aren’t even any brake discs on the image in the advert. All of this causes a lot of confusion for the user who struggles to work out what they are looking at. To avoid this, make sure your image makes sense with your sales copy.

This week, I’m looking at a classic mistake people make when targetting their ads: not targetting it at the correct level of customer. To do it, I’m using this ad that popped up in my newsfeed.

Here’s what I don’t like about it: I have no idea what a “mumbler” is.

At first, I thought it was some kind of speech impediment group. I’ve got a lot of friends who have come through the McGuire Programme, which helps with stammers, so I assumed it was something similar at first glance.

But then it mentions babies, so I’m wondering whether it’s a mum’s group.

None of what they are doing makes any sense.

First, why am I seeing this? They could set the targeting to be people who have interacted with their page or visited their website, in which case it makes sense to go straight into your sales copy without explaining what your group is.

Or, if it’s a general ad, they need to explain what it is. Think of Eugene Schwartz’s levels of awareness. They need to tell me what their group is.

If it is a mums group, why am I seeing it? I’m a dad. They can set gender targetting on the ad to just include mums, or they could have a separate version of the ad, targetted at men, which makes it clear that dads are welcome too.

Conclusion

I’ve written before about how community groups should not use Facebook ads. Do it if you know what you’re doing. But you probably don’t know how to write copy or set the targeting, so you’re probably wasting your money. This ad is a good example of that.

If you do want to use Facebook ads, then make sure you know how to target your ads appropriately and come up with relevant ads for each audience segment.

Live Strong is back with a new ad this week. They’re not suggesting I’m over 40 this week, but it still seems a strange use of your advertising budget to show me this.

Last month, I wrote about people wasting money on advertising. I said it happens a lot: and it does. Here are two more examples I found this month.

First, here is a Google AdWords advert by Treatwell. Except the page does not work.

And here is an advert from Live Strong. The link does work: it takes you to the article on tips for women over a 40. Bear in mind that you put the targeting parameters in when you create a Facebook ad. Facebook knows I a man under 40, so they could easily exclude me from seeing an ad I obviously have no interest it.

Facebook ads cost money. Therefore, if you’re running them, you want to make sure they are converting. Rule one of this process is to make sure the links worth. It sounds obvious, but these people seem to have missed it.

Here is an advert by RaceCheck that produces a 404:

A funny one-off, you might think. But you would be incorrect. I see this kind of thing all the time. Here is an advert by Live To Tri that does the same thing:

By the way, if you ever wanted proof that people will interact with a Facebook post without actually clicking on it, notice that 12 people have liked an ad that does not work.

Here is another advert fail. Facebook allows us to target age. So, they know that I was not born before 1985. Why would they target someone born after 1985 with this ad?

Maybe it is some kind of clever tactic that makes people click out of anger? I’m not sure. But I didn’t click.

If you’re spending money on Facebook advertising, it is worth checking whether the links work. Otherwise, you are literally throwing money away.

If you are interested in great advertising, take a look at this. The best hit potential customers with a specific pain point and promise to fix it. Which is exactly what this advert from Sportive Breaks does. It was freezing this morning and I would much rather be cycling on Mallorca.

I’m not sure Leeds City Council have quite mastered this marketing thing yet…

When you send an email newsletter with a provider such as MailChimp, Aweber, etc, they give you a report on who opens your emails. But how accurate are these numbers?

I had the opportunity to test this recently.

It’s good practice to clear your email list periodically because email providers use open rates to access whether your email is spam or not. So, if you have a lot of old, inactive addresses on your list, or it’s going into people’s spam box and they’re not seeing it, it is a good idea to remove them so that it does not affect email delivery to the people who are reading your emails.

How I tested it

For two lists I had, I created a segment who had not opened the last five emails we sent them.

I then sent these people an email saying “are you receiving this?”, inviting people who still wanted to receive the email me back. Anyone who did this would indicate that the numbers are not accurate.

Here are the results…

West Yorkshire Humanists

We had 120 people on the list. 36 had not interacted with the last five campaigns.

Of those, 11% read and 6% clicked the email. This suggests that people are receiving my regular emails but choosing not to read them.

An additional four people emailed me to say they wanted to continue to receive the email. This suggests that the tracking statistics are out by a significant amount. This is because this is just the people who were bothered to email me back; how many were in the same situation but didn’t bother to?

Anxiety Leeds

We had 256 people on the list. 100 had not interacted with the last five campaigns.

7 people emailed me to say they would like to continue receiving the emails.

Again, this is probably only a selection of the people who are receiving the emails and not being tracked.

Conclusion

The open rate tracking provided by MailChimp, and likely other email providers, is a useful guide to see campaign to campaign. However, it does not seem to be an accurate measure of who exactly is reading your email because many people are reading them but not reporting as having done so in the reports.

There are a lot of excellent podcasts out there. I could do a whole blog post on my favourites. But, in particular, there are a few episodes that really stand out as useful for entrepreneurs and marketers.

I’m only listing a few here, with a plan to expand this list over time.

How to Get 100,000 YouTube Subscribers

Noah Kagan is the founder of Sumo.com. In this episode, he interviews Tim Schmoyer, an expert on YouTube marketing.

Click here to listen.

Getting Inside Your Prospect’s Head

David Garfinkel is the star of the show in the Copywriters Podcast. Getting inside your prospect’s head is difficult and few people explain it well. I think Garfinkel has come the closest.

Click here to listen.

How To Build A Fanatical Tribe of Customers

Mike Dillard runs Self Made Man. In this episode, he interviews Russell Brunson, founder of Clickfunnels, and author of Dot Com Secrets.

Click here to listen.

This is the second of two blog posts about billboards. Life does not get any more exciting than this. Read part one here.

I ran up the canal. And for a long time, there was a First Direct billboard half way up my route that said: “people people wanted”. Every week I told myself I should take a photo of it. Finally, after a month, I resolved that this would be the day. So, I ran up there, pulled out my camera and… it had gone.

However, I recently saw this advert at the train station and it will illustrate my point just as well.

The headline reads…

Good with people? Then you’ll be great with us.

In both of these instances, it could be that they are just looking to drive some recruitment there way. And to an extent, it is. But there must be far more cost-effective ways of finding people than a billboard that targets everybody. Most people have a job, for example, and don’t work in customer services.

However, these advertisements serve a secondary purpose.

They are also value signalling. Not only do they advertise for friendly customer service people but they also say to everyone who reads it “why not come and bank with us – we care about getting friendly staff on board.”

Few people are people people looking to move into a different customer services role. But everybody would like a bank with friendlier customer services.