The Psychologist reported about an experiment in a retail store in the USA.
3 different prices were A/B tested.
Control price: $24.95
Variant #1: 20% discount For 3 Days
Variant #2: 30% Discount Today, 20% Discount Tomorrow, 10% Discount On Day 3
The first offer of a 20% discount for 3 days caused a 70% increase in sales. However, the second offer of a tapering discount resulted in a staggering 200% increase in sales!
The rationale was that customers were keen to avoid losing out on the discount so were prompted into taking action and made an immediate decision to buy.
The biggest media companies are far too busy and get pitched far too often.
They often get their stories from smaller outlets and quote them.
Instead, of pitching writers for big media companies, track who they’re linking out to every week (or scrape external links) & pitch straight to the smaller source.
Researchers from Yale and The University of Chicago ran an experiment for price variations.
In their experiment, a mail order catalog was printed in 3 different versions and sent to an identical number of people. A standard woman’s clothing item was tested at the prices of $34, $39, and $44.
Results:
In all tests, the item ending with the number 9 price got the most sales.
Even when the item was priced at $39, it got more sales than the same item priced at $34!!
In an age where social media advertising is a $16.3 billion business, launching a successful ad campaign on a social media platform is essential for a brand. In particular, creating a video ad that’s adapted to mobile devices is the key to reaching a growing demographic of consumers. From 2015 to 2016, mobile video ad revenue climbed from $1.69 billion to $4.16 billion, and is expected to outpace, if not entirely replace, desktop video ads.
Of the social media platforms set to capitalize on the growth of mobile video advertising, Instagram is the one to watch. A recent report from digital benchmark agency, L2, revealed that in Q1 2017 Instagram far exceeded its competitors concerning video ad engagement: 16% engagement on Instagram versus 1.5% on Facebook and 0.3% on YouTube. With such an active user base, it’s no surprise more and more advertisers are turning to Instagram as the platform for launching their video ad campaign.
Instagram’s Advertising Potential
With an advertising behemoth like Facebook as its parent company, Instagram has both the support and role model to become a mobile advertising contender. By the end of 2017, it is predicted to comprise 10.6% of Facebook’s total mobile ad revenue worldwide, which equivocates to over $2.8 billion in revenue. Instagram’s advertising success is driven not only by a growing user base (it recently surpassed 700 million users worldwide), but also a constant rollout of new features for marketers.
To get an understanding of Instagram advertising’s potential, it helps to analyze how users use the platform:
The introduction of video ads into Instagram Stories at the beginning of 2017 was a major development that inspired brands to launch a video ad campaign on the platform. This was preceded by other developments that helped to construct the foundation of a functional and efficient advertising platform, including the ingratiation of the Facebook Power Editor and Ads Manager and the introduction of CTAs in 2015. Marketers could now reach the 400 million+ daily Instagram users through static photo ads, traditional video ads, carousel ads, and Stories ads. This variety of venues allows businesses to capitalize on one of the most highly engaged audiences on any social media platform.
Launching Your Instagram Ad Campaign
If you’re familiar with launching Facebook ads, then getting an Instagram ad campaign up and running will seem very familiar. The first step is to establish an objective for the ad: brand awareness, reach, traffic, app installs, engagement, video views, or conversions. For a video ad, your objectives may be more restricted depending on your goal.
Then, establish your target audience (which includes custom options similar to Facebook). After setting the budget, it’s time to design the video ad based on Instagram’s specifications. According to industry insights, optimizing an Instagram video ad for best possible performance includes creating a captivating and concise caption, using relevant hashtags, and keeping the aesthetic and material on-brand.
When done correctly, an Instagram video ad campaign can lead to a massive increase in purchase intent, brand engagement, and ad recall. Perrier’s captivating Instagram video ad campaign led to a seventeen point increase in ad recall and a four point increase in purchase intent. Lay’s meanwhile, launched an ad campaign on both Facebook and Instagram. Their Instagram video ads resulted in a 5% greater reach, 3% lower CPM, and 5% increase in sales lift versus their Facebook campaign alone.
With no end in sight of Instagram’s continued advertising growth, embracing their video ad capabilities is a strategy for all brands to adopt. Already, three-quarters of American companies are predicted to use Instagram by the end of 2017. The video ad engagement gap between Instagram and other social media outlets is the main draw for these marketers, and will continue to attract more into the future.
Facebook ads are a quick-and-easy option for hassle-free, affordable advertising for your business. Within minutes, you can create a campaign, set up goals, and choose a budget. Sometimes, however, these simple steps may still lead to a failing campaign. Fortunately, there’s a bulletproof way to optimize a winning ad.
Know Your Goal
Before you begin creating your ad, keep your goals in mind. Think what do I want this ad to do? Small businesses, for example, should choose “Website Conversions” as their main goal. This way, you’ll be able to see just how much a new lead or customer will cost.
Create A Narrow Audience
One of the best features of Facebook’s advertising platform is that you can create your own audience. By breaking your audience into several smaller audience segments, you’ll be able to see which audience setting optimizes conversions and works best for your business.
Monitor The Metrics
Facebook allows users to monitor their CPC, CPM, and CTR. Keep your ads thriving by checking out your average-value-per-customer and subtracting it from your cost-per-customer.
Take Advantage Of Lookalike And Custom Audience Targeting
If you’re trying to enhance your click-through rate, then lookalike and custom audience targeting is the way to do it.
Custom Audience Targeting: Facebook will let you target your audience by uploading their phone number or email address into the system.
Lookalike Targeting: Facebook will then copy traits (location, gender, age) from that list of people and generate a brand-new lookalike audience.
A/B Test Your Ad
A/B testing is a marketing strategy in which two versions of the same ad are created and tested against each other.
A/B testing requires you to create a few different versions of your ad. Each version should only have one change. For example, if you’re A/B testing your headline, you would use the exact same photo and copy, and only change the headline in the new version.
Keep It Short And Sweet
If your ad is long and boring, no one is going to read it. In fact, a recent study found that Facebook posts with 80 characters or less received 66% higher interaction rates than longer ones. In addition, posts with 40 characters or less received 86% engagement.
Rotate Your Ads
If you pay attention, you’ll notice your Facebook ad’s CTR decrease after a few days. This is because your ad is repeatedly showing up to the same audience over and over again. To avoid Facebook ad fatigue, change the headline and the copy of your ad. You could also try using a new photo, or something that will grab your viewers’ attention.
Create landing pages that compare your product / company to the competition. Call it “XXX Alternative”
Use SEO to drive the page up.
Prospects are 15% more likely to convert to your product because they already don’t like your competitor!
Use Testimonials and Product Recommendations!
1. Personalized recommendations increase revenue by 300%.
2. 100% of the TOP 10 websites in the Internet Retailer 500 use product recommendations.
3. 70% of Amazon.com’s homepage is devoted to product recommendations.
hourglass
+585% Conversion Rate by Delaying Retargeting
Retargeting ads are powerful, since they only show to people who have visited you before. However lots of those people were never interested to begin with.
So Justin Brooke from IMScalable ran a test, he only retargeted to people who spend more than 45 seconds on his site.
The result? For every $1 in retargeting, he made $6.36: A 585% improvement!
