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đ Special Halloween Edition: Growth Hacks Based on Fear đ±
đ± Very Scary Growth Hack #1 – Fear of Being Rejected!
Listerineâs 1920s ads turned bad breath from a fairly common minor flaw into halitosis, a condition that made you into a social pariah, sexless and alone.
Consumers were rendered so effectively insecure that Listerineâs sales rose âfrom $115,000 to more than $8 millionâ in just seven years.
đ± đ± Even Scarier Growth Hack #2 – Fear of Death = Shockvertising:
Non-profits and public service announcements use this tactic often. Using horrifying or discomforting images along with alarmist headlines gets a real visceral reaction from people.
Fear is used in these ads for one simple reason: because it works. In 2012, the CDC reported that one week of scary anti-smoking ads prompted 50,000 smokers to quit.
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đ± đ± đ± The Scariest Growth Hack #3 – Fear of Missing Out!
One clothing company has this all figured out. This online retailer tested a limited next-day shipping offer against another version in which the limited offer wasnât shown.
The limited time shipping offer boosted sales by 226%.
All it took was one line of text with a countdown and somewhere around 45 seconds to install it.
But to take full advantage of scarcity to increase your sales, you need to fully understand itâs power.
With a custom illustration in your Facebook ad, you can give your brand an aesthetic.
You can also use it to engage users more effectively and earn their business.
There are a few, cheaper ways to create these custom Facebook ads if you donât have an in-house digital designer.
Online tools like Canva offer a simple platform for design, or you can use sites like Upwork to find freelancers at reasonable rates.
3. Color Gradation
We donât need to talk again about how important visuals are in Facebook ads.
But when it comes to color, thereâs one trend that keeps on repeating: Gradients.
Image source: https://www.topik.in/
Gradation is so successful thanks to the role it plays in the overall consumer psychology.
Just as with the psychology of SEO, the psychology of Facebook ads is a study of how users subconsciously interact on the platform and what innately appeals to them or not.
The idea is to tap into how a consumer thinks in order to present them with the most relatable, compelling content.
Color is a crucial piece of this Facebook marketing puzzle.
Use your creativity to create GIFs that tell a story about your brand, highlight a product, or really do anything else relevant that will capture usersâ attentions.
6. Comparing to the Competition
Though you should review the competitor rules before taking on this strategy for your Facebook marketing, there has been a definite rise in the number of comparison ads.
By comparing your brand to another, you are clearly showing why yours is the better solution.
Essentially, these Facebook advertisements act as visual value-props.
Image source: https://www.pinterest.com
Without explicitly spelling out why your brand is better, the visual element used makes that clear.
And we all know how important the visuals are in Facebook advertising.
You donât even necessarily need to compare your own business with another.
Consider comparing situations that your product or service improves, such as Cleanlyâs above.
They demonstrate the difference between not using their service and having to go to the laundromat vs. having your laundry delivered in the comfort of your home with their service. Â
7. Flat Designs
A flat-laying Facebook ad plays into a personâs preference for organization in a visual context.
Basically, people want to see things that are placed carefully, symmetrically, and/or evenly on a layout.
Image source: https://www.nanigans.com/blog
This tactic is especially useful for retail and clothing brands.
They can show off an entire array of products, including recommending style combinations in an attempt to upsell.
The flat design also makes it possible to present products that can appeal to more than one demographic.
For example, you can show shoes for men, women, and children in a flat layout all within a single Facebook ad.
Though you can expect to see some of these trends change as we move into following years, one thing they all have in common is captivating visual content.
Having visuals in your Facebook ad that draw users away from your competition and towards your brand instead is crucial.
Looking at what other businesses are doing with their ad designs is a great source of inspiration for optimizing your own Facebook marketing strategy.
Here’s what Mashable uncovered while investigating their phenomenon – They validated the idea 2 years before creating the product.
Everything started as a Google April Fools Day joke back in 2014. They published this video and it gained over 6 million views within a couple of weeks (16 million in 2014). This video collected over 16,000 comments = feedback from future customers.
They used this as proof of a market before they built their product.
Dropbox did the same. First they created a video about a nonexistent product. Then they gained email addresses. Only after that did they create their real product.
It’s a priceless example on how to achieve Product Market Fit before wasting money on developing an actual product.
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Growth Hack #3 – Get Your YouTube Videos to Rank!
A study by Backlinko.com found a strong correlation between COMMENTS on a YouTube video, and how highly it ranks for YouTube search queries.
Get your audience to participate (or get your friends to help!) and watch the views pour in!
And itâs for good reason that 62% of marketers recognize Facebook as their most important advertising platform.
With ROI from Facebook ads only continuing to increase year over year, brands are able to enjoy success now more than ever.
Results from Facebook marketing can range from up to a 55% increase in sales revenue within six months to reaching 20 million people and earning a 2X return on ad spend within a single, 7-month Facebook ad campaign. Â
There are many elements that go into a winning Facebook ad, though.
Here are six quick tricks for optimizing your Facebook advertising strategy and maximizing your ROI.
1. Switch Up the Facebook Ad Format
Nowadays, people are less convinced to click through an ad that has only a single, static image.
Video ads on Facebook have become increasingly popular, with over 100 million hours of video watched daily on the platform.
Videos have been shown to increase purchase intent by at least 70%, increase brand awareness by 65%, and increase ad recall by 74%.
Keep it short – according to Facebook, people prefer videos that are 15 seconds or shorter
Track results and optimize – Use the Page Insights feature of the Facebook Ads Manager to analyze how your video ad performed and make adjustments for improvement.
Done right, a Facebook video ad like San Francisco Travelâs can yield 3.8X return on ad spend and a 49% higher conversion rate.
2. Send People from Your Facebook Ad to Designated Landing Pages
Directing users that click on your ad to just your Facebook Business Page or website homepage is not the best way to convert them into paying customers.
Instead, create landing pages for each ad set and audience segment.
Businesses with over 40 landing pages, whether theyâre B2B or B2C, enjoy far more new leads.
Even companies that increase total landing pages from just 10 to 15 total experience a 55% growth in lead generation.
Given Facebookâs extensive audience targeting tools, you can show different Facebook ads to different groups of people that direct to a specific landing page suited just to them.
This is all part of an ad targeting optimization strategy that can help you nurture existing leads while capitalizing on new ones.
Once you have a landing page optimization strategy in place, this quick Facebook ad hack can be implemented for greater conversions and higher ROI.
3. Use Emojis in the Facebook Ad Copy
Emojis arenât just for expressing that you â€ïž đ or would prefer 𮠠over đ.
They can (and should) also be used in your Facebook advertising strategy.
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Growth Hacks:
Growth Hack #1 – Get Higher Clickthroughs:
Low click throughs on your ads / emails / content?
Maybe youâre being too salesy too soon.
Baby steps:
1. Build trust by: being educational, sharing a secret / perceived insider information, offering something valuable for FREE (for now).
2. Grow trust EVEN MORE by overdelivering more of the same and following thru on original offer.
3. Go in for the sell with psychological triggers.
Wistia analyzed 564,710 videos and more than 1.3 billion plays. Here’s what they found:
1. Videos up to 2 minutes in length get the highest engagement.
2. Engagement is the same between 1 second and 2 minutes.
3. There is significant drop-off between 2 and 7 minutes (every second counts).
Half or even the majority of your A/B testing wonât product mind blowing results that will 10X your conversion rate. Thatâs normal.
GOOD a/b testing:
1. Focuses on 1 BIG thing, not a micro improvement you waste 1 week finding out
2. Happens in weekly iterations
3. Runs on a big enough sample size â at least a few thousand visits
4. Doesnât get cut short just b/c you think you âknowâ the results
5. Shows you whatâs wrong as well as whatâs right
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Growth Hack #2 – Contests that Receive 40% More Subscribers:
“$500 giveaway” vs “October $500 giveaway”.
A research project that analyzed 3 million visitors showed that, when you specify the month of the contest, conversion rates increase by an astounding 40%.
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Growth Hacks:
Growth Hack #1 – Get Bloggers To Quote You:
The Taktical team tested two different email outreach approaches:
First: Direct pitch. “Hey quote us”
Second approach: Send one email with the soft âfeelâ, “… I liked your article … I created something that can be of additional value… Would it be ok to pass along? …”
2nd email (if “Yes”) – A link to their piece of content.
Results: The direct pitch (#1) got a 16% reply rate and the 2-step email sequence (#2) – 40%! That’s a 2.5 times higher rate.
Growth Hack #3 – When in Free Trial Mode, Force Users to Keeping Moving Along:
ProdPad had a 30-day trial.
By analyzing user behavior, they found that they could predict by day 9 if a user would convert into paid.
So they tried an experiment:
They decided to cut their trial period to 7 days. However, users could earn more free trial time (28 days max) by completing simple onboarding tasks like “add a product name”, etc.
Result:
Their overall conversion rate increased by 200%!
Thereâs no denying the social media platform has solidified itself as a leader in video advertising.
Ensuring that your Snapchat marketing strategy is reaching the right audience is essential.
It lets you capitalize on the 2X higher visual engagement, 80% lift in website visit duration, and 5X higher swipe-up rate Snapchat advertising offers.
In order to achieve results like Kraft that earn 28 million-plus views and a 13% lift in purchase intent, you need to know how to successfully target your Snapchat ads.
Choosing the Right Snapchat Ad Format
Snapchat offers social media advertisers three distinct products: Snap Ads, Lenses, and Filters.
Snap Ads are the only format that offer brands the ability to use their own data or third-party analytics instead of Snapchatâs own.
Therefore, weâll only be discussing Snap Ads in the rest of this post.
Within the category of Snap Ads, format options for your Snapchat advertisement are based on goal and include:
App Install
Web View
Long-form Video
All of these offer you the ability to incorporate video into your Snapchat advertising campaign.
Doing so means taking advantage of the 64-85% of people who are more likely to convert after watching a product video.
These new targeting options, termed Snapchat Lifestyle Categories, are based on Snapchatâs own data compiled from how users interact in the app.
The data is gathered from Snapchattersâ behaviors that include the Discover channels and branded Stories that they view.
Snapchat Advertising: Audience Match
Along with introducing Snapchat Lifestyle Categories, Snapchat rolled out Audience Match and Lookalike Audiences at the same time.
Audience match allows Snapchat marketers to upload a custom list of email addresses or other identifiers directly into the platform.
This information is then used to create custom audiences that can be tracked and targeted based on their mobile ID.
Snap Ad Audience Match matches customer information owned by the brand with Snapchatâs own user data.
As a result, businesses advertising on Snapchat can create more effective custom audiences and launch retargeting strategies from directly within the platform.
Snapchat Advertising: Lookalike Audience
To expand upon the Snapchat ad targeting options of Audience Match, Lookalike takes this set of users and targets those with similar behaviors, demographics, etc.
With this feature in particular, Snapchat marketers can expand their audiences â not just reach current ones more effectively.
You can decide how closely you want the Lookalike Audience to resemble your current consumers when choosing the Lookalike type:
Similarity: Smallest audience that most closely resembles your existing user base
Balance: Medium-sized audience thatâs intended to be a balance between pre-existing customers and extending the reach further
Reach: The largest audience size that has the least resemblance to your current customers but offers the most reach
Snapchat Ad Targeting by Engagement
The last notable targeting option available to businesses advertising on Snapchat is Engagement Audiences.
This most recent addition to the suite of Snapchat ad targeting tools lets you target users that have previously engaged with one of your Snapchat marketing initiatives in the past.
You have three options within Engagement Targeting, based on the type of Snapchat ad you previously ran:
Target users that engaged with Snap Ads
Focus on those who interacted with a Geofilter
Target Snapchatters that engaged with a Sponsored Lens
Letâs use one of Gatoradeâs Sponsored Lens Snapchat ads as an example.
Image source: https://delmondo.co/
Once Gatorade finished this campaign, they could create a Snapchat Engagement audience that targets only those that interacted with their Sponsored Lens.
The new campaign wouldnât have to be another Sponsored Lens.
Instead, it could build upon whatever the previous Snapchat ad campaign advertised or accomplished.
Using Snapchatâs Engagement Audience tool is a way for you to target consumers that have already expressed interest with your brand on Snapchat.
Essentially, they are the âlow-hanging fruitâ that all Snapchat marketers dream of.
Succeeding with Snapchat ad targeting is the key to unlocking the ROI and engagement potential of the 92% of millenials that use the app.
Snapchat continues to roll out improvements to its ad platform and partner with third-party data providers.
As a result, Snapchat advertising agencies and brands can expect to have even better ways to measure success on the platform and optimize their Snap ad campaign results.
