Growth Hack #3 – Get an 18% Conversion Rate on Affiliate Program Sign-Ups:
Hailey Friedman found the secret to affiliate marketing that led to a growth rate of the RealtyShares program 9X year over year.
How did she do it? It started with listicle content with as many categories as possible related to a specific industry.
All together they ended up mentioning over 373 different blogs, podcasts, books and influencers within these “Top” lists.
Next, she reached out to every single person via email that was mentioned in one of the blog posts without ever mentioning their affiliate program at all.
Out of the 373 influencers emailed, 66 of them ended up signing up for the affiliate program.
Are you a good bot or a bad bot? There are two types of bots in the world. Businesses, of course, want to take advantage of good bots while avoiding the bad. Since 2017 seems like the year of the chatbot – a semi-automated way to talk to visitors on your website – we’ll take a closer look at how your business can use chatbots in your own digital marketing efforts. But first, let’s take a look at what bots are and how they got to where we are today.
Most Web Traffic Is From Bots
In 2016, humans were just under 50% of web traffic, and the rest of the traffic was from bots. This isn’t necessarily a problem; in fact, that’s how the web has been designed, quite intentionally. For decades, useful site crawlers or spider bots for search have helped us categorize the web. They make sites and their content searchable down to the most minute detail. They also alert us to price changes on our favorite ecommerce or airline sites.
Other types of good bots are transactional bots, informational bots, and entertainment bots. These categories of bots help automate business processes, publish news and information, and play games or become gaming personas. They take on repetitive, time-consuming tasks that either humans don’t want to do or could not do in the same amount of time as a bot.
The web wouldn’t be what it is today without good bots. Nor would it be the way it is without the bad ones.
The Bad, and the Ugly
Bad bots are rarely useful or productive. Bad bots are built for nefarious purposes, almost always to the advantage of the bot controller and the disadvantage of the website affected. These bots include impersonators (the cause of most DDoS attacks on websites), scrapers, spammers, and hackers.
Recently, as we’ve all come to learn, bad bots have been highly engaged in worldwide political processes. This is especially evident on social media including Facebook and Twitter. Armies of bots, created to look like everyday people, infiltrated the social networks and promoted various political viewpoints. Russia has been proven to be behind not just U.S. bot attacks, but those in other countries and electoral systems as well. However, there are undoubtedly plenty of other players in this game, given the high stakes involved.
Nearly every website has fallen prey to some kind of bad bot. Fully 97% of sites with unique content or product information have been hit by a scraper bot. These bots take that information and turn it into another site, other types of content, or something else that benefits the bot creator/manager. Most sites have also been hit by bots trying to maliciously log in to credit one or sign up for the site.
By 2021, cybercrime damage is estimated to be at $6 trillion, with the cybersercurity products and services industry growing to $1 trillion in revenue. Large businesses have entire departments devoted to preventing, detecting, and recovering from cyber and bot attacks.
Small businesses should do what they can to prevent their sites from becoming compromised. This includes keeping website software up-to-date, using two-factor authentication where possible for logins and passwords, and by blocking common bots from accessing your website.
Now, On to the Good
But wait, you say: are all bots bad? Definitely not! Many are currently being used for good, and many more are under development and will change the world over the next decades.
Good bots fall along a continuum of bot intelligence and usefulness.
In the center of the scale, smart bots are mostly voice and messaging bots. You may already have one or more of these in your home, office, pocket, or wrist. These include AI bots like Alexa or Siri. They use machine learning and artificial intelligence to answer questions and provide information. At the top of the scale are bots that are much more autonomous; they’re often called intelligent agents. These are the bots that control cars (like Tesla) or provide extreme data analysis (like IBM’s Watson).
For our purposes today, we’re going to talk about the bottom of the scale, script bots. These are the bots that you’re likely seeing pop up everywhere from Facebook to your favorite airline website to every software startup you’ve ever visited. The good news is that you can have one (or more), too!
Script Bots = Chatbots = Good Business
Chatbots are services powered by rules and/or artificial intelligence. They are built to live in major chat platforms (Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Kik, Slack) or on your own website. Chatbots usually have a distinct purpose and capability. This includes bots that can tell you the weather (and related implications), bots to help schedule meetings among multiple people, bots to assist with shopping online, bots to encourage good personal finance habits, and bots for customer service and sales.
The two primary types of bots are rules-based and machine learning-based. Rules-based bots are sort of “dumb” bots: they can only respond to specific commands, and they are completely programmed. These bots, while limited, are very easy to implement and use. They can also be free or very low-cost to create.
Machine learning-based bots are much more sophisticated. They rely on artificial intelligence, and many of them can learn and grow over time by expanding the information they understand and can process.
Chatbots are on the rise because our preferences as consumers are changing. More than half of consumers expect answers from companies 24/7. Additionally, nearly half prefer contact through messaging versus email or the phone. Competition for chatbot platforms is growing; of course Facebook currently dominates, and would like to remain the leader. However, as the industry is still rather new, it remains to be seen if they can hold on to their lead. Nevertheless, 1.2 billion people use Facebook Messenger monthly, so that’s a pretty good start for the social media giant.
Businesses can create bots within Facebook or other common social messaging apps. Or they can build bots for use on a corporate website or within an app.
Creating a Chatbot
When considering a chatbot, businesses should consider their audience. Millennials love them, but not all audiences will respond to or want to interact with bots. Chatbots will also shift traffic and customer use from a company’s branded mobile app to the bot platform, assuming it’s elsewhere (such as on Facebook Messenger). Therefore, development resources might get stretched or need to change.
When creating your first business bot, don’t overcomplicate it. Instead,use the bot to solve for one key task or set of questions. Additionally, make it part of your overall marketing strategy. For customer service, for example, it should be easy to jump from bot to human chat, voice, or email (and vice-versa), instead of the bot standing alone.
Murray Newlands, a bot guru, suggests that you treat your bot like any other marketing project or tool. Create a strategy to market it, communicate its value to your customers, and devote the right amount of resources to it. He also suggests that you give your bot a unique name and personality, and that it shouldn’t be overly pushy or sales-oriented. Lastly, as with any other tech project, be sure to test your bot extensively.
Chatbot Resources
Are you ready to get started with your first chatbot? Implementing some types of bots is so easy, you can do it in an afternoon.
I recommend you start with a Facebook Messenger bot. The following are free tools that enable quick and easy creation of a Messenger bot:
Multi-platform bots can be deployed across various messaging platforms, as well as your own website. They’re more complicated to create; use the following developer tools for multi-platform bots:
And if you’re primarily interested in customer service and sales, two bots you should investigate are Intercom and Drift. These ready-made bots integrate smoothly into your website and provide 24/7 communication with your company. You can see how Drift looks on our agency website. These bots are somewhat pricey, though for large companies they’ll likely reap savings versus customer service staff.
Are you using chatbots in your business now, or do you plan to? Reach out to me on Twitter and tell me about it, I’d love to know more. I really think we’ll see a lot more bot marketing in the near future!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephanie Schwab is the founder and CEO of Crackerjack Marketing, a fast-growing social media and content marketing agency focused on lifestyle consumer and early stage tech companies. She is also on the marketing faculty of Loyola University Chicago, Parsons | The New School, and Harbour.Space University. Connect with her on Twitter or LinkedIn.
In 2016 Facebook confessed to something that sent shock waves throughout the PPC advertising world.
They admitted to having too many ads in the News Feed 😱 .
The number of Facebook ads served to users is also known as ad load.
The platform monitors ad load to make sure it does not affect their experience on the social media site.
When Facebook feels like ad overload is impending, they limit the number that can appear.
And their announcement made it clear that the News Feed Facebook ad load is set to max out in mid-2017.
Well, folks, we are well within that mid-2017 date range; in fact, we’re well past it.
Before you shut down all of your Facebook marketing campaigns and try to find out if MySpace is still a thing, take a breath and relax because all is not lost.
You can explore the other Facebook ad placements the platform offers, from Messenger ads to Instagram Stories.
Take it from Dane Kragness, Senior Account Manager for Paid Media here at Taktical:
“Facebook is attempting to rapidly expand its placement offerings as currently the influx of advertisers to the platform seems to be outpacing the growth of the actual user base, which forces them to reach people on different placements rather than reaching more people. We’ll start to see that Facebook’s new offerings (Watch, Marketplace, etc) will begin to offer more options to advertisers, whether it’s video content, or advertisers creating their own curated “stores” within Facebook Marketplace.”
In this post, we’ll discuss your other options for Facebook ad placement and how to succeed at advertising on them.
The max out on News Feed ad load is far from being the demise of Facebook advertising.
Instead, it will provide additional sources of revenue and reinvigorate the marketing strategies of brands.
Facebook Ad Breaks in Longform Video Content
Mid-roll Facebook ads let you put your ad in front of users who are watching a video on the platform for 20 seconds or longer.
Think of it like a traditional commercial break you used to see on TV. The program cuts away for the duration of the ad.
Image source: http://www.kathyregister.com/
The benefits of a mid-roll Facebook ad in a third-party video include:
Greater dwell time, as the ad requires the user to sit through the entire ad in order to return to their program
Currently, this ad placement struggles from too many restrictions and a lack of viewership.
Simply put, there aren’t enough people viewing long-form video on Facebook. . .yet.
Not only is Facebook introducing its own native content, but also its pivoting to rank long-form video content higher in News Feeds.
Facebook introduced Watch earlier this year. As a result, choosing mid-roll Facebook ad as an option for where you should advertise on Facebook will only continue to improve.
Messenger Ads on Facebook
Messaging apps have recently surpassed social networking apps as the most popular mobile apps, based on total number of monthly active users.
With this in mind, you truly cannot underestimate the the power of messaging.
And because this is a platform used exclusively for direct interaction and communication, brands have a unique ability to engage customers like never before.
It allows a user to simply click a brand’s icon in their Messenger feed or click the “Send Message” CTA from their Facebook ad to begin a conversation with them.
Now, over 100,000 branded chatbots exist to nurture customer relationships and increase engagement.
Another option within Messenger ads for your Facebook marketing is to have it appear within a Messenger feed and direct people to the destination of your choosing.
Like a News Feed ad, this can lead to a product page, Messenger conversation, app download, etc.
A tip to keep in mind as your advertise on Facebook Messenger is to opt for Automatic Placement when setting them up.
This is not only what Facebook recommends, but also can help your content appear in the most relevant places and at the best times given your target audience.
Instagram Story Ads
There’s little denying the rise to power of Instagram.
Since releasing its Stories feature, the platform’s user base increased by 200 million users.
Social media marketers have capitalized on this audience by launching Instagram Story ad campaigns.
Taktical’s Haley Preininger gives her insight into this Facebook ad option:
“This placement is definitely something to consider when avoiding ad overload in the holiday season. According the Instagram Advertiser statistics, 75% of Instagram users take action after looking at an advertisement post. With a [daily] audience of more than 500 million users, it is a good option to explore if your target audiences matches that of instagram users (18 to 29 year olds).”
80% of people follow a branded account on the platform
1 in 5 minutes that people spend on their mobile device is spent on Facebook or Instagram
There are even more users attracted to Instagram daily.
As a result, your audience reach is nearly as wide and diverse as if advertising on the Facebook News Feed.
Keep in mind that the design specs for Instagram Story ads are slightly different than for other options of where to advertise on Facebook.
Your Instagram ad should be vertical, have a 9:16 aspect ratio, and more often than not be a video.
When done well, Instagram Story ads can yield a 24-point increase in ad recall and 8% lift in online conversions, like Tchibo.
The Facebook Ad Load is Near
It’s only a matter of time before Facebook News Feed ads reach their load limit.
When that time comes, prepare by exploring your other options of where to advertise on Facebook.
The social network is always continuing to launch new features and options for ad placement, and maintain its viability as a leading advertising platform.
Messenger, Instagram, and ads within native long-form videos all present Facebook marketers with excellent alternatives to News Feeds.
Discover where your audience is more likely to spend their time.
Then build your Facebook ad campaign in the right venue.
In the email mention the 3 other colleagues you emailed. This increases the chances of an employee, their boss and the boss of their boss talking about you.
The rate of positive replies increases especially if you target people in multiple layers of an organization.
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Growth Hack #2 – 7 Steps to Scrape Your Competitors’ Customers:
If you’re involved in SaaS you know Capterra, GetApp, G2Crowd and their gazillion cousins.
These sites are a great way to get to know your target audience and their needs. But how do you reach all those target customers at scale?
It’s a 7-step process:
● Step 1: Create a scraping recipe with Recipe Creator
● Step 2: Scrape it with DataMiner
● Step 3: Match Company Names with Domains using PhantomBuster
● Step 4: Use FindThatLead to find email addresses for cold emailing
● Step 5: Match personal addresses to make Facebook Audiences with FindThatLead
● Step 6: Match LinkedIn Profiles with PhantomBuster
● Step 7: Automate LinkedIn outreach with Dux-Soup
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Growth Hack #3 – The Only Template You Need for Event Postings:
Want all the templates Josh Fechter, Co-Founder of BAMFMedia, used to host over 150 events in two years?
Immediately link to the Eventbrite, focus on learning points, use a picture of the
speaker and the host (done with the Google Slide in this folder), and promote any partners.
Creating multiple variations of ads has always been of the utmost importance for Facebook marketers.
Testing combinations of headlines, images, videos, and more allow PPC advertisers to zero in on the perfect blend of copy and imagery for their target audience.
How do you isolate each variable without driving yourself crazy?
Let’s say you want to test 3 headlines, 2 videos, 4 versions of text, and 2 call to action buttons that gives you a grand total of….. 48 Facebook ads.
Yikes.
There’s simply no efficient way to manually test and optimize those ads.
Even worse, rather than allocating spend evenly across these ads, Facebook will start zeroing in on 2-4 variations exclusively.
This leaves the rest of your meticulously crafted Facebook ads going completely untested.
The newly introduced Facebook Dynamic Creative Adsfeature aims to take this issue off of your plate and into the data-hungry mouth of its ever-growing algorithm.
Like automatic placement optimization before it, this tool aims to take manual testing out of the equation, and let the all-powerful algorithm decide.
So what do you get with Facebook dynamic creative ads?
Taktical’s very own Paid Media Manager, Dane Kragness, gives the inside scoop below on what Facebook dynamic creative ads are and how you can start using them today.
The Basics of Facebook Dynamic Creative Ads
Instead of painstakingly creating every possible variation of an ad, Facebook dynamic creative ads allows you to submit variations for each aspect of it.
The platform then automatically mixes and matches them, and tests all the possible variations to determine which works best for each part of your audience.
Here’s what you can test with Facebook dynamic creative ads:
5 headlines
10 images OR videos
5 versions of text
Five descriptions
5 CTA buttons
(you cannot combine images and videos in the same test)
Now, instead of 48 different ads, you’ll have 1.
This single Facebook ad then has 48 variations dynamically tested by the all-knowing algorithm.
How to Launch a Facebook Dynamic Creative Ad
Creating your Facebook dynamic creative ad looks like this:
Create your campaign in POWER EDITOR (dynamic creative is not currently available in “Guided Creation”):
At the ad set level, flip the “Dynamic Creative” switch on:
Then, at the ad level, select all the assets that you want to test:
And view all your variations!
Of course, you still exercise some measure of control over the software.
In the “Breakdowns” menu, you’ll find an additional option to breakdown “By Dynamic Creative Asset”:
Here you can see how each asset performs, and whether you want to breakdown by image, headline, text, etc.
Now, you can still clearly see which assets are performing best for your Facebook ad campaign, and easily remove those that are not.
Unlike before, Facebook tests each asset more evenly, giving you more information about which variations of your ads result in optimal performance.
The Impact Dynamic Creative Ads on Facebook Have on Your Business
This newest feature from Facebook HQ makes life far easier for businesses advertising on Facebook.
Facebook marketers no longer need to create individual variations as their own ads.
Instead, all the variations now reside within a single Facebook ad.
Then, the platform’s effective ad algorithm cycles through for automatic optimization.
The other major benefit of Facebook dynamic creative ads is the advantages it offers for the success of an overall campaign.
Facebook ad testing is the basis for boosting your ROI and maximizing engagement.
The new Facebook dynamic creative ads provides the ultimate tool for marketers to simplify their ad campaigns. It also aids in increasing conversions and benefitting a brand’s bottom line.
For additional help in understanding what Facebook dynamic ads are and how to use them, a professional Facebook advertising agency is the best place to start.
Contact Taktical Digital today about how we can help get you started on launching a Facebook ad campaign using the best tools and knowledge in the industry: Let’s Chat!
Growth Hack #2 – 3 Words Increased Mobile Conversions By 36%:
Adbasis ran the same A/B test for different ads. 42 times it yielded a positive change to the conversion rate. The average conversion rate increase, based on the positive examples, was +36.6%. 12 out of 48 times this test more than doubled the conversion rate (100%+ lifts).
These 3 magic words were “from your phone”. Worth trying to use them in your mobile ad.
Growth Hack #3 – Send Push Notifications in the Afternoon for Maximum Impact:
Leanplum, a mobile marketing automation tool, broke down 671 million pushes to uncover some interesting trends on time of day targeting for push notifications.
Pushes sent and opened trends upward throughout the day, with a small peak around noon, a slightly larger one around 3pm, and the largest in the evening.
The post-evening trend is interesting – after 6pm, on a relative basis, Pushes Opened starts to trend higher, relative to previous hours, and Pushes Sent is lower.
This indicates that while mobile apps are delivering a ton of pushes leading up to evening, it might be more effective to time them post-evening, when engagement seems high.
So you’ve launched your Facebook ad and you’re noticing your click-through rate and engagement is lower than expected.
You tweak the copy, change the visual, and add a catchy headline.
And yet, there’s very little improvement.
What you probably failed to adjust is where your Facebook ad is appearing.
Sure, you changed the features of the ad itself, but your Facebook advertisement placement can actually be a major factor in determining if your campaign is a success or not.
With 6 different placement options, selecting the right one for your Facebook marketing goals depends on the type of product or service you offer, what industry you’re in, and more.
After you’ve selected your objective in the ad creation section of Facebook Ads Manager, you can scroll to Placements.
It is here that you can select the automatic option, in which Facebook decides the places to show your ads for you based on your objective, eligibility, and creative elements.
Or, you can select the Edit Placements option, which lets you customize where and how your Facebook ads appear.
Image source: https://adespresso.com
If it’s not your first time running a Facebook advertising campaign or you want to have some customizable options, select Edit Placements.
Be aware that your options for Facebook ad placement may vary based on your objective.
For example, if your objective is Mobile App Installs, then you will not see Desktop Feeds as a placement category.
Desktop News Feed Facebook Ad Placement
Don’t get this confused with mobile News Feed ad placement.
Desktop News Feed Facebook ads appear on desktops and laptops only.
Now that’s cleared up, desktop News Feed ads are those that appear front and center in a user’s News Feed.
They offer brands the ability to have a larger visual and more ad copy so you can tell the whole story while grabbing your audience’s attention more effectively.
They’re also considered the best option for businesses new to Facebook advertising.
Desktop News Feed ads work by seamlessly integrating into a Facebook user’s experience.
Right Column Facebook Ad Placement
Since being updated in 2014, Facebook’s right column ads are 50% better at increasing dwell time and 29% more effective at attracting views.
With this option, your ad is shown only on the right-hand side of desktop screens.
This is the least intrusive of all Facebook ad placement options.
It’s also cheaper when it comes to costs-per-click and costs-per-conversion.
Right column ads are great to use in tandem with another Facebook ad placement option to make sure you’re capitalizing on all conversion opportunities.
These ads are also good options for brands on a budget or those looking for a subtle social media advertising alternative.
In order to reach the increasing audience segment of mobile Facebook users, your business should run Mobile News Feed Facebook ads.
These appear similar to Desktop News Feed Facebook ads, but are formatted for mobile and therefore have access to customers anytime, anywhere.
The effectiveness of mobile News Feed ads is in their engagement: Mobile Facebook ads often enjoy a 6X higher CTR than those on desktop.
And the CPC is lower by half, too.
Image source: https://appsamurai.com
Mobile News Feed ads are also advantageous for how they appear to users.
Unlike Desktop News Feed Facebook ads that have to compete with right column ads and the additional menu bars and content of the platform, mobile News Feed ads take up a majority of the screen.
There are no sidebars to compete with, and even less News Feed content invading the screen and distracting from your ad.
In-Stream Facebook Video Ad Placement
This option is for advertisers that meet strict requirement standards from Facebook to incorporate ad breaks in other video content.
However, if your business qualifies it is an excellent opportunity for branding. If you’re a video buff, you might also get some use out of YouTube’s Vanced APK.
The major benefit of producing one of these 5-15 second videos is a high completion rate.
People are more likely to watch your entire ad in order to continue watching their video.
Whenever a user opens an article on Facebook, Instant Articles ad placement lets your Facebook ad appear to them.
An Insight Articles ad can include CTAs directly within the article for your business.
Or it can be an entire article your business launches to inform your audience more about your brand, sales and promotions, or any other content you’d like to disperse.
When used with desktop or mobile News Feed ads, Insight Articles let you access customers throughout their whole Facebook experience.
It’s a popular option for media publishers that want to provide their audiences on Facebook with engaging and shareable content more quickly and easily.
As we saw in the earlier graph, Instagram ads are often the more expensive PPC advertising option.
However, they are also incredibly effective at earning ROI and driving conversions.
People tend to engage more with brands on Instagram than on any other platform – 10X more, in fact.
When you place your ad on Instagram, it can show up in people’s Feeds and/or their Stories based on how you set your Facebook ad placement preferences.
Make sure your Instagram ad is visually compelling as that is the basis of success on this platform.
Image source: https://quarterlab.com/
Placing a Facebook ad on Instagram is an excellent way to tap into the motivated consumers that flock to the platform for engaging with the brands they love and for discovering new ones.
These people also intend to buy: 72% of Instagram users claim the platform has influenced their purchasing decisions.
Think About your Facebook Ad Placement
Where you place your Facebook ads clearly has consequences for the success of your campaign.
In most cases, you should advertise in multiple places and across multiple devices and platforms.
Track which Facebook ad placements are working best for your business by filtering your ads by Placement in Ads Manager.
With close results-tracking and A/B testing, you can conclude which placements work for you and optimize your Facebook advertising strategy.
