Category Archives: Mobile Tips

Jan 23 2013
Leave a comment
Mobile Tips

Mobile Facebook Ads and What You Should Know

Not only did Facebook hit the one billion active user mark last year, but the number of people accessing the social site primarily over mobile devices also skyrocketed, to about 60 percent of total users. And co-founder Mark Zuckerberg has said that mobile users are 20 percent more likely than desktop users to go on Facebook on a given day.

What business owners should take note of: Mobileadvertising on Facebook is said to be producing better results than ads that appear in the right-hand column or in the news feeds for desktop-only users. And click-through rates on Sponsored Stories have been, on average, 12 times higher on mobile devices than on desktops, according to Marc Grabowski, COO of Nanigans, a firm that buys Facebook ads for its clients. If there was ever a time to start testing mobile ads, that time is now.

 

But setting up mobile-only ads isn’t as straightforward as using Facebook’s self-serve ad manager. You can’t just click a button to make your ads accessible on mobile devices. Instead, you need to reach mobile users through their news feeds because they cannot see the ads that appear in the right-hand column on Facebook.

Related: 5 Tips for Getting Started With Mobile Advertising

Getting to know the Facebook ‘Power Editor’: Unless you’re using the Facebook API for ad management, the only way most business owners will be able to set up mobile-only ads is through Facebook’s free Power Editor, a Chrome-only plugin. To get going, open Chrome, install the Power Editor, and access it here. Select “all” accounts when prompted so you can get your past ads — these can come in handy when creating new ads and tracking results.

For newbies, the Power Editor can feel more difficult to navigate than Facebook’s self-serve ad manager. So, Facebook has created a guide to using it. It’s worth getting to know well enough to leverage its more advanced tools, including the “placements” feature that enables you to create ads that go to the news feed on desktop, news feed on mobile only, or both, or right-column only ads. 

Four ways to get your ad into mobile news feeds: Once you set up Power Editor and are ready to create an ad for mobile users, decide which ad type you want to test. There are four primary ways to get into your fans’ mobile news feeds:

1. Page post ads, when set up with Power Editor, appear directly in the news feed and, as a bonus, can be targeted beyond fans and friends of fans. They can include photos, offers and more, just like a normal page post ad, and usually show up with a “sponsored” or “suggested post” label. Here’s an example from Country Outfitter, an image captured on my mobile phone:

What You Need To Know About Facebook Mobile Ads

With page post ads, you can reach users via mobile, desktop or both. (But note that the new Facebook ad guidelines state that text in any news feed ad is limited to 20 percent of the total ad image area.)

Related: New Facebook Rules Limit Use of Text on Images

2. Promoted posts look exactly like page post ads in the news feed, but you can buy these ads through the promote button in the status update box on your page or use Power Editor — and they always go into the news feed. The main difference between page post ads and promoted posts is that promoted posts can be shown only to fans and friends of fans, whereas page post ads can be targeted to non-fans as well.

3. Sponsored Stories show in the news feed under the heading “Pages You May Like,” and are used to promote activity to your fans’ friends, with the intention of attracting like-minded people. These ads promote activity such as a fan liking your page, claiming an offer you created or commenting on one of your posts. As always, take care with how you target these to get the most engagement and likes. These can also be targeted to mobile-only, desktop or both, with the Power Editor.

4. Mobile app install ads can be a fun way for companies with registered apps to prompt users to go to their app download page. You can even choose what kind of operating systems and mobile devices your targeted audience has, which is useful if you have, say, an iPhone-only app.

For small-business owners new to mobile ads, it’s best to test a few different news feed ads and target them carefully. Don’t abandon desktop-only ad strategies that are working. Instead, find a way to integrate mobile into your overall strategy so you can compare results, test, track — and test again.

Related: 10 Quick Steps to Creating a Facebook Ad Campaign

Original Post

Tagged , , ,
Jan 17 2013
1 Comment
Mobile Tips

3 Tips for Local-Mobile Marketing

iPhone_5Just as radio gave way to TV and newspapers gave way to the internet, the growing use of mobile phones offers new opportunities for delivering your company’s message to potential customers. While the power of being able to reach exactly the right consumers in exactly the right location at exactly the right time may sound like an advertiser’s dream, there are a lot of factors to consider to get a local mobile advertising campaign right.

Mobile-marketing experts from heavy hitters such as the Weather Channel and AT&T AdWorks shared their thoughts on the many factors that go in to a successful localized mobile ad campaign at a panel discussion at this week’s Street Fight Summit in Manhattan. If mobile advertising is a whole new world for your business, here are three things beginners should familiarize themselves with. 

Related: Making Mobile Marketing Work for Your Business

 

1. Junk location data. There are different forms of location data: automatic geo-tagging from a wireless device or user-inputted data such as a ZIP code. Make sure you know which data you are looking at. A lot of the location data that are being used are inaccurate, according to Monica Ho, vice president of marketing for xAd, a mobile-local ad network that manages billions of location-specific ad requests monthly. The most common ZIP code entered is 00000 — because savvy consumers don’t want to be tracked. Geo-tagged or lat/long (latitude and longitude) location data is obviously more accurate, so basing your campaign on that data is more likely to reach more people. 

2. Geofencing. Geofencing is a marketing technique that allows advertisers to select a virtual fence around a certain geographic area that will send potential customers an alert on their mobile device when they walk into that area. It’s opt-in — potential customers have to choose to share their location by turning on the GPS setting on their device, but there is a lot of potential.

Your message can be as straightforward as a coupon or it can be a broader relevant advertising message. If it’s relevant to your brand, you may also consider geofencing an event such as conference or sporting event so that anyone with an enabled mobile device who enters that stadium or convention hall will get your targeted ad.

Related: 5 Lessons in Local Mobile Advertising from Big Brands

3. The trade-off between reach and precision. Keep your expectations of reach realistic. If you want to reach women age 18-25 who are interested in skateboarding within a certain ZIP code, you can’t also expect your ad to reach thousands of people.

Since you can’t have it both ways, evaluate the trade-off between precision and reach. Sometimes reaching only five people is what you want. Other times you may want to expand your net a little — if customers are within one-and-a-half miles of your store instead of one mile, are they really that much less likely to come in?

Things change quickly in mobile advertising, so keep in mind that your strategy may have to evolve with the medium. Even the definition of what is a mobile device is changing. “We are questioning if we will even be using the term mobile 18 months from now,” says Sharon Knitter senior director of mobile for Cars.com, a consumer car-sales site. “It may be in home versus out-of-home,” she explains, since many people use their mobile device at home.

And local mobile advertising doesn’t just have to mean smartphones and tablets. Eric Hadley, senior vice president of sales strategy and marketing for the Weather Channel, mentioned his company’s use of cable technology that allows them to target local TV audiences.

Related: Top Tech Trends From CES 2013

 

Original Post

Tagged , , , , , ,
Dec 04 2012
Leave a comment
Marketing Tips, Mobile Tips

3 Reasons to Use SMS Marketing in Your Ads.

J2 Marketing SMS Marketing

Are you running a TV/Radio/Billboard/Print ad for your business? How are you supposed to know if it’s working? I’m sure the producers will convince you that it’ll work or that somehow it is working. We suggest always making sure your marketing efforts are easily measurable, or else you could just be throwing money into a rat hole in the name of “marketing.”

That’s one of the greatest advantages we’ve seen with text marketing. It’s a simple concept and easily inserted into many different avenues. For example (I’ll use our company); at the end of your commercial Ad or bottom of your print Ad, you can ask the viewers/listeners to text “J2″ to 72727. (Obviously you fill in your own credentials.) When they do, their information is now saved into your database and you can easily measure your Ads return.

Here are some benefits to SMS Marketing:

1. You are giving your viewers/listeners an immediate call to action after hearing/seeing your ad

2. With those collected phone numbers, you have hot leads from your Ad instead of waiting for people to come to you

3. After your Ad campaign is up, you can have a better measure of how many people were reached by counting all the phone numbers you’ve collected. (let’s keep those advertisers honest!)

Bonus: Now that you have those phone numbers from your Ad, you can send follow-up text blasts with coupons or deals to try to secure more customers!

Here’s a link to SMS Marketing if you need it :)

Blessings,

EJ

Tagged , , , , , , , ,
%d bloggers like this: