Putting Your Best Face Forward: Is Facebook Advertising Helping Your Business Grow?

Since it's creation in 2004, Facebook has connected over two billion individuals with local small businesses (Dan Levy, Director of small business at Facebook). Levy further explains that "approximately 70% of monthly active users in the U.S. and Canada are connected to a local business on Facebook."

Yet, with the statistical success that most businesses have when promoting themselves on Facebook, why do some companies miss the boat? Not every business that advertises on Facebook receives the same response. In case your business has not reaped the full benefits of Facebook marketing, here are some things to consider for your next venture on this multi-billion audience platform:

1. Content is King. Yes, I might be biased toward the importance of content writing, but the fact of the matter remains: content is the most important aspect of advertising. It does not matter on what platform you post if you clients are not engaging with your advertisements. Make sure that the content you are posting on your Facebook page is both relevant to your audience and engaging. Identify your target audience and write content that is relevant to your readers' interests. Additionally, make sure that the content is slightly open-ended and begs comments and shares. When I say "begs comments and shares" I DO NOT mean that you should blatantly ask for shares in your posts, unless you are running some sort of contest. What I DO mean is that you should ask for your viewers' perspectives on your content. If you own a restaurant Facebook page, a post asking about people's favorite summertime snack would be both relevant to your readers and engaging because they would be enticed to comment on your post without being blatantly asked to do so. Remember, you must first know your target audience before you can be relevant and engaging.

2. Let's Get Competitive. I feel fairly comfortable stating that you must be competitive in order to run a successful business. So, why not bring some of that competitive nature into your Facebook advertising? People love a good contest, but more importantly, people love a good prize. Set up a contest with a score system. For example, receive one point for entering the contest with a valid email. Receive one point for sharing the contest on Facebook. Receive five points every time one of your friends enters the contest through your shared link (some apps, such as ConstantContact have a special contest link that tracks who enters through shared posts). At the end of the contest, the person with the most points wins the prize of your choosing. The contest will not only increase engagement on your Facebook page, but it will also spread your business to new audiences through all of the shares from the contest participants. 

3. Here's The Deal. Similar to running a contest, offer a deal to help spread the word about your business to the Facebook community. Write a post that states you will send out a coupon for X percentage off next purchase (or whatever discount pertains to your company's industry) to the first 50 people that share your post. You will drum up more business by sending out coupons, and your readers will spread the word about your business for you by sharing your post. In my professional opinion, running a Facebook deal expends the most amount of profit and engagement for the least amount of work. 

Just remember, all of these tools must be tailored to your business and your target audience. I have said it once and I will say it forever: you must know your audience before you can begin ANY type of effective advertising campaign. Know your audience. Increase your profit.

President Obama's Health Care Plug

I would like to start with a disclaimer:

This piece does not reflect any political bias for or against President Obama. This piece also neither condemns nor condones the Health Care Reform. As a matter of fact, this political piece holds no bias whatsoever and is purely focused on analyzing marketing strategies to specific demographics.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, I would like to take a moment to analyze the most recent marketing campaign for the Health Care Reform. On March 11, 2014, President Obama appeared on the Zac Galifainakus show, Between Two Ferns. If you haven't seen it yet, I strongly advise that you watch it now:

The target audience for the current Health Care Reform campaign is young adults ages 18-25 years old. According to studies, this is the generation with the least amount of people carrying health insurance and the lowest income. Therefore, the Health Care Reform marketing campaigns have specifically targeted this group of adults in an attempt to enroll them into the Health Care Marketplace.

After the target audience is identified (young adults ages 18-25), the next step is to gear content towards the ideal demographic in a way that is both informative and engaging. This is where many marketing campaigns go adrift. Companies either pick informative OR engaging, but in order to be effective and generate sales, the two must be blended. For example, if you hire on a website design company, you expect that their own website will be interactive and visually engaging, while still providing the information you need to know about the services offered.

The same is true for the campaigns with the Health Care Reform. Prior to this outside-of-the-box marketing technique, the government focused on informative campaigns to promote the Health Care Reform. They didn't receive the response for which they were hoping. I'm not sure which marketing executive thought of the appearance on the Zac Galifainakus show, but whoever it was is a genius. The primary audience for this show is young adults (remember that ideal demographic for the Health Care Reform?).

In order to effectively reach his audience, President Obama had to play along with the rules of his marketing platform, i.e. he had to take a couple jabs from comedian, Zac Galifainakus. He understood the rules of the show and played along to keep the attention of the audience. When it came time for his Health Care Reform plug, he allowed Zac Galifainakus to make jabs and side comments, which eased the informational tone and still kept the show entertaining. Thus, President Obama blended both information and engagement during his Health Care Reform pitch.

That, above all, is the most effective form of marketing. Know your audience and create your marketing content to be both informative and engaging. Need help creating effective marketing content? Contact me for a free consultation.

Search Engine Optimization 101: Keywords

So, you read the last blog post and are interested in learning more about how to grow your online presence. You learned briefly about SEO and how keywords and content play together to boost your search engine ranking. Now, let's take a look at how to pick the best keywords for your business.

A keyword is essentially anything that a person would type into the search bar of any search engine. If I am looking for a custom logo design, I might type in the words "custom logo design" or "custom graphic design" and so on. The search engine would return various custom logo design companies that could help me with my needs. These design companies have all selected keywords that are precise and accurately describe their services, which is why the search engine has chosen them as a result for my query.

When you are thinking about what keywords to select for your company, think about both your services and your brand. You can choose several keywords, so you want to hit all of your company's services, but also the branding that your company has established. For example, if you search "GEICO camel" you will receive five different links to GEICO's website. The same goes if you search "Carfox." The top result will be the Carfax website.

One of the most important aspects of keyword creation is choosing keywords that both describe your company and appeal to your ideal clientele. Before any keywords are picked, I strongly encourage you to develop a profile of your ideal client. There are several programs that allow the search trends of certain demographics and industries to be monitored; these programs allow businesses to choose keywords that are relevant to their industry and to their ideal clients. Ask me more about these programs.

Once you have your ideal client profile and your keywords ready, the next step is to write meaningful content that will both engage your readers and boost your SEO.

Search Engine Optimization 101: What is SEO?

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If there were ever a buzzword in the business world, it would be "SEO."

Business owners desperately want it; marketers promise they can deliver it. Most business owners with whom I have discussed SEO have a partial knowledge (or sometimes inaccurate knowledge) of what SEO really entails and how it can help grow a business. I would like to make a disclaimer that this is obviously not true of every business owner. Sometimes, it is just a little difficult to find time to study an entirely new and frankly quite vague concept when running a business.

Which leads me to my next point: the marketing professionals with whom I have discussed SEO all seem to have a different definition and approach to getting results. I'm all for variety in how to reach a goal, but sometimes muddy waters hinder results.

As with all of life's great mysteries, the best possible solution is to go straight to the horse's mouth: GOOGLE. This is going to be a two-part blog series explaining SEO and how to use it to grow your business. This first post is a brief overview of SEO; the second will dive deeper into techniques to grow your business.

SEO simply stands for Search Engine Optimization and is a series of keywords, metadescriptions, and metatags within a website that helps boost a site's ranking in various search results. In its simplest form, SEO helps the search engines partner the searcher with the most appropriate website. For example, if you were to search for custom bracelets in Tampa, you probably would not want to get a search engine list back of horseback riding lessons in Miami. Those results would have nothing to do with your search.

So, how do you make sure that your website is showing as a result for relevant searches? Simple (ish). Make sure that the "behind the scenes" view of your website has appropriate keywords for your website content. Again, the website that sells custom bracelets in Tampa would likely have keywords like: bracelets, Tampa, Florida, custom, etc. It would be a good idea for that website to also list the types of materials used in their bracelets, i.e. leather, gold, etc. to answer more specific searches.

The search engine (Google, for example) matches the words in the search to the keywords in the website to find the most accurate match. However, SEO does not end there. The content on your website must match your keywords. For example, you can't have a website all about baseball, with keywords all about swimming and fishing. The search engine would see that your content and keywords do not match, and your website would be marked as spam (which is basically a death sentence to your site).

There is a magic ratio between number of words in your content and number of keywords in your content. ASK ME MORE. Insert more or less keywords in your content than this magic ratio and your website will be negatively affected.

Now, I know that was a whirlwind of explanation (or maybe lackthereof), but really I did my best to explain the breadth of SEO in a minute blog post. The following post will discuss how to pick keywords to both match your industry and the search tendencies of your ideal client demographic.

The "Farming" Facebook Can't Control

Anyone who has a Facebook business page might have noticed some recent changes in the way Facebook measures its advertisement campaigns. When you have a business page, you have the option of "promoting" your page to a specific client demographic to increase the "likes" on your page. You can set a limit to how much money you want to spend per day and restrict the location to which your page is advertised.

Sounds great, right?

Well, it was a great way to advertise and get your business name out in the social media community- until the cropping up of "Like Farms." A "Like Farm" is a company in a developing county (usually Indonesia, Nepal, Bangladesh, etc.) that pays its employees $1.00 per 1,000 likes clicked on Facebook. So, when you are approached by a marketing company that can promise X amount of "likes" to your business page in a month, please know that they are outsourcing to these "Like Farms."

Now, Facebook started cracking down on these business pages using "Like Farms" to increase their visibility; over 85,000 company pages have been deleted by Facebook so far for this action (so be warned).

In order to stay in business and become undetected by Facebook, the employees at these "Like Farms" starting "liking" everything. This way, Facebook cannot tell if it's someone who is paid to like a certain page, or if the profile just happens to "like" everything advertised on Facebook. These employees watered down the "likes" to remain undetected.

Why is this relevant if you want to advertise through Facebook?

So, let's say you set a budget per day to advertise your page through Facebook. You might get some legitimate response from people interested in your business, but based on studies conducted, about 80% of the "likes" will be from employees of the "Like Farms" in developing countries. If you own a little boutique in Tampa, FL, a "like" in Indonesia is not going to benefit your business.

More adversely still, your posts and campaigns will be negatively affected by these fakes "likes." Facebook measures post engagement very simply:

If you post something, Facebook will send it to a handful of your followers. If they interact with it, Facebook thinks, "Ah. This must be a good post." So, it sends it out to another handful of your followers, and so on. This is how Facebook measures engagement for your page. You must maintain a certain percentage of engagement for Facebook to keep your profile.

If the majority of your "likes" are from "Like Farms" that have infiltrated Facebook advertising, then they will most likely not be engaging with your post, which limits the number of followers to which Facebook will send your post. The cycle continues until your page shows no interaction and Facebook begins to question its validity.

This post has illustrated an exaggerated scenario, but one that is easily reproduced based on current statistics with Facebook advertisement. Facebook can still be used to grow your business, but it has to be done through very specific campaigns and very closely managed to prevent fraudulent "likes."

If you are interested in learning how to do this, or if you want to know how to grow your business through other means, please give me a call at (813) 629-1561 or email at info@rhetoricrefined.com. You can also visit www.rhetoricrefined.com for more information.

The Appeal of "Puppy Love": an in-depth analysis of why that Budweiser commercial is so darn cute!

I am going to make the assumption that everyone has seen the Budweiser Super Bowl commercial, "Puppy Love." If you have not seen it, please do yourself a favor and view the video here.

The most fascinating aspect of the Budweiser commercial (in my opinion) is not the adorable puppy or the heartwarming story of friendship, but instead it is the widely adored reaction that it received from almost every viewer. Social media is on fire with applause about this one commercial - this commercial that did not feature any celebrities or offer any humor, like most memorable commercials possess.

This commercial did not even include dialogue.

After careful analysis, I have discovered why this "Puppy Love" has so many fans swooning over it. Here is why Budweiser's non-verbal rhetoric stole the hearts of America.

First of all, let's talk about timing. The most important aspect of advertising is timing. Obviously, a commercial during the Super Bowl is optimal advertising time. On a more accessible scale, though, timing is the key to great advertisement. For example, studies show that people are most active on social media sites between 8:00 AM - 10:00 AM (sorry employers!) and 8:00 PM - 11:30 PM. Therefore, if you plan to launch a site or blog post (ahem) during the week, this is the optimal time to reach the most visitors. The same goes for press releases and other marketing platforms. The Sunday paper receives more viewers than the Tuesday paper. Study the general population's tendencies and use them to your marketing advantage.

Secondly, know your audience. This expression is often thrown around when someone tells a terrible joke, but there is often very applicable truth to the saying. Look at the values that Budweiser displayed in the "Puppy Love" commercial: brotherhood, freedom, non-conformity. Now think about the Super Bowl. This has to be the most "American" (stereotypically) day of the year. People are celebrating our country's own sport, chowing down on hotdogs and chips, and drinking beer like it's its own sport. Famous singers are brought in to dazzle the crowd with a plethora of American anthems. And, regardless of what team you are cheering for, there is a sense of overall camaraderie amongst the fans.

So, in the midst of the most "American" day of the year, it's pretty genius that Budweiser drenches its commercial in all things American. American history is drenched in brotherhood - United we stand, Divided we fall. This great American bond is symbolized through the relationship between the puppy and the horse. No matter what trials life brought, they found their way back to each other. Which then leads us to freedom - the most American value of them all. The puppy escapes his confines time and again to reach his desired destination. Nothing can hold him back from his dreams. The puppy desires to be one with the horses; nonconformity at its finest. He can be anything he sets his mind to. Hello, America.

When creating an advertisement, it is important to know the demographic that you are reaching. Know the breakdown of male vs. female. Research the age groups, income levels, health problems, etc. Know what you are selling and to whom. Most people in this world care about one thing above all: what's in it for me? The only way to convince someone to buy your product is to convince them of why they need it. Know your audience so you can make a case for your business.

The final reason why the Budweiser commercial is so universally loved is just that - it is universal. There are no words spoken in the commercial, which makes it relatable. It doesn't target just dog owners or just horse owners. It targets anyone who likes puppies or horses, anyone who values friendship, and basically anyone who has a soul. While it is important to know the general demographic of the audience your advertisement is reaching, it is also important to give your campaign a sense of universality. Don't exclude people from your advertisement, because you never know who will read what you have to say.

Ready to start implementing these strategies into your marketing campaigns? Convinced that now is the time to grow your business? Contact Rhetoric Refined at info@rhetoricrefined.com or view the packages offered at www.rhetoricrefined.com

3... 2... 1... BLAST OFF!

I cannot explain how excited I am to present Rhetoric Refined. We are going to revolutionize the way small businesses market by offering services that help grow businesses without breaking the bank.

Check out www.rhetoricrefined.com to learn more about the services offered.