Suffolk Marketing Blog | Social Media Advertising

With literally millions of visitors every hour, Facebook & LinkedIn display advertising is a tempting proposition for anyone looking to get their business in front of a very big audience.

Assuming that most businesses do not have an infinite marketing budget, particularly for advertising via an immature channel, there will be some fairly serious questions to either ask or answer.

So which to use?

Clearly that very much depends on your business, your objectives and of course who (and where) you customers are. However, here are some quick guidelines that may help you decide where to put your money:

LinkedIn:

LinkedIn is the platform to use if your business sells to other businesses (B2B sales). Whilst businesses themselves are still run by human beings, a business purchase decision is very different from a consumer (B2C sales) purchase decision.  B2B purchasing tends to be a longer, fact based process that focuses on ROI. B2C purchasing tends to be a shorter and much more emotive process that focuses on our need for something immediately.

LinkedIn does a great job at encouraging us to complete our online profiles. This is important to marketers as the LinkedIn advertising system enables us to target our adverts by specifically targeting people with certain skills, job titles, industries and locations. This means we can precisely target likely prospects for our business offering.  Be aware that job titles can be a little deceptive or ambiguous and that the skills listed on certain profiles can be somewhat “aspirational” or just plain wrong!

Because B2B buying is often a medium to long term process, we would recommend not including incremental direct sales as an objective from a LinkedIn ad campaign. Yes, this might depend on what you’re selling, but you’re far more likely to successfully develop increased company/product/service awareness or generate new leads. The latter is likely to be achieved by incentivising people to sign up to receive more information on what you’re selling after they’ve clicked through to your landing page. Once you have their details, they’re fair game to contact using a secondary channel such as email marketing or even the good old fashioned telephone.

Facebook

Facebook is the platform to use if your business mainly sells to consumers. In addition to generating leads and developing awareness, Facebook advertising is also better at actually driving direct sales. Why? As well as sharing LinkedIn’s ability to target by location, Facebook advertising can target people by their interests, i.e. things they like. This automatically enables us to sell to someone’s emotions. For example, we can ensure adverts for mountain bike accessories only appear to people who have listed mountain-biking as a hobby. An emotive purchase is usually a no-brainer, in fact almost literally, as it’s bought with ones heart and not ones head! I’m sure we can all think of a personal example where that has backfired!

Facebook advertising can be used to target business Pages (note the capital P), as opposed to making the adverts appear on individuals pages (note the small p); so B2B targeting can also occur on this platform. And again, by considering interests, job titles and location, a good level of targeting can be achieved. Just like a lot of online B2B marketing, due to longer and more considered buying cycles, it may be worth limiting expectations to generating leads and developing awareness rather than generating direct sales.

B2B advertising is often more challenging. For example, your company sells PC support services; it’s highly doubtful that many people have listed a hobby that indicates their likely to want your services! Consequently, many B2B campaigns have extremely low click-through-rates.

Two final items to consider..

Firstly, click through rates via social media advertising in general, and in particular on Facebook, are extremely low. Obviously this is offset by the potentially huge number of impressions (number of times your advert is seen), but be prepared for some very low numbers. Like, really low, i.e.  0.03% - 0.1%.  

Secondly, consider those percentages when calculating a campaign budget if that campaign is to be priced by impression. You may find that even with a significant number of impressions, such a low click through rate may not deliver enough traffic to generate enough new enquiries that actually close into new business. Focussing on conversion optimisation is therefore critical!

If your budget can stretch to it, try running a campaign on both platforms at the same time. If  managed correctly, and the messaging is right (maybe different for different platforms?), it should be possible to definitively answer the question of which platform is right for your business.

Do you need to outsmart your competitors? Contact us now on 0845 310 2457 to discuss what you want to achieve and how we can help you meet your goals.

Why not find out more about Business Vitamins, Strategic B2B marketing agency Suffolk.

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Suffolk Marketing Blog - Business Vitamins Websites Video

 

So are you basically lazy and can't be bothered to scroll down to see a selection of the websites we've designed and built over the last couple of years?

No problem, we've just created this handy video so you can sit there and see what our web team have been doing!

Psst, not only is the video in HD quality, (make sure you go "full screen"), we've used some rather cool funky music too - so go on, pump up the volume, we dare you...

Do you need to outsmart your competitors? Contact us now on 0845 310 2457 to discuss what you want to achieve and how we can help you meet your goals.

Why not find out more about Business Vitamins, Strategic B2B marketing agency Suffolk.

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Suffolk Marketing Blog - How to Win Customer Loyalty

In the current economic climate, customers are increasingly likely to shop around for goods and services.  When budgets are tight and adding real value becomes more difficult by the day, maintaining market share is all about customer loyalty.

During a recession, customers are less susceptible to a simple discount or a reward in return for a purchase.  Customers know the value of their money and seek to get the most from every pound.  From a commercial point of view, the way to bring that indefinable added something that customers seek is often through a loyalty scheme.

If you’re considering setting up such a scheme, the first thing to realise is that a good scheme is not about being cheaper.   It’s about being better and being different.    It is also an efficient way to influence customer behaviour without entering into a price war.

Second, you need to consider your objectives and aims carefully.  What are you trying to achieve?  Where does your product/service/brand fit?  You need to understand your customers to hold on to a share of their budget for any length of time.  Examine the supermarkets as a great example of this.  Sainsbury’s gives points, Tesco gives discounts; the difference is subtle but key to attracting their different target audiences.  A common objective for many loyalty schemes, particularly for offline businesses, is to capture customer details such as contact information and other additional demographic data. Online businesses will often have access to these details as part of their customer registration process, but could use a loyalty scheme as a tool to gain even deeper customer insight.

Third, knowing the client inside out is crucial to keeping a loyalty scheme fresh and ensuring the rewards remain appropriate.  A scheme must provide clear benefits for members and deliver added value in terms of financial rewards, customer service and the member experience.  Therefore it is critical your scheme collects relevant data that you can act upon quickly.  It must also offer members a better service than their non-member counterparts. 

Once you have customers earning rewards for loyalty, you are still only half way there.  To build a truly loyal customer base, redeeming rewards has to be simple.  Customers increasingly like to redeem rewards via the same channel with which they have initially engaged with the brand.  Online is obviously critical, while QR codes, mobile apps and NFC (near field communication – i.e. mobile phones chipped for quick transactions) are becoming more popular as the mobile platform develops. Customers now expect instant in store reward redemption to complement purchases.

For smaller companies considering a loyalty scheme but with concerns about cost and operational burden, working in partnership with carefully selected partners can offer a satisfactory solution.   However there are issues to consider such as diluting a strong brand, information leaks or customers receiving irrelevant offers.  It is crucial that brands are compatible. 

Loyalty schemes at their best should deliver for both sides.  If a loyalty scheme is well planned, expertly executed and consistently improved, the subsequent gain in revenue should far outweigh the running costs.  But never forget, a bad customer experience will always cause damage however many points or gifts you offer the customer.  If you neglect the customer experience, your reward scheme is doomed to failure.

Do you need to outsmart your competitors? Contact us now on 0845 310 2457 to discuss what you want to achieve and how we can help you meet your goals.

Why not find out more about Business Vitamins, Strategic B2B marketing agency Suffolk.

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Suffolk Marketing Blog - Totally HR

Rain rain rain, miserable. But nothing cheers us up more at Bizvits than publishing a new website for a new client! Business Vitamins were approached by the Director of Totally HR to design them a new website. They were looking for a 100% bespoke design (check), no cheesy graphics (check), no complex or "out there" conceptual themes (check).

Of course the new site also had to position their business as a quality service provider, (check) utilise their existing logo and colourways (check) and most of all perform FAR better (for SEO) than the previous site ever did in the Google rankings (check!).

We're really happy with how the site turned out,  and more importantly we know the client is delighted too.

Do you need to outshine your competitors? Contact us now on 0845 310 2457 to discuss what you need and how we can help you meet your goals.

Do you need to outsmart your competitors? Contact us now on 0845 310 2457 to discuss what you want to achieve and how we can help you meet your goals.

Why not find out more about Business Vitamins, Strategic B2B marketing agency Suffolk.

Or follow BizVits on Twitter? 
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Or see the Business Vitamins channel on YouTube?

Suffolk Marketing Blog - Vandersanden, Integrated Campaign Management

The Client

Vandersanden BV (VDS) is a major European manufacturer of specialist building bricks, based in Belgium. They turn over c€80m, with most of their revenue coming from northern Europe. They have a long history of making very high quality bricks from locally sourced clay, as well as designing new and innovative building systems.

The Objective

VDS wanted to launch their flagship product, the Zero Bricktm into the UK market. Their target audience was wide, ranging from small private self-builders, specialist low-volume house builders and architects and specifiers from commercial architects and building contractors.
 

The key sales message was that the Zero Brick was new, different and unlike competitive solutions could be easily and quickly implemented without any additional training required by the brick layers.

VDS set themselves a target of having the Zero Brick firmly specified on a “significant” UK building project by the end of 2011. By significant, they specifically meant greater than 250k bricks. For reference, a typical UK 4 bedroom domestic property has c15k bricks.

The Problem

Vandersanden do not have a presence in the UK, except via their sales partner, Hoskins Brick, based near Cambridge. Historically, both VDS and Hoskins had only managed sporadic, ad-hoc display advertising which had not been backed up with awareness building via press releases. As a result, very few members of their target audience in the UK would have known either Vandersanden or their products. Whilst VDS knew what they wanted to achieve, they had little firsthand understanding of the UK construction or architectural media space.

The Solution

VDS turned to Business Vitamins who had been recommended having recently designed and built the new Hoskins Brick website. Business Vitamins drew upon their prior experience of marketing high quality products to the architectural and construction space, to create a workable marketing plan for VDS.

An initial mediaplan was built, listing the likely key publications read by the intended target audience. Using this, a range of PR opportunities was identified; a number of full page display adverts were created and a small number of direct mail pieces were designed. Each of these had specific tracking mechanisms in place to ensure that leads could easily be attributed to each media channel, and within that, which specific media title.

Additionally, an existing Zero Brick microsite was recreated by Vandersanden on a .co.uk domain, with tracking code in place in order to measure visitor numbers.

The Results

The campaign commenced in late June 2011 and ran for circa 5months. In total there were over 200 leads generated from the campaign. Of these, 128 leads were captured and recorded directly from the advertising, direct mail and PR. In addition, there were around at least another 75 instances of prospects contacting Hoskins Brick directly via telephone.

Most importantly, the campaign met its key objective. A major project, relating to the new construction of a major public sector building in Battersea, south-west London, has seen a deal specifying c6million Zero Bricks being specified for the sites marketing suite. 

Business Vitamins understand there is considerable potential for further sales leading directly from this initial opportunity; due mainly to interest from other public sector projects that are planned nearby.

Do you need to outsmart your competitors? Contact us now on 0845 310 2457 to discuss what you want to achieve and how we can help you meet your goals.

Why not find out more about Business Vitamins, Strategic B2B marketing agency Suffolk.

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Suffolk Marketing Blog - Moves With Care

Happy New Year! New Year, New website launch - this time for a rather unusual business. Moves With Care, are the only business in East Anglia offering a "senior relocation service".


Moves With Care approached Business Vitamins when it became clear their old website was simply not fit for purpose. It was an old design and simply wasn't performing well on Google. So, as well as a bespoke design and build, Business Vitamins assisted with the rewriting of the web content and also optimised the HTML tags to bolster the SEO friendliness of the site. The result? Two new enquiries almost immediately after launch.

Do you need to outsmart your competitors? Contact us now on 0845 310 2457 to discuss what you want to achieve and how we can help you meet your goals.

Why not find out more about Business Vitamins, Strategic B2B marketing agency Suffolk.

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Suffolk Marketing Blog - Danbred UK

Business Vitamins are really pleased to announce we've published yet another website! There's nothing like local business, and these guys (Danbred International) are "quite literally" a stones throw away, being based in our home village of Bacton, Suffolk.

It's not all old fashioned farming up here though, oh no. DBi are seriously high-tech, involved with the importing and development of Danish pig stock to produce top quality British farmed pork. Follow the link above to read more - warning - you might want to dig out some of your 'A' level biology notes beforehand... as I said, VERY technical!


Business Vitamins managed all the design, build, contributed to the photography and also assisted in writing some of the copy. The project tied into the creation of a folder and a number of small brochures, designed to promote different aspects of their business.


The website also includes a discussion forum, hosted on the DBi web server.


Do you need to outsmart your competitors? Contact us now on 0845 310 2457 to discuss what you want to achieve and how we can help you meet your goals.

Why not find out more about Business Vitamins, Strategic B2B marketing agency Suffolk.

Or follow BizVits on Twitter? 
Or Like us on Facebook?
Or +1 us on Google+?
Or see the Business Vitamins channel on YouTube?