digital marketing

FB Direct Marketing to boost Amazon Sales-featured

Setting up Facebook Ads to Boost Amazon Sales

How to Set Up Facebook Ads to Boost Amazon Sales

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SPICY NUGGET
You can sell anything to Amazon buyers from an ad in Facebook… Even uranium cubes as I show in this video. Just kidding.
— Adam A. Sene, CEO

In this video, Adam is being interviewed by Curtis Johnson, President of ManageByStats, a tech company that built a software platform for Amazon Sellers, to provide functions that are not provided well by Amazon or other services.

The interview focuses on the basics of setting up Direct Marketing Campaigns on Facebook to boost Amazon sales.

The video starts with a short introduction of its purpose, with a brief review of the landing page specifically set up for the demo. This is a demonstration of the steps involved in setting up the campaign in the Facebook Business Account Manager: Adam and Curtis do not expound on how to set up the Business Account Manager, it is assumed that the viewer has one already, and there are plenty of videos around to teach anyone to set up a basic set-up.

Here is the list of timestamps, to enable you to slide to any area of specific interest to your operations:

00:00 Introduction
01:45 Presentation of the Demo Landing Page
02:23 Setting up Facebook Business Manager Account
02:52 Business Settings in the Business Manager
03:43 Creating a “Custom Audience” in Facebook
04:03 Why create a Column for Customer Value?
04:50 Uploading Customer List & Naming Audience
05:10 Mapping data from List to Business Manager
07:49 Setting up your Campaign in the Facebook Ads Manager
08:46 Setting up the targeting for your Ads Set
11:13 Creating your ad
12:28 Tip on media crop for Stories
14:08 Completing the ad set (text, buttons, target URL)
15:17 Wrapping up

There is way more to be done with your Facebook ads to ensure you get a good ROAS on any monies you spend on Facebook, but this will be the topic of other videos. Reach out to us at Eden Ads if your Amazon sales numbers aren’t up to snuff: we’ll have a conversation to understand where you are coming from, and how we can help you. Call us at (813) 940-5699.

Reviews reflect CX - Customer Experience

Customer eXperience and ROI in a Post-Pandemic Economy

Customer Experience (CX) and ROI in a Post-Pandemic Economy

SPICY NUGGET
Customer satisfaction means even more today in a digital economy. But did you actually measure its impact on your ROI? Or do you just assume your organization delivers great CX?
— Adam E. Sene, CEO

Delivery gap and wrong assumptions

Customer satisfaction is way too important a business matter to merely assume that “your organization provides excellent service”.

The issue is first a matter of defining “good customer experience” correctly. How do key functions in your organization measure the degree to which their clients are satisfied?

In 2019, Bain & Company published a research study in which they found that “80% of the 362 businesses surveyed believe that they delivered ‘superior experience’ to their customers”… while only 8% of their customers thought actually were”.

Delivery Gap: Executive assumptions don't match customer experience Clearly, there’s a huge disconnect. Bain called this the “delivery gap” and cited 2 reasons for its existence:

“Most growth initiatives damage the most important source of sustainable growth: a loyal, profitable customer franchise… [A business] compounds the problem when it tries to expand its customer base, as pursuing new customers distracts management from serving the all-important core.“
“Good relationships are hard to build. It’s extremely difficult to understand what customers really want, keep the promises you make to them and maintain the right dialogue to ensure that you adjust your propositions according to customers’ changing or increasing needs.“

Bain cites the case of Intuit, the well-known financial software company, which committed major blunders in their expansion strategy in 2003 and saw their online market share plummet.

We would compare it to the case of Harley-Davidson, the iconic motorcycle manufacturer. As the gravy train of the early 2000s waned, Harley started to see its sales decline progressively from 2008. The CEOs tried to expand the product range to hit new markets, both demographic and geographic, completely ignoring their loyal fan base. As a result, the brand was vilified in the biker forums by their core audience for a variety of reasons, including expensive dealer fees, vastly overpriced bikes, and plain bad customer service at the dealerships. In 2020, Harley Davidson was only $1.3 million short of reporting a net annual loss… on sales of $4 billion.

Overdelivering to outperform

According to an article penned by Blake Morgan in Forbes, companies that provide a great customer experience outperform those that don’t. Among the host of percentages mentioned by Blake Morgan, these 3 appeared partcularly relevant to our own team:

84% of companies that work to improve CX report an increase in their revenue.
73% of companies with above-average CX perform better financially than their competitors.
96% of customers say customer service is important in their choice of loyalty to a brand.

If you haven’t yet made an in-person check of how good (or bad) your customer experience really is, may we suggest that it’s time you play “Undercover Boss”?

The pandemic and post-pandemic paradigm

Come 2020, Covid-19, and the worldwide lockdowns. Businesses are forced to rethink extensively their organizational model, from HR to sales to marketing to shipping. Whether small or big, most businesses entered completely unchartered territories where physical proximity and in-person sales/delivery meant nothing anymore.

contactless delivery and customer expectations Consumers found themselves home-bound, forced to rely on any information they could find on the web to make educated choices for almost everything they would buy. This is a new web paradigm: as the volume of ecommerce transactions is exploding, the volume and quality of content available to help consumers in their choices have both dramatically increased, and the number of reviews has followed a similar trend.

Now more than ever before, consumer reviews have become a nexus of information where retail clients and brands meet, with intersecting agendas.

The quantity of research available on the topic of online reviews and their impact on a business is mind-boggling. Enter the search query “statistics” AND “customer reviews” AND “2021” in Google, and you can start reading over 8 million web pages on the topic. Suffice it to say:

Tons of good reviews will help your business sell more, sell more often, sell to more customers, and sell at higher prices
Too many bad reviews will sink your sales, revenues and profits.
You’d better get your Google rating in the 4.0 to 4.7 star range (an Uberall study quotes 3.7-4.9 but this is a wide range and it ultimately depends on the local competition facing your business in its industry)

New reputation management tools have sprung into existence over the last couple years, with 2 major functions: (a) Get more reviews written as soon as the product or service was delivered; (b) Alert immediately the management of a negative review. Though these tools can’t “gate” reviews (i.e. delay the publication of a bad review until the seller does something about it, or avoid presenting the reviewer the possibility to publish her/his review on Google), they use navigation schemes and psycholinguistic triggers to allow customers to vent before their dirty review hits the web.

Quality of experience is the new benchmark

In times of hardship, who needs another headache, really? If a business is known online to treat customers poorly, when its competitors are walking the extra mile to support their products and services online, doesn’t it mechanically follow that a greater number of consumers (or businesses in B2B industries) will find themselves looking at more options, even more so than in pre-pandemic times?

Google has picked up on the trend towards quality. Since mid 2021, their Google My Business unit is gradually implementing new quality tags in their review system. In certain industries and certain markets, Google My Business reviews now offer consumers to click on experiential criteria to bring more qualitative data to a review: “courtesy”, “professionalism”, “punctuality”, “product knowledge” are among these news tags. It is unclear at this stage how Google My Business actually uses the qualitative data in its ranking algorithms, but if past experience is any benchmark, it is safe to venture that at equal average rating (total number of stars/total number of reviews), Google will give an advantage in its rankings to the business getting the best qualitative data.

The Unique Selling Proposition is corporate-wide

Back in the late 1940s – early 1950s, legendary adman Rosser Reeves developed a new concept he coined the “Unique Selling Proposition” (USP). Reeves actually attributes the origin of the concept to his time in NY-based ad agency Ted Bates.

In his 1951 book “Reality in Advertising“, Reeves defines the USP along the lines of 3 principles:

Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer… Each advertisement must say to each reader: “Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.”
The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique…
The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions, i.e. pull over new customers to your product.

Cover of Reality in Advertising - The book that fleshed out the Unique Selling Proposition concept By way of example, Starbucks became what it is today because Howard Schultz’s vision was to make his coffee shop chain: “A Third Place Between the Office and Home.” In itself, the concept was brilliant, but for it to be workable, it actually had to find its incarnation in everything a Starbucks shop was.

A Unique Selling Proposition is not just product puffery or a brilliant slogan:
it is an actual experience offered to a customer throughout the entire chain of functions of the organization.

Jay Abraham, a direct mail genius of the 70s and 80s, said nothing less when he wrote:

“All your in-store clerks, telephone staff, receptionists, customer-service people — everyone with any public contact or customer interaction or anyone who makes any decision that impacts your business — must fully understand, embrace and believe in your USP. That passionate belief in your USP must become part of every employee.”

How does your marketing tie into a Unique Selling Proposition? How does every function of your organization support your Unique Selling Proposition? And how do you measure the results of the collective and individual efforts in terms of Customer Experience?

A team of result-oriented millennials

Eden Ads is a full-service digital marketing agency based in Tampa, FL. Our team is young: we are all Millennials, except for our two old barbs, Jamie and Phil, who love to remind us of sound business principles from the height of their 30-year business experience.

Although we are Millennials, we place results first, feelings second. We take your experience as a customer very seriously, almost religiously. Our philosophy of “being in service” spans across and up-and-down our agency: from the technical specialists, to the Customer Satisfaction Managers, to the support staff, all the way to the execs.

For instance, our good clients have our personal phone numbers. They know they can reach us when they need us. We will walk the extra mile for them.

For the last 10 years, our Ads Management team has successfully created and managed clients’ ad campaigns using Facebook, Google, Instagram, Amazon and LinkedIn. We run successful campaigns of all sizes and our ROAS is 5-7x. Our web design team builds high performance designs for both local clients and national brands. Our SEO team applies cutting-edge techniques to rank websites in search engines. Our SEO team lead has over 20 years in experience optimizing websites for businesses in the U.S., Europe, and China.

Free independent evaluation

Eden Ads is a full-service digital marketing agency in Tampa, FL. Our team offers qualified local businesses a unique opportunity to have their website and digital marketing/advertising campaigns fully evaluated under multiple aspects:

ROI of Google Ads campaigns
Finding where you waste money in your Google Ads campaigns
ROI of Facebook campaigns
Search engine position checks on your 2 or 3 main keywords
General SEO-readiness
Adequacy of mobile design
Google speed scoring of your mobile website

This free independent evaluation can reveal weaknesses that hurt your site and prevent it to get to the top of search results. It can also highlights design issues blocking it from converting more visitors into leads. Call our web consultants today at (813) 940-5699 to request a free independent evaluation, and discuss your most pressing needs.

If you’re want results, speak with one of our Marketing Consultants to find out how we can help you! Call us at (813) 940-5699 or make contact with our team via our secure online form.

Eden-Ads Facebook marketing Tampa featured thumb

Digital Marketing: Key Benefits of Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads: Legit Digital Marketing Tools

SPICY NUGGET
Facebook Ads will significantly help grow your business. The Facebook Ads Manager tool is not intuitive however, and it takes skill and diligent testing to make it lucrative.
— Adam A. Sene, CEO

As a Facebook user, you’ve probably experienced seeing ads on your personal feed that were annoying or not appropriate for you, right? Yet, you kept on seeing them. They just won’t go away, and herein lies one of the key benefits of Facebook ads: they work. (When they are targeted correctly.)

If you’ve ever felt annoyed by an ad, you can safely assume that you were not the right target for the company placing the ad.

On the other hand, if you‘ve ever searched online for a product you wanted (say, a new Trek Bicycle) only to later see an ad offering you a great discount on Trek Bicycles the next time you visit Facebook, you probably wouldn’t have the same reaction as above. In fact, you might be be quite pleased. That’s just part of the magic of a correctly targeted Facebook ad in a digital marketing campaign.

But… Facebook Ads Didn’t Work For Us!

If you’re a business owner or a marketing manager and you aren’t using Facebook Ads, you might want to re-think this approach. (Read on and we’ll explore the main benefits of Facebook ads as compared to other ad platforms.)

If you’ve tried Facebook Ads and were underwhelmed by the results or stopped because they “didn’t work,” there’s a good reason why they didn’t work—and it’s probably not because your target audience isn’t on Facebook.

For most businesses, a good percentage of their buyers use Facebook. Some niche industries may find better success using a different ad platform, which is something our Ad Specialists will determine in our initial discussions with you. However, if your business has an obvious demographic available on Facebook and ads aren’t working, then we can safely assume the ads were not done correctly.

Facebook ads especially are an ever-changing nuance of digital marketing which require professional strategy and execution. For best results, use a marketing pro and don’t go it alone.

Finally, Facebook Ads are not the same as using the “Boost Post” button on a post you create on your business page. For a truly effective campaign, a trained FB Ads Specialist must use the Facebook Business Manager platform to create ads targeted towards a precise audience with results in mind.

Target Your Exact Audience

Facebook provides comprehensive audience targeting—better than Google Ads. You can target user personal interests, user demographics such as age bracket and location, behavior, connections and language. A savvy Facebook ads marketer can even target your competitors’ followers.

Pro Tip: The Facebook Business Manager platform enables you to refine your targeting so that you can eliminate Facebook users who are not in your target market. This ensures that your Facebook Ads are placed only in front of users who are potential customers and ultimately saves advertising dollars while ensuring higher quality leads.

Reach More of Your Target Market Than with Organic Facebook Posts

The unfortunate truth about your Facebook Business or Fan page is that only a small percentage of your followers will ever see what you post on it.

The [always changing, never predictable] Facebook algorithms determine the visibility of your page amongst your followers. Recent implementations caused significant decreases in business pages’ visibility as Facebook moved towards a news feed which prioritized posts from friends and family and reduced business page posts to a less frequent rotation.

In simple English, this means that if you want to make use of Facebook as a tool for new leads, customers or even just a larger fan base, the most effective way to do so is by using Paid Facebook Ads. Lest we forget, Facebook is a for-profit organization after all.

The good news is that by using the Business Manager platform effectively you can get a solid return on your ad dollars, and the Eden Ads team averages 4-7 times the return on ad spend (ROAS) for our Facebook Ad clients.

Remarket to People Who Have Already Interacted with Your Brand

Remarketing (aka retargeting) is a smart and lucrative way of reaching your target audience. The reason this digital marketing technique works so well is because interested users who have visited your website in the past (and did not become customers) will see your ad again as a reminder of their initial interest.

It’s estimated that 3 out of 4 website visitors that go through the steps to place items they intend to buy in their shopping carts, fail to purchase.

Through the use of remarketing you can re-target those “lost customers” and rekindle their interest in your services or products. According to a recent remarketing study, website visitors who are re-targeted with display ads are 70% more likely to convert on your website. This tackles the issue of website and digital cart abandonment once and for all.

Target correctly with inexpensive conversions

Facebook’s CTR (click-through-rate) is steadily increasing because of refinements to their advanced advertising tools. Because of these constant improvements to targeting capabilities, professional digital marketers can effectively target audiences and do so at a low cost.

With the small amount you pay Facebook to run ads and target only the people you want, you’re spending very little to get a great ROI from your ad spend. It can feel expensive in the initial stages of setting up Facebook Ads while your campaign manager is doing testing. This is unavoidable and you should account for this testing period when setting your ad budget.

Facebook‘s plat de résistance: the “Lookalike Audiences”

After you’ve used Facebook Ads with some success and determined the best target audience that actually converts, you can begin to replicate that success by targeting people who are very similar matches to them by using a Facebook technique known as “lookalike audiences.” This feature allows you to take a custom audience and use Facebook to find similar people who are most likely to purchase from you.

The size and targeting options are very specific to ensure that your lookalike audiences accurately reflects the target market that is already converting using your ads.

3 More Reasons to Love Facebook Ads

Your buyers are frequently on Facebook, plain and simple. According to BroadbandSearch, the average person spends about 2½ hours daily on social media, a large part of which is Facebook. A dynamic and visual platform full of rich behavioral data and metrics, Facebook is fantastic place to invest your ad dollars.

You can profitably scale your Facebook Ads by reaching more potential buyers than you ever could organically. Once you’ve tested and established the ads that convert most profitably, you simply invest more money into them and keep using them as long as they are producing a profit. In this way, you can keep growing your customer base much easier than with almost any other advertising platform.

Finally, Facebook is a fantastic tool for building your brand and gaining customer loyalty. For this reason, many companies use Facebook pages to create a sense of belonging to a community for their followers. These pages create the opportunity for real engagement with customers and prospects; this in turn cultivates positive brand image, greater customer loyalty and SuperFans. This activity leads to business growth, higher customer retention, and even more sales.

Ready to Set Your Marketing on Fire?

The most important of all the benefits of Facebook Ads is that they will significantly help grow your business. The Facebook Ads Manager tool is not intuitive, however, and it takes skill and diligent testing to make it lucrative. This process can be vastly accelerated if you lean on a digital marketing pro that has blazed this trail.

If you’re ready to grow your business and get real results with Facebook Ads, speak with one of our Marketing Consultants to find out how we can help you! Call us at 727-325-6471 or send us an inquiry via our secure online form.

Why Your Business Should Use Google Ads

5 Reasons to Sow With Google Ads
(Get Ready to Reap)

SPICY NUGGET
Google Ads are one of the greatest marketing and advertising tools available to you today. (Yeah, we’re fans.)
— Adam A. Sene, CEO

A Google Ads account in the hands of a dedicated expert is a ferocious tool that will reap in customers from the online battlefield known as the competitive marketplace. In other words, it works very well if you know what you’re doing. “But, will Google Ads work for me?” you ask.

They will work for your business if it meets these criteria:

Your customers go online.
Keywords relevant to your business are searched for online.
Some of your competitors or companies with similar offerings use it.

If You’re Not using Google Ads, You’re Making a Big Mistake

There are a few reasons why your business, no matter the size or its current phase of growth, would benefit from Google AdWords.

1) AdWords gets much faster results than SEO (organic traffic takes much longer to build).

SEO and Google Ads are both search engine marketing strategies that generate traffic to your site. SEO is organic, Google Ads are paid; but hiring an SEO team (it’s one of our digital marketing services) to get you those organic rankings can be costly, and it is slow. Google Ad campaigns, expertly designed, will work much faster to get you top rankings in Google’s pages when people search for your services and products.

You can also monitor very accurately what you’re paying for and getting with Google Ads — you can’t track your results as precisely as that with SEO.

2) Surprising to many, Google Ads often converts to more leads/sales than organic traffic.

As reported by HubSpot:

a) The top 3 paid advertising spots get 46% of the clicks on the page. The top three links on a search engine results page (SERP) capture almost half of all traffic for that keyword. This data supports the PPC method as it involves buying ad space at the top of the SERPs.

b) Businesses make, on average, $3 in revenue for every $1.60 they spend on AdWords. PPC is a relatively inexpensive way to experiment, and there is a solid average ROI for investing in paid search ads.

c) PPC Ads can boost brand awareness by 80%.

d) Google’s algorithm updates don’t affect PPC. While not a stat per se, a big benefit of PPC is that it’s immune to Google’s changing ranking algorithms. In 2018, Google reported that they had updated their algorithm 3,234 times! If you’re using SEO, you have to adjust many factors on and outside of your website to match updated algorithm requirements.

e) 63% of people reported that they would click on a Google Ad. A high click-through rate (CTR) is the goal driving both PPC and SEO, and if the majority of surveyed consumers report that they would click into a paid search ad, it is a compelling statistic for investing in PPC.

f) 75% say it’s easier to find what they’re looking for from paid ads. The reason the top search results in Page 1 gets the vast majority of clicks is due to a combination of ease of use and finding what you are looking for. Bidding on target keywords through PPC accomplishes both needs: Paid Ads are easy to find at the top of the page, and they bring the right answer to the question of the searcher.

3) Google Ads are Scalable.

One of the most difficult things to do in marketing is to create lead sources that can scale — that means that you don’t have to 10X your ad spend to 10X your leads. Google Ads is very scalable. When you create a Google Ads campaign that converts with a good ROI, you don’t have to limit your ad spend for that campaign. You can increase your PPC ad spend… and your profits will increase in proportion to the higher budget.

4) Reconnect with past website visitors.

This is what’s known as remarketing (or retargeting). Google Ads provide the capability to reconnect with your past website visitors who didn’t convert on your site, abandon a shopping cart, peruse the site but don’t download anything, etc. With remarketing, your business can continue to show the visitor your offerings through targeted ads directed at them.

This is a great way to pinpoint the people who are interested in what you offer without the need for them to navigate your website — you target your Google Ad message precisely, and send the people who click on it to a specific landing page that gets your message across clearly (without anything else to distract them).

Remarketing can produce a very high ROI. These targeted ads provide a second chance to convert those ‘could-have-been’ customers into paying customers.

5) Increase your brand awareness.

In addition to increasing traffic and conversions on your website, Google Ads are a compelling way to tell people about your brand. It’s been reported that paid search ads lift top-of-mind awareness by an average of 6.6%.

Ready to Kick Off a Google Ads Campaign?

If you’re not yet convinced to try Google Ads, you should speak with a trained Google Ads Consultant on our team who can evaluate your website and offerings, answer your questions and help you determine an advertising strategy that’s right for you, your brand and the products and services you offer.

WTH Are Ad Impressions, and Who Cares?

Spicy Nugget: Ad impressions – Use & limitations

“If your digital marketing agency is leading with ad impressions as their number one metric for your campaign’s success, run. As fast as you can. What this statistic tells you is how many times your ad was on the screen of a user/potential buyer. It shows that your ad is going out and saturating, hopefully multiple times over, your target audience.

“What it does NOT tell you is whether that user even noticed the ad, did anything with it, or if that user is even the right person to be targeting. We don’t use this metrics to determine an account’s success, but rather to diagnose the source of potential problems.

“Our advertising nerds—ahem, I mean experts—will compare Impressions to other metrics but never as a standalone measure of success. If your agency is reporting Impressions to you as a “results” metric, then you might have an expensive problem to fix.”

-Adam A. Sene, CEO

What are impressions, and who cares?

Impressions are, to quote Facebook exactly: “the number of times your ads were on a screen.” Google defines the word in much the same way, counting one impression each time your ad is shown on a Google search results page or as a display ad in the Google network. Since neither of those definitions really tell you anything about what impressions actually are, let’s dig in.

Ad impressions are a commonly monitored metric and usually make the “top 5 fave metrics” list for marketing pros. This is because they are the number one way to measure how many times your ads were exposed to your target audience, so obviously they matter to a certain extent.

How Are THEY Counted?

One impression is counted for each instance an ad appears on screen for the first time. The example Facebook gives is that if an ad appears on screen for a user, and then the user scrolls down and back up to the same ad, that counts as only 1 impression. If an ad appears on screen for someone 2 different times in a day, however, that would count as 2 impressions.

On Google, an impression is counted each time your ad is shown on a search result page or on another site in the Google Display network.

What’s the Difference Between Impressions and Reach?

Reach is defined as the number of people who were exposed to your ad campaign at least one time. Reach might seem super similar to impressions (because it is), but the main difference between the former and the latter is that impressions can include multiple views of the same ad by the same user.

Reach is essentially a PEOPLE metric, whereas impressions are VIEWS.

Get to the Point… Why Do AD Impressions Matter?

Impressions are a great metric for a number of reasons, not the least of which is brand awareness and recall-ability for your potential buyers. If you’re running a brand awareness campaign, this IS your key metric.

Have you ever seen an ad on Facebook or elsewhere for a brand or product you liked, and then when someone else mentioned that brand or product to you, you said, “Oh yeah, I know them… I saw them online somewhere”? Boom. Impressions.

Impressions are an awareness metric. They are eyeballs on your brand. This, loosely speaking, can translate to new clients, leads and more sales. Without impressions, you’re literally living in a cave where nobody sees you or knows about the amazing services you offer.

Impressions tell you that your ads are being seen by your target audience, but just on their own, they definitely don’t determine the success of your campaign. You have to keep one eye on Impressions while keeping another eye on each of your other metrics like Spend, Click-Through-Rate (CTR), your Leads, Cost Per Click and Cost Per Lead. (That’s at least 5 more eyes—yikes!)

A Lesson From Nerds: Ignore Data if You Like Wasting Money

A little known secret about ad experts is we’re actually complete nerds. You might think splashy creatives and amazing taglines are what get the job done, but we’re here to tell ya—it’s the numbers and the data. Our super nerds analyze, refine and optimize campaigns based on the data we gain from metrics, so that campaigns perform beyond our clients’ expectations. The honest truth is that our Design Team just does a heck of a job making math look sexy.

For example, if we see a campaign getting thousands of Impressions per day for months and months, yet CTR and Leads are still in the toilet, chances are the audience isn’t refined enough and you need to tighten things up.

Do I Need an Agency to Run My Ads on Facebook and Google?

Business owners hire professionals to handle ad campaigns because agencies have more eyeballs than business owners. Plain and simple.

Can you run your own ad campaigns? Of course you can! We even created this guide to getting Facebook Ads approved because we believe in you! But you’d better be prepared to lose some money along the way as you learn the ropes. Ads without precise optimization, targeting and data analysis can be quite a money pit.

Want some help? We’re here, and we give out free advice all the time. Reach out!

A Newbie’s Guide to Organic Content Marketing

Spicy Nugget: Content Marketing

“Whether you’re a small business owner or running a large corporation, organic content strategy is vital. Does it directly produce leads? Maybe. For the most part, content does NOT drive leads—it nurtures them.

-Adam A. Sene, CEO

Before you complain about how expensive or time consuming it is to maintain a social media presence or to have content written, consider this.

If you’re too laser-focused on the sales aspect of your business strategy, you’ll neglect to build a brand which will sustain the sales you’re trying to make. Having a strong website where relevant, high-quality content is housed is like having someone to answer the phone at your front desk.

If you run ads with a dated logo, a website built in 2008 and not even a little brand presence in the form of content to help nurture sales, it’s kind of the equivalent of having lunch lady Doris at your reception desk yelling at anyone who dare to call your business. You’ll just drive them away.

“I run ads, so no need for an organic content strategy, right?”

Wrong!

The Eden Ads blog isn’t called Spicy Nugget-ville for no reason. No kid gloves here, just marketing advice that cuts to the point. A well-developed organic content strategy is the stuff of which your brand is made, so let’s dive in.

What is Organic Content Marketing, and Who Cares?

In the world of digital marketing, the term “organic” just means it isn’t a sponsored (paid) advertisement of any kind. It may have cost you some money to create the graphic or have a writer create the blog or write the caption, but that’s beside the point.

Organic content is that which isn’t used in an ad campaign.

Good organic content strategy looks for opportunities to establish a voice, build trust, inspire confidence, share what amazing work you do and—best of all—to engage with your fans, followers and potential customers. If you aren’t posting organic content, you are in fact missing out on a vital building block of marketing.

The Purpose of Organic Content Strategy

If you aren’t creating organic content, you are further missing out on an opportunity to show your prospective customers how you’ll solve their problems.

The purpose of organic content, whether it’s a blog post, a simple social media caption or a billion dollar video is to:

Pose a problem, situation or experience, and
Position Brand ABC’s products or services as the solution to 1.

EXAMPLES:

This dietician does a great job highlighting the types of diet pitfalls people experience and then poses her custom diet plans as a solution. Ultimately, people who are struggling with their diet and who end up on this website need her help with their diet plans, and she knows that and plans her content around it.
Hubspot is somewhat known for covering topics surrounding digital marketing trends in their blog, and they’re pretty good at it. But it can be overwhelming, so many of their 29M visitors per month turn to them for the expertise they’re known for.
Stitch Fix is a personal style box service that also has a blog with fashion and styling tips. But for those who are overwhelmed at the idea of personal styling and following fashion trends, that box full of clothes that arrives on your doorstep sounds mighty good.

Maybe you’ve noticed that when you’re reading a good article, a few things happen.

First, you become interested in the article because it genuinely grabs your attention with a problem or situation that hits home for you.

Next, you start into the article, voraciously looking for solutions. “Hmm… Some good information here.”

And by the end of the article you’re thinking, “You know what? I’ll just hire these guys to do it for me.” (Or, “I’ll buy their product. They seem to really know what they’re talking about.”)

Therein is the entire purpose of organic content marketing.

People Are Stalkers

Social media and the internet in general is beloved by many for the fact that it affords us the ability to creep around and look at people/product makers/brands, without those people/product makers/brands knowing we’re doing so. (Well, that’s not entirely true… but that’s another topic for another day.)

When a potential client or customer finds your brand through an ad or bumps into you on Google, they will mostly likely engage with you first by doing a little lurking.

If their first impression is that you haven’t written a blog since 2017 or your last social media post was 8 months ago (or that you don’t have these assets in place at all), they might be a little off-put.

Organic content is THE place where your brand voice is born. It’s also where brand positioning takes place. If you sell vitamins, for example:

What type of customer do you want to attract?
How is your product superior to those concrete vitamin tablets you can buy at Walgreens?
How will you inspire your audience to become your customer for life?

These questions can be answered with organic content.

Content Marketing is Expensive

Well, kinda. You’ll get what you pay for. More importantly, how much does it cost you to NOT have organic content?

If your social feed is sparse or your blog is wildly outdated, the cost of not converting a lead once they arrive at your website or social media page is something you can’t afford—I guarantee it.

You can get thrifty by utilizing your staff to come up with some ideas for an organic content marketing strategy and you’ll save some money by doing this. But if you’re a business owner or a receptionist, you know how unworkable it can be to have the receptionist writing your blogs and doing social media posts for you.

Need help? We’re here for you. Our team of seasoned writers across all industries from science to lifestyle, personal care and medicine will write your web content, blog or even the next letter to your grandma. Connect with us online or give us a call at (813) 940-5699!

Your Complete Guide to Getting Disapproved Facebook Ads… Approved

Spicy Nugget: Disapproved Facebook Ads Can Get Approved… With Patient Tweaking

The process may lead you into a spiral of frustration and continued disapprovals. While banging on your keyboard might feel like a fantastic outlet for said rage, we don’t recommend it.

-Adam A. Sene, CEO

True story

Recently we set up Facebook ads for a client who sold protein powder. The ad set was disapproved for being “inappropriate,” and when we looked into this it became clear Facebook disapproved the ads because they thought we were selling er,… adult toys.

That’s right, sex toys.

How Facebook thought a canister of PROTEIN POWDER was a sex toy, we have no idea (bots, anyone?) — but this is merely one example in a sea of thousands of situations we’ve seen.

Ads for soaps, hand creams, coffee beans, wellness treatments and even t-shirts were rejected by Facebook advertising team (bots? AI? humans? cyborgs?) for being inappropriate, explicit or flat-out something that “will make others feel bad.” Yes, Facebook cares for your feelings.

Half the time, Eden Ads is hired to handle disapproved Facebook ads for clients who are simply too frustrated to deal with Facebook constantly disapproving sponsored content.

So, you’re not alone, O Frustrated Facebook User. It happens to the best of us.

Just recently we loaded a hand cream ad which was rejected for being “too controversial.” (Ummmh…) But fear not! We have a few tricks up our sleeves we’re happy to share in the hopes that you’re able to get your ad campaigns off and running.

Disapproved Facebook ads: initial Steps for Overturning the No

If your ad isn’t approved, as a first step take an honest look at your ad content—both the visual and the copy. If your ad contains adult content, promotes any kind of violence, nudity, illegal activity, misleading claims or sensationalism it is likely to be flagged and disapproved. We don’t love or agree with all of Facebook’s advertising policies, but you can read them in full here.

Up until September 2020, if your ad graphic contained too much text, it could be disapproved. The tool proposed by Facebok to measure the % of text coverage had been widely criticized for years in the advertising community, on the ground of both advertising fundamentals and pure testing proving Facebook wrong. Facebook finally listened, and gave new advisory guidelines to advertisers. It’s helpful to read them.

Finally, check that your URLs are correct and that your landing page(s), website and link pathways are all functional.

If you move through these troubleshooting steps and still have trouble getting your Facebook ads approved after appealing the decision, read on.

Getting Facebook Ads Approved… WTH Adam, help me out here!

Getting disapproved Facebook ads approved is an art and a science. It’s also a real pain in the butt. Sometimes making a simple change to the ad creative and appealing to Facebook’s bots—I mean, ahem, customer service team—does the trick.

But sometimes, this process just leads you into a spiral of frustration, rage and continued disapprovals. While screaming and banging on your keyboard might feel like a fantastic outlet for said rage, we don’t recommend it.

Instead, try the following (see pictures for illustration).

In the bottom right-hand corner of your Facebook Business Manager platform, click on the Help Desk link.
Then, at the bottom click to “Get Started” with Support.
Select “Policy & Account Security” as your support topic.
Then shout, “Expecto patronum!” (Ok, this step is optional.)
On the next screen, click “Chat with a Representative” and fill out your personal information.
The customer service rep may ask you for the ad ID’s for the specific ads in question. You can provide these preemptively before the chat to save time, or during. To get the Ad ID #’s, return to Ads Manager in a separate tab and add “Ad ID” as a column by using the Customize Columns option.
Select, by Ad ID, the ad account which you’re experiencing the chronic disapprovals, check a few more of their info boxes and voila… “Start Chat.”

We recommend starting the chat polite by being polite, hoping that FB just woke up on the right side of the bed and made a mistake.
Be clear in your description of what the problem is, e.g.: “My ad was disapproved for violating _____ policy, but there is no mention of _____ anywhere in the text, image or on the website. I tried appealing, but it was rejected and it doesn’t appear that anyone actually reviewed my case.”
It isn’t uncommon for these live chat reps to play dumb or act like they can’t do anything. In this case, it may help to take a sterner tone of voice and express some degree of disappointment that your representative is useless

If through this course of action you find your ads STILL are not approved, we’re sorry to say you’ll have to delete the campaign and start from scratch.

O Facebook, Why Are Thou So Difficult?

Sometimes Facebook can be a real doozy to work with, but we put up with it because it’s an otherwise fantastic advertising platform that allows seriously precise targeting based on audience behavior that exists literally nowhere else on the internet.

If you’re struggling with disapproved Facebook ads and want some help with campaigns that will literally blow your mind with the return on ad spend (ROAS), or even if you just want some free advice from our expert team, we’re happy to chat with you. Give us a call at (813) 940-5699 or send us a message here.

Digital Marketing: You Don’t Know Anything, So Test Everything

Spicy Nugget: In Digital Marketing, Test Everything

“Just because you tested something once doesn’t mean you discovered a new Law of Physics. Don’t get cocky and equate a win with a rule that works under any and every circumstance. You don’t have the next Nobel Prize in the bag just yet!

-Adam A. Sene, CEO

When it comes to marketing campaigns, test everything: special offers, landing pages, keywords, creatives, all of it. Nothing is certain until tested. Even then it may only be certain for that specific set of variables.

Offer A worked and Offer B worked, but both offers together in the same ad may create confusion.

Then again, maybe not… So test everything.”

Let’s talk about your brilliant marketing ideas.

You know, the ones where in your mind you thought something like, “I’ve got it! I’ll target women in Tulsa like I did before with much success, but this time I’ll use a picture of a baby. Holding a kitten! They won’t be able to resist my products then.” And you practically booked a one-way ticket to the Maldives because you expected your retirement to come early, right?

Wham. Turns out that brilliant marketing idea… Well it didn’t really work out, did it? But why?

Rule #1: Every Single Thing You Do in Marketing is a Test

Any marketer that’s been at it for a long time will tell you—coming up with new “bright” ideas for marketing is both tiring and kind of useless. The reason it’s exhausting is because most great ideas sound great in theory, but usually they don’t pan out all that well.

“Wow, you guys are so negative,” you say.

Ok, fine. Let’s say you had a great idea and it did pan out. Woo hoo! The baby holding a kitten targeting women in Tulsa WORKED! So you take that same exact formula and you target women in Denver instead of Tulsa. Wham. Failure. What does this mean?

All it means is you got a little over-excited, and you need to keep testing. Don’t assume that your first idea is your best one. Try it against some different parameters, a different audience or a refreshed creative, and continue to try new things.

Everything is a test, and everything must be watched carefully for performance. If it’s working, do more of it. If it’s not working, well… duh.

Be especially careful with agencies who don’t admit to this fact, but be even more careful with agencies who tell you that “failure is inevitable.” Testing, optimizing and scaling an ads budget can be a rapid fire activity and you shouldn’t be experiencing months of financial loss. (If you are, please let us do a free account audit.)

Rule #2: Testing Produces Data, Not Laws

The results of a single test do not make a rule that applies to everything.

If you tested an ad with success using landing page A, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work on landing page B. You have to test it.

Your targeting parameters may have worked with that one design, one audience, pointed at that one landing page. It may not work on all audiences, all the time.

Testing produces results and data. Testing does not produce laws. If you test with success, fantastic. Identify what worked if you can, scale your budget and keep on testing.

Avoid Dumpster Fires (Like This One!)

You Don't Know Anything... So Test Everything in Marketing | Eden Ads As you come up with brilliant ideas, you might start to see these bleed together in your campaigns. For example, you saw some great results using a five-star customer testimonial. Great! You also concurrently saw great results with an ad using starburst graphics and the words “Free Lunch.” And in yet another test, you told your company story and it worked even better, and another with a picture of your CEO in a diaper, and so on, and so on.

Condense everything that ever worked into a single promotional campaign, and before you know it you’ve got ALL of those things in one super ugly, muddled message piece of garbage. (Like this one!) Your dumpster fire of a design will likely have become too convoluted and complex with too much to look at, all of which undermines the campaign message completely.

As a rule of thumb for campaign design of all kinds, always simplify the message. Something clean and easy to understand beats out all of those “great ideas,” and certainly all of them combined.

In Digital Marketing, Test Everything

We believe everything in marketing is a test. We don’t claim to know it all, and this sense of explorative willingness is what drives us to constantly improve, keep learning and do better for our clients. If you’re tired of not seeing results and need some support, give us a shout. We’d love to help!

6 Business Tips for Surviving the COVID-19 Pandemic

You don’t need another article telling you about the specifics of the coronavirus pandemic. If you’re living in the same world we are, you’re probably all too aware of what’s happening all around you. Operating a business under the circumstances of stay-home orders, state lock downs and major business closures is stressful and challenging to say the least.

Essential COVID-19 Business Tips

These 6 steps are simple, effective ways you can ensure your business survives this pandemic. All entrepreneurs, business owners and e-commerce professionals can act on these now, from the comfort and safety of a home office, to positively impact your business immediately and create lasting, positive effects once “normalcy” is resumed.

1. Continue promoting as much as you can.

If you sell online, this is a no-brainer. Use ads on Facebook, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn and other platforms to let the world know you’re open for business. Offer incentives and discounts to buy now. Those who are hurting financially will appreciate discounts which help them obtain services and products they need to continue their lives and their businesses. This will help them as much as it helps you.

If you don’t sell online, you should still promote offers online that are good for some months. Use creative design and messaging to make these look like coupons or vouchers. You’ll need those people to buy from you when you open your doors.

2. Take this opportunity to update your website and your social media pages.

Make the fixes you’ve been meaning to make. Update your profile and header images, spruce up your “About” copy with fresh content and create posts which promote your discounts and specials. Consider also a regular cadence of social media posting which educates, entertains and provides value to your audience. Americans are on their computers and mobile devices now more than ever.

3. Crate an email campaign (it can be as simple as a series of 5 email messages) and send your entire database.

While you may be aiming to promote and sell as a priority, be sure to diversify the content you send by including relevant information about your industry, news, tips, guidance as well as products, services and discounts. Produce and send content that might help them in any way during this crisis.

4. Contact your customer database and thank them for being your customers.

Give customers an update on what’s happening with your business. Offer them something that might help them if you can, but even a simple communication from the CEO expressing understanding and compassion for what they might be experiencing will resonate with them. You’ll be surprised at what you get back from a genuine, heartfelt communication.

5. Do everything you can to promote your company and tackle backlogs that require your attention.

Address that long-forgotten to do list and wrap up all the things that need to be squared away. Consider this time an opportunity to become more prepared for delivery, sales and production than ever before. Being prepared for when things get back to normal is something your future self will thank you for.

6. Lastly, because we are following the same advice that we’re giving you: If you need any help with any of the promotional activities outlined here, please reach out.

We’re here to help. Eden Court Advertising Co. provides expert service, marketing strategy and account management which will help you promote your business and gain a positive return on your investment. That’s all we do—help you make more sales and profit.

If you’d like to get 5 to 7 times the return on your ad dollars, speak with one of our marketing consultants and find out how we can help you.

And if you really have no budget for advertising right now with everything going on, we’re happy to jump on a call with you and talk through some strategy or offer any other ideas we might have.

Call us at -727-366-1243 to set something up, or send us a note and let us know how you’re doing. We’re stronger when we work together. Wishing you much success!