Our Top 5 Christmas Advertising & Marketing Tips.

 

1. Facebook turns traditional Christmas advertising rules on its head.  Usually at Christmas, most businesses (unless a retailer with Boxing Day or New Years Day sales to promote, a bar or club, travel agent or have a business within the Travel/Leisure industry). Most types of businesses i.e. Motors, Property, Business, Recruitment etc. Opt out of advertising over the Festive period. Mainly due to most people being off on annual leave or visiting family members and being away during the festive break. 

However, Facebook advertising turns the normal rules of advertising at Christmas on it's head. Mainly due to the fact that when people are off work at Christmas - what do you think they are doing? Correct!  They are being active on Facebook.  We trialled this during Christmas last year and found our Facebook page to receive double if not triple the number of Facebook "likes" we would normally receive within a day. This obviously had a dip on the morning of the 1st of January and again when the country returned to work after the new year break.

If you are in the hotel or leisure industry with Festive Events/Festive Menus to promote - We have a fantastic way to promote these on Facebook.

https://www.facebook.com/corriedmarketing/app_379922265412301

2.  Think about your Christmas & New Year advertising well in advance as you don't want to cancel or have cancellation fee's for leaving it too late if you don't want to advertise over Christmas. If however, you are looking to advertise over Christmas, most businesses start organising these campaigns after the summer. Make sure you book your ads early to guarantee a position well in advance, especially within local and national press as the newspapers drop in pagination - if you leave it too late to book they might not have space available to accommodate your needs.

3.    Identify your target market and place yourself in their shoes. What will they be doing at Christmas? Target your advertising and marketing campaigns and budgets accordingly.

4.  Use themes i.e. Christmas or New Years Day across your Social Media Network, Marketing &  Advertising campaigns. Be seen as a fun place to be and work.

5.  Send a Christmas Card or even better, a Corporate Gift - as a token of your appreciation i.e. bottle of wine or box of chocolates to clients. (Even if these are to a small minority of your clients). E.g. Top 10 Spending Clients. Let them know that you value and appreciate their business.

What are your top tips for Christmas?

FacebookTimeline Apps/Tabs how to use them to maximise ROI

Facebook Timeline Tips & Tricks from Corrie D Marketing

How to use the tabs/apps on Timeline to promote and showcase your portfolio of products and services! 

We absolutely adore the new changes to Timeline Facebook which came into effect for every business page owner on 30th March 2012.

Facebook now gives you a fantastic opportunity to create customised tabs/apps (running directly along the top of your page under your cover image).

If you think of these tabs/apps as prime advertising positions running along the top of your page (premium position) you have two standard tabs "photos & likes." Each page receives these two tabs on the Facebook Timeline layout.

We trust you will see you have 4 tabs running along the top and a further 8 tabs running below, when you click the arrow total = 12 tabs. You can look at our example Facebook Apps/Tabs you will see our 12 visible tabs however we have 24 tabs in total the remaining 12 are invisible to visitors unless we move them into the top 12.

You can move these tabs.  If you don't know how to move your tabs around, you need to click on the drop down arrow to the right to expand your tabs and then right click on the top right hand corner of the tab - a pencil icon should come up on the top right hand corner, click it and a drop down menu of your other tabs/apps should be showing. Click the name of the tab from the drop down menu you want to swap with. Taaa-Daaaa! You should now have successfully switched your tabs around!

Tabs/apps can be used to as a portfolio of your services. The first tab on every page is the "photos" tab (you cannot switch this tab postition) but you can move your "likes". Our first two tabs are points of reference for our target audience (page owners/page admins) as we want to ensure that our target market to use our page is a useful reference point to keep coming back and paying return visits. WE create customised tabs/apps for companies (please click on the highlighted links) to view our own Facebook page as an example  Facebook Timeline Guide and a Facebook Marketing Live Stream

Example - we carry out 360 Degree Panoramic Virtual Tours ideally suited to the Travel, Tourism and Leisure Industry. We then embed these into customised tabs/apps we create for our clients Facebook and we also embed these into your website.

Customised tabs allow you to showcase your portfolio of services, we call this your marketing collateral, which we create for our clients. We have used our own page to showcase these, as an example of how you can market your company/brand online.

Marketing Collateral 

360 Degree Panoramic Virtual Tours - perfectly suited to the Travel, Tourism and Leisure industries eg. Marinas, Hotels, Property Developers and Holiday Park Owners. We can then embed the VT's within your website & within a customised Facebook App/Tab within your Facebook page. Virtual Tours offer a truly world wide platform once embedded within your Facebook and website. We can even insert speaker icons to make it a virtual guided tour (which is effectively open 24/7.  You can see an example in our Marina VT (Portavadie Marina Virtual Tour)

3D Gallery walls is another of our services we carried out for a number of our clients i.e. Magna Carte Barge and Portavadie Apartments. By using the slider along the bottom you can move the 3D Gallery wall to click on images you want to highlight. We trust you will see the image opens into a larger image on it's own and can then be made full screen size. An ideal way to show 250 images which saves users having to scroll through endless photos'/images which can become tedious and boring.

e-Brochures are a perfect way to get your offline brochure online. You may already have e-Brochures embedded within your website as a Downloadable PDF however we do not recommend this as the more steps/actions you ask visitors to take to your website, the less likely they are to carry it out - due to the distractive nature of internet browsing (incoming emails/Facebook etc).  Therefore it's much easier for visitors to view your brochure online as a 3D interactive page flip e-brochure as opposed to a downloadable PDF. We can even embed your YouTube videos into these. If you see click the link to our Jeuneusse Example https://www.facebook.com/corriedmarketing/app_194234897346125

We also recommend you post to your page with industry relevant content and post often, using the 80/20 rule. 80% sharing content, 20% selling your own product/service. Facebook advise posting approximately 3-4 times per week. You can analyse using your Facebook Insights the best times to post by trying various times to post as we believe the best times to post will be different based on the type of business ie B2B or B2C.

Facebook recommends the best times to post are at weekends when engagement with Facebook is high as Mon-Fri most people are in work however if you're a B2B and targeting owners this might not necessarily be the same result.

You can be as creative as you want to be with the apps/tabs we custom design.  If you have an idea of a customised tab/app for your business let us know what it is and we will create one for you as we can do almost ANYTHING on Facebook Apps within your new Facebook Timeline Fan Page and we mean literally anything !!!  From single promotion apps to a fully fledged website or store (YES you heard that right -  a full website !!! ) or any part thereof, and like gate, invite gate, share gate it, and make your promotion, contest, new product launch, new service or whatever you are marketing or promoting, GO VIRAL and sell on Facebook.

If you would like to book any of our services please call Corrie-Dee Whaite, Corrie D Marketing on Tel 01294 559480 or Mob 07411 170758.

Corrie D Marketing February Review

Who has the Passion For Fashion? Roll on next week when two of our favourite magazines get published. 

The fabulous Scottish bi-monthly "Scottish Woman" magazine is one of our all time favourites. It's only been running in Scotland for approximately seven years but its full of fascinating articles, a travel section with unbiased travel advice and a fantastic homes interiors section, not to mention there passion for fashion! We were pleased to help out with the B2B advertising sales in the March/April edition by carrying out personal sales on there behalf. 
http://www.scottishwomanmagazine.com/

After a few hours of selling, we successfully sold two pages! An amazing achievement as one of them was to one of the world’s most exclusive resorts based in Ayrshire. Turnberry, A Luxury Collection Resort, Scotland. http://www.turnberryresort.co.uk/  

The second page was sold to Chairs & Beds, who is advertising within the Homes & Interiors section. They offer demonstrations within the comfort of your own home for reclining chairs and beds to the mobility market. However they have recently moved into the bespoke custom built sofas and settees market (previously known as Scottish Mobility) and is currently re-branding to the new name. T 0800 056 1886.

Bavaria Scotland Charters used our consultancy advice back in November/December regards promoting there summer tours in the Spring issues targeting newspapers & magazines in the UK but finally decided to target the female Scottish market. They booked two full pages in colour, running in the same March/April edition of the magazine. They organise bareboat charters, skippered charters and corporate events on their stunning Bavaria Yachts. Whisky Distillery Tours and & Island Tours throughout the Scottish Isles and further afield, throughout Summer. As we were booking the space advertising space for them for there ad and editorial to appear in Scottish Woman Magazine, we got chatting to the owner of the magazine and acquired Scottish Woman as our newest client! http://www.bavariascotlandcharters.co.uk/

Are you thinking of buying a Franchise?  Looking for impartial advice? Then London based Bi-monthly "Franchise World magazine" is for you and  is available by subsription. They have a fantastic range of Franchise Advisors, Finance &  Business Consultants that specialise in Franchising but most importantly Franchisors looking to recruit Franchisees. The March/April issue is running a  eature on the NEC Birmingham Franchise Exhibition. We are running our own advertising campaign within this title as we are aiming to target the franchising industry. http://www.franchiseworld.co.uk/

We would like to take this opportunity to wish to our clients and media partners all the best success for the future.  Already we know March is looking to be an amazing month due to all the developments with the new Facebook Timeline for pages recently being announced. We would like to wish our good friend Barry Pontin Concepts all the best of luck with his new business venture and hope he is settling in okay down South. We would also like to wish Maria a speedy recovery and we're all hoping you get better soon.

Whats been happening with your business in February? Did you have any good news and success stories you can share with us... It's all doom and gloom in the newspapers therefore we thought we'd like to hear about any inspirational good business stories or contracts you have secured lateley? Please feel free to share with us we'd be happy to hear how things are going especially the success stories - We "like" those :)

6 Reasons why it’s important have a “like” page and banner ad on a business profile!

It's time to GET SOCIAL!

1)      A “LIKE” page is sometimes known as "LIKE Gaiting!" Also known as a welcome, landing page for non fans.  It gives visitors a reason to “like” your page. Once they have liked your page they can access your wall etc and engage in the conversation and interact with your brand. It's quite difficult to get visitors to "like" your page, if you're eg an accountants or car repairs. A pub/club or restaurant is much easier to "LIKE".

2) A personal profile is easier to engage and interact as you can actively make friends requests however it is against Facebook rules to use a personal profile page to promote a business. If you have the new timeline layout it also flags a warning that businesses should not use timeline to promote brands with logos etc. We wouldn't recommend doing this as they are both different and have various restrictions ie you can't add friends to a business page, but you can't advertise a personal page on Facebook Ads. You have to rely on visitors opting in to "like" your page and follow your posts.  Hence why we advise having the "Like" page. It looks professional and can be customised with your branding, logo's etc.

3)      A banner ad appears down the side of your Facebook business profile page,which will replace your profile pic (If this is your logo, please change this to ad ad and make this space work for you). Think of your Facebook business page as real estate and this is a prime location to promote and advertise your company services. Again this should be branded.  A picture of your logo is doing nothing for you. It doesn’t tell visitors to your site anything. It’s a logo!  Having an ad  is very important as its FREE! Facebook DO NOT charge you for your banner ad to appear up there. It should ideally, list the services you offer, it will have good copy content (remember AIDA the basic advertising rules when writing ad copy) Attention, Interest, Desire, Action.  A call to action  will be your web address and telephone number. This ad appears on all your pages ie welcome page, photos, wall etc.

4)     Once you have a great looking page you can start advertising on Facebook Ads relatively cheaply as opposed to traditional forms of media ie local and national press. We recommend approx 100 likes and ensure you have a vanity URL, banner ad and like page, to get as much value as possible from your Facebook advertising and business profile.  Facebook advertising is 11% cheaper in the UK than any other country, there are also ways you can keep your advertising costs down by upto 45% by remaining within Facebook ie using the Facebook Ad campaign to link to your Facebook business profile page as opposed to an external URL to a website. Again another reason why it's so important to have a GREAT looking page. It's even better than a website as IT'S LIVE AND IT'S RIGHT NOW...!!!


5)  Use insights to enable you to  monitor and analyse what posts your tribe (fans) react to most, best times for posting etc. You can also monitor your ad spend using Facebook ads, as these are live you can pause and stop. You can create multiple ad campaigns (remember to name them all differently to stop any confustion when analysing the success rate of each campaign). You can  measure your ROI by asking every enquiry you receive how did you hear about us. Most Facebook enquiries will message on Facebook however we have had calls and visits to our website but they originally found out about us through Facebook. By using Google Analytics in conjunction with Facebook Insights you can monitor the traffic Facebook directs to your website from your advertising campaigns by analysing the data over the same time period or you can compare it by doing a control test when the website relied purely on organic traffic without facebook ads.

6) It's always best if you have an idea in mind of an end goal or target ie to achieve e.g. target is to get from 112 to 500 likes, or it could be to generate £X amount of sales on your website (if you have an e- commerce site) or if you don't have an e-commerce site it could purely be to drive traffic to your website. As this way you have a benchmark that you can use to monitor and analyse your advertising. 

If you require any help or assistance with any of the above you can visit our website www.corriedmarketing.co.uk or www.facebook.com/corriedmarketing/

How Can Social Media Help Franchisor and Franchisees alike?

How Can Social Media Help Franchisors and Franchisees alike?

Are you too busy selling your franchises and promoting your own products & services,
that you take your eye off the ball when it comes to your marketing and advertising?

What are the 2 major concerns keeping you awake at night?

1. Is it lack of franchisees? Or is your competition gaining an edge?
2. Or it could be that you don’t have the time or technical understanding or knowledge of the wide range of marketing & advertising techniques that are available to you?

You know you need it and want it. You understand that you’re franchise will be left behind your competition if you don’t do it. WE ARE HERE TO HELP! By offering you high quality, yet cost effective social media & marketing solutions.

We understand franchising has the 3 sides to the business - the franchisor, the franchisee and the product/service! Our services help you sell your franchises to franchisees, we can also assist each individual franchise and finally we can help you both in promoting the brand, product/service.

Now businesses have more media choices than ever before and making the right decision is crucial to your business. We are a Social Network Media Management & Marketing Consultancy, specialising in Franchising and the Retail sector with twenty year’s marketing experience. Eight years within the Franchise industry and twelve within Retail.

Social Media is not a fad and it’s not going away any time soon. Theworld's largest social networking site “Facebook” is currently the second most visited site after Google and recently surpassed a record 800 million active users in one day. Users now devote more time to Facebook than any other website, with their favourite pass time being uploading pictures, spending a total of 53.5 billion minutes a month on the world's largest social, networking site. This is far ahead of sites like Twitter & Blogger etc. Users cumulatively devote 723 million minutes a month. Twitter, receives 565 million minutes of users time per month and LinkedIn, which claims 325 million minutes per month. Yahoo, the second
most popular web brand overall, receives just half as much of users' time as followed by Google (12.5 billion minutes, which does not include the 9.1 billion minutes people spent on
YouTube).

If your company wants to embrace social media we would recommend setting up a business page on
the 3 main social media sites. These are Facebook, Twitter & Linked In. However some industry experts predictnot for long. Google+ is a new contender in the social media landscape. With Google’s new search results changing which now include Google+ Search plus Your World, means that search results are now being heavily influenced by Google+. With over 3 billion searches per day on Google, it’s poised to explodethis year. Newfigures recently released show Google+ growth accelerating. It
recently Passed 62 million users. Adding 625, 000 new users per day. Predicting that by the end of 2012 that this figure will jump to 400 million. Google+ could now be a serious contender. Previously we believed that companies did not have the time to do all of these social media sites properly due to time restraints, but with the addition of another new social media site, time spent on these sites has now been reduced even more.

Why Facebook? Facebook is the second most used site after Google. Currently hit a record 800 million active users in one day. We set up customised and branded Facebook Business Fan Pages, for your company with a Welcome/Landing Page for non- fans to land on which is also known as “like gaiting”. This gives visitors to your page a reason to “like” your page and engage with your brand. Facebook pages are a more intimate and direct marketing channel. They are instant and up to date. It can even be more up to date than a website as it’s RIGHT NOW!

Our award winning graphic designer will really make your company fan page stand out by
creating a banner advertisement which will appear on all of your franchise pages as well as your own, these can all be designed in the exact same style, font, type, colours etc. Protecting the brand and corporate identity by adhering to your brand guidelines. The banner advert replaces your
business profile picture but with minor changes to the copy content eg each franchisee would have different contact details, we can insert the Geographical area or postcode area they cover or we
can change the address, email, telephone number, website etc. The banner ad appears within all of your Facebook pages on your profile e.g.welcome page, wall, photos etc. We can also brand your “like” page designs sothat they are all the exact same or can be individually designed to suit each franchisee because it’s all the one company designing for everyone’s business/brand/product or service they can all be in keeping with one another. We can also create pages and skins using your corporate branding within all the other social media sites eg Twitter, You Tube etc.

We understand the different social media sites there audiences and there media consumption.
We can assist you to set up whichever social sites you prefer, whether its “You Tube” to post videos for your business or perhaps if you’re in the music industry Flowd or Soundcloud are better suited to your needs, to get your music heard! We follow your prospect’sonline journey, using Google Analytics and Facebook Insights our comprehensive understanding and knowledge of analytics and the power of knowing when to post (the best times) and what content your fans/tribe react to HELPING YOU GENERATE RESULTS. We are a target-led results driven company and would advise at the outset before embarking on a social media campaign to have a goal or target in
mind of what you want to achieve ie 100 likes in 3 months, to drive traffic to your website, or to increase sales. If you would like a chat regarding the options available to you please call Corrie
Now for details! Tel: 012924 559480 or Mob: 07411 170758