Content Marketing, Facebook Ads Archives

26 Mar 2020

Sticky Post By Ana Cristina Posted in Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Facebook Ads Permalink

Marketing Strategies For Cleaning Companies During The Coronavirus Outbreak

Sticky Post By Ana Cristina On March 26, 2020

As Coronavirus (COVID-19) cases worldwide continue to rise, businesses have been struggling to maintain their operations… except for commercial cleaners.

Professional cleaning of all kinds of facilities, from healthcare to food production, has taken on new urgency. Concerns over the rapid spread of the virus have put cleanliness first in everyone’s mind, creating explosive demand for commercial cleaning services.

Check out this graph measuring interest in the search terms “commercial cleaning” and “office cleaning” on Google. A value of 100 is peak popularity. “Commercial cleaning” went from a 75% interest in the past 12 months to a 100% interest rate in the last month, with “office cleaning” increasing from 50% to 90%.

Source: Google Trends

Here’s another example of search results for these and related terms in the United States for the past 90 days:

Source: Google Trends

While demand is skyrocketing, Coronavirus also creates new challenges for marketers, who must switch from their traditional marketing channels and activities to approaches focused on online platforms that can help their businesses survive for the long haul.

Here are some of the marketing strategies we’ve been implementing with our commercial cleaning clients to retain current customers and to ensure a steady flow of new customers during the Coronavirus outbreak:

1. Communication with your current and potential customers

Retention is critical at this time and is crucial as a cleaning company to keep your clients updated, to set expectations, and to let them know you’re still in business and ready to serve them.

It is crucial to maintain communication with existing clients, reminding them of the power of your products and services and take advantage of the opportunity that some customers will be interested in adding more days to their cleaning contracts.

Communication with your current franchisees and employees is also essential since they could be afraid of losing their income. They are putting their health on the line to continue working, so they should feel a sense of support from the company and motivation to keep moving forward.

2. Content is king

During the Coronavirus pandemic, content marketing is one of the most effective ways to stay in touch with current and potential customers, promoting your products and services.

Generate valuable information such as recommendations and cleaning protocols for businesses and individuals to avoid the spread of the virus and to keep their workplaces as clean as possible.

Through content marketing, you have the opportunity to showcase the value of your company differentiating from others with the competitive value of your products and the awards and recognitions your business has received so far.

Videos from your senior staff are a great way to gain the trust of your audience, as well as educational infographics and blog posts; all shared through social media or email newsletters.

3. Optimize your Google My Business profile

Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool for companies to manage their online presence across Google. It is a simple way to make your business more discoverable, but most importantly, to stand out from the crowd.

Having a fully optimized listing in Google My Business is crucial for local SEO (search engine optimization) because it enables your listing to appear in local search results for queries specific to your products or services.

Due to the Coronavirus outbreak, many businesses have updated their profiles with their current business hours, clarifying closures, and limited service, as well as any other changes in their schedule due to ongoing restrictions.

4. An opportunity with online advertising

Many PPC advertisers are pausing their campaigns amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Google Adwords is usually very competitive in the commercial cleaning industry, and the cost per click can generally be very high. However, that’s not the case right now. Costs have come down, fewer competitors are advertising on Google Ads, and there’s a high demand for keywords like “disinfectant,” “cleaning services,” and “office cleaning.”

Get ahead of the game and use this opportunity to position yourself at the top of Google search results.

5. Video conferencing with your potential customers

If you’ve mostly done your business in person until now, you already know you’ve got to adapt… fast.

People across the United States are firing up video conferences to relocate meetings due to Coronavirus.

Commercial cleaners take notice; this is an excellent strategy for these challenging times. There are video conferencing options, with Zoom, Google Hangouts Meet, and Skype among the most popular.

Conclusion

The Coronavirus has affected the economy worldwide, and of course, we hope it will end soon with the least possible further impact.

While many businesses are affected by the pandemic, there are opportunities for those providing services in renewed demand. In these challenging times, no opportunities should be overlooked.

Despite the fact that many customers are canceling or putting their contracts on hold, we’ve never seen such high demand with the cleaning companies we are working with, not only for recurring services but for one-time services as well.

Use these strategies to build your business, and if you’re looking for experts to help, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re ready to take on the challenge of building your commercial cleaning marketing strategy.

Sources:

16 Jul 2019

Sticky Post By Alejandra Vasquez Posted in 2018, Content Marketing, marketing goals, Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Facebook Ads Permalink

New To Marketing? Here’s a Guide for Creating an Initial Strategy That Will Set Your Business For Success: Part 1

Sticky Post By Alejandra Vasquez On July 16, 2019

Beginning marketing efforts for a new or existing brand can be quite hard, especially if you don’t know where to start. With so much content that can be found in social media channels, podcasts, websites and pretty much anywhere in the web it’s very easy to get lost.

That’s why we’ve decided to put together this guide to help you succeed in your marketing journey. The following are the steps we take into consideration when building marketing campaigns for our clients. We’re quite certain that if you do these steps right you will set your business for success!

1. First And Foremost, Define Your Target Market:

For marketing to pay off, start by understanding who your target market is. Many businesses make the mistake of believing their product or offer is for everyone, but in reality, the better you understand the market segment your ideal customers are in, the more effective marketing will be.

The best way to define your target market is by understanding why existing customers bought your product. You can use some of these criteria to help organize your findings:

Sources: QuickSprout & Oberlo

Start by gathering general information, and then get as specific as possible. If you sell laptops, for example, are they for children? Students, professionals? Try to narrow down who your product attracts, the problem it solves and who it is solving for; “professionals” is good. “Graphic designers” is better.

After getting a clear idea of your target market, move on to creating buyer personas.

2. Create A SWOT Analysis:

You need to know where your company and brand stands in the market. A SWOT analysis can give you and your team a clear vision of your:

You should also apply SWOT to your competitors: their market share, value proposition, pricing, whether they’re conducting marketing efforts or not, and anything that helps you identify opportunities to leverage your company, reach a higher audience, and- most importantly- how to address your market, which begins when you…

3. Create Your Elevator Pitch:

The concept of the “elevator pitch” has been growing in popularity because it helps you build a short, concise framework of your business goals. Startups use their elevator pitch to find potential investors and most importantly sell their ideas as should you and your team, this will help everyone get aligned with your product and sales approach.

Your customer should have a very clear idea of the problem your product or service solves in less than 30 seconds. Catching people’s attention gets more difficult by the day; that is why it’s so important for you and your team to efficiently communicate your product/service’s message.

How do you create an elevator pitch?

Identify the problem or market needs- then, the solution- your idea!
Be straightforward and emotionally compelling in your language – give facts are impactful to your audience. Make them believe in your cause.
Know your audience and speak to them personally- address their pain points, and they’ll identify with your offer.
Identify your product or service – be specific and measurable.
Remember, the point of the elevator pitch is to keep it BRIEF – 30 seconds is a good guideline.

Here’s an example of applying these principles to a great elevator pitch.

“Don’t you hate how lazy and out of shape hamsters are these days? But there aren’t any gyms for small rodents, and personal trainers are expensive. The Ham 2000 is great for hamster moms and dads- a tiny full-body exercise machine they can put right in their hamster cage and get on with their day. Plus, it’s adorable!”

4. Create A Brand Identity Book And Give Your Brand a Personality:

Most business don’t believe this is an important step in their marketing strategy – not only is it vital, but it’s essential to do it as early in the life of your brand as possible!

If you want your brand to have instant recognition out the door, you need an eye-catching brand personality that conveys your culture and product.

A brand personality book establishes the consistent rules and principles that will guide your brand identity – for example, a small family of fonts that will always be used, color schemes for product livery or logos, aesthetic guidelines, etc. Visuals are one of the fastest and most instinctive ways humans accept- or reject- new experiences. Give your brand a personality and stay true to it.

Developing your brand’s personality will not only make sure branding stays consistent across your team, creating it requires you to take a long, thoughtful look at what you want your brand identity to be – and how you want it represented to the world.

5. Create a Website Or Landing Page:

If your audience can be found online, you need a website or landing page. Period.

First of all let’s start off by understanding the main difference between a website and a landing page. Landing pages are built to drive traffic for a specific marketing campaign, the main purpose of a landing page is to make the visitors focus on the intent on the page that could for instance be “Schedule a tour to our facilities”, “Purchase THIS product” etc. It should only have content that is specific to the offer, product, or service. A landing page has no distractions and should be designed to convert the user or take them one step down your marketing funnel.

A website on the other hand is a group of pages designed to help visitors coming to a website and drive the desire to navigate all or most of its content in order to build interest in a product or service.

A great, navigable site is one of the biggest customer trust indicators. Building a great site is challenging, but following these principles will help a lot:

Set a timeline and due date: This is fundamental – if you don’t set a completion timeline, you won’t complete it.
Define the hosting platform: if you have your own developers, great! If not, there are plenty of supported-DIY hosts like Wix, SquareSpaces or Webflow.
Have a plan: don’t jump into sitebuilding without design goals. Will your site have a shopping cart? A Contact Us section? What do you want visitors to see first?

Start by defining your website’s navigation – main menu and footer.

Stick to your previous work: Make sure that during the creation of your website you have on your top-of-mind your buyer persona, brand book/personality and your elevator pitch.
Design: start creating your website’s wireframes – a rough blueprint of your site and page layout. There are plenty of free, online tools to help you build one, but a map on your whiteboard or even pen and paper is fine! Define where you want to place titles, texts, images, call to action buttons and any other expected features.
Create prototypes: Develop and test your prototypes or final design pieces- but always test and preview before you go public!
Review: The last step is extremely important! Show your final prototypes to a useful sampling of visitors for feedback and bug-hunting: a small group of trusted, existing customers is great for this. Always be open to clear, constructive feedback!
Iterate as necessary.

Building an initial marketing strategy is way too big a subject to do it justice in just one blog post! In 2 weeks, we’ll dig even deeper into the next steps. Stay tuned!

Does creating a marketing strategy by yourself seem too daunting? Get in touch with us. We’re passionate about marketing strategy, great advertising, creative content, fun design, and helping people succeed in telling their brand’s story.

Sources:

11 Mar 2019

Sticky Post By Ana Cristina Posted in Content Marketing, Content Marketing, Facebook Ads, Digital Marketing, Digital Marketing, Facebook Ads, marketing Permalink

Are You New To Facebook Dynamic Creatives?

Sticky Post By Ana Cristina On March 11, 2019

Here’s Everything You Need To Know

Dynamic creatives allow advertisers to create and deliver different combinations of ads, finding the perfect match of headline, text, image, description, and call-to-action that are more relevant and engaging to their audience.

How do Facebook dynamic creatives work?

Take John, who lives in Miami. John has never really thought about his eating habits but has decided today that he’d like to lose some weight because his “date jeans” don’t fit anymore.

There’s also Laura, who also lives in Miami, and enjoys eating healthy and exercising every day. Laura should probably teach John about portion control, and John could probably help Laura not be so maddeningly perfect. But that’s another story.

Then there’s YOU: the owner of a health food company doing business in the Miami area. You want your marketing material to deliver a message to John AND Laura that will resonate with them, but it may not be realistic in your marketing budget to design a “John-type ad” and a “Laura-type ad”- to say nothing of your other market segments- from scratch. You know messaging is never one-size-fits-all, and that different audiences will respond to individual creative elements- image, copy, timing- differently as well.

It sure would be great to get that all done in one shot!

Here’s where dynamic creatives come in handy. Using them, you’re able to test different creative components to define which combinations give you the best response- mixing and matching creatives and testing the various combos, all live. This lets you maximize the value from Facebook ads budget.

Remember that dynamic creatives are different from dynamic ads– this tool is for testing a variety of creatives around the SAME product. Dynamic ads retarget users with different products.

So, how do you do it?

Step #1:

Source: Facebook

Step #2:

Source: Facebook

Step #3:

Source: Facebook

Let’s see how to create dynamic creatives:

When you create a new campaign on Facebook, after selecting the objective and name of your campaign, go to Ad Set and turn on the “Dynamic Creative” button.

After selecting your audience, placements, budget, and schedule, continue to the next section to edit your ads.

In “Media,” you’re able to add up to 10 images, videos or slideshows. Add ALL the visual creatives you want to test in dynamic ads.

Then, you’re able to add up to 5 texts, headlines, link descriptions, and calls to action as shown below. Again, add all such copy that you want to test, in any combination.

There’s a maximum of assets in each category for a dynamic ad campaign:

Image or video/slideshow: maximum of 10 images or 10 videos
Headline: maximum of 5 titles
Text: maximum of 5 bodies of text
Description: maximum of 5 descriptions
Call to action: maximum of 5 CTAs

When you finish editing your dynamic creatives, click Confirm to publish your campaign.

Facebook will automatically generate multiple combinations of your creatives, varying the mash-up to assure each asset is used at least once.

Pretty cool, right?

Why are dynamic creatives awesome?

Glad you asked. After using this new feature for a number of different client campaigns, we’ve gotten consistently positive results in a few areas:

1. Testing

We’ve actually found that dynamic creatives are a better testing tool than the split testing feature. Seriously! (We were surprised, too.) You can test up to 30 components at the same time while simultaneously measuring efficacy, which is the equivalent of running a couple of dozen split tests (and measuring KPIs over weeks of separate campaigns).

2. Efficiency and budget

Dynamic creatives allow you to learn which assets are performing better, faster, letting you optimize content for the best performing ads and move on to your next project. Getting your best material out sooner means quicker campaign results, which translates to lower costs for running or boosting ads.

3. Mastering personalization

John and Laura from our first example will probably respond to very different content, with the same hopeful outcome- buying your health food. John might be motivated by content emphasizing results- eating right will take the unwanted weight off- whereas Laura will likely respond better to messaging that your health food fits into her existing lifestyle of wellness and self-care. Using dynamic ads will let you try a potentially wide range of combos for John AND Laura, letting you learn how their demographics respond- simultaneously.

Bear in mind also that dynamic creatives aren’t intended as a long-term strategy; this is a research tool, designed to help you quickly sort out what works. As a long-term campaign, it is less effective than a targeted campaign using creatives in combinations that you know to be successful.

Conclusion:

It’s important to highlight again that dynamic creatives are different from dynamic ads. Dynamic creatives are used to find the best ad combination around the same product.

Dynamic creatives, used properly, will let you maximize the value of your Facebook campaigns, and save a lot of time and money. Does it sound great, but overwhelming? Can’t wait to try it, but you don’t have a ton of creatives (or want better ones)? We should talk, right now- we’re passionate about great advertising, creative content, fun design, and helping people succeed in telling their brand’s story.

So, what do you think of dynamic creatives? Have you tried this feature yet?

Sources:

https://www.facebook.com/business/m/facebook-dynamic-creative-ads

https://www.growwithbamboo.com/blog/4-dos-and-a-dont-facebook-dynamic-creative-optimization-best-practices/

https://medium.com/@ayranamongush/5-reasons-to-use-facebook-dynamic-creative-optimization-8687140175e3

16 Jan 2018

Sticky Post By Edgar Guillen Posted in Content Marketing, Facebook Ads With No Comments Permalink

Ask Yourself These Questions Before Launching your next Facebook Ads

Sticky Post By Edgar Guillen On January 16, 2018 With No Comments

Advertising through social media channels is a must have for every marketing campaign worth its salt: it allows us to reach out to the exact demographic at the right moment.

Yet, coming up with brilliant social media ads demands the same level of precision one would use for making tasty macarons. You can’t throw together ingredients (or copy and paste images in our case) in a bowl, toss it in the oven and pray for the best results.

This is especially key when it comes to the social media network all marketers want to master: Facebook. A winning Facebook ad is a balancing game between precise guidelines for text and image, and trying to stand out from others who also want your audience’s attention (including their own friends and family).

How do you do it? With a lot of creativity, and keeping some important considerations in mind that can help you get those much needed clicks. You need to bring your own creativity to the table (sorry, we won’t give you our secret recipe), but we do have some practical advice for you.

Whether you’ve already written some Facebook ads for your next campaign or are in the process of doing so, reflect on your content with these questions before offering it up to the F shaped god. It’ll save you time and earn you money.