Month: June 2022

social_media_management

10 Signs It’s Time to Finally Hire a Social Media Manager

Posted on | by devops
Expert Tips For 10 Signs It’s Time to Finally Hire a Social Media Manager

If you’re a small business owner, an entrepreneur, or a CEO of a start-up, you might have limitations for human resources and funds. As a result, one person may have to deal with a range of tasks in multiple departments while also implementing creative solutions to fit your budget. Regardless of the size of your business, a critical aspect of running a successful company is establishing a robust online presence. In this blog post, we’ll highlight 10 signs telling you it’s time to hire an expert to take over your social media marketing.

What is a Social Media Manager?

A social media manager manages an organization’s online presence by developing strategies, producing great content, analyzing user data, facilitating customer service, and managing projects and campaigns. They are dedicated to your business’s social media marketing and establishing an online presence that’s focused on the goals of your company. They will ensure you’re getting consistent, authentic exposure on your social media channels while driving traffic, leads, and conversion. If some of the reasons listed below apply to you, it’s time to consider hiring a social media manager.

10 Reasons Why You Should Hire a Social Media Manager You’re Busy

Running an organization isn’t easy! There are countless things that require your attention and it’s hard to dedicate time for anything new. The key to running a successful and sustainable business is task delegation. Having an expert devoted to a crucial part of your workload allows you both to do what you do best while sharing a common goal. By hiring a social media manager, you can shave off a few hours from your schedule each week without breaking the bank.

You Lack the Right Tools

The tools for an effective social media marketing campaign require more than just a smartphone with a camera and some rudimentary editing software. Simply posting content on your social media channel gives you the most basic level of online presence, but if you’re looking to increase your follower base and cultivate engagement and interaction, then you need to kick things up a notch. A great social media manager has tools like social media monitoring software to help you understand the success and performance of your content while surfacing ways to improve. They’ll offer metrics of success so you can keep things fresh and tweak your strategy to be as effective as possible.

Little To No Progress

All marketing campaigns are designed to achieve certain goals. Goals for a brand awareness campaign could be getting 30% more followers and increasing engagement by 5%. It’s the same for social media marketing. If you’re investing resources to creating impactful content, the goal would be to attract more followers and have them engage with your brand on your homepage. It’s pretty easy to see whether you’re hitting these goals and if you aren’t, it’s time to hire a social media manager.

No Updates in Real-Time

If you’re managing your social media campaign on your own, using a tool that lets you schedule posts a week or more in advance could save you time. However, this method isn’t as sustainable. A successful channel needs real-time posts and direct engagement with followers. Posting in real-time shows your followers that your brand is relatable, relevant, and open to communication.

Other Revenue Sources Are Being Neglected

Focusing on social media management on top of all of your other responsibilities takes away from effectively running your business. You could miss out on new sources of revenue and if you’re just starting out on social media, it can be challenging to tackle it on your own.

You Aren’t Sure Which Social Media Channel Works Best for You

Facebook, Twitter, Tik Tok, Instagram, and LinkedIn are indeed major platforms for social media marketing, but they’re not the only ones that matter. The list of emerging social media channels that can be useful for small businesses grows and changes with each year. If you’re just starting out, you can run the risk of spreading your resources too thin by targeting several channels. It’s more cost-effective to focus on a few key channels, but knowing which ones work best for your business can be difficult. If you lack the experience or time to assess social media channels and decide which would be the most relevant and impactful for your business, you should consider hiring a social media manager.

You’re Looking to Keep Up with Trends

As seen with Tik Tok’s immense success happening overnight, staying up to date with trends both content and platform-wise keeps your brand relevant to your target audience. If you lack the expertise or time to implement social media marketing strategies in real-time you could miss valuable opportunities.

You Aren’t Able to Commit to Consistency for Each Channel

How often you should post on social media depends on the channel. For Twitter, it’s recommended that you tweet about three times a day, while on Instagram, brands usually post once or twice a day. Frequency is something to keep in mind, but more than anything else, successful social media marketing requires consistency. If you post several times a day, then transition to a few times per week, you will start to lose followers and generate lower engagement per post. To achieve consistency, you must have a clear plan and allocate time to put it into action.

Low Engagement

Communication is one of the main reasons why consumers love interacting with their favorite brands on social media. They’re able to chat, DM, or comment with brand ambassadors to ask questions or learn more about the company’s culture. If you’re busy managing other tasks and don’t have the time to reply to messages, you could be losing customers. You need someone who can be present and engaging to keep the conversation going.

You Want to Create a Community Around Your Brand

A robust community gives modern brands an edge that can’t be replicated. Anyone can repost content from a competitor, and guarantee expedited shipping, or drop-ship products, but true social media fandom is unique. Creating a community doesn’t happen by just posting on your social media channel, it’s about engagement, social awareness, and having an open dialogue with your customers. Building a community takes dedication and you need an expert to cultivate it.

Conclusion

Although a new investment can be daunting at first, hiring a dedicated professional to manage your social media marketing and create effective and engaging content will save you time and money, while growing your business exponentially in the long term. If you’re ready to reach global audiences, create lasting relationships with your customers, and develop a loyal fan base, start a conversation with the experts at Agency Partner Interactive today! API offers an array of affordable marketing services, and we’ll customize your social media marketing strategy to accelerate the growth of your business and deliver actual results.

crm_system

Why Your CRM System is Costing You Time and Money

Posted on | by devops
Expert Tips For Why Your CRM System is Costing You Time and Money

A CRM system is a vital part of any small business. It helps you keep track of your customers and their interactions with your company. However, CRMs are complex tools and can be expensive to maintain. If you’re not sure exactly how much you’re spending on CRM maintenance and how cost-effective your system is, we’ll break down some of the fees associated with CRM software and how to choose a CRM system that works best for your company.

What is a CRM System?

CRM is short for customer relationship management. It’s a software system that helps business owners easily track all communications and build relationships with their leads and customers. CRMs replace a multitude of spreadsheets, databases, and apps that most businesses patch together to track customer data and they connect your sales leads with your customers all in one place. They also consolidate all communications (forms, calls, emails, text messages, and meetings). With so many benefits, you may be asking: why shouldn’t I implement a CRM system? The answer: you should, but there are several things to know to streamline your CRM implementation so that it’s doing the most work for you and that you’re not paying for extra features that go unused.

Common Faults of Your CRM system

Most CRMs are set up with reporting, contacts, accounts, opportunities, and leads all under one dashboard. This is too complex and makes it hard to efficiently view and track the information you and your employees need to know. Complexity also means more money. A simple CRM system is much more versatile, and versatility is one of the biggest assets a small team can have.

How Much Does a CRM Cost?

If you’ve ever asked, “how much is this CRM going to cost me?” you probably have never gotten a straightforward answer. This is because they almost never cost face value. The true cost of a CRM implementation is difficult to understand when the process begins. CRM system pricing varies depending on the features and complexity you need, and many CRM platforms charge per user. Enterprise CRMs can cost up to $160 per month. More affordable CRMs can cost $12 per month per user, while still having hidden implementation fees. Although there isn’t a set amount for the total implementation and maintenance of your CRM, we’ll outline some of the transparent fees you’ll be paying at the beginning to give you a more accurate estimate.

Transparent Costs

Subscription costs: the price you pay to have system access. There are a few types of CRM subscriptions, and you will have to decide between cloud CRM and on-premise CRM. Cloud CRM systems are replacing on-premise CRMs because they take less upfront investment and offer more subscription options. If you’re managing sensitive data or need total control over the system, on-premise CRMs might be a better option for you.

Service level costs: your service level cost is determined by 3 factors: plan level (service package you buy from the vendor), volume (number of records, contacts, or data points you can store for a specific price), and add-ons (premium features, integrations, or capabilities you can add).

Cost per user: CRM plans or service levels may only allow for a set number of users per month while other vendors will let you add individual users for a set amount more each month.

Implementation fees: once you’ve decided on your vendor and plan level, it’s time for your CRM roll-out! Vendors offer setup and implementation services and these range in costs depending on the scope of the implementation. This could include building customized dashboards, template creation, consulting services, data migration, contact import, and workflow export/import, to name a few. Doing all of this could cost you a lot of money. Vendors usually don’t tell you how much each of these services costs, making this stage a bit of a grey area. Some range from $1,200 to $5,000, while others come with no fees for services like implementation and migration.

Transparent time: discovery, selection, data preparation, implementation, and training. These time investments correspond to the five stages of the CRM implementation process.

What Do You Need Out of Your CRM System?

Take some time to evaluate exactly what you need your CRM system to do and which features would be most beneficial for your business. The five aspects of CRM discovery are:

List of feature requirements: make a list of what you need to have, what would be nice to have, and what you need each feature to do.

Business requirements: what are some of your problems? Which process feels unorganized and chaotic? Who needs to communicate and what information is being lost?

Non-functional requirements: how fast are you growing? What would a system outage mean for your current system? How sensitive is your customer data?

Functional requirements: what specific things do you need for your business process? What are the use cases? What does your sales and onboarding process look like? Think about these questions from the viewpoint of each team who will be using this tool.

System design: what will different teams need from different dashboards? What information will be shown on each dashboard? How will users interact with it?

The most important part of choosing a CRM system is to ask how much each feature, implementation step, monthly subscription, and cost per user is going to be. If you don’t ask these critical questions, vendors usually won’t tell you. Empower your decision by knowing as much as you can about how much you’ll be spending initially and each month so you can avoid incurring unnecessary costs as much as possible.

Where to Begin?

With so many things to consider, you may need an expert to guide you through what your business needs out of a CRM system and how it should be structured. To speak with a professional, contact Agency Partner Interactive and schedule a consultation today. Our team is dedicated to accelerating the growth of small businesses and we’ll help set you up for success and streamline and manage your CRM system processes so that you can get the most of out your investment.

facebook_marketing

Is Facebook Marketing Still Relevant in 2022?

Posted on | by devops
Expert Tips For Is Facebook Marketing Still Relevant in 2022?

There’s no doubt that Facebook has been one of the most important marketing channels over the last decade. But with changes to the algorithm and increasing competition from other social media networks, is Facebook still as relevant in 2022 as it was in 2012? In this blog post, we’ll discuss whether Facebook is still a valuable marketing tool, its competitors with respect to marketing viability, and how these platforms can help you reach your target audience.

What Happened to Facebook?

In the era of its conception, Facebook was THE social media channel for advertising. With the acquisition of mainstream platforms like Instagram and WhatsApp, it was almost impossible to find someone who wasn’t a part of the Facebook ecosystem. Then came the onslaught of scandal after scandal, privacy leaks, and government intervention. This along with site updates that made it harder for businesses to connect with consumers created a massive shockwave of negative exposure for Facebook and continues to degrade the company’s reputation and popularity. Despite the negative publicity and uprising of contemporary competitors, Facebook remains in some ways a great marketing platform for businesses to reach a specific target audience. Below, we’ll outline some of the pros and cons of Facebook marketing so you can determine whether it’s worth your investment.

What Are the Pros of Facebook Business Marketing?

  • Demographic: Facebook is still wildly popular for users over the age of 30. There hasn’t been a significant decrease in users of this age group after the waves of bad publicity and Facebook still generates roughly 2.9 billion users daily. If your target audience is over the age of 30, Facebook ads for marketing are still extremely relevant.

 

  • Flexible and Cost-Effective: Facebook has a robust online advertising tool integrated into the platform itself. You can tailor your ads by demographic and interest more so than on other social media outlets. Facebook marketing also offers more freedom in terms of budget constraints. You can run an ad campaign with a low budget and still expect to see results from it. There is also more flexibility to adjust and redefine your ads to generate optimal returns by exposing them to the exact target audience that will most likely take action.

What Are the Cons of Facebook Business Marketing?

  • Demographic: If your target audience falls below the 30+ age group, Facebook marketing is no longer relevant for your ad campaigns. It wouldn’t be worth investing in Facebook business marketing since this user demographic has been significantly declining in recent years. Marketing on other platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch will give you more exposure and be the most relevant platform for marketing your business.

 

  • Exposure: In 2022, it’s extremely difficult for non-paid content to gain exposure. This is mostly because of algorithm restructuring and frequent platform updates. The result is that business marketing pages have an exceedingly hard time showing up on users’ feeds, even if they are following you and are actively engaging with your posts. This puts pressure on businesses looking to grow reach and engagement to use boosted posts. Boosted posts are paid tools to increase the likelihood that your posts are showing up on users’ feeds. Even if you’re regularly posting compelling content with high user engagement, you’ll have to spend money on the backend just so that they’ll reach your target audience.

Conclusion

There isn’t a straightforward answer to the question: is Facebook marketing still relevant in 2022? When developing your marketing strategy, it’s important to clearly define your target audience/demographic, know what type of content you want to create, and keep in mind your ad spend budget. This is the key to generating brand exposure and engaging with your audience in the most impactful and relevant way. For more information on how Facebook marketing or other forms of social media marketing would work best for your business, contact Agency Partner Interactive and schedule a consultation. Our expert social media marketing team will help you develop a powerful marketing strategy to expand your reach and engage with your target audience to help accelerate your business growth.

amazon_ads_optimization

10 Tips for Amazon Ads Optimization: How to Get the Most Out of Your PPC Campaigns

Posted on | by devops
Expert Tips For 10 Tips for Amazon Ads Optimization: How to Get the Most Out of Your PPC Campaigns

If you’re running Amazon ads, it’s important to make sure you’re doing everything possible to optimize your PPC campaigns and get the most out of your ad spend. Today, we’ll outline 10 ad optimization techniques to organize and scale your Amazon ad campaigns to help you achieve real results. With these Amazon PPC tips, you’ll be able to improve your click-through rate, conversion rate, and overall ROI from your Amazon ads campaigns. Let’s get started! 

  1. Campaign Structure

Your PPC campaigns serve as a general outline for all of your ad activities. A campaign structure provides a set of traits following patterns like the product category, brand, and top sellers. However you decide to organize your campaigns, the most critical thing is to be consistent. If you create one campaign by product and another by brand, you could have the same products appearing in multiple campaigns, meaning that they might be in competition. 

  1. Identify Relevant Keywords

If you’re just starting out as a seller or launching a new product, it’s important to start your PPC journey with long-tail keywords. After you’ve mastered these keywords, you can go after the most-searched, generic keywords. If you target highly searched keywords from the beginning, you’ll run into tough competition from established sellers and will likely spend a lot of money without getting exposure for your brands, along with traffic and conversion. It’s recommended to run an Amazon automatic campaign and a manual campaign simultaneously with the same products. Allow the automatic campaign to run for a couple of weeks, then examine which search terms generate the most sales. Next, transfer these search terms into your manual campaigns. This is how to make the most out of Amazon’s capabilities while building up your own campaign to improve PPC optimization. 

  1. Rank Optimization

The larger your selection of products, the larger your number of keywords with different levels of specificity should be. For example, if you’re selling a variety of shoes, the keyword “shoe” is relevant for all of them. For some shoes, the keyword “women’s shoes” is relevant. For some women’s shoes the keyword “women’s sneakers” is relevant. If the keyword “women’s shoes” were to be placed in all ad groups for women’s sneakers, heels, or boots, you could easily lose track of which ads are shown for which keyword bids. The concept here is to have three different sets of ad campaigns with mids and budgets varying significantly across each of these sets. The bids and budget assigned to a keyword depend on the search rank of the listing in Amazon’s search results for that query.  

Ad group 1: “women’s shoes” for general keywords of that product category (“shoes for women,” women’s shoes,” and top sellers. 

Ad group 2: “women’s sneakers” for specific keywords “sneakers for women,” “women’s trainers,” “women’s tennis shoes,” and corresponding products. 

Ad group 3: “women’s boots” for specific keywords, “women’s boots”, “hiking boots for women,” and corresponding products. 

  1. Group Variations Together

If you have multiple variations of the same product, grouping them together is a great way to create more brand awareness and visibility. Running an ad campaign for multiple different products may not be the most cost-effective and they might end up competing among themselves for ads. This is considered product cannibalization and you should avoid it at all costs when it comes to PPC campaign optimization. A technique to prevent this problem is to group individual variations into one single package, then sell it on Amazon under a unique Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN). 

  1. Optimize Listings

Amazon likes to be sure that the ads being shown are relevant to the consumer. This is why ads can only be shown for keywords that are also contained in product listings and text like title, description, search terms, etc. Check to make sure you’re not utilizing keywords that make no impression in the text of your product listing. 

  1. Get Rid of Unwanted Search Queries

Amazon ads don’t always show the exact search terms you’ve bid on as a seller. Search queries can depend on the keywords you’ve entered according to match type. There are two techniques that can prevent you from incurring unnecessary costs: set keyword match types and set negative keywords. 

  1. Track PPC Ad Spend Based on Performance

Usually, there are many different products in one ad group sharing the same keyword. As you run your campaigns, it will be clearer over time which products sell best within the given ad group. Your goal for Amazon PPC optimization should be targeting the max number of sales with that ad group by removing products with poor performance from that ad group. This will help you concentrate impressions and clicks on those products which effectively converts clicks into purchases. It also avoids spending more money on products with low conversion rates and optimizes your ad spend. 

  1. Define Target Ad Cost of Sales 

Your Target Ad Cost of Sales (ACoS) is calculated as ad spend divided by ad sales. It should at least have a rough outline and can differ depending on the purpose of your campaign. If you’re chasing profit, then your target figure will be based on your profit margin. Target figures for ACoS are generally between 5% to 15%. 

  1. Track and Optimize Bids

The best target bid depends on the keyword. This is why every bid can be controlled separately for every keyword in manual campaigns. Know that a good amount of data is needed as a base for evaluating bids. A few general principles for bid optimization are:  

  • If the ACoS for a keyword is above the target value, you should lower the bid to test whether ad spend and sales can be brought to a cost-effective ratio 
  • If the ACoS is below the target value, test the ad’s reach and sales can be expanded by raising the bid price. 
  • If keywords aren’t generating any sales or impressions, test whether a higher bid price can make revitalize them. Higher bids can result in higher placement, leading to more clicks and impressions. 
  1. Bid on New Keywords at Higher Prices

If you’re adding a new keyword, you should set a higher initial bid price, usually at least 0.75$ depending on the category. In order to get a new keyword started and have it generate some clicks and impressions, a higher bid price must be attributed to it. As soon as some click history builds up, the bid price of this keyword can often be lowered to successfully find an optimal price for the bid.

If you’re ready to revamp your Amazon ads optimization strategy, let Agency Partner Interactive do the heavy lifting. API is growth-focused, helping over 500 businesses dominate their markets and achieve real results they can count on. Our expert team specializes in PPC campaign optimization and we’ll make sure you’re getting the most out of your ad spend. Ready to get started? Contact us today!