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Umbrella branding
Umbrella branding — is a marketing practice that means launching a new product or even a product line under a famous brand name. The goal of this strategy is to increase a company's market share. The term is also known as family branding.
Watch this video created by Brand Master Academy to learn what umbrella branding is, the pros and cons of using this strategy, examples, and how to leverage it as a brand architecture strategy for your business.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Umbrella Branding
This marketing practice is popular today because of the long list of benefits a company can get from this style of branding. Still, there are some important issues you should consider before giving it a try. In this section, we’ll cover both the pros and cons of umbrella branding.
Advantages of Umbrella Branding
Marketers believe that consumers associate brands with a certain level of product quality. Hence, if a particular brand has gained customers' trust and credibility, clients will consider every new offer from the brand a high-quality product due to their previous positive experiences. Let's take a closer look at the benefits this strategy can provide.
The success of a popular product gives credibility to the new product. That's exactly what we've described above. Every positive experience and interaction with a brand makes it easier for brands to build a ladder of trust towards their business.
It decreases advertising costs. Promoting a new product under a "no-name brand" is a real challenge. Umbrella branding requires no extra costs on bringing a product to market, building up your target audience and a powerful brand image, developing a positioning strategy, as well as your marketing strategy in general. A famous logo gives more chances for a new product under an umbrella.
You already have loyal customers. You are more likely to get money from loyal clients who buy other products from your brand than from a cold prospect. Moreover, you'll have to pay for customer acquisition. If you promote your offer under an umbrella, you can rely heavily on word-of-mouth since consumers will definitely look for reviews before buying a new product.
You can launch a product from a different category. Umbrella branding provides companies with a safety net to support their brand. This way, you can launch a product, not from your main category. For example, if you are a successful clothing manufacturer, consider producing footwear.
You can significantly increase sales. Since you may be entering a new market if you launch a product from a different category, you raise your market share, which definitely leads to more sales.
Despite such tempting benefits, one mistake may lead your brand to failure. Umbrella branding has several important drawbacks. Check them out below.
Disadvantages of Umbrella Branding
You should remember that a single mistake can rock the boat of your brand. Since the consequences can be disastrous, pay special attention to possible issues below.
The production of unrelated goods can raise questions. Don’t try to conquer every niche. Remember that all your products should be related. Would you buy medications or perfumes from a household appliance manufacturer? The brands’ clients will also find this at least a little strange. They will think that your goal is revenue by any means, and this could scare them away.
Clients expect high-quality products. Everyone should do their job. Your product may have no competitors in the market due to its high-quality, but it’s impossible to maintain the same quality for all of your products. You will definitely need to focus more on particular goods, neglecting the quality of other products.
One mistake can ruin your business. Just the same as a clients’ positive experience influences their next interaction with a brand, your reputation may be spoiled with one failure. As a result, it will be hard to win their trust back.
Now you’re aware of the main pros and cons you face by choosing this strategy. Individual branding is kind of a way out for new products from popular brands. Let’s take a closer look at this marketing practice.
Umbrella Branding vs Individual Branding
While umbrella branding implies promoting a new product under the name of a popular brand, individual branding is just the opposite.
Individual branding means promoting every new product as a separate entity. It works well if a company promotes a product from a different category. It provides a brand with several advantages. First, it doesn’t run the risk of your brand losing everything, including its reputation, if the new product fails. Secondly, marketers can choose a completely different positioning and marketing strategy and target other segments. That means that a new product is not tied to the brand since it carries another name, logo, etc.
These two strategies are worth your consideration. Study each one in detail before choosing it for your business.
Examples of Umbrella Branding
You certainly know the world’s most popular umbrella brands since we use them almost every day. One of the most famous ones is Apple. Firstly they only produced PCs. Their top product was the MacBook, but now the company’s product line includes iPhone, iPad, AirPods, Apple Watch, etc.
Another popular brand under an umbrella is Procter Gamble. The product line of these world-known companies includes the following brands: Head Shoulders, Pantene, Lenor, Ariel, Gillette, Tide, Herbal Essences, and Tampax.
Now you know a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of umbrella branding, the differences between this strategy and individual branding, and some examples. It’s time to choose the best strategy for your business.
Transactional SMS
A transactional SMS is a non-marketing automated text messagethat companies send to support their audience along the customer journey. Among the most common transactional SMS types are order confirmations, welcome text messages, and shipping updates.
Benefits of Transactional SMS
People read it fast. According to VentureBeat, more than 90 percent of people read a text message within the first three minutes. Besides, their open rate reaches 98%, according to Gartner, which is dramatically more thanemail marketing.
It is a convenient medium. On average, people spend about 3.5 hours a day on their smartphones, as ResqueTime claims. The chances are that you will reach your audience.
It helps people. Transactional SMS assists people in various communication touchpoints with your brand. Using SMS, you will build a solid brand image.
Transactional SMS vs. Promotional SMS
Unlike promotional SMS, which companies utilize for marketing purposes, transactional text messages provide customers with helpful information.
Besides, promotional SMS is an instantly sent or scheduled SMS campaign, while transactional SMS needs to be set up only once and works automatically after that.
Types of Transactional SMS
As a brand, you can utilize transactional SMS for various non-marketing purposes like the following:
Allow checking debit and credit information on bank accounts;
Help to get access to an account with one-time passwords;
Reset passwords;
Confirm orders to ensure everything is OK;
Keep clients informed with shipping and delivery updates;
Confirm or cancel ticket booking.
Schedule appointments to speed up communication with multiple customers without personal contact.
How to Send Transactional SMS
You can send transactional SMS to your audience with LIKE.TG Automation360. For this purpose, create workflows. Learn how:
Set up a trigger event. Go to Event Manager and add an event that will trigger the flow of messages.
Make up a start of the flow. Read how to do it here.
Add the “SMS” element. Connect an “SMS” element. Customize the text and sender ID. Remember that in some countries, your sender ID must be registered.
Transactional SMS Examples
PizzaHut. This transactional SMS is sent to confirm an order.
Citibank. This message answers how much money is there in the user's bank account balance.
Facebook. The social media giant uses transactional SMS to enable users who have forgotten their password to log in their account.
USPS. The mailing service provides a report with all the necessary information regarding the shipping details.
Unfair competition
Unfair competition is using illegal, deceptive, and fraudulent selling practices that harm consumers or other businesses to gain a competitive advantage in the market. Federal and state laws fight against these issues.
There are several types of unfair competition. Let’s consider them in detail.
Types of Unfair Competition
There are seven most popular types of unfair competition. We’ll review each of them and provide examples.
False advertising. This is a well-known issue that has provoked hundreds of scandals and cost some brands millions. It means making untrue statements about a product to gain more revenue. Such ads usually promise that a product will solve a particular problem when it actually doesn’t. It is a widely-used practice among manufacturers of dietary supplements and food. For example, it cost Dannon $45 million in 2010. They claimed that their yogurt helped regulate the digestive system, for which there was no scientific evidence.
Trademark infringement. It means stealing your intellectual property. For example, if competitors want to increase their market share, they can use your logo or slogan to promote their products. Hence, it’s vitally important to register your trademark.
Bait-and-switch tactics. This deceptive practice is widely used in retail stores. Advertisers promote a product at an extremely low price, and when consumers visit a store, they’re told that it has run out of this product. Hence, they are offered to buy a similar, more expensive product. Some states in the U.S. consider this practice a crime.
Unauthorized substitution. This practice is similar to the previous one. It means promoting a product that is not what consumers expect to buy. After a seller gets money, they provide a client with a worse quality product or even a counterfeit. The features of such goods are often exaggerated.
Misappropriation of trade secrets. It means that your competitor discovered the secret of your recipe, strategy, or formula that was your competitive advantage and uses it to gain more revenue. An employee can be a source of information leakage in this case. A non-disclosure agreement regulates confidentiality clauses.
Rumor mongering. This practice speaks for itself. Competitors can slander your business in their marketing campaigns to look superior.
Below-cost selling. A company sets a much lower price than others in the market, even if its net cost is higher. This way, they operate at a loss, but it allows them to increase their market share and fight off competition.
Now you are familiar with the types of unfair competition, you can protect your business and fight fraudulent selling practices.
Triggered email
A trigger email is an automated email that marketers send to inform customers and show that the company they’ve subscribed to is a reliable brand. A trigger email is an automatic reaction to a subscriber’s particular action or behavioral pattern.
The LIKE.TG marketer defines a trigger email and shares must-have emails for e-commerce. Watch the video to draw inspiration!
Why are trigger emails important?
Build trust
Fulfill customers’ expectations
Inform well
Increase customer retention
Build trust. Trigger emails are a dialogue in a way: users take some action, and in response, they receive an email. Trigger emails move subscribers towards further communication and deeper relationships.
Fulfill customers’ expectations. As email marketing evolves, subscribers now expect that placing an order, booking a room, subscribing, and other actions will be followed by an email. Trigger emails lead customers down the sales funnel. And compared to regular promotional emails, trigger emails show higher open rates.
Inform well. Trigger emails are an excellent way to let people know that their booking or subscription process is going well or if there are any issues. For instance, when people order sneakers from an online sports store, they receive an email, which confirms that the money transfer was successful and provides a link to track the shipment.
Increase customer retention. It is cheaper to keep an existing customer engaged than it is to search for a new one. Trigger emails are a crucial tool to reach this goal with reactivation emails.
Trigger Email Types
Welcome emails
Reactivation emails
Abandoned shopping cart emails
Transactional emails
Birthday emails
Welcome emails. This type of email reaches the inbox when a user completes the subscription process and automatically joins your mailing list. A welcome email usually sounds thankful, engages the recipient, and promises more value in the future.
Reactivation emails.Theseemails intend to bring back customers who haven’t shown any sign of engagement during a relatively long period. Reactivation emails ask to start the communication over and remind what value the subscriber gets from the company. In case reactivation emails don’t work, it’s a good practice to remove inactive subscribers from the mailing list.
Abandoned shopping cart emails. When subscribers like a product, add it to the shopping cart without confirming the purchase, they receive an abandoned shopping cart email. This type of trigger email aims to help leads with decision making and turns them into customers.
Transactional emails. This type of emails is used to confirm a purchase, order, or payment. Transactional emailsare a way to ensure the customer that you received their payment, and their product is on the way to the recipient.
Birthday emails. These are emails that companies send to celebrate a subscriber’s birthday. To make this possible, gather users’ birth dates in the subscription forms or the footer of an email.
How to Send a Trigger Email
Create an automation flow
Set up the start of the flow
Create the first trigger email
Continue with the second trigger email
Send the third trigger email later
You don't need to be a programmer to send trigger emails. LIKE.TG takes care of the technical side of things for you to craft a strategy that strikes!
Automate everyday challenges!
You can send triggered emails automatically according to pre-defined events, conditions, and customer actions. Keep your audience engaged, improve the customer lifecycle, and boost sales.
Register and send trigger emails!
Let’s build a follow-up email campaign. Imagine that you are own a music store and just sold a guitar to a customer
Step 1: Create an automation flow
You can trigger any user’s action to send more targeted emails. To do this, set up an event in the Event Manager. There are prepared events that you can use, but to create your event go to the "Event Manager."
Name the automation flow. Choose the email sender address and write the sender’s name. Decide upon the date and time to send.
Step 2: Set up the start of the flow
Click on the element “Flow start” and set it up on the right-hand side. Select the eventthat willbring this automation to life (the trigger). Possible events include “Add Subscriber,” “Special date,” “Contact webhook,” “Change variable,” or any custom event that you create in the Event Manager.
Step 3: Create the first trigger email
Drag the “Email” element from the left-hand side and drop it under “Flow start.” Select the sending time — 5 days after the flow starts in this example, type in the subject line, and add an email template.
In this follow-up email, ask if everything is okay with the purchase and kindly suggest buying a package of strings with slightly different, more “garage” sound.
Step 4: Continue with the second trigger email
Add another “Email” element repeating actions from the previous step. Give recipients more time before sending the second follow-up.
Seven days after the previous email is okay to suggest buying a tuner. Perhaps the customer is an amateur, or his tuner doesn’t work. It’s high time for your shop to cross-sell.
Step 5: Send the third trigger email later
Repeat the actions from the two previous steps.
Send this email about a month after the purchase. This time offer something huge, like a guitar amplifier, for instance.
Trigger Email Best Practices and Tips
Create though-out automation
Try different trigger emails for different purposes
Make your message clear
Create subject lines according to the trigger action
Segment subscribers
Create though-out automation. Make automation work for you, so your trigger emails will be logical and to the point. Monitor the statistics of your campaigns and run A/B tests to achieve better results.
Try different trigger emails for different purposes. Examine the opportunities of your email marketing campaigns. Be flexible and try various trigger emails if you have enough time and resources. The higher-quality trigger emails you send to the point, the better the buyer journey will be.
Make your message clear. The email inbox is not the right place for long philosophical words. Your trigger email should be short and include only informationthat is relevant to the trigger action.
Create subject lines according to the trigger action. The subject line of the trigger email should reflect the activitythat causes the start of the email workflow. By following this best practice, you ensure recipients that your company is here for them.
Segment subscribers. Segmentingyour audience enables you to send trigger emails with more specific targeting for your customers.
Trigger Email Examples
Welcome email
Abandoned shopping cart email
Birthday email
Reactivation email
Welcome email
This welcome email from Doodle shows small instructionsabout how to start using their service.
Abandoned shopping cart email
This Adidas abandoned shopping cart email reminds you to complete your purchase and shows that you're missing out on having a new pair of shoes.
Birthday email
This birthday email by Converse engages the customer with a significant discount during the birthday month.
Reactivation email
This is a reactivation email from Roxie at GrowthRocks, the virtual queen of the email inbox. No comments.
Send a triggered email.
Undifferentiated marketing
Undifferentiated marketing, also called mass marketing, is a strategy that entails creating one message for an entire audience. It helps businesses reach more people at a lower cost and improves brand recognition.
In this case, companies focus not on how the needs of customers differ from each other but rather on the similarities they have. This strategy best fits businesses that develop products and marketing programs for large market segments that will reach a ton of people.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Undifferentiated Marketing
Companies choose this strategy when it is difficult to identify their target segment of customers or when segments transform over time. There are several pros and cons of undifferentiated marketing to consider.
Pros of undifferentiated marketing:
cost-effective in the long run;
no need for constant changes to content;
greater reach;
no in-depth market research necessary;
improved brand recognition.
Cons of undifferentiated marketing:
changes in your business environment can be triggered by changes in price, consumer preference, or inflation;
it doesn’t bring many loyal customers;
it is challenged by competitors focused on satisfying the needs of a smaller segment of your audience.
So now that you know the main pros and cons, let’s discover the difference between differentiated and undifferentiated marketing.
Undifferentiated Marketing vs Differentiated Marketing
Understanding the main points of differentiated and undifferentiated marketing strategy enables you to choose the most appropriate approach for your future business. Consider all the options and select the strategy that best fits your company.
Undifferentiated marketing
It is used by companies that produce everyday products for common use. Campaigns created with this strategy don’t require in-depth research to reveal the needs and preferences of your target audience. The strategy aims at influencing and reaching as many people as possible. To achieve this goal, marketers use radio, TV, and newspapers as product promotion channels. As a result, the company exposes the product to a wider audience, which directly correlates with the number of sales and total revenue.
This approach makes the most sense for widely consumed items like gasoline, soft drinks, dairy products, bread, personal hygiene products, etc. Companies selling these kinds of products should always monitor the values, attitudes, and behaviors of customers since they are constantly evolving.
Differentiated marketing
With this strategy, businesses can appeal to several customer segments and target groups by using a special message for each. Unlike mass marketing, a differentiated strategy enables companies to develop separate approaches to reach different audiences. Many businesses prefer this type of marketing in their strategy for several reasons:
it enables them to meet various customers’ needs;
it helps reach different audiences with different approaches;
it provides effective resource allocation;
it provides a competitive advantage;
it enables quick responses to changes with your audience;
it helps create an effective distribution channel.
Let’s take, for example, Tesla. This electric vehicle company firstly targets customers in the luxury sector. Their eco-friendly cars have several features that make them differ from others, among them regular software updates, self-driving features, solar panels, and more. That’s why the creators had to segment their target audience.
With LIKE.TG, you can segment your target audience by applying segmentation criteria and send push notifications, email campaigns, and SMS campaigns to particular contacts and save your segments.
To create a new segment with LIKE.TG, you should select the appropriate list in the “Mailing list” menu and proceed to the “Segments” tab. Add a new segment by selecting the right criteria.
You can also create a new segment or select an existing one when creating an email campaign. Choose a mailing list and tick “Use segmentation,” where you can select the necessary criteria.
Now that you know the difference between mass and differentiated marketing, it’s time to review some examples to encourage your imagination.
Examples of Undifferentiated Marketing
Colgate
Coca-Cola
General Motors
Persil
MM's
Famous brands and manufacturers of everyday products use mass marketing. So let’s find out how exactly they do it.
Colgate
The company sells a widely used personal care product like toothpaste and reaps the benefits of its successful strategy. Toothpaste is a product that doesn’t have any age categories or a particular group of people who use it, so there is no need to segment customers. As a result, the brand has a big audience.
Coca-Cola
The world-known multinational corporation founded in 1892, Coca-Cola uses mass marketing. The company presented a single product to the market, a carbonated soft drink. The brand has done and continues to do a lot to promote its products to a huge number of consumers worldwide who are ready to buy this famous drink. Over the years, the product has changed its label appearance, bottle shape, aroma, and taste but continues to sell in record numbers.
General Motors
The multinational corporation introduced in 1908 claims to produce equipment suitable for any person, budget, and purpose. Indeed, the company produces vehicles for all age groups, and it’s justified. The company is always ready to deliver products for a wide range of cars from different brands to satisfy the needs of buyers.
Persil
Persil, a brand of laundry detergent first introduced in 1907, is also a great example of mass marketing. Consumer packaged goods like soaps and detergents use undifferentiated marketing strategies as they are used by a big market segment.
MM's
A brand famous for its button-shaped chocolates of different colors is a great example of undifferentiated marketing. The company addresses people of all ages and appeals to everyone looking for sweets in its funny commercials on TV. The same MM's product that the brand has used years remains the same.
To sum it up, undifferentiated marketing is a strategy that fits companies that don’t segment their audience and address the entire target market by conveying one message to all people.
Telegram marketing
Telegram marketing — is a type of messenger marketing that implies promoting a brand through Telegram. With this channel, you can grow your outreach, boost sales, and help customers explore your service.
In this video, Caleb Smith, a digital marketer at LIKE.TG, explains how to create a Telegram chatbot for your business with LIKE.TG.
Telegram is a cloud-based messaging app that works across any device: smartphones, tablets, and computers. It’s fast, secure, and free. It allows users to send text messages, share photos, videos, and files. You can also create groups and channels to better interact with your audience.
Why Should You Use Telegram Marketing for Your Business?
As of April 2020, Telegram’s audience has grown to 400 million active monthly users. 1.5 million users download the app and sign up every day. The growing popularity of the platform allows marketers to enjoy many of the following advantages.
Benefits of Telegram:
Allows marketers to keep their audience informed. This is possible with Telegram channels. Create either a public or private channel and invite your current customers to join it. Share more photos and videos of your products, tell subscribers about the history of your brand, and introduce your team. Notify clients of the upcoming sales and hot offers.
Helps marketers better communicate with their customers. Telegram groups will help you interact with your customers directly. A Telegram group is a chat where you can communicate with your audience, and your group members can interact with one another. You can also add administrators to manage your group more efficiently. With a group, you can let your loyal customers help new leads by answering questions about your product or service. Telegram Groups are a great opportunity to build a community.
Allows brands to support customers 24/7. This is where chatbots come into play. A chatbot is an online assistant which you can use to streamline everyday tasks. Delegate answering FAQs, handling orders, and consulting clients to chatbots, that are available 24/7. This way, your customer support team can work on more complicated issues. Create a chatbot without any technical skills with LIKE.TG, and develop auto-reply flows to send messages after a user enters a keyword specified by you, for example, “delivery,” “price,” or “refund.”
Allows brands to drive traffic to a website. Share links to your landing pages, invite your customers to check out your new collection, or share a link to your client reviews. This way, you’ll increase traffic to specific site pages.
Increase user engagement. You can easily do this with the Telegram polls. Create a poll with multiple answers to get to know the opinion of your customers about your product or service; create a quiz where you’ll explain why a user chose the wrong variant. The last option is especially great for educational services. Your polls can be anonymous.
Now, that you’re aware of the benefits of using Telegram, let’s get to know how to include all these tools in your strategy.
Telegram Marketing Strategy
Set your goal
Create a Telegram account
Promote your Telegram account
Step 1. Set your goal
Developing any strategy starts with establishing a goal. Your goal will predetermine the tools you will use, content formats, and KPIs to measure. With Telegram, you can pursue the following goals:
driving traffic to your website;
boosting customer engagement;
building trusting relationships with your audience;
automating routine tasks;
supporting clients;
increasing sales.
For example, if you aim to build trusting relationships with existing customers, and, at the same time, increase sales, you can create a private channel for your most loyal clients. Let them be the first to learn about upcoming sales, create a poll to let them choose the desired items to get a discount for, etc.
Step 2. Create a Telegram account
Now when you’ve established your goals, it’s time to get started. There are 3 options available for you: a group, channel, chatbot.
Group
A group is a chat where you can add many people. It can have up to 200,000 members. After joining it, members can send messages, photos, videos, and audio files. You can create either a public or a private group. If it’s public, any user can find it in search, join, and view the history. If it’s private, people can join it only if you manually add them or with the help of an invite link.
To create a group, click on the 3 horizontal lines in the top-left corner and choose the option “New Group.” Add members, name it, and set a photo or video.
To better maintain your group, you can add admins and choose what they can do: change group info, delete messages, ban users, invite users via a link, pin messages, add new admins, or remain anonymous. You can also set permissions to choose what members of your group can do and create polls to boost engagement.
If you’re already popular and have thousands of fans, consider creating a channel.
Channel
Telegram channels are created for broadcasting messages to large audiences. They have no limitations regarding the number of members. The difference between a group and a channel lies in several facts. Firstly, only the admins of a channel can post to it. Secondly, each member is notified of every new post. The members see the name and the photo of a channel instead of an individual sender, like with groups. Members of the channel can’t see each other as well as the admins. Only the owner and the admins can see the members.
To create a channel, click the 3 horizontal lines in the top-left corner and choose the option “New Channel.” Give it a name, write a description, set a photo, choose if your channel is a public or a private community, enter the text of an invite link, and add members.
You can see the number of views under each of your posts. If you have more than 500 subscribers, you can track detailed statistics on the following information:
languages your subscribers speak;
the number of users who join, leave, and mute your channel;
the way followers found your channel
the way followers interact with your posts.
You can schedule your posts, and they will be sent automatically at the time specified. You can also send silent messages during non-working hours or at night, so your followers will receive a notification with no sound. To improve navigation and provide followers with important information, use hashtags. You can add admins and enable signatures to better manage your channel. This is a helpful feature if you have a large company, and your top managers are the admins. So, your coworkers need to know who posts: Director, HR, Accountant, etc.
If you are interested in the opinion of your followers, you can create a discussion group. All of your posts will be forwarded and pinned there. Members can comment on each post, and their comments will show up in a thread. Creating polls is also available in channels.
If you want to support customers 24/7 with the least possible resources, consider creating a chatbot for this messenger. You don’t need to code or have any technical skills. Read on to find out how to create a chatbot.
Chatbot
If your company develops quickly, hundreds of customers connect with your support team daily. You definitely need a chatbot. This is a virtual assistant that imitates real conversion with a client based on a pre-designed scenario. Chatbots can provide users with more information about your brand, show catalogs, share prices, arrange consultations, answer FAQs, close deals, and automate routine tasks. Its flexibility depends on you. The more you “teach” it, the better it works.
LIKE.TG offers a flexible chatbot builder. Create a widget and place it on your site so that users can subscribe to your bot.
A chatbot works the following way: you create a list of questions/commands users can enter and enter answers to them. The more commands you have, the more advanced your bot will be. Then, after a user enters a keyword, an auto-reply flow starts. The chatbot communicates with the customer according to YOUR scenario. Creating a chatbot with LIKE.TG is free. You can send up to 10,000 messages per month at no cost.
Firstly, you need to create a bot and connect it to LIKE.TG. To do this, follow the steps below:
Go to your Telegram account, enter @Botfather in the search tab, and choose the bot. Click “Start” to activate it.
Type the /newbot command and send it.
Name your bot and copy the token value.
Then, go to your LIKE.TG account. Navigate to the “Chatbots” section and paste your token to the corresponding field. After that, subscribe to your bot.
You are ready! You’ve added your chatbot to LIKE.TG.
Now you can create your flow. Start by creating a welcome flow. Think of the keywords that can trigger sending messages. Create a flow to welcome subscribers, sell products, assist customers, and other events. Follow this step-by-step guide to building your flow.
With our chatbot builder, you can segment your audience. Tags and variables will help you send the right message to the right people. Save the information your customers enter to create relevant offers for them in the future.
For more valuable information, get inspired by the ideas of chatbots for eCommerce, healthcare, online service providers, and travel agencies on our blog. You’ll see how to organize a chatbot structure and build your flow.
Step 3. Promote your Telegram account
After you’re ready with the goals, it’s time to choose the type of account you want to use — a group, channel, or a chatbot. It doesn’t matter which one you prefer. It should be visible in front of your audience. Below we listed some effective ways to promote your Telegram account. So, check them out.
Social media. Social networks today are an awesome source of leads. You may already have thousands of followers on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn. Don’t miss an opportunity to let them join your brand on Telegram. Put a link in your Instagram bio or create an exclusive offer available for those who join your Telegram channel or group.
Cross-promotion. Look for popular Telegram accounts in your niche and offer them cooperation. For example, if you sell tours, ask a famous traveler or a blogger to promote your agency in exchange for a big discount, or if you sell materials for beauty procedures, cooperate with top specialists in your region.
Facebook Ads. You can promote your Telegram account by launching an ad campaign. Prepare an irresistible offer and pay special attention to targeting the best audience to show your ad to. Keep in mind that this method can be costly, so make sure you’ll have a chance to bring your investments back if users join your account.
Groups. These are chats created by like-minded people to discuss a topic of interest. You may look for such chats and promote your account there. Remember that it should match the topic and that promotion is not prohibited, otherwise, you’ll be banned.
Your website. This is one of the best places to start. Use your most visited pages or product landing page to tell the visitors about your Telegram account. You should provide an incentive to join you, otherwise, users won’t have a reason to do this. If you have a bot, invite visitors to talk to your customer agent agents or make the right choice of product. If it’s a channel, motivate them to join it for the most exclusive offers. You can also promote your account via a multichannel subscription form available with LIKE.TG. You only need to add the link to your account.
So, choose the best method for your business, or create a promotion mix for better efficiency.
Telegram Marketing Examples
In this section, we’ll share examples of effective chatbots from different industries for you to get inspired. Check them out.
Eddy Travels bot is a virtual assistant that allows users to discover the best flight deals in seconds. You can search for either hotels or flights. Just enter the country you’re going to visit and the date. The chatbot will search for the most relevant offers. You can go directly to Booking.com or Scyscanner right from the messenger.
AsosHelperBot is an eCommerce chatbot. The same products have different prices on other ASOS country-dedicated websites. This bot compares prices and finds the necessary item at the lowest price in the desired currency.
Smokey is a bot which provides information about the air pollution level in your region. You can also get detailed information about smog and ways to tackle it, as well as find out more about masks.
Congratulations! Now you know how to create a Telegram marketing strategy and automate routine tasks with chatbots. Register with LIKE.TG and develop your chatbot!
Connect your Telegram bot
Trade marketing
Trade marketing is a process that entails manufacturers performing promotional activities to increase the demand for their products among wholesalers and retailers. This type of marketing encompasses a business ensuring product availability and consistent supply, providing discounts and freebies.
In this article, we’ll uncover why trade marketing is essential and who uses it. We’ll also list 8 trade marketing strategies and examples for you to grab some inspiration.
Why is trade marketing important?
Trade marketing aims at getting products to the shelves of shops, supermarkets, and malls. Suppliers leverage different promotional activities and demonstrate the advantages of their products to attract potential buyers. If manufacturers succeed in making wholesalers believe that their products will bring good revenues, they can become suppliers of these goods and help meet customer demand.
Manufacturers focus on cross-promotion, time of sale, and product value to trade their goods. They introduce new flavors, show the pros of packaging, and demonstrate their competitive advantage. An effective successful trade marketing strategy helps businesses stand out and gain a market share. When presenting products at trade shows, manufacturers increase exposure, and build brand recognition, and awareness.
Companies provide retailers with discounts, free samples, and shipping for the first purchase to encourage more buys. After implementing a trade marketing strategy and generating interest, brands can increase sales, reach new audience segments and cooperate with new partners, and receive direct feedback on their goods from potential customers.
Now that you know about the importance of trade marketing, let’s uncover the parties of the trading process who benefit from this process.
Who uses trade marketing?
Manufacturers use trade marketing to reach their supply chain partners, such as retailers, distributors, and wholesalers. They implement various marketing strategies to draw the attention of supply chain partners, communicate product value, and convince potential partners that their product will bring good revenue. The main aim of manufacturers is to get their products onto the shelves of stores in front of consumers. Trade marketing is popular among companies that have physical stores and suppliers try to reach the shelves of stores with their products.
If you produce goods and strive to find distributors, you need to develop and stick to your trade marketing strategy. Below you’ll find several points you should consider before searching for supply chain partners.
8 Trade Marketing Strategies
Before running any trade marketing campaigns, you need to develop a strategy. Setting key objectives and conducting research will prevent you from having issues with your campaign.
Conduct market research. Every business starts with research. The main focus of your research is your target audience. During this process, you can collect information about your target market and make sure that your product will be successful. After investigating the market, you’ll be aware of the state of the industry. Research enables you to identify your audience segment and understand its problems, pain points, and desired solutions. As a result, you can come up with a relevant offer. Besides your audience, you need to research your competitors. Conduct competitor analysis. Focus on your competitors' features, market share, price points, marketing strategy, strengths, and weaknesses. Besides, see customer reviews to find out why customers choose these specific businesses.
Develop a comprehensive plan. After the research, you need to prepare a detailed plan. It should cover the demographics you want to target, long-term and short-term goals, budget, strategy, tactics, etc. Follow your plan step-by-step to attain your objectives.
Participate in trade exhibitions. At trade shows, you can showcase your product, communicate the benefits, and draw the attention of your target market. Since many retailers and distributors visit these events, you can obtain partnerships beneficial for your company.
Ensure to have strong branding. Often, people make purchasing decisions based on their emotions. This rule also works for supply chain partners. That’s the reason why you should pay attention to your branding. If you succeed in making partners remember your brand, you can establish an emotional connection and encourage them to purchase. A consistent, credible, and recognizable brand helps you stay ahead of competitors and stand out. As a result, retailers will choose your product over dozens of substitutes.
Run ads. Brand awareness is essential for every business since it helps increase sales, boost traffic, and improve revenue. Advertise online to promote your manufacturing business. Consider sending email newsletters to generate leads and connect with customers. Since 17% of B2B buyers look for peer reviews, you should add accurate information about your brand to online business directories. To do it, develop company profiles on platforms like Google My Business, Yelp, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Google Customer Reviews, Foursquare, etc. Another type of useful online advertising is PPC. It helps your website get more targeted visits. In addition, consider running paid ads on social media and pre-roll ads on video platforms like YouTube to get exposure.
Consider trade promotions. Provide your potential clients with special incentives like coupons, discounts, and promos to encourage buying. They will help you stand out from the competition and get a competitive advantage. Better yet, if your products are superior to others in quality, price, and features, retailers will strive to display your goods on the shelves of their stores.
Use digital marketing methods. Consider implementing your trade marketing strategy online. The modern world requires you to be socially active. Establish an online presence with social media, messengers, email marketing, and online ads. Communicate with your prospective customers on social media, educate them about your product through content marketing, and update them on releases through email campaigns. You can save time and resources by using LIKE.TG’s email campaigns, chatbots, landing pages, CRM, SMS, and web push notifications.
Leverage trade marketing tools. You can use different trade marketing tools such as email marketing software, landing page builders, SEO, CRM, etc. With LIKE.TG, a multichannel platform, you can send email campaigns to your potential partners and create a landing page and share a link to retailers through email, SMS, or chatbot messages to promote your product. Our service also offers a free CRM that helps you store all partners’ data in one place and access it freely.
It might be challenging to stick to the strategy yet the result will justify your efforts. The next section will provide you with brilliant ideas to promote your product and reach new heights of partnership.
Trade Marketing Examples
Companies have to maintain good relationships with distributors and prove that their product is worthy. There are many ways you can sell your product to potential supply chain partners. Now you’ll discover the strategies well-established brands implement to drive interest.
Sweets and Snacks Expo
Trade exhibitions and shows allows manufacturers to demonstrate their products and attract potential partners. They display their goods so that retailers see their value and advantages. Suppliers choose the best representatives to talk about the product and communicate its benefits. They use targeted messaging to meet the needs of retailers and persuade them that the product will bring good profits.
Sweets and Snacks Expo perfectly fits confectionery and snack retailers, manufacturers, and suppliers. The producers of sweets have the opportunity to debut new products at this exhibition and find supply chain partners. The event provides industry connections and opportunities for partnership.
Consumer Electronics Show
New technologies and global innovators are presented at Consumer Electronics Show (CES). You can find thousands of famous brands displaying their products and searching for partnerships. Manufacturers, developers, and suppliers of consumer technology hardware participate in this event to showcase their new inventions. The show covers many product categories so companies from different industries can take part in it. Besides, CES has a program where business leaders talk about the industry's most relevant problems.
Congrats, now you understand what trade marketing is and why it’s essential. Hope that our examples inspired you to take part in trade shows and showcase the benefits of your product to potential distributors.
Trademark
A trademark is a symbol, sign, design, phrase, or word that denotes a certain product or service belonging to a specific brand and legally differentiates it from competitors. It helps customers recognize a company’s products and services, associate them with a particular business, and protect the intellectual property of their original creator.
In this article, we’ll review the importance of registering a trademark and its types and make the difference between trademark and copyrightclear. Then, we’ll talk about how to register a trademark in the US.
Why is it important to register your trademark?
A trademark helps a company label its products or services and single out them among others. It’s also crucial for customers since a special sign, design, emblem, or word enables them to find goods of a specific brand. These aren’t all reasons to register a trademark. When you start your own brand, it’s critical to comply with all legal procedures to protect your intellectual property and avoid problems that might emerge.
Registering your mark provides you with legal protection that reduces the possibility of unfair competition. However, if someone dares to do it, you’ll be able to prove that it’s illegal since you have exclusive rights that your certificate can confirm. The mark is necessary to ensure that your company is unique and there are no other businesses with similar symbols, signs, or phrases.
In a nutshell, your company is secure with a registered trademark, and you can prevent somebody from making use of your essential elements or benefiting from your brand’s reputation and success. You also have the legal right to take action against other companies that intend to use your intellectual property for personal gain.
Now that you know why it’s crucial to have your trademark registered, let’s explore its types.
Types of Trademarks
Trademarks take care of the ownership of products and services that belong to a certain person or business. They can be different based on the industry a company operates in. We distinguish five main types.
Generic mark. It is when a brand name becomes a generic term due to its popularity. As a result, the brand is synonymous with a certain product or service. This happens because a company that offers certain products builds strong associations with the brand itself. Examples include Xerox, Taser, and Google.
Descriptive mark. It describes a product or service. The mark that has a descriptive character can’t be protected by trademark rights since a descriptive mark can’t help identify a source of goods or services.
Suggestive mark. This trademark doesn’t describe a product but invites customers to associate a brand name with a product or service it provides. Microsoft, Netflix, and Android are bright examples of such marks.
Fanciful Mark. It’s a made-up term that doesn’t have any special meaning. Fanciful trademarks are created to serve solely as trademarks and don’t have a meaning in everyday life. However, before making up a new term, a company should explore the reaction of its target audience. Entrepreneurs need to determine whether the word is easy enough to pronounce, short, and easy to recollect. Examples of trademarks with the highest level of protection include Kodak, Exxon, Lexus, and Verizon.
Arbitrary Mark. This type of trademark consists of a word or several words that have their own meaning in everyday life. However, when a company uses them to name products or services, they are unrelated. For example, Apple sells famous electronics and is named after a fruit. The products this brand offers are not only expensive and high quality but,ironically, are also inedible.
Now that you know the types, let’s make the difference between a trademark and copyright clear.
Trademark vs. Copyright
Sometimes it can be confusing to find the difference between trademark and copyright because they both protect the rights of a company’s source owner. To enable you to distinguish between these two concepts, let’s consider each of them separately.
Trademark is an intellectual property that includes a sign, word, symbol, brand name, design, or phrase and is used to show that a product or service belongs to a particular company. It helps customers and companies identify a brand and differentiate its goods from competitors. It protects the visual elements of a brand or individual who creates and develops them.
A registered trademark prevents others from using certain visual assets owned by a specific brand. It also hampers other businesses from creating and registering a mark similar to the existing one. In the US, if you see the ® symbol, it means that a trademark is registered. At the same time, if you notice the ™ sign, it denotes an unregistered one.
Copyright is the legal right to reproduce intellectual property owned by creators of goods and people whom they give exclusive permission to do it. Companies can copyright literary and musical works, sound recordings, paintings, films, software, designs, etc. Copyright owners can permit individuals or businesses to copy their intellectual property for an agreed amount of money. However, brand elements like logos, slogans, and company names aren’t included in this list and aren’t amenable to copy.
It’s time to dive deeper intohow to make a trademark yours legally.
How to Register a Trademark in the US
If you want to protect your trademark and have legal rights to it, it’s pivotal to register it. Read on to figure out how to do it in the US.
Check if you can register your mark. Before filling out the application form and sending it, find out whether your trademark can be registered. For this purpose, you need to check if there are similar trademarks registered. Second, check the USPTO’s requirements to ensure that your trademark complies with them.
Get ready with the application form. Once you have the information that your mark is safe, apply for its registration. The trademark you need to register can be for use in commerce (this means that at the time of document submission, you have already used your mark) or for use in the future (this signifies that at the time of submission, you haven’t used it yet but will do so in the future). Get ready with the application that includes your name, address, type of legal entity, citizenship, and address of your legal representative, an image of your trademark and its explanation, goods you want to use the trademark with, date when it was used for the first time (only if you have already used it), a declaration signed by a legal representative, and a certain fee.
Send your application. If you want to go through the process of registration online, make use of the Trademark Electronic Application System. After submitting your form, you’ll obtain a receipt. If everything is right and your trademark is approved, it will later appear in the USPTO’s Official Gazette. If you’ve already used your trademark before, it means that you will receive a Notice of Allowance. Once you receive it, prepare and send a statement of use along with the evidence of using the mark before. If approved, an attorney will register your trademark and issue a certificate.
Comply with the rules to renew registration.Rememberto pay all the necessary fees and file your documents to keep your trademark. You should also send a Declaration of Continued Use every sixth and tenth year.
Congrats, now you know about the types and importance of trademarks. If you want to register your mark, make use of our instructions and recommendations.
Team selling
Team selling is a strategy that includes two or more representatives from different company departments that collaborate to close more deals. It helps meet better exchange of business information and agree on price, terms, and conditions.
Why do companies use team selling?
Ensuring an easy buying process for your customers can distinguish your company from the increasing number of competitors. Team selling is one of the ways to do it. The method includes using the necessary skills of a cross-functional sales team to accurately address clients’ concerns and pain points.
This sales strategy allows you to obtain better insight into your customers’ unique needs and expectations since you have experts in sales and marketing who possess the necessary skills. Besides, your team can see the selling process from multiple perspectives.
It helps improve buyer experience and sales performance of your company, speed up problem-solving, etc. These are not all the benefits of this sales strategy. Let’s walk you through the advantages and disadvantages of team selling in more detail.
Advantages and Disadvantages of Team Selling
Team selling has the following pros:
helps strengthen the relationships between your company’s members;
increases customer engagement;
ensures that your company understands your buyers’ concerns and expectations;
provides answersto customers’ questions from specialists in different fields;
distinguishes your firm among competitors;
allows reps from different company departments to cooperate to improve sales performance;
ensures that buyers’ needs are met;
improves buying experience;
helps increase conversions.
However, this sales strategy also has somecons:
since every department has its terminology and a way of conducting business, their communication can sometimes be difficult;
you can miss some of your customers’ requirements.
This sales strategy brings a lot of benefits to your business, but some entrepreneurs still wonder whether individual selling is better. We’ve prepared several distinctive features that help differentiate the two strategies.
Team Selling vs. Individual Selling
Team selling is a comprehensive strategy that helps companies handle and close more complex deals. It requires a cross-functional team that involves reps from different departments such as marketing, sales, and customer service that cooperate throughout the sales cycle.
This sales approach helps your company unleash your team’s knowledge, improve the buying experience, solve problems quickly, and increase conversions. It brings many advantages for the company, including key insights on the performance your team can give. This information allows you to improve the experience for your prospects. Individual selling is a sales strategy that entails one salesperson using special skills and abilities to warm up a lead and close a deal. This strategy is considered traditional since a seller has to meet customers face-to-face, which requires a lot of time and investments.
A salesperson needs to highlight all the features and advantages of their product to make a customer believe that it can add value and make this person purchase. Some companies use individual selling to spread brand awareness and do it in two ways: retail and direct-to-consumer channels.
Now that you know the difference between the two strategies, it’s time to learn how to improve your team selling.
6Tips to Improve Your Team Selling
Select people with the necessary skills and knowledge
Divide tasks among your team members
Set a clear reward system
Consider account maps
Conduct meetings with your sales team
Stay a step ahead
Several specialists involved in the selling process can significantly improve your sales performance. We’ve prepared some essential tips for you to consider.
Select people with the necessary skills and knowledge. As you build a sales team for your company, ensure that the people you choose are a good fit in terms of skills, experience, and personality.
Divide tasks amongyour teammembers.If you want your business to be effective, you should have a deliberate sales structure. Therefore, before collaborating on a deal, carefully delegate the responsibilities to ensure a smoother sales process.
Set a clear reward system. In team selling, the contribution of each member of a team is less clear than in individual selling, and it can be challenging to create a reward system to appreciate those who show excellent results in sales. However, this plan will perform excellently if you want to motivate your sales reps.
Consider account maps. As we’ve mentioned before, this sales strategy is mainly used to handle and close complex deals that involve many moving parts and players, which is usually challenging. Creating account maps allows you to visualize your accounts for each customer and avoid complications. With the help of this method, you can identify gaps, obtain a clearer picture of each account, and avoid duplicating.
Conduct meetings with your sales team. Regular meetings are an effective way to establish contact between your reps. They should also understand how important they are to your company.
Stay a step ahead. Control the performance of your sales team to avoid unpleasant surprises in metrics and your business in general. Set bigger goals for your high-performers to keep improving their professional skills. Let your team know that you believe in their success.
To conclude, team selling is especially effective in complex deals. With a team of professionals, your company can easily manage and close a lot of deals. Many businesses have already implemented this strategy and reap the benefits it brings.
TikTok marketing
TikTok marketing is a strategy that involves creating short-term video content for TikTok to promote and sell products. The approach helps increase brand visibility, reach a target audience, establish communities, expand reach, and grow a business.
In this article, we’ll unveil the importance of TikTok for business and review its difference from other social media. We’ll also show you how to grow your business with this social media network and provide some effective tips.
Why is TikTok important for business growth?
According to statistics, with its one billion monthly active users,TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms nowadays. Since the network has many users from different geographics, age groups, and backgrounds, it helps businesses expand. Let’s find out how the platform empowers them to do it.
The following reasons make companies want to implement TikTok marketing.
Expansive user base. TikTok’s audience is vast and diverse. You can find people from different age groups, locations, and backgrounds. With TikTok, your business can reach potential customers worldwide.
Engaged audience. With the platform’s algorithms, you can quickly communicate your message to the audience and reach a vast number of people. Your task here is to create highly engaging content. This way, your product and content can become viral without any investments.
User-generated content. On TikTok, users often create videos related to product and brand recommendations. It’s time to encourage your audience to make such reels. You can run a contest, challenge, or campaign to stimulate customers to promote your product to get valuable prizes.
Brand awareness and recall. Interesting, useful, and engaging videos are easily promoted. When customers find something interesting for themselves in your videos, they’ll remember your brand. More and more people will find out about your company and recall it in the future.
Cost-effective advertising. TikTok promotes good videos based on algorithms for free. So if you succeed in creating something viral, your target audience will see it. There’s no need to pay for this type of promotion.
E-commerce integration. The platform is becoming more and more suitable for businesses. Now it provides e-commerce integration. You can add "Shop Now" buttons to encourage in-app shopping experiences. It makes buying and selling easier for customers and business owners. Buyers can complete the purchase without leaving the platform.
Promotion across multiple platforms. TikTok video format is easily shareable with other social media networks. So, if you want your customers to see your content across various channels, you can do it in no time. As a result, more people see your video and find out about your brand.
Many advertising options. In-feed ads, branded hashtags, and challenges are the advertising formats you can use to attract new customers. The platform allows you to promote your product through the network and reach your target audience. It results in higher brand awareness, better site traffic, and more purchases.
Now that you know the reasons to consider TikTok marketing for your business, it’s time to compare TikTok with other social media networks.
How is TikTok different from other social media?
In this section, we’ll unveil some unique features TikTok offers its users. These differences help businesses promote products, establish trusting customer relationships, and encourage brand awareness. Let’s find out about it in more detail.
Short-form video content. Since the platform is designed for short video content, its users can create videos from 15 seconds to three minutes in length. This video length is suitable for fast, engaging, and visually captivating content. Customers find out something interesting, useful, or important within seconds.
Vertical video orientation. since TikTok is a video-focused platform, it has a vertical orientation. This format allows mobile users to enjoy the platform’s videos and hold their phones as they used to when watching video content.
For You Page (FYP). The platform’s FYP is a page where users can find videos they might like based on TikTok’s algorithms. TikTok analyzes the history of videos watched, preferences, and interactions and offers similar content. It allows users to explore new videos and creators related to the topics discovered before.
Vast music library. The platform offers a great library of music people can use for their videos. Audio-driven content works better for user engagement and activity. Besides, various challenges and trends helped different artists promote their tracks. Music added to stunning videos often becomes popular among TikTok’s international audience.
Content discovery. With “Discover” and “Trending” sections, TikTok enables users to find popular videos people prefer to watch. Content discovery helps followers explore content beyond their circle of interest. This way, they can find something helpful and valuable for other areas of life.
Innovative editing tools. TikTok perfectly suits amateurs and professional social media creators because of the tools it provides. The platform’s editing tools and filters help create videos and edit them without any special skills or knowledge.
Challenges and trends. TikTok gained popularity thanks to its challenges and trends where users upload videos with their dance covers. When participating in such challenges, users feel like a part of a community and are eager to stay in it. Besides, trends encourage users to create user-generated content, which is especially useful for brands.
In-app features. With in-app features, TikTok encourages engagement. In-app shopping, live streaming, and reaction creation invite users to complete purchases, participate in events online, and leave their reactions under specific content. These features let users complete specific actions within the platform. As a result, more active users are on TikTok.
Live streaming. With TikTok live, users and creators can communicate in real time. This feature allows creators to connect with followers and communicate the necessary message to their audience. Real-time interaction encourages trust and awareness.
Easy shareability. Videos created for TikTok can be easily shared on other platforms. So, if you want to increase your reach and establish visibility, you can add the videos to your Instagram or Facebook account.
Now that you know the features that make TikTok stand out among other platforms, we’ll proceed to the next section to unveil how to grow business with TikTok.
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How to grow your business with TikTok?
You can reach multiple business goals when using TikTok — one of them — business growth. We’ll provide you with a detailed guide on attaining this objective.
1. Set up a business account
If you already have a personal account, you’ll only need to switch to a business account. If you don’t have one, the first thing you should do on TikTok is to create a business account. Once you do it, you can access essential features such as analytics and TikTok ads. You get an account on TikTok and explore insights into your content performance and users’ activity for free.
2. Develop your content strategy
Think of your content strategy and the goals you want to achieve with it. Your strategy should align with your company’s mission, goals, and personality and resonate with your audience. Make sure you create valuable, interesting, and appropriate content for your audience segment. Since TikTok is a separate platform with its features and peculiarities, you need to develop a unique strategy different from your Instagram and Facebook.
Below, you can check out the elements your content strategy should cover.
Attention-grabbing thumbnails
A thumbnail is a small version of a video that helps viewers recognize specific video content. With its help, users can understand the content of the video before watching it.
Make sure that your thumbnail can grab users’ attention. Consider using special platforms like Adobe Photoshop, Canva, Pixlr, or Snapseed to customize it. Your thumbnail should be visually appealing. For this purpose, we recommend using high-quality images that align with your brand.
We recommend you use 1280 x 720 pixels or 1080 x 1080 pixels aspect ratio to prevent cropping in your TikTok videos. When all the necessary edits are done, save your thumbnail as JPEG or PNG.
Short and engaging videos
When creating videos for TikTok, keep in mind that the platform appreciates short, full-of-context videos. They need to be useful, engaging, and interactive. Your video should range between 15 seconds and three minutes. Since TikTok supports horizontal and vertical video, you can use any of them. However, 9:16 is the preferred aspect ratio for vertical video, while 16:9 is common for horizontal video.
Your video should be in MP4 or MOV format, clear, well-lit, and visually appealing. Users pay attention to the usefulness and quality of videos they watch.
Captions and text overlays
Captions and text overlays are important elements for followers because they help improve accessibility, engagement, and storytelling. To make text overlays work for your business, ensure they are short, concise, and easy to read. Captions allow you to emphasize key points of your video, highlight specific things, or write down some things to remember.
Since many people explore TikTok in public places, they often watch videos with sound switched off. When you add text overlays, you increase accessibility. People can still watch videos in a loud environment and understand your message without the sound.
Music and soundtracks
Adding music to your videos is essential for engagement since it makes your video dynamic, emotional, and enjoyable. Moreover, if you use trending songs, you increase the chances of being discovered by a vast audience. Music can set the mood for your content and establish emotional connections with users. This way, you can grab the attention of the right audience and deliver your brand message.
3. Consider trends and challenges
If you want to boost user engagement and your brand’s visibility, you should monitor TikTok's newest trends and challenges. When some of them align with your brand, consider participating in such campaigns.
4. Use TikTok advertising for promotion
TikTok has a wide choice of advertising tools for product promotion. The platform has the following features: in-feed ads, branded hashtag challenges, branded effects, topview ads, and others.
In-feed ads are a type of video advertising around 60 seconds in length that users can see within the For You Page feed. This full-screen ad format has a call to action. After a user clicks the button, the ad redirects this potential customer to your brand’s site or app.
With branded hashtag challenges, you encourage the creation of user-generated content related to your product or company. Consider creating a special hashtag for your challenge and inviting users to participate. Encourage your prospects with special offers and prizes for their video content. Your hashtag will appear on the Discover page, so it won’t be a big deal for users to find your challenge. The benefits of branded hashtag challenges include brand awareness, popularity, expanded reach, etc. If your challenge goes viral, you can bring your business to the next level.
Branded effects empower you to design custom augmented reality effects, stickers, and filters for TikTok users. If your followers often use these stickers for their content, they promote your brand. The more people see your filters and stickers, the more TikTok users become aware of your product.
Topview ads are short videos users see once they open TikTok. The visibility of such an ad format is high, making it a perfect tool for a concise message.
5. Encourage user-generated content
TikTok is a perfect platform for user-generated content. Since people have a high level of trust in customers, this content will be a powerful promotional tool for your products. We recommend you initiate some challenges and encourage existing clients to create videos related to your company. This way, you’ll establish word-of-mouth promotion through video content.
6. Measure TikTok marketing success
To determine whether your TikTok marketing strategy works, you need to monitor your key performance indicators. These metrics include engagement metrics, follower growth, conversion metrics, reach and impressions, hashtag performance, audience demographics, and video completion rate. Pay attention to likes, comments, shares, views of your videos, click-through rates, website traffic from TikTok, conversions, number of challenge participants, and user-generated content.
With a business account, you have full access to TikTok analytics, so make use of it. Dashboard for TikTok Pro accounts provides information about your account performance (follower demographics, views, and engagement).
Now that you know how to grow your business with TikTok, it’s time to explore the 10 most effective TikTok marketing tips and examples.
10 Most Effective TikTok Marketing Tips with Examples
TikTok, along with its features, is a powerful tool for business owners. However, to reach the necessary result, you need to be wise in using the platform to your advantage. In this section, we’ll uncover 10 outstanding TikTok marketing tips with examples.
Use trends and challenges
TikTok empowers you with useful tools like trends and challenges that help increase brand awareness, expand your customer base, and grow revenues. By running challenges, you can make your video go viral and establish great visibility.
Ocean Spray is a cranberry farmer corporation combining more than 700 small businesses. This corporation is an amazing example of a company successfully running its "Cranberry Dreams" challenge. After creating the viral video, the brand drastically increased searches and sales. All these businesses experienced a spike in sales and Google searches. They achieved brand awareness, visibility, and high revenues.
Below, you can see a screenshot of the challenge that went viral.
Encourage user-generated content
User-generated content is always a good idea for product promotion. Your existing customers are the best sources of information about your brand. They can showcase your products, share their thoughts, and talk about their experience. Videos with recommendations will encourage trust and increase sales.
Below, you can see tricks from Rhode’s customers.
Partner with TikTok influencers
Collaboration with opinion leaders allows your brand to expand your reach and deliver your message to the audience that aligns with your buyer persona. Influencers can showcase your products on TikTok and talk about its benefits.
Below is an example of such collaboration between Lays and TikTok influencers.
Respond to comments under your videos
Increasing engagement and activity under your videos is a must. TikTok algorithms pay attention to your videos’ likes, comments, and shares when promoting content. Moreover, when you respond to users’ comments, you establish the feeling of a community that shapes around your brand. We recommend you interact with your followers to boost engagement and build trust.
For example, Charli D'Amelio, a media personality from the US, often replies to her followers’ comments.
Use trending music
Consider adding trending music to your videos. It increases the chances of gaining popularity on TikTok. Popular music helps establish emotional connections with viewers and provides your videos with a specific mood. People usually stop scrolling videos when they hear songs that sound familiar. It will help grab users’ attention and encourage them to watch your videos.
Below, you can see how famous TikTok dancer Addison Rae uses trending music for her videos.
Publish how-tos and tutorials
TikTok format is perfect for how-tos and tutorials because people often use the platform to learn something new. By sharing step-by-step tutorials, you increase the chances of being noticed by a larger audience.
Below is an example of a short cooking video that teaches how to cook chicken Alfredo with broccoli.
Deliver content in an entertaining manner
If you want to instantly grab users’ attention, consider finding an entertaining and joyful way to communicate your message. Your videos should be fun and interesting.
For example, SmashingPencils provides videos on color mixing.
Share educational content and tips
Videos with value are always a great way of promoting your product. Informative and educational content helps you expand your reach and deliver your message to the right audience.
For instance, Clean That Up! provides users with cleaning tips and product reviews.
Create your branded hashtag
Custom hashtag means additional visibility for your company. Consider adding branded hashtags to your videos to make it easier for users to search for your videos and share them with others. Besides, more TikTok users can discover your content if you use a special hashtag. TikTok hashtags allow creators to reach audience segments that search for specific topics.
For instance, Colgate customers can find the company’s videos on TikTok using its hashtag #Colgatesmile.
Design a custom effect or filter
Branded effects and filters from TikTok allow you to establish visibility and present your company to new prospects. When using your effect, users can spread awareness about your brand and make it popular.
For instance, Rare Beauty created the Rare Beauty Bracket Filter to celebrate the third Birthday of the brand. The effect helps customers identify their favorite Rare Beauty products. The filter is both entertaining and educational.
Congrats, now you know what TikTok marketing is and why it’s essential for modern brands. Hope that our tips and examples will inspire you to develop an outstanding strategy for your company’s TikTok.
Transactional email
A transactional email is an automated message sent to a subscriber based on their actions on a particular application or website. Order updates, booking, subscription confirmation, and notifications are examples of transactional emails.
In this video produced by Mailjet, the lecturer highlights the difference between transactional and marketing emails.
These emails inform customers about the start or completion of a specific process. It is, therefore, important to automate these messages to ensure that the right emails are sent to the right recipients at the appropriate time. Apart from that, personalizingmessages is also vital. Why? It ensures that the marketer always sends relevant information to the recipient.
From a customer’s perspective, transactional emails go a long way in reassuring them of a brand’s reliability. Moreover, they help companies offer better customer service. For example, an order confirmation email confirms that a business has received a customer’s order. In turn, it keeps the buyer from being uncertain regarding the status of their transaction.
Email marketing services allow reaping the maximum benefits from these emails. They offer a trustful SMTP service, which ensures a high email deliverability rate. Besides, they provide additional means of authentication for better performance.
Why are Transactional Emails Important?
Develop customer trust
Boost customer engagement
Stimulate additional sales
Foster brand recognition
Transactional emails are essential to businessesbecause of their many benefits. Let’s highlight some of the areas these emails can bring value to:
Develop customer trust. Customers undoubtedly feel safer when they interact with a business that offers useful information during every phase of cooperation. With transactional emails, companies can eliminate customer concerns.
Boost customer engagement. Transactional emails employ a coordinated approach that makes customers feel appreciated, thus inviting interaction. This cooperation, in turn, leads to better social media engagement or even higher customer participation in surveys.
Stimulate additional sales. With transactional emails, marketers can send product ads that are related to what their customers have purchased. These subtle advertisements can go a long way in cultivating a desire to buy additional or complementary products from a business.
Foster brand recognition. Transactional emails are a great way to present the brand’s elements (logos, typography, colors, etc.) to the attention of the client. In turn, this ensures that shoppers remember a particular business in the future.
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What is the difference between a marketing email and transactional email?
To most people, the line between marketing emails and transactional emails is often blurry. A marketing email is any commercial content or message that is sent to a subscriber list. This type of email usually prompts the recipient to convert, and it is generally sent at strategic periods. All marketing emails must follow the local laws and should only be sent to people who have opted in.
A transactional email, on the other hand, is triggered by a recipient’s unique behavior. When a customer performs a specific action, they receive the corresponding email. An order confirmation email sent to a customer who has made a purchase is an example of a transactional email. Unlike a marketing email that can be sent in bulk, a transactional email is intended for particular and narrow mailing list segments.
Transactional Email Types
Order confirmation
Shipment status email
Password resetting email
Pricing plan upgrade email
Transactional emails can bring marketers better results in terms of ROI and customer engagement. It is also possible to create transactional emails with LIKE.TG. However, one must first understand the different types of transactional emails to leverage their power:
Order confirmation
When a customer makes a purchase, it is an excellent practice to follow up with an order confirmation showing the shipping details and order tracking process, if possible. If a payment has been made, also include a receipt. These emails reassure the customer that the purchase was successful and gives the business a chance to cross-sell or upsell the products.
Shipment status email
This email is sent to keep a client in the know regarding the order made. Companies tell customers about the date of the product arrival. Moreover, they give a chance to track the shipment right from the email.
Password resetting email
These emails are sent to website visitors who ask for password changes and usually contain clear instructions on how users can change their login password. They may include a link for the reset, and another to report unauthorized password change requests.
Pricing plan upgrade email
This email motivates users to upgrade their pricing plans. Marketers usually tempt with unique features that will boost productivity. Another common practice is giving a time-limited discount. Especially when an annual policy is considered.
All you need is to choose a reliable service that will send your transactional emails in a flash.
How to send a transactional email with LIKE.TG?
Register with LIKE.TG
Create an event
Create an automation flow
With LIKE.TG, you can send up to 12,000 transactional emails each month for free. To improve the performance of your emails, you can set up SPF and DKIM records to authenticate your emails. This way, your campaigns won’t land in the subscribers’ spam folder.
Sending transactional emails with LIKE.TG takes four steps.
Step 1. Register with LIKE.TG
Fill in this registration form if you don’t have an account with the service.
Step 2. Create an event
Firstly, you should create an event that will trigger your transactional email to be sent. Let’s say, you want to send a confirmation email. So, you need to go to the “Automation” tab, choose “Events Manager.” and click “Add new event.” LIKE.TG offers 4 pre-defined events: registration, abandoned cart, purchase, and custom events.
To send an order confirmation email, choose the “Purchase” event. Fill in the variables with the information you want to transfer about your client. After that, we'll generate code including the URL that will receive data. Ask your developer to send data to this event.
Follow this step-by-step guide to creating events with LIKE.TG.
Step 3. Create an automation flow
Now, you can get started with creating your flow. Go back to the “Automations” tab and click “Create new automation.” Choose the event you have just created, as the start of your flow. Then, add an order confirmation email. Keep in mind that you need to create an email template to select it. You can use LIKE.TG pre-made templates for this purpose.
This way, every time a user clicks “Buy,” they will receive an order confirmation email.
You can also add a condition to send users a thank you email after they confirm their order. If they don’t confirm it, you can remind them about it in two days. To launch this kind of flow, you need to create two events:
The first event will send data regarding the customer and their order. It can be an abandoned cart email event.
The second event will send the data regarding the purchase. It will be the corresponding event.
Look below to see how this flow looks.
After launching your flow, you can monitor conversions. In our Knowledge Base, you’ll find the instructions on how to set up a conversion count.
Transactional Email Examples
A transactional email from Apple. It confirms a subscriber’s change of their Apple ID password.
An upgrade pricing plan email from Grammarly. The brand gives a generous discount to leave no chance for reflection.
An order confirmation email. This email provides users with all the necessary details regarding the order to make a client trust.
An example of a shipment status email. The sender gives a chance to track the shipment status in real-time.
Transactional Email Best Practices
Transactional emails should be focused on giving customers information and assistance whenever needed. Here some best practices for this type of email:
don’t confuse transactional emails with marketing emails. Mixing the two can land a brand into trouble with the law as well as the recipients;
be specific. State the reason for writing this or that email clearly — avoid being too wordy;
authenticate emails with SPF and DKIM records. This way, there are more chances for your emails to land into the inbox.consider sending from a dedicated IP address to be fully responsible for your sender reputation;
use a “reply-to” email address to increase engagement. “No-reply” email address looks robotic and leaves no chance for interaction with your brand;
monitor email statistics to update the strategy on the go.
To learn how to create and send transactional emails,follow this step-by-step guide.
Send transactional email
Total addressable market
A total addressable market (TAM) is a measure that reflects revenue opportunities businesses can receive after selling a specific product or service. It helps companies identify market demand for their goods. TAM enables entrepreneurs to assess their revenue potential from a specific product and prioritize tasks.
In this article, we’ll reveal the difference between the total addressable market and market size and review how to estimate the metric.
Why is calculating the TAM important?
If you decide to run a business, the first thing you should do is estimate your total addressable market. A total addressable market is an indicator that helps starters enter a new market, and well-established companies calculate profit potential. Large brands estimate the measure to find out whether they still have some space to grow within the market and increase their revenue opportunities. This metric allows you to evaluate the potential scale of the market. When making estimations with TAM, it’s crucial to use accurate values.
Entrepreneurs capture TAM to identify the number of clients they can reach using their marketing efforts and sales channels. Companies assess their market share to determine the size of their target audience. You need to estimate the measure to have a realistic outline of your new business. It will help you reach your business goals faster.
Now that you know why TAM is essential, it’s time to make the difference between total addressable market and market size clear. After exploring the next section, you’ll be able to determine each for your business.
Total Addressable Market vs Market Size
Since there’s often a misinterpretation of these two concepts, we’ll review each term in detail. This section will help you find out their peculiarities and calculate the measures for your company.
Total addressable market is an indicator that shows the revenue potential a company can obtain after selling its product. Calculating TAM enables you to decide whether it’s worth entering the market with a specific product or not. The value reflects the market demand for specific goods and services. Once you estimate the metric, you can make well-informed business decisions.
TAM provides you with a clear understanding of your market share and the size of your target audience. As a result, you can receive information about your business growth and future profits. After identifying TAM, you’ll be able to determine whether you can release new items and have bigger revenue potential.
Market size is a term that reflects the potential market volume and sales revenue. It refers to the total number of prospects for a specific product during a certain timeframe (usually a year). If you want to run a business, you need to discover the market size to efficiently allocate resources, build an effective business and marketing strategy, and receive investments.
Now that you know the difference, let’s discover how to estimate TAM for your business.
How to calculate the total addressable market?
Whether starting a business or having an established brand, you should capture your TAM. In this section, we’ll unveil three main ways to do it.
Top-down approach. The approach requires you to search for market reports, research studies, and industry data to determine your total addressable market. However, if you do it on your own, data might be limited and out of date. Consider hiring management consulting companies like Gartner and Forrester to find relevant and fresh industry data. They will conduct deep research and provide you with actionable insights. This information will help you make smart decisions and improve your company’s performance. Their information will allow you to define subsections of your industry aligned with the offer and main objectives. Yet industry data might be limited and contain old data.
Bottom-up approach. To calculate TAM using a bottom-up approach, you need information about your previous sales and pricing. Firstly, multiply your average sales price by the number of current clients. Once you do it, you’ll receive your annual contract value (ACV). Secondly, multiply your annual contract value by the total number of consumers. Finally, you’ll obtain your TAM. Let’s say you sell an average of 75 T-shirts at $10 each to local shops. 75 multiplied by $10 equals an ACV of $750. The next step is multiplying your ACV of $750 by the total number of shops (150). Let’s calculate: $750 * 150 = $112,500. Your TAM is $112,500.
Value theory. The theory relies on your product’s value and the willingness of consumers to purchase it for a higher price. You need to find out whether customers will pay a higher price for the superior quality of your product in the future. Say your competitors sell sports shoes for $40/ pair and you sell your super light and comfortable shoes for $50. Will your customers pay more for better quality? Once you estimate your TAM, it’s necessary to decide whether you’ll obtain the targeted profits or not. If you get the measure equaling $30-$200 million/year, you can try entering it and receiving revenue opportunities. However, if the market size is too small ($5 million per year) or too big ($1 billion per year), it’s not worth entering. If you join such a market, it might be challenging because of low revenue and high competition.
Congrats, now you know what TAM is and why it’s essential. Hope that our guide will help you calculate yours.
Teaser advertising
Teaser advertising is using intriguing headlines, eye-catching images, and suspense to create buzz around a brand and build excitement about its new product.
In this article, you'll learn why teaser advertising works, get to know how to create an effective campaign and see some examples.
Why does teaser advertising work?
The main purpose of a teaser is to drive the attention of site visitors. Marketers use this type of advertising to announce the release of a product, share the news about its launch, pull back the curtain on a collaboration of a company with a big star. They increase their brand awareness, drive much traffic to the website, and blow up sales with a well-planned campaign.
Teasers do work because people love anticipation. Remember preparing for Christmas. This time brings much joy to people because they look for the best presents for their friends, decorate the apartments, and feel this magic in the air. The feeling of belonging to something big fascinates people. Real fans of a brand feel the same. They enjoy being a part of a community as much as knowing the secrets that others don't know. Besides, people are curious to pass by an attractive or even clickbait headline. Marketers know that people love talking, so they make the most out of teaser advertising.
There's a fine line between a good teaser ad and a cheap clickbait banner cheating people. So, let's find out how to create an effective teaser ad.
How to create an attractive teaser ad?
An appealing teaser ad should make people click and find out more about the offer promoted. The main rule is to stick to your promises. Unmet expectations are the worst thing your potential client may face since it's pretty difficult to recover from a negative first impression. So, always stick to your word.
You can intrigue users by creating mystery around your brand. Keep them engaged by playing a guessing game and revealing the information in small portions. This way, you'll manage to keep their curiosity insatiable. Ensure that your product or news is worth waiting for. Avoid exaggerating, using shocking and cheating messages and statements that can't be verified.
There are lots of formats available for teaser advertising. You can run digital ads placing banners on relevant websites, send email announcements, launch your campaign on TV, release video teasers, etc. The most important thing is to target the correct audience. There's no point in showing your teaser ads to all the users since it will only exhaust your budget.
To promote your offer in teaser networks, you should firstly register on one of such platforms. They make the cooperation between an advertiser and publisher easy and transparent. Then, set your budget, ad display time, and the number of clicks, and create your advertisement. After, a publisher will receive a specific code to be installed on a website. An advertiser rewards a site owner according to chosen pricing model for clicks, impressions, or specific actions.
Now that you know the features of teaser advertising, check out some examples.
Examples of Teaser Advertising
You’ve definitely seen lots of teaser ads while watching videos on YouTube, checking your inbox, or navigating blogs and news resources. We’ll share some examples of different formats of ads.
With a teaser ad below, the company entices an email recipient to follow the brand news not to miss a big sale. The metaphor behind the image speaks for itself, and a countdown timer is an additional sales driver.
Apple fans are always excited about new brand products. The company does its best to build buzz around its new launches without being too wordy. This time the brand says nothing about their new watch — just asks users to save the date to their calendar.
Now that you know the way teaser advertising works, how to create an effective ad, and have some examples at hand, design a perfect campaign!
Targeting
Targeting is an advertising mechanism, that allows you to segment some visitors, who meet a defined set of criteria, from the general audience. It helps increase the effectivity of the campaign. Targeting is also used in email marketing for segmentation. Find out more.
This video made by tutor2u considers three marketing strategies along with its benefits and explains the way to combine them effectively.
Why is targeting important?
Without a proper targeting strategy, your product promotion is doomed to failure. To sell successfully, firstly you need to know who you're selling to, and then pick up the most relevant strategies and techniques for each segment.
With an effective plan, you’ll be able to reach the following goals.
Attract quality leads.Only target leads who are most likely to be interested in your product. This way, you won’t spend extra money and effort on advertising to big audiences.
Stay competitive. The more accurately you target, the more competitors you leave behind. Clients always choose brands that provide relevant offers.
Improve your service and products. To develop an effective targeting strategy, you need to deeply analyze your audience. You’ll get to know your clients’ needs and wants. This information will help you improve your product and service.
What’s the difference between segmentation, targeting, and positioning?
These three elements play an important role in promoting a new product. You can’t escape any of them since an effective marketing strategy implies using each one step by step.
Segmentation comes first. It refers to the process of dividing your entire audience into smaller groups called segments. They are made up of people whose needs and interests are similar. They respond differently to your campaigns. Without a proper segmentation strategy, you won’t be able to enter the next stage successfully.
The second stage is called targeting. Now that you have your audience segmented, you start developing the strategy and the tactics that will help you communicate with people more effectively. Analyze each segment, create a buyer persona for each, and then work on designing the best promotions for each group. This way, you target different segments of your audience using the most relevant techniques.
The last stage is positioning. This stage is extremely important since its success predetermines your place in the market. Your task here is to persuade your potential clients that your brand is the best choice. You should create an image of your company in your customers’ minds. Educate them about the benefits of using your product and do your best to be associated with a particular need. One of the brands that managed to do this successfully is Coke as far as almost every person thinks of this manufacturer when talking about soda.
Targeting mechanism
The audience is monitored during the information gathering stage. At this stage of targeting, a marketer monitors consumers' tastes, finds out which stores they visit, what actions they carry out on the Internet, what the users are interested in, etc.
The information analysis stage allows you to conclude the preferences of your target audience, their tastes,methods of communication, and their purchasing behavior from a significant amount of data gathered from a large number of users. Accordingly, you should focus your marketing efforts on the people who are most likely to engage with your brand based on the information that you gained from your analyses.
Inthe next stage, it is possible to present an information message, a product, a service profitably for the target audience. After the audience is determined, an advertising and information message should be created.
Advertising is placed only on those information resources that are visited by a potential audience (specific sites, pages, sections of stores, departments of the stores, television broadcasts that are most relevant to your target audience).
Targeting Types
Theme-based targeting. Advertising and information messages demonstration according to a particular topic.
Contextual targeting. Message demonstrations according to users’ interests.
Geotargeting. Advertising demonstrationbased onthe geographical location of your target audience
Behavioral targeting.This is oneof the most promising types of targeting. The essence of behavioral targeting is introducing a mechanism to collect information about users’ actions: routes of travel, favorite places to visits, shopping behaviors, etc.
Sociodemographic targeting. This is a concentration based on age, gender, income, social status, etc.
Targeted Email Marketing
Marketers use targeting to craft relevant and personalized email campaigns. This mechanism lets you divide your mailing list into small segments with shared interests and offer them different goods and content. By doing this, you'll get a higher ROI and ensure customer retention.
Convert prospects into leads with LIKE.TG!
Carry out segmentation to send the most relevant emails with valuable offers to each client. LIKE.TG offers ready-made segments and advanced options for better performance.
Register and send segmented emails!
After the registration in LIKE.TG, you can group your clients by their rating, age, location, occupation, gender, and based on their actions — the way they interact with your emails. We provide ready-to-use segments available for free.
If your client base is less than 500 subscribers, try segmentation within the free pricing plan. Send up to 15,000 emails absolutely for free to 500 subscribers monthly.
Create an email campaign
Total cost
Total cost is the sum of expenses a company needs to manufacture a specific level of output. It’s a total of fixed and variable costs, calculating which helps product managers evaluate their overall profit margin.
Business owners should possess information about profits and expenses to reassure that their companies are running smoothly. Total cost gives entrepreneurs an understanding of their firms’ profitability and performance. In this article, we’ll reveal several steps necessary to calculate the total cost and discuss an example.
How to Calculate Total Cost
Different types of businesses leverage the formula to evaluate their overall profit margin. If a firm doesn’t bring the expected revenue, it’s up to its owner to decide whether to make any changes to turnover or pricing. So if you need to obtain the measure, let’s review four steps to calculate it for your company.
Sum up all fixed costs. First of all, you need to determine the fixed costs of your company. These are business expenses that aren’t influenced by the number of manufactured products or services. They include machinery, property taxes, equipment, rental or lease payments, etc. Once you know your fixed costs, sum them all up.
Find all variable costs. The next step is to figure out the variable costs. These refer to expenses influenced by the number of products manufactured by a particular company. Expenses on raw materials, utility costs, packaging, wages, and commissions are examples of variable costs. Therefore, you need to obtain a total of these expenses.
Add all fixed and variable costs to define the total cost. Once you have all your fixed and variable costs, you can estimate the total cost by adding all these expenses.
Check the income statement to find your business’s costs. Financial documents contain records about the performance of a certain company and its business activities. That’s why it may be helpful to check an income statement to find information on the costs of a business. Besides the income statement that nearly every company has, you might need to consult a balance sheet to check your company’s financial health.
Now that you know the necessary steps to calculate the total cost, let’s proceed to the example.
Total Cost Example
Businesses use the formula to obtain this metric that enables them to assess their profitability. Business owners compare total costs at different time intervals to figure out whether a firm needs to boost sales, review pricing, or generate more revenue.
Let’s imagine that there’s an apparel company. The owner of this business needs to calculate the total cost to determine whether the firm brings any profit. For this purpose, there is a necessity to obtain all fixed costs of this business. You can see them below.
The second step is to find all variable costs and sum them up.
Now when you have the necessary measures, you can easily estimate the total cost by adding all of the expenses.
Hence, total cost helps entrepreneurs define the profitability of their companies. Taking this metric into account also helps assess a company’s performance and determine its position in the market compared to competitors’. The results can be used to review how successful a particular product or product range is.
Targeted advertising
Targeted advertising is a type of Internet advertising that delivers promotional messages to a customer according to their specific traits, interests, and preferences. Brands get this information by tracking consumer profiles and activity on the Internet.
This video by Online Ads Edu explains what targeted advertising is and how it works.
Although there is a discussion to be had about the ethics of collecting and using personal data for promotional purposes, targeted advertising has proved its efficiency as a marketing channel. In this article, we’ll learn more about this tool and explore the main tactics and successful examples of targeted advertising campaigns.
Benefits of Targeted Advertising
Hitting the right audience
Advanced personalization
Lower cost
Instant results
Higher ROI
In-depth analytics
Re-engagement
More than half of the global population uses the Internet every day. People look for products and services using search engines, browse social networks, visit online stores, and so on. Brands employ different marketing channels to make the most of these activities. Targeted advertising has a ton of advantages compared to other ways of promoting a business online.
Hitting the right audience. Over 50% of prospective customers turn out to be a mismatch for businesses. Targeted advertising allows brands to interact with prospects who are most interested in their products. It increases the chances of selling to a particular buyer.
Advanced personalization. Personalization is crucial for online marketing, and targeted advertising lets you take it to the next level. Knowing your audience's traits, interests, and behavior, you can offer them the most suitable products or services.
Lower cost. Compared to traditional offline advertising or complex online strategies, such as content marketing, targeted advertising is cheaper. Better yet, using this marketing channel, you never go over budget; as soon as you reach the limit, an advertising platform stops showing your ad.
Instant results. Most online marketing strategies require a long time to reach your goals. For instance, SEO brings desirable outcomes after six months or more. In contrast, targeted advertising is a great way to acquire customers here and now.
Higher ROI. Showing relevant offers to your audience, you get higher conversion rates, improved sales, and boosts revenue. Meanwhile, sophisticated targeting on advertising platforms lets you reduce the price for a click. As a result, you get a better return on investment.
In-depth analytics. Most advertising platforms show your campaign’s performance in real-time, provide advanced analytics, and let you make timely changes to achieve better results.
Re-engagement. First-time website visitors or ad viewers rarely convert into buyers. You can set up targeted ads to re-engage these potential customers with your brand over and over again. It helps prospects move down the pipeline towards making their purchase.
These benefits make targeted advertising one of the most popular ways to promote business online. For instance, in 2016, European brands invested over 16 billion euros into targeted ads. Read on for more targeted advertising statistics.
Targeted Advertising Statistics
Statistics is a golden opportunity to spot trends and get useful insights. We have selected some facts to help you better understand targeted advertising.
27% of internet users consider targeted ads to be a convenient way to learn more about appealing products. Meanwhile, 51% of respondents believe this type of advertising is an inappropriate use of personal data.
Young audiences are the most positive about targeted advertising. 41% of respondents aged 18-24 like discovering new goods through this promotional channel.
In 2018, contextual advertising was the most popular type of targeted advertising. Thus, 80% of European businesses preferred it over behavioral and geographical targeting.
In 2016, 90% of the digital display advertising market growth came from formats and processes that use behavioral data.
Behaviorally targeted ads proved to be the most cost-effective type of advertising. Their average click-through rate was 5.3 times higher than in advertising, which does not use behavioral data.
You may puzzle over the question of how exactly targeted advertising systems gather and use your data and online behavior. We’ll explore the mechanics further.
How Does Targeted Advertising Work?
To place a targeted ad online, you need to set up a campaign on an advertisement network. Those networks show ads to users based on their data – demographics, buying history, or digital behavior.
Advertising platforms can collect data from different sources. The most common of them are cookies on the websites you’ve browsed. Cookies are tiny files that store information about your on-site actions or purchases and transfer them to the CRM or third-party services.
Another source of information about you is search engines. They analyze search queries and users’ habits to employ this data for showing them paid ads on the search engine results page.Finally, advertising platforms get your data from social media profiles. Social networks store information about your age, gender, beliefs, preferences, and so on.
Knowing your main characteristics and online behavior, advertising platforms can show you targeted ads on different websites. For instance, if you often browse makeup products on the Lookfantastic website, you may see ads from other cosmetics retailers on various online platforms.
Brands often use targeted ads to show you the products you’ve looked through before. This tactic is called retargeting. It helps businesses spark your interest in returning to their websites and purchasing the product.
As you can see, brands use a whole lot of data about you to target their ads. Based on the information used, we can distinguish different types of targeting. Let’s delve deeper into them.
Types of Targeted Advertising
As targeted advertising grows, online platforms get more and more data about their users and can offer advertisers different types of targeting. Here are the most popular of them:
Demographic targeting. This type of targeted advertising focuses on the audience’s characteristics – age, gender, salary, nationality, and more.
Behavioral targeting. The core of this type is potential customers’ on-site and purchasing behavior. Platforms assemble data on the items users browse through and show ads according to it.
Contextual targeting. Contextual targeting implies displaying ads based on a website’s content. For instance, a publisher may show toy advertising on a parenting website.
Geographic targeting. This type focuses on the potential buyer’s location.
Time targeting. The base for these ads are periods when users show the highest online activity. For example, ads occur from 4 PM to 8 PM, when people typically travel home from work.
Device targeting. Advertisers can target potential customers according to the device they use.
We’ve unpacked a few common types of targeting. However, advertising platforms offer many more options. Let’s move on and find out how to work with ads on Facebook and Instagram.
How to Do Targeted Advertising
How to do targeted advertising on Facebook
How to do targeted advertising on Instagram
Setting up a campaign on most advertising platforms is easy as pie. However, to get sustainable results, you’ll need to get in hot water and learn as you go. To help you out, we’ve prepared tips on Facebook and Instagram targeted advertising.
How to do targeted advertising on Facebook
To make the most of your Facebook advertising, follow our comprehensive guide. It will teach you to create ads and give a few pieces of advice. In this article, we’ll sum up the main steps of setting up a Facebook campaign:
Choose an objective. You can opt for a Facebook page promotion, getting more website visitors and leads, or promoting your business locally. You can advertise particular types of content as well.
Create an ad. Facebook allows you to go for a video, single image, carousel, and slideshow. To get more inspiration, follow our guide on creating Facebook ads.
Define your audience. Facebook lets you choose between a great many targeting options, from geographic location to lookalike audiences.
Define the duration and budget. The system will show you the approximate results of the campaign with the selected parameters.
The key to success in targeted advertising is keeping track of your performance and making timely changes. To measure and analyze your campaigns effectively, follow Facebook’s guidelines.
Also, you may reinforce your Facebook advertising with other marketing tools. For instance, you can create a chatbot to nurture leads. To set up your bot for Facebook, try LIKE.TG and send up to 10,000 messages for free.
How to do targeted advertising on Instagram
Instagram is part of the Facebook family, so you need to go to Facebook Ad Manager and follow the steps listed in the previous section. Out of the box, the ad manager will publish your ad on both Facebook and Instagram. You can switch to Instagram only but bear in mind that images posted on Facebook via Instagram drive 23% more engagement.
You can also promote existing Instagram posts and stories out of the mobile app. It’s way simpler than setting up a campaign from Facebook Ads Manager. To learn more about boosting your organic publications on this network, follow our guide on Instagram promotion.
To drive desirable outcomes for your targeted advertising campaigns, you have to learn through trial and error. You can speed up the process and exclude some mistakes by following the tips we’ve picked for you.
Targeted Advertising Tips
Target your existing customers
Show ads to your fans
Split test your audiences
Avoid hyper-targeting
Target the lower stages of the funnel
Benefit from lookalike audiences
Marketers have accumulated a lot of tricks during the years of working with targeted advertising. Let’s get into the details of the best practices and adopt some of them.
Target your existing customers
Acquiring new customers is often the primary purpose of launching targeted advertising campaigns. However, this might not be the best strategy as the probability of selling to new buyers is around 5-25%. Meanwhile, loyal customers make purchases in 60-70% of cases!
To drive more sales and boost your ROI, target your advertising at existing customers. You can do this by creating customer lists and feeding them to Facebook, Google, and Twitter. The first one targets your customers with the Custom Audiences tool, the second – with Customer Match, the third – with Tailored Audiences.
Show ads to your fans
This piece of advice resembles the previous one, but it only suits those who have a loyal audience on Facebook. This social network allows you to target your ads at people who have liked your page.
Showing ads to your fans affects your ROI dramatically. One experiment showed that this tactic increased a campaign's return on investments by 35 times. The reason for success here is the same as with targeting loyal customers; this audience already knows you, likes you and trusts you.
Split test your audiences
You probably heard that split testing is essential for achieving your advertising goals. Testing various targeting options, you can find the most effective one. To run split tests on your audiences, create two campaigns, and choose slightly different targeting parameters.
To get crystal clear results, change only one feature at a time. It may be gender, age, interests, devices, and so on. By testing your audiences, you’ll finally find your most promising prospects and learn to target them more effectively.
Avoid hyper-targeting
Targeting settings allow you to pick your prospective customers precisely. In fact, it might be harmful as targeting a very narrow and specific audience can drive poor results. Try to avoid overly narrow targeting and embrace a broader clientele instead.
What quantity of audience size is best for particular networks? The only way to figure it out is by testing. However, if you need a cheat sheet, consider LinkedIn recommendations. This social network advises opting for an audience of over 50,000 for Sponsored Content and Text Ads.
Target the lower stages of the funnel
People in the lower stages of the sales funnel have higher chances to convert into customers. Thus, targeting them is a must if you aim at growing sales.
Google and Microsoft’s advertising networks allow you to target in-market audiences – those who are searching for a specific product and are probably ready to buy it. To find these people, platforms use data on the sites they have browsed, the proximity and frequency of visits, clicks on similar ads, and conversions.
The good news is that you can use the same mechanics on YouTube; this platform offers Custom Intent Audiences. YouTube uses broad-match related search queries that people looked for on Google.
Benefit from lookalike audiences
Advertising networks on search engines and social media let you expand your audience through lookalike targeting. This feature mirrors your custom audiences and offers you users with the same defining characteristics. This way, you can increase the number of promising prospects that you target.
Applying the tactics listed above, you can improve your targeted advertising results. To learn how to do it more efficiently and creatively, read on – we’ll examine examples of stunning targeted campaigns.
Targeted Advertising Examples
When it comes to targeted advertising, you need to not only spot your audience’s preferences but also to show creative and attention-grabbing content. To ignite your inventiveness, look at the advertising campaigns we’ve picked for you.
Amanda Foundation
Amanda Foundation used behavioral and geographical targeting to find homes for animals that were spending their last days at shelters across Los Angeles. To increase the chances for pets, the non-profit showed ads to people who were the most likely to adopt a particular cat or dog.
The ads appeared on websites according to users’ demographics and browsing behavior. For instance, if a person was prone to a sedentary lifestyle and interested in small dogs, they saw banners with chihuahuas or toy terriers.
In the picture below, you can see the set of ads for cats and dogs in search of a home. Each message introduces the viewer to a suitable pet. The text highlights the traits that a specific animal and the ad viewer have in common.
Sephora
The cosmetics retailer, Sephora, launched a Facebook campaign to boost sales during the holiday season. The company targeted people who visited the Sephora website and left without making a purchase. The second segment was Americans interested in beauty, skincare, and makeup.
In its ads, Sephora showed viewers the type of products they would prefer. For instance, if a person had shown previous interest in or intent to buy makeup online, they saw the ad with makeup products.
Each ad started with an engaging video and several product images below it. After tapping the post, a viewer went to the Sephora website. The links led directly to the category presented in the ad. Also, a user could switch to a different group of products and choose a particular item to buy.
Tesco
The retailer, Tesco, chose Facebook for its advertising campaign in Malaysia. The company used geographical targeting to reach people who lived near specific stores.
The brand used discounts to incentivize visits to its supermarkets. Tesco showed three ads that offered prospects to save from 30 to 100 Malaysian Ringgit. Viewers had to save unique codes generated for each ad on Facebook. Later, the social network reminded users to redeem the coupon in the nearest shop.
Each ad was a simple combination of an image, text, and call to action. The promotion showed the amount that customers would save, if they take the chance.
J2O
J2O provides another example of the creative use of Facebook video ads. The company wanted to increase brand awareness before Christmas and boost its seasonal drink sales.
J2O targeted the people in the UK aged 18-44. The campaign consisted of three eye-catching and engaging videos with a brand character – a colorful alpaca, Mojo, which you can see in the picture below. Facebook Ads Manager optimized each display to show the best-performing versions.
Targeted advertising may be the perfect option to acquire new leads, move them down the sales funnel, or re-engage loyal customers. However, do not rely on this channel alone – a complex approach drives the best results. Enrich your marketing strategy with email and SMS campaigns, chatbots, and web push notifications – register with LIKE.TG.
Subscription marketing
Subscription marketing is a strategic approach aimed at transitioning customers to a subscription-based business model, where clients pay a specific fee to access a product or service. This method enables companies to forecast their revenues, foster long-term relationships with customers, and maintain their loyalty.
In this article, we’ll unveil why businesses opt for subscription marketing strategy and guide you in building an effective one for your company. In addition, we’ll provide you with 8 best practices to implement a subscription marketing strategy.
Why do businesses choose a subscription marketing strategy?
Subscription marketing provides a way for business owners to acquire and retain customers. However, this isn't the sole reason for companies to adopt this approach. Further, you’ll find out some more arguments why it’s crucial.
Customer retention. A subscription-based business model is a perfect way of keeping repeat customers. With its help, you can retain existing customers without any need to spend additional costs on acquiring new ones. Customers can renew subscriptions to your product or service on an ongoing basis.
Recurring revenue. After buying a subscription, people usually stay with the company for months or even years. By doing so, customers create a stable stream of recurring revenue for such companies. Usually, subscription-based businesses have a small number of loyal customers who bring most of the revenue to their companies.
Lasting relationships with customers. Subscription helps establish a long-lasting bond with clients. This business model differs from usual for all buying-selling processes because it lasts longer. When customers stay for a long time with a business, they become familiar with it. It makes them repurchase the subscription.
Upselling and cross-selling. Customer loyalty enables the smooth implementation of upselling and cross-selling strategies. Loyal subscribers, trusting your business, are open to additional features for an extra charge, contributing to increased revenue.
Demand forecasting. The subscription-based business provides owners with insights into customer preferences, their needs, and problems. By analyzing customer behavior and desires, you can improve their products with some additional features and add-ons. This way, you’ll be able to satisfy a wider audience and encourage them to purchase a plan.
Implementing this strategy positively impacts various aspects of brands, including revenue, and comes with several benefits:
Cost-effectiveness. With a subscription model, your focus is on building a loyal audience for long-term subscriptions, eliminating the need for continuous customer acquisition efforts. Unlike brands where customers make a single purchase and leave, a subscription model ensures predictable revenue without ongoing lead generation costs.
Customer satisfaction. Subscription service allows you to provide your customers with personalized experiences. This makes a huge difference when it comes to buying decisions. If you manage to meet clients’ needs and desires, you’ll be able to get new loyal subscribers.
Reduced customer acquisition cost. Since the subscription business depends a lot on loyal repeat customers, you don’t have to pay again and again for customer acquisition. This way, you can avoid the time and money-consuming process of acquiring new customers all the time. However, you’ll need to do it once to generate leads. Yet you won’t do it regularly so your costs will be secure.
Steady income. Loyal repeat subscribers mean that your company is supported. If they stay with your brand, these customers bring you steady revenue. So your company can succeed and expand.
Now that you know about the pros, it’s time to proceed with building an effective subscription marketing strategy for your business.
How to build an effective subscription marketing strategy?
Creating a loyal customer base that continuously subscribes and provides consistent revenue requires a well-thought-out subscription marketing strategy. Though it may demand effort from your team, the results will be worth it. In this section, we'll guide you on how to manage this process effectively. Let's dive in.
Think of the right pricing model. Customer decisions are heavily influenced by the subscription price. Choose a fee that is competitive yet affordable for your company and target audience. Avoid overpricing your product to maintain customer interest and prevent them from exploring alternatives.
Develop an intuitive site. If you want your potential customers to instantly explore all the benefits and features of your product, make sure that your site works properly. The features, essential information, and a call to action button should be visible. Prioritize site speed and error-free functionality to enhance user experience.
Attract customers with free trials and free plans. Offer free trials to allow prospects to experience your product or service before committing. Free plans can showcase basic features, enticing leads to upgrade to premium options. This approach gives customers a firsthand understanding, empowering them to make informed decisions.
Incorporate an auto-renewal system. Simplify the subscription process with auto-renewal systems. Customers only need to set up their payment method once, eliminating the hassle of filling in details for each transaction. Streamlining payments enhances user convenience and encourages subscription renewals.
Provide discounts for longer subscriptions. Encourage long-term commitment by offering discounts for extended subscription periods. For instance, a 10% or 20% discount on yearly subscriptions incentivizes customers to stay loyal. This benefits subscribers and strengthens their relationship with your company, reducing the likelihood of exploring competitors.
Retain customers with special offers. As a wise business owner, you need to care not only about new customers but about your loyal clients as well. You can use special offers, loyalty, and referral programs to show your care. By providing customers with rewards, you can appreciate them for their loyalty. It’s a perfect way of establishing long-lasting relationships with them.
Monitor performance metrics. Focus on long-term metrics to evaluate your subscription model's performance effectively. Key indicators include customer lifetime value, churn rates, customer engagement, retention rates, and referrals. These metrics provide valuable insights into customer behavior and help optimize your marketing strategy for sustained success.
Now that you know the process step by step, it’s time to find out what will help your team succeed with a subscription-based model. We’ve prepared some of the best practices to apply.
8 Best Practices to Implement a Subscription Marketing Strategy
There are plenty of subscription marketing strategies, yet they don’t guarantee success for your business. In this section, we’ve gathered all the strategies that work and bring measurable results to companies. Let’s explore them in more detail.
Add positive reviews from satisfied clients. There’s nothing better for customers than other clients recommending a specific product or service. Effective marketing campaigns, calls, and offline events don’t have the same influence on the audience as personal recommendations. That’s why it’s crucial to have those on your website. To gain customer trust, you need to ask your satisfied customers to leave their positive reviews. It’ll be great to encourage them with special offers, discounts, or free renewals for their feedback. Once you get the reviews, make sure to add them to your site. They’ll positively influence buyers’ decisions in the future.
Collaborate with opinion leaders. Now when almost everyone is active on Instagram, it’s essential to establish an online presence on the most popular social media platforms. One of the fastest ways to reach a wide audience of your potential customers is by partnering with influencers. Their endorsement introduces your product or service to a vast audience, making your company a viable solution for potential customers seeking similar products.
Incorporate a referral program. A referral program is an excellent way of attracting qualified leads. You don’t have to spend additional costs on customer acquisition and encourage uninterested people to purchase your subscription plans. The referral program enables your loyal customers to bring people who already know about the benefits of your product and have a clear understanding of your company. They come and purchase subscriptions to receive their perks. Such a program streamlines the lead generation process.
Run a loyalty program. A successful business always has a base of loyal customers who bring the most of its revenue. To become loyal, clients should trust your company and be happy with it. After making sure that your audience is satisfied with your product, consider implementing a loyalty program. Reward your clients for being loyal to your business and repurchasing the subscription. You can provide various rewards presented in the form of a discount, special offer, gift, add-ons, free advanced features, or a monthly subscription. Such incentives will help you continue good relationships with your customers.
Offer no-commitment free trials. The free trial works well with prospective customers. If you have a free trial that doesn’t require credit card information, people can come to you and try your product. After testing it, they’ll make up their minds about whether it suits them. This way, you can showcase the benefits of your products and generate more subscribers.
Provide special offers. Special offers work well for new and existing customers. They might differ based on the stage of the customer journey. For instance, you can provide free trials and zero sign-up fees to generate more prospects and give free renewals to retain existing clients. As a result, you get more potential customers and reduce customer churn.
Give discounts for repeat purchases. Cultivate customer loyalty by offering discounts on repeat and significant purchases. Appreciate customer loyalty and encourage higher spending. Discounts serve as powerful tools for fostering customer relationships and boosting revenue.
Provide reduced pricing for yearly subscriptions. If you want customers to stay loyal to your company longer, provide discounts for annual subscriptions. This way, you offer benefits to clients and ensure that they’ll stay with you for one more year. It results in a stable income.
Congrats, now you know what subscription marketing is and why it’s essential. Hope that our step-by-step guide and effective strategies will help you reach your business goals.
Targeted mailing list
A targeted mailing list isnecessaryfor productive and profitable email marketing. A mailinglistis a list of your subscribers’ email addresses. There is a significant difference between a standard mailing list and a targeted mailing list. The quality of your mailing list determines the results of your work.
A targeted mailing list is a segmented list according to some criteria.
Segmentation Criteria
Age
Gender
Place of residence
Occupation
Income
Interests
Hobbies
Preferences
Targeted mailing lists is to include one essential component – the recipient’s history of interaction with your business.
Why use targeted mailing lists?
A highly-targeted mailing list will help youto:
Establish relationships with clients;
Increase customer loyalty;
Receive better conversions and higher ROI.
How to Get a Targeted Mailing List
The first and the most important thing – your mailing list must be LEGAL. This means that you have to resist the temptation to buy a mailing list. A purchased mailing list won’t bring you long-term results. Recipients fromsuch a mailing list are not interested in your work. They have never permitted you to send them emails, that’s why you have high chances togo into the spam folder.
Targeting Mechanism
Analyze your current database of customers. Make sure that all the customers are active and interested in your business, as well as their personal information – it is to be actual.
Do your best to get information. The quality and quantity of information about the customers will help you to create personalized campaigns. It can be gathered from questionnaires.
Offer exciting and valuable content. Your content is the first thing to make subscribers interested. While you offer useful and relevant content, your customers will be with you. They should feel the necessity of your work.
Give workshops, webinars, conferences, competitions, exhibitions, etc. Make your customers feel the importance of your work.
Promote your company with the help of partners.The partner’s website is a great chance to reach new customers. Search for new sources.
Make use of the information on the history of relationships with the clients, their activities on your web-site, purchases. Analyze your interactions for better results.
Make an effort while creating a targeted mailing list and enjoy the results!
Target audience
A target audience is a group of peoplethat share similar needs and interests that a business aims to serve. These people are the end users in most cases.
In this video, you’ll get to know two different strategies that will help you find your target audience without much sweat. Check out!
Look back on your childhood and recall the day-to-day situation when you were about to beg for a piece of candy. The only thing that stopped you was the wise choice of asking your parents. Every little detail mattered, including your approach and parents’ mood. It’s the same with marketing — the right audience determines the success of your product.
What is the no. 1 mistake in business? Many startups tend to fail during their first operational year as they try to appeal to everyone. Each individual has different tastes and needs. So, every company should offer a specifically targeted product. Otherwise, a marketing campaign may result in nothing as it casts too wide a net.
Why is identifying the target audience so crucial for a company?
Beat the competitors
Reduce costs
Know your customer base
Find growth potential
It’s essential to realize precisely who your final consumers are because it assistswithcreating compelling marketing communication strategies. Thus, it is critical to narrow the focus to your core audience.
First of all, identifying your proper market sector makes it possible to focus your efforts cost-effectively. Without having to target everybody, you will minimize the money invested in your project and avoid the most common mistakes in email campaigns. One of the examples of successful market targeting is Facebook Ads. The tool allows you to select the audience based on its interests.
Sending the same message to each client is a bad idea. You will receive a better return on investment by targeting clients that may be interested in your offer.
Those are just some of the examples of why it is critical to target your audience correctly. We will dig a bit deeper to provide more reasons.
Beat the competitors
Each client that you miss because of poor targeting or marketing strategy that does not work smoothly becomes one of your rival’s customers. The idea is that if a person is searching for a specific product or service, they will eventually make a choice, and it does not necessarily have to be one company. It all depends on the effectiveness of your approach to marketing.
It is critical to select the “chosen buyers” from the narrow audience. Several loyal customers may guarantee higher profits and conversion rates than many one-time clients.
Reduce costs
Poorly assessed marketing campaigns will waste your time, money, and nerves. You should not try to launch ads too frequently. It is possible to target the right audience with a single correctly addressed and composed message. Numerous studies have shown a decrease in costs of more than 55% for companies that apply quality audience analysis. Targeted email marketing will help increase CTR and open rates with a minimum of investments.
Know your customer base
The base means a very narrow and specific audience. If you take into account only students when targeting the market for your online tutoring services, you should still divide them into different categories based on a subject they study, age, level of proficiency.
If your service offers advanced subjects, for example, the MBA level, then you should pick young people interested in related disciplines or those who already study in business schools. Drilling down into the nuances makes it possible to tailor campaigns that reach users who are most likely to purchase your products.
Find growth potential
Almost every business wants to expand and go big one day. Often, a small group of customers provides a chance to grow sales. If you produce milk-free ice cream, you should focus on those consumers who are lactose-intolerant and vegans. They will show you possible waysto expand by sharing fresh ideas and feedback.
Types of the Target Audience
Demographic information
Geographic information
Psychographic information
Behavioral information
The main obstacle on the way to select the proper segment is to target is the number of factors you should consider. You may ignore some of them, but the results will be less accurate. If you wish to reach maximum profitability and cost efficiency in the shortest period,consider the following criteria:
Demographic information. It provides businesses with an essential user background, in particular, age, gender, marital status, race, religion, ethnicity, income. It doesn’t require an in-depth analysis, so this data is easy to collect.
Geographic information. It means user location. This kind of data is especially important since it provides local businesses with more opportunities. For example, a company that offers surfing equipment may exclude nordic countries while creating an ad campaign and focus their efforts on the South to break down the budget wisely.
Psychographic information. This piece of data includes users’ traits, lifestyle, social class, beliefs, interests and preferences, hobbies. That is a chance to dig deeper and know your audience better. You may get this information from a customer preference center, ask via email, or analyze their behavior on your website.
Behavioral information. To gather this information, you should monitor the way users interact with your website and create campaigns based on items they view and add to their shopping cart. This way, you will be at the right time and place to convert leads into clients.
Now when you are familiar with the types, have a look at how to identify the right audience.
Target Audience Analysis
Facebook Instagram Tools
Google Analytics In-Market Segments
Affinities
Email segmentation
Target audience analysis is the process of investigating the way your consumers interact with a product to create a buyer persona. Luckily, companies today have unlimited access to high shares of data on their potential and existing buyers. It is possible to retrieve such information digitally. Online tools are the most effective way to evaluate your audience based on statistics. Here are the top-recommended resources.
Facebook Instagram Tools
The insights from these popular social networks are one of the best ways to assess the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and choose proper audiences.
If using Facebook for your business goals correctly, you can filter the potential clients and understand the current needs of your target audience. After all, these two social networks represent the interests and needs of the users.
You can gather and review metrics in various groups and communities. Facebook and Instagram both allow narrowing down the audience by choosing demographics, interests, age, gender, and more. Use filters wisely to create ads on these social networks. Instagram business tools, as well as Facebook instruments, can also help to launch and promote events related to your product.
Google Analytics In-Market Segments
An excellent example is a team of consumers who are looking for the best restaurant or sightseeing attractions in their town to visit. This category of buyers tends to find many options, compare and contrast them based on the critical reviews and customer feedback. Search engines track the entire search process, and you may use Google Analytics to evaluate such actions.
Affinities
Coming back to Google Analytics, there is another option for businesses. That is called Affinities. The idea is to analyze an individual’s lifestyle and hobbies to obtain an overall picture of their habits and possible demands. Such metrics allow predicting how the preferences and needs of the specific person may change over time. It is essential to learn what people who look for your product or service may also be interested in.
Email segmentation
This instrument makes it possible to segmentsubscribers with the help of subscription forms and email campaigns. While the tools mentioned above refer more to analytics, this one is best used when you already know who you target or at least have an idea.
LIKE.TG is focused on effective email marketing. Even once you have the data and stats necessary to come up with a message for your customers, it is not that easy to craft a targeted email campaign. Often, third-party services like LIKE.TG might be more effective than trying to do everything on your own.
The service also offers a statistical analysis based on campaign performance. Businesses can track opens and clicks that allow monitoring the results and improving the existing strategies. Once you know the audience for sure, you can customize and personalize emails so that your clients will feel special.
How to Find Your Target Audience Fast
First of all, you should answer the following questions:
What is the expected age group? Is your audience made of men or women (or both)? Where is the target audience mostly located? What are they interested in?
You can also consider some smaller details to get more. Stick to these six steps while analyzing the answers to the questions above:
Observe your current clients.
Study the competitors using SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats), A/B testing, and PEST analysis (political, economic, socio-cultural, and technological).
Come up with buyer personas.
Select locations and regions that you plan to focus on.
Pick personal characteristics of the potential customer.
Analyze and revise the segmented audience.
Then, the rest of the pieces of one big puzzle will fall into place faster and simpler. You should also take into account the useful sources of information for your decision-making process.
Top-effective Strategies for Reaching the Target Audience
Listen to what they say
Talk to them directly
Build trust and credibility
Change the message
Pick the right promotional channel
What are the most effective strategies used to make your marketing campaigns work?
They depend on the target audience heavily. Check out some common tips below.
Listen to what they say. Pay attention to the needs of your potential customers.The good idea is to spend more time with the representatives of your target audience and try to find out their demands and preferences.
Talk to them directly. If you are too shy to communicate with potential buyers directly, use social networks. You may also hire advertising gurus to create a compelling message.
Build trust and credibility. Emphasize that you are an officially registered entity and that you have the necessary guarantees. You should provide some success stories, cases, and customer reviews to increase your credibility.
Change the message. You should be ready to rebrand at any time. The needs of modern buyers often change, taking into account the dynamic world. That is why you should always keep up-to-date with the trends.
Pick the right promotional channel. Analyze different avenues to discover which one works better with your audience. You may choose several platforms that help pursue different goals. Make sure that you don’t duplicate promotions on these channels; otherwise, you risk to become annoying.
Now, when you know target audience types, ways to analyze, and practical tips, start segmenting your audience with LIKE.TG!
SXO
SXO (search experience optimization) is a set of methods that improve user experience on search engines. It applies SEO principles and helps enhance UX to meet users’ needs and find answers to their questions.
In this article, we’ll uncover the importance of SXO and teach you how to measure and improve it.
Why is SXO important?
Nowadays, it’s now enough to develop a comprehensive SEO strategy to reach prospects and make them convert. To be successful, a company needs to care about a set of aspects such as web development, content marketing, UX optimization, analytics, conversion rate optimization, etc.
With SEO and UX activities, marketers seek to win the attention of as many people as possible and meet their needs with quality content, valuable product features, or an excellent user experience. Companies do it to encourage searchers to take the desired action. It can be a conversion, purchase, or signup. If everything is done right, brands can understand customers’ needs and desires, and get to know their preferences.
SXO is essential for a higher level of conversions and sales volume. If you rank high on Google and provide a seamless customer experience, you’ll be rewarded. Besides, search experience optimization helps obtain more customers who come back, improve the content, stay consistent in marketing strategies, and more.
Now you know the reasons for SXO, so let’s explore how to improve it.
How to improve SXO?
Improving SXO is always useful for a business. We’ve prepared some of the most effective strategies that will help you do it. Look through all of them and then decide which of the aspects require your immediate action.
Make use of a chatbot. Some customers can figure out how the product works by themselves, but others need help from your company. That’s why your customer support team should always be ready to provide solutions and assistance. There’s an excellent solution to this problem. To provide instant assistance, consider implementing a chatbot. LIKE.TG’s chatbot builder empowers you to facilitate live communication, provide support 24/7, ensure a seamless buyer journey, and help with onboarding and setup. You’ll save time and money.
Speed your website load time. According to Unbounce, 70% of consumers say that their decisions to purchase depend a lot on website load time. Your website’s load time greatly impacts customer satisfaction and conversion rate. The faster your website speed, the happier users will be. That’s why you need to pay close attention to web page optimization. As a result, you’ll see instant changes in user experience, conversions, and profits. According to statistics, the first 5 seconds of web page load time are crucial since they influence conversion rates the most. Every additional second of load time reduces the conversion rates of your company. So, keep these facts in mind when you work on website development.
Create structured quality content. Content stays among the most important aspects. Well-structured informative content can win hearts and encourage visitors to engage. It has a great impact on ranking and organic traffic. To keep your company in the top positions, you need to publish quality and unique articles on your blog regularly. Remember, the structure of your content, its length, and readability are important. Use original images and infographics to break your articles into logical parts. They will allow readers to perceive your materials faster and easier.
Remember about mobile users. According to OuterBox, around 79% of customers use mobile devices for online shopping. This supports the fact that customers prefer using a smartphone to buy products because it’s fast and convenient. You need to provide a website with a mobile responsive design. Create intuitive navigation, clear and visible CTAs, use whitespace, optimize videos and images, and be consistent. As a result, your site will display well on small screens.
Use meta tags. Besides quality content, you should also remember about the optimization of meta tags. They help users and Google understand if your content meets searchers’ queries. Create intriguing title tags and meta descriptions that encourage users to click and visit your website. You should include the most relevant and important facts about the content of the article.
The ways to improve SXO are clear, it’s time to unveil how to measure SXO.
How to measure SXO?
To evaluate SXO, you need to identify several important metrics. Below you’ll find out what measures indicate the situation with your search experience optimization.
Pay attention to your bounce rate. This metric is about users who visited your website but left it without performing any actions. Look through the pages that might have a high level of bounce rate. Many steps to place an order, additional costs such as taxes, the lack of convenient payment method can become serious reasons for potential customers to leave your site. Check your website for such issues and eliminate them. Remember, an unpleasant experience influences your sales and revenue.
Analyze click-through rate. Use Google Search Console to identify how many people clicked the link on the search engine results page that leads to your site. It will help you figure out what to change: meta tags, ads, or content.
Calculate conversion rates. By estimating conversions, you’ll be able to uncover whether you succeeded in reaching your goals of bringing in new customers. If you manage to increase your customer base and sales, it means that your SXO strategy works.
Estimate the average time visitors spend on your website or page. If you have quality and engaging content, users will spend more time on your website and read different articles. Time will give you a hint whether your content is compelling and meets users’ needs.
See your organic traffic. Once you start implementing the steps we’ve mentioned before, you need to analyze the results. See if the content you publish reaches your target groups and resonates with them. You should analyze the changes in your organic traffic from the moment you started improving your SXO.
Excellent user experience and SEO are the two aspects that impact conversions, bounce rate, customer satisfaction, and finally, your revenue. You'll see a real difference when you consider our tips on improving SXO. Hope the metrics will help you evaluate SXO for your company.
Subscriber
A subscriber is a person who chose to opt-into your mailing list.
Marketers strongly recommend compiling your subscribers' list by asking their permission for it. Otherwise, such mailings are considered to be spam. When people receive mail, they have not opted in for, the chances are that they will mark it as spam. Many spam complaints will contribute badly to your IP address's reputation among popular web clients. Apart from this, you risk being reported to anti-spam organizations like SpamCopor Spamhouse.
If you ask people to opt-in for your commercial mailings, your list will be comprised of subscribers who expect to see your mail and are interested in receiving it. You can bouncefrom there to build leadnurturing campaigns and customer loyalty programs, to turn them into your loyal leads.
This video by the Deep End uncovers tips and tactics on how to build an email list fast.
Ways tosubscribe
An opt-in form on the homepage of your website
A pop-up window with a subscription form on your website
Offer a bonus or a discount in exchange for a subscription
Place a subscription formon your social media page
Once you have your subscriber list, it is recommended to segmentsubscribers.
Segmentation criteria
Age and gender
Geographical location and time zone
New subscribers/active buyers
People who abandoned the shopping cart without going through with the purchase
The usage of subscriber insights
send personalized emails;
make relevant offers;
choose the right time to send emails; and
launch triggered emailcampaigns.
With a smart email marketing strategy and minimum costs, you can turn your subscribers into regular customers.
Suppression list
A suppression list is a list that includes email addresses of all the users who opted out of your email campaigns. There is a default feature in LIKE.TG that helps comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, which requires you to add an unsubscribe link to each email.
How a Suppression List Works
Once a person clicks on the unsubscribe link, fills in the form on the unsubscribe page, or marks your email as spam, LIKE.TG automatically adds their email addresses to a suppression list. We have designed it to protect your sender reputation. The suppressing list is individual for every account.
Each time you send an email campaign, the algorithm compares recipients' email addresses with those on the suppression list. If email addresses match, the email won’t be sent to those particular addresses.This means that you can’t accidentally or intentionally send any email to users who have opted out. Otherwise, email providers like Gmail and Yahoo would be more likely to bounce your emails hard, and you would have a hard time delivering your marketing messages in the future.
On the screenshot below, you can see how the suppression list looks in LIKE.TG: email addresses, the name and date of the campaign when they left your mailing list, and comments.
For your information, we also add hard-bounced addresses to the list of incorrect addresses, so that you won’t waste your resources on invalid addresses.
How to Manage the Suppression List
You can move users to the suppression list manually. For that, go to the “Mailing lists” category and click the “Unsubscribed” button. After that, fill in a single user’s address, upload a file, or copy and paste up to 10,000 addresses. You can mention the reason for unsubscribing a single email address, and it will appear in the comments of the suppression list.
Synchro marketing
Synchro marketing is a strategy in which a seller provides customers with attractive offers (discounts, free installments, or free additional products) during a low season to control the irregular demand for a product. It helps capture customers and sell off-seasonal goods.
In this article, we’ll cover the difference between synchro marketing and demarketing and review synchro marketing strategies and examples.
Synchro Marketing vs Demarketing
Synchro marketing and demarketing are the two opposite concepts. The first strategy aims to create a demand for off-seasonal goods, while the second one strives to discourage the demand for a product that a company can’t meet. Let’s review each concept in more detail to know the features.
Synchro marketing means using different tactics to control irregular demand. These methods include attractive offers such as free installments, gifts, or discounts to encourage customers to purchase off-seasonal goods. Manufacturers use the tactic during the low season to increase sales and profits.
Let’s take the sellers of heaters, for example. During the high season — winter, they experience high demand for their products, and their revenues constantly increase. However, no one buys heaters in summer when the temperature inside and outside is already high. So companies control the irregular demand by providing customers with special offers to sound more attractive. As a result, they increase sales.
Demarketing means discouraging the demand for a product because the manufacturers don’t have enough supply or feel unprofitable to deliver products to certain regions. Companies usually increase the price, use scaled-down advertising, and redesign a product to reduce the demand. For example, TATA group discouraged its customers from purchasing Tata Nano because of the low supply that can’t meet customers’ demand.
Now that you know the difference, let’s move to the strategies which might come in handy.
Synchro Marketing Strategies
You can use several strategies to increase the demand for your product during the low selling season. Three tactics below will help you improve sales.
Provide customers with attractive offers. To hook the audience’s attention when there’s no demand for a product is no easy task. But still, you can do it with the right approaches. The first thing you should do is to create attractive offers. Do something for free or provide additional gifts. Let’s take sunblocks, for example. To sell these items in winter might be quite challenging. Yet, if you make discounts, provide small gifts, or leverage a “buy one get one free” sales promotion, you have a chance to increase revenue.
Reduce the prices. Reduced prices also attract customers. Offer discounts to make your product look more attractive even during the low season. People will appreciate buying an air conditioner with a 50% discount in the off-season.
Promote your offers. To capture many customers and raise the demand, you need to promote your products. Use various online channels and traditional advertising to inform customers about your sale. You can advertise it on Instagram, Facebook, or send an email campaign to reach your online audience. As a result, your target audience and the number of sales will increase.
Now let’s have a closer look at some real examples to grab some inspiration and develop an outstanding synchro marketing strategy to attain your goals.
Examples of Synchro Marketing
Synchro marketing is one of the most effective strategies used by cafes, restaurants, and cinemas. Since most customers are free in the evenings and weekends, cafes, restaurants, and other places are crowded with visitors. The demand is very high. However, you won’t find many people enjoying a cup of coffee in a cafe in the morning or working out in a gym at lunchtime. To increase the demand in the morning and afternoon, different companies use various methods. Gyms encourage visitors to purchase gym membership at a lower price, cafes provide complimentary drinks, lunches for special prices, and cinemas sell cheap movie tickets.
Clothing stores also sell items for a lower price during the off-season. When there’s no demand for certain items, stores leverage “buy one, get one free item” and give customers big discounts to free the warehouse for new collections.
Synchro marketing suits the best during the off-season when the demand is deficient. It helps brands earn revenue and sell goods that aren’t popular at a certain moment.
Subscription form
A subscription form is a form located on any page of a website or blog where the users can fill in the fields with their data to receive emails on topics related to their interests. The primary purpose of the subscription form is opting-in subscribers to your mailing list.
Watch this video to create a multichannel subscription form using LIKE.TG visual form builder.
Why are subscription forms important?
They help generate leads
They help collect subscribers’ information
It is easy to create and set up them
They are convenient to customize
They are legal
Generate leads. In internet marketing, a subscription form is a crucial tool for lead generation. When subscribers fill in the form placed on a website or blog, they express interest in the company and its products and services. They are not just cold leads, who accidentally run into a webpage — they want to receive the newsletters.
Collect subscribers’ information. Subscription forms are a universal and standard way to get users’ data, which is handy for future lead nurturing and for building strong win-win relationships between a company and customers. It is possible to collect the following information: name, email addresses, gender, age, country, etc.
Easy to create and set up. It takes little time to create a subscription form with LIKE.TG. You can construct subscription forms with our handy drag-and-drop editor and customize the elements to your liking. Our subscription form editor is a free tool.
Convenient to customize. It is convenient to change fonts and colors when creating a subscription form relevant to the brand’s identity.
It's legal.A subscription form is a legitimate way to gather email addresses as opposed to buying email lists, which falls under the "spam" category and goes against the law.
All you need is to choose a marketing service that provides a form builder, so there's no need to code.
Let's generate subscribers!
You can create a subscription form that suits your brand style in 30 minutes for free. No technical skills required!
Register and create a form!
How to Create a Subscription Form
State your objectives
Choose a type of subscription form
Select a mailing list
Use our drag-and-drop editor
Get the code
State your objectives
Determine the aim of creating a subscription form and find a place where you want to have it.
Choose a type of subscription form
Select the “Subscription forms” menu. Click on “Create subscription form.” Choose one of theavailable “Form templates” or the drag-and-drop “Form builder.” In the drag-and-drop editor, choose whether you want to create embedded, pop-up, floating, or fixed structure of subscription form.
Select a mailing list
Decide the mailing list where you will add new subscribers. When leads fill in the fields in the subscription form and then confirm it in their email, all their data automatically goes to a specific mailing list(s).
Use our drag-and-drop editor
Drag the elements from the left-hand side and drop them where you need them. The building components available are input, checkbox, radio buttons, drop-down, text, image, and spacer. Customize them on the right-hand side, switch element and design options, to come up with a subscription form that meets your objectives.
You can also let users contact your brand via Facebook Messenger and Telegram by adding links to your chatbots. Check out such a form below.
Get the code
Copy the code generated and insert it on your website.
Subscription Form Best Practices
Make it as short as possible
Place the fields in one column
Design in your brand’s style
Create a visible CTA button
Clean the area around your subscription form
Give a clear idea of the subscription's value
Launch A/B tests
Make it as short as possible. The more fields that a subscription form hasto fill in, the harder it will be for people to complete. Аsk only for the most necessary information — you will have other chances to get more data. For instance, you can offer subscribers to manage their mailing preferences or ask for additional data to send more personalized emails directly.
Place the fields in one column. Use one vertical column that looks like a funnel, because multiple columns confuse users. Using a funnel design will ease the subscription process. Though, it is practical to place name and surname fields one after another.
Design in your brand’s style. Use the right set of colors and fonts to apply to your brand’s style. Leave enough area between the text fields to ensure everything is readable and clear.
Create a visible CTA button. A call-to-action button usually appears at the bottom of a subscription form. Use colors that contrast the background — it will be more eye-catching. Put a brief and strong CTA text to the button.
Clean the area around your subscription form. Remember that any videos, ads, or bright images will take people’s attention from your subject matter. Make sure that the areas where you add a subscription form to your website are free from any visually disturbing elements.
Give a clear idea of the subscription's value. Help your contacts understand what they will gain by subscribing. The best practice is to send them an automated welcome email to complete a double opt-in process and to say “thank you” for providing their personal information.
Launch A/B tests. You can examine which variants of the text, fields, background images, and CTA buttons are getting on.
Examples of Subscription Forms
Pampers. Here is an example of an embedded subscription form at the bottom of a webpage. It has a lot of space and only requires an email address to be filled in.
BrainPickings. Here is an unusual example of when two subscription forms are used at once. This leaves as much room as possible and reduces the number of fields for users.
Accessally.Here is an example of a pop-up subscription form. It is clear what value the subscribers get in exchange for sharing their data.
If, for some reason, the free subscription form builder in LIKE.TG doesn't meet your requirements, check out this list of alternative subscription management services available in the market today.
Create a subscription form
Substitute products
Substitute products are goods that can be used interchangeably. They have similar features and solve the same problems which makes them alternatives.
In this article, we’ll review the types of substitute products, tell how price changes influence them and provide examples.
Types of Substitute Products
There are two types of substitute goods: direct and indirect. Belonging to any of the groups depends on the degree of correlation between the products. If an item can be easily replaced by another one, it's a direct substitute. It means that this product can solve similar problems. Indirect substitutes imply products that are weakly correlated with each other, still, they can replace the main item.
Let's have an example to make the difference clear. Say, you're a member of a fitness center with a wide range of activities available. You visit twerk classes. The next time you come to have the training, you find out that your teacher is ill and there will be no twerk lessons. So, you have to choose which class to attend not to lose your money. If you choose reggaeton or vogue, this will be a direct substitute since these are dancing classes as well. If you choose swimming or go to the gym, this will be an indirect substitute.
Substitute products occur due to price changes. Let’s take a closer look.
Effect of Price Change on Substitute Products
If a relative price for a product increases, it makes consumers look for alternatives to save money. Hence, the demand for a more expensive item decreases. Substitute products cause competition on the market which is good since it both provides people with a choice and products at the best price and makes companies develop, improve and create innovations to stay competitive.
Substitute products are often compared to complementary products. Let’s see the difference between these two concepts.
Substitute Products vs Complementary Products
While substitute goods can replace each other because they serve the same functions, complementary products are items that add value to the main product or even can’t be used separately.
Let’s have some examples. On the right, you’ll see complementary goods.
iPhone — iPhone caseDVD — DVD PlayerEyeshadow — brushCar — petrolMobile phone — sim cardVinyl record player — recordsToothpaste — toothbrush
Some of these complementary products can’t be used without the main item, so if its price increases, the demand for a complimentary item goes down.
Now, we’ll remind you about famous substitute products.
Examples of Substitute Products
The following products are often used interchangeably by consumers since they either find them almost the same or the price for one product increases.
McDonald’s — KFC and Burger King.
Coke — Pepsi.
iPhone — Samsung Galaxy.
Pizza Hut — Domino’s.
Playstation — Xbox.
Butter — margarine.
Congrats, now you know what substitute products are, their types, changes caused by the price increase and have some examples.
