Week 11 – Use of ads

Online social media sites are now the new battleground of advertisement’s. You can’t go more than two scrolls through your news feed without seeing and ad creepily tailored to your likes and profile information. Although creepy and invasive, ads through social media really work well. So well in fact, that we are learning about it in this class for use for our own (fictitious) business.

Designing an ad

Designing an ad takes a little more than Photoshop and a few hours. What you say, how you position it, even down to how you color it, all have factors in how people perceive it and if they want to interact with it. The book focuses on some principles of design, however I want to address some factors that are more on the ground level and from practical experience (to give you a break from rereading all the regurgitated language from the text book that most students copied for the assignment) Be Obvious – The message needs to be straightforward. When someone looks at the ad, they need to understand right away what you are trying to convey.

Be Simple – Anything that takes them longer than 2 seconds to decipher will confuse and keep people away. This is social media, where attention span lasts shorter than a four year old on Christmas morning.

Capture attention – There needs to be content in the add that appeals to your target market. For example, if you are a beer company, your target market is man between the ages of 21 and 30. 

Therefore, a beautiful woman drinking a beer is the stopping power you need. Selling baby food? Put a baby playing with a puppy and you’ll have women snap too for the ad. Cheating? Yes, but it works and people do it often.
 

Use of Banner Ads

Banner ads online and in social media are tricky. Facebook is the main area where banner ads are being utilize to gain attention of a target audience. The reason why banner ads are so useful on this platform is because of the information Facebook has about each of its users. Want to target men who like foot ball, drink beer, and sit around playing video games all day? No problem. Facebook knows when they drink, what teams they follow, and what their favorite weapon is in Call of Duty. That kind of detail offers marketers creating ads a very fine way to target someone. And you can do the same thing if you want to.

Twitter Advertising

Twitter is another way to get your message out to a large and attention deficit audience. However, the ads end up showing in the news feed rather than on the side like Facebook. This is also less of image advertising and more script (under 140 characters). The potential to reach a large audience quickly on this platform with ads is just as powerful. However, Facebook would be a more long term advertising route that Twitter. If you are going to advertise on Twitter, I would suggest you use this for a promotion or coupon that involves a quick call to action. This is a great way to boost traffic to a website or boost sales in the short run. Over a long period of time, it will not work based on how much information is pushed through Twitter.

 

Ads for my business 

During the course of this class, my business is taking a different direction. I will be rebranding the company a book publishing company to that of an eBook distributor. With that in mind, I am going to employ a different marketing strategy than most would when it comes to using social media.

 I know the assignment it to come up with an ad and post a screen shot, but I’m not going to do it. Unless you have a large budget with a team to develop an effective advertisement, the work and monetary allocation will not equal the amount of interaction and conversion that you might need, especially as a start up company with a limited budget.

 Go ahead instructors; hit me with a few points lost. I’m not going through the motions of creating an advertisement that I am not going to use.

 To counter the homework, instead of explaining why ads are effective, I am going to explain why they are no longer affective in the social media space. Keep your hands and arms inside the ride at all times kids; you’re about to learn something new.

 Ad space is incredible crowded – according to studies, people see around 5,000 advertisements a day. Everywhere you look, be that online or just walking down the street, you are bombarded by brands and commercials from every which way. People are becoming numb to it and seeking areas where they are not inundated by commercials. Marketers are fast to follow, but case in point there’s way to many that people just ignore.

Lack of trust – Consumers find banner ads online to be the least trusted form of advertising. Most of us grew up with false banner ads and pop ups that lead to sites that mostly likely have viruses, result in spam, or tricked the consumer into visiting the site that is not what they intended.

They’re incredibly expensive – I’ll bet after taking a look at what it might cost to run an ad to a large audience on Facebook, you’ll agree with me that its becoming rather expensive. With how these social media companies are growing in terms of users, the ad space will only become more and more expensive.
 

In conclusion

Go ahead and read my next post that will show you my tactics for getting the word out about your company over social media.

Week 10 - Email Marketing

Email marketing can be effective if done correctly. Businesses have a tendency to over to do sometimes, such as sending out emails daily. For a small business, learning how to have the right blend of content and consistence for each news letter or email you send it a delicate dance that could be the difference between a customer visiting the site again, or ending up in the spam folder.

I've done a little bit of emailing with news letters for my business. Lets go over some of the possible content that I have used in the past. These are both things that my customers enjoy and have proved to be effective.

Writing Contest

On my website, I have a tab specifically for holding a monthly writing contest to help find new writers. When the page it not active, it allows customers to input their email for updates on the contest. When it is active, they must enter their email address in order to participate. 

The news letter that I created has one of two types of messages

1. A call to action announcing that the contest is under way and that submissions are being accepted

2. An update as to who the winners are. 

These are sent out once every two weeks or when there is new information to share with the competitors for the contest. 

Blog Posts

I have a separate email list for people who signed up for the news letter and updates about new blog posts. Here, I created a special template that showcases the last three blog posts that were written. I only send this email out once every two weeks.

Press Releases

For any major updates, such as a new author, publication of an ebook, or advancement of the company, I put into a small press release in the form of a blog post. I sent the email out with a small synopsis for the article, then the link for the blog post. This one I push out to people when new things occur in the company, which comes out to an average of about once every month. I also integrate new blog posts into this one, so I am not sending more emails out than I need to. 

Conclusion

The idea is not to send an inordinate amount of email to your recipients. Once a week is more than enough. You also want to make sure that they sign up for the updates and that you do not input their email address into your mailing list without their permission. There is nothing that makes a customer more angry than getting email when they didn't ask for it. 

Week 9 - Organization of Blogs

Keeping things organize for a blog are relatively difficult to balance. Choosing between the right topics to offer a diverse amount of information can easily be seen as not enough or cumbersome. To attract the audience for the business that I am running, I have decided on the following topics:

Company News

Here, I can release and press releases that I might have with regards to activity with my business. This will be for all general customers and anyone interested in the daily activity of the company. This will also target individuals interested in becoming part of Social Publishing House to see if the company is legitimate and moving forward. 

Writing Tips

This will be the most active out of all the tabs and will target the writers who are interested in improving their craft. These posts will be spread out on social media and target the heavy duty writer getting ready to publish. This will help draw legitimacy to the blog and to the company by offering well written tips and advice that move writers forward. 

Fun and Interesting

This will be for the general user and reader who might want to buy an ebook someday. This area will be more sarcastic and cover topics that target a wider range of people for views. This will help grow the business by attracting more viewers and get more shares to get the heavy duty writers and book buyers in. Basically, this section will boost awareness of the company. 

Book Reviews

This section will target books written by independent writers. The goal here is to highlight well written work of an author with a medium to large platform. They will be most likely to share that blog post with their platform and bring readers to the company. In other cases, this section will also be used to bring awareness to the company by reviewing books that will soon become movies. Those interested in reading reviews that compare the movie to the book will find articles relevant to what they are looking for. 

Publishing News

This will be a very niche section of the blog that will give writers and readers a summary of what is happening in the book publishing industry. Although the audience for this is small, the idea is to grow this over the long term as a key source of information for people looking to make publishing decisions. 

Blogs I posted on

http://wafflehaususa.blogspot.com

http://travismoss1986.blogspot.com

http://smstacey.blogspot.com

Week 9 - Blogging

Blogging is becoming a powerful way to draw traffic to a business website. The fresh content that appears on the page is identified with online search engines and increases the probability that you will appear on searches. It also provides customers with fresh content and information they can share with others. 

The question posed by the class is how professional does one need to be with a blog and how personal can one get. 

When to be professional

Blogs can take the form of news posts and the reporting of facts. For the Social Publishing House blog, we have a section specifically for press releases and information updating the status of writing contests. In these areas, its important to be very matter of fact and professional. It leaves little room for discussion and personal opinion. 

When to be personal

The use of the first person in a blog post can make it feel very personal to the reader and allow them to connect more to the content. It can be effective, but it has to be used in the right matter. 

For example, blog posts that I write for the company normally are impersonal and do not use the first person. Most of the time I use the second person, addressing the reader directly, which can also be just as personal. In these posts, the topic usually covers ways they can improve their writing or things they have to look out for. 

Audiences respond to different posts, and its a good idea to diversify the posts. So where I am more impersonal and matter of fact, I bring in writers who use more "I" in their posts to draw in attention. One writer give his opinion on books that are read that will eventually turn into movies. Sarcastic as they may be, they appeal to particular kinds of readers that would shy away form the matter of fact posts. 

What Makes Sense

At the end of the day, it matters what you are writing about. If its reporting, be impersonal. If its about a new book or movie coming out, its more opinion and can be more personal to the writer. But as a business owner, its important to have a balance of content that can reach to several different target audiences that you are looking for. 

Week 8 - Businesses Similar to Mine

Major publishing houses of the book publishing industry use very quiet tactics to promote themselves. Their main efforts are in promoting their individual authors and their work, thereby driving interest and revenue into their company.

As these large companies focus on branding themselves quietly through their main authors and stay behind the scenes, we will take a look at social media accounts for two of the largest book producers on the planet: Penguin and Random House.

Penguin

Penguin maintains an active Tumblr account. They focus on displaying the covers of the books that they produce. Although some of the book covers are simple, they actively display the Penguin logo on all covers. Due to the fact that they mostly rely on words for their actual product, displaying the visual part of the covers is essential and is a great way to draw in audiences

Random House

The Titan of the book publishing industry, Random House uses a variety of media that include a very under used social media tactic, GIFs. They also have, dispersed throughout their platform, images of the covers of their books that they sell along with antidotes by the authors. Interlaced with those are promotions and calls to action. 

Visual Social Media for Social Publishing House

The use of visuals for Social Publishing House is very difficult in the beginning. This is a book production company, which focuses on the written word and prose. Photography and visual arts are not my forte. However, in order to draw in attention to the company, we have to have some type of image based content. Therefore, the best of both worlds is to exist on Tumblr, where the target market is most likely to read content as well as engage with visuals. 

Here is the Tumblr Account use for Social Publishing House. It has been connected with the Facebook page. 

Week 8 - The Visual

Images are the most powerful thing you can use to enhance traffic and engagement on social media. As the social media world has evolved, there are four major platforms that focus almost entirely on the visual, and they are now holding most of the sway and power for a business.

Right for my brand

For Social Publishing House, the use of images is difficult. As a book publishing company, the target market is mostly for individuals who take time to read articles and posts. However, the stopping power of an image still appeals to these readers, the fact is that reading mostly takes place in the imagination. 

Despite this case, using visuals to attract readers is still important. And the images could be used as a stopping power to draw in people to read what is posted on social media. Here are the four visual networks and how they relate to the brand of Social Publishing House

YouTube

This is a video based social media network and rely on video production methods. Videos are almost the complete opposite of the production of books, which can pose a problem if I were to use this site mainly to promote the company. There are ways that this platform could be used to draw traffic to the brand, such as the creation of commercials associated with particular books that are produced, or small commercials that talk about the brand. But outside of that, and for the start up phase for my company, it is not the most effective platform. 

Instagram

This social media behemoth is on the rise and is quickly becoming the choice of millennials and generation Z. Due to the younger target market and the fact that this platform is completely photo based, this area would not be an effective area for developing the brand of Social Publishing House. The target market is much older (35 to 45). Additionally, users are going to be more visually based than they are creative based, meaning that people who read are less likely to be on these platforms. 

Pinterest

This platform is more promising due to its target market and sharing ability that focus around products. The clientele is mostly affluent women who are in the target market range for Social Publishing House. They will make boards and pin products that they want in the future. Some of those include the covers of books that they want to read. So, this is an ideal place to start marketing the brand of Social Publishing House and the promotion of its books. 

Tumblr

This last platform is the most effective one to spread the brand of Social Publishing House. Although this is an area where individuals share photos and videos, it is also blog based. Articles and written work permeate through the feed. The target market also excises on this platform, and many of them are also writers as well. Social Publishing House will build the brand in this area and recruit its writers from this platform. 

Week 7 - Twitter

Twitter is a powerful tool for business. Although most would say that Twitter is for people to follow celebrities and post what they had for breakfast, its actually much more than that. 

Finding Connections

I looked for people who are in the publishing industry and write about publishing. Specifically, I look for people who are talking about the Amazon vs Hachette ordeal that is taking place and rocking the price of eBooks. So I searched "Amazon vs Hachette" and found several articles written about the topic. I looked to the authors of those articles then found them on twitter and started to follow them. 

I found about a half dozen authors who write for Digital Book World, Huffington Post Books, and the New York Times. Some of these individuals even started to follow me back. 

Lists

I created two different lists: One for the major ebook distribution companies and publishing companies out there, then one for some of the major writers in the industry that I just described above. This helps me keep things organized in several ways. For example, when I want to see what tactics and books that these publishing industries are doing currently, the list allows me to get a good glance on their activity in the last few hours. With the list for the major writers, this allows me to see what the reaction to these promotions and books is and see how it is shaping the industry. 

Lists for Goals

Creating lists helps to keep things organized by keeping a finger on the pulse of companies, competitors, and trends in the industry you are operating in. This way, you can easily look at what is going on and get the most up to date information you can about what others are doing. This helps you daily gather intelligence to make decisions about your own company.