Simplify your Communication for a Happy SEO client

Have you been striving to convince your client on your SEO services? Many clients are not sure exactly how the SEO works for their business. Simplifying the SEO process for your client is often important from a point of client management. When a client understands SEO, they can value your work. It requires time, effort and patience to simplify the process to the client.

Say ‘NO’ to technical terms

Explaining SEO to non SEO people should be done in a simplified and informative way. Of course, they are not going to understand the technical term that marketers are using. For example, the term SERP, CTR, Page Ranking, meta tags may seem weird for your client. Just make sure the below things when you explain it to your client

  • Understand the level of knowledge your client has and explain SEO in a language they will understand. Give examples while explaining, share a live screen for example from Google for certain terms like SERP.
  • Avoid using short forms and technical words
  • Relate the examples with their industry
  • Explain why it is necessary for his/her business
  • Showcase their competitor site and point out what they are missing out

Breakdown the process and set the expectation clearly

Everyone needs a quick result and often your clients believe as soon as you start your work, they will rank on the first page. While everyone wants that to happen in reality but it’s not the truth. Yes, the truth is SEO results take time. Simplify the process and set page ranking goals for specific keywords, to achieve the result. Don’t forget to share the goals with them. Breakdown the process starting from finding where your client is at to what you can do for them. Accordingly, you can explain to your client in a step by step manner. Tell them why it is important to have meta titles, descriptions, alt text etc in their website and what happens if it’s not there. Tell them the need for providing the keywords within their content. Make clear communication and give them enough information so that they understand the task at hand.

Prepare the report of your work and Update the client weekly 

However, SEO takes time and your client doesn’t want to wait for that super surprising result at the end. Documenting your work and sharing the reports with your clients makes them not feel down or not feel confusing about your work. It also gives transparency and honesty to your work. Try to present it in a neat and clear way that your clients understand and show them each time you are trying to improve their online presence. The more often you communicate, the more your clients have trust in you and it helps to maintain a long term relationship between both. 

Poll Question on Social Media Platforms to understand Audience Behavior

Don’t confuse a poll with a questionnaire or an extensive audience survey. An audience survey allows multiple questions whereas a poll allows only one question with 2-4 multiple choice options on social media platforms.

We recently conducted a poll and wanted to share our learnings with you all.

Case study:
The first step is to frame the poll question right and short because in social media mediums it gives limited space to ask a question.

We recently conducted a poll for our own study to understand if people are listening to podcasts like before. Initially, we posted it organically across different social media platforms and engaging the reach we thought of promoting it.

Below is the poll question posted organically on Twitter.

Below is the table summarizing of poll availability on different channels:

As organic mediums are the most cost-friendly mediums, we posted poll questions on Facebook groups, Facebook stories, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram stories. Even though the poll was created on multiple platforms, the responses were limited.

One of the best ways to promote a survey is through WhatsApp, where you can make a google form survey and spread it to your network in the WhatsApp groups.

You can also put up poll questions in your YouTube videos and get responses organically across the platform. This option is not widely used but it exists.

As these methods are organic, one can only hope for people to respond and share it with friends and family members to spread it.

If you wish to promote the poll and get a larger reach, only Twitter allows you to promote a poll question.

Facebook and Instagram:
We decided to go around it, created a post on Facebook and Instagram, and promoted it. We asked people to comment on it since the platform didn’t allow us to promote the poll.

However, since you know that comments and shares are a highly active form of engagement, it is not easily achievable. We promoted this post for an amount of Rs 200 each platform for two days. Unfortunately, we didn’t get any comments although we got a good reach and likes.

Both platforms have good targeting options and it is cost-effective compared to other platforms.
Below are the screenshots of the target audience set of Facebook and Instagram we used:

Twitter: To promote polls on twitter, the targeting options were limited and the cost has to be set in US dollars which is expensive. So, we didn’t choose this platform.

Below is the screenshot of the target audience set and cost settings on twitter:

LinkedIn: Here the targeting options were limited and not cost effective. However, LinkedIn doesn’t allow us to promote poll questions.

There are no good or bad practices unless you try out the options in hand and learn from them. Not all of your learnings would be successful. Failures if studied well, leads to great learning.

Marketing strategy: An overall game plan for your brand

Have you ever thought, why having a marketing strategy for the brand is important?  Do you think smacking together a few ideas is a brand strategy? Then you are wrong. A good marketing strategy helps brands to identify the methods to promote their product and services to the right target audience. Creating an effective marketing strategy is the way to growth, expansion and success of the business.

Why should small business owners invest in a marketing strategy?

  • A strategy helps you uncover the new findings of what people are looking for.
  • A better understanding of your marketplace, your competitors, ongoing trends in the market, type of customers and make plans based on the needs and enquiries of your prospective audience.
  • It helps plan out scope of improvement across your channels of focus.
  • It gives you an ideal plan on how much you should invest and minimises the investment risk

The below images show the basic steps in a Market Research.

#Understand the client’s service – We deep dive into our client’s offerings and break it down into smaller segments of products or services. We then do a survey of the client’s web and social media presence.

#Understand the industry and the market – We try to understand our client’s industry, the customers of that industry, its marketplace requirements and the competitors. It helps us identify new opportunities for the brand and also identify any weaknesses or gaps, also seen as opportunity or scope of improvement. 

#Understand the competitive landscape – We study how search engines (Google) and how social media platforms respond to keywords related to our client’s services and products. We use permutation combinations of it to uncover Results, Adscape, Offers, Listings and more. 

Case Study:

Recently one of our clients approached us for a marketing strategy for her business. The client’s industry is that of Energy Healing and the client is based out of Delhi. They have a service as well as a product line. We invested time in doing a thorough understanding of the industry and the market to deliver a good outcome.

Here are some learnings that have been reaffirmed through our research:

Understanding each online channel independently contributes to creating a sharp strategy

Every channel has its benefits and limitations, accordingly each has its own set of preferred audience segments. It’s imperative to figure out which channel suits your customer set more.
A detailed online research of every platform in terms of profiles, content and groups needs to be conducted. Quora, Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, LinkedIn, Twitter is good to start with.  

It’s important to know what people are asking, searching for online

It is said the better you know your customer queries, hesitations, doubts, the better you can align your products or services to it. There are tools and channels at your disposal which can be used to uncover these queries. Keyword research tools & widgets, SEMRush’s Topic Research tool, manual research on a few sites like Quora and Reddit, helped us bucket queries together, brainstorm ideas and give a direction to our thoughts. 

Your customers can belong to many other intersections

Every brand tries to understand the various interests of their customers, so they can meet them halfway, so the brand can cater to them in their language content wise. Intersection helps to identify the interests of the audience better. So we made use of available ‘audiences’ tools within  Facebook and Google to dig more.

The customer will have similar interests, it’s just about finding that interest. In this case study for example, we found similar interests for the energy healing client, such as yoga, mental health, astrology, tarot, zodiac, sustainable living etc.

Investing in a well conducted audience survey is worth every penny

Conducting audience surveys with a well constructed questionnaire, with a good outreach plan brings about very useful and insightful results that can help a brand optimise its product line, broaden or focus its services too. We believe in a combination of qualitative and quantitative approach, so we often use questionnaires that we can send out digitally and in-depth, sometimes short interviews that unleashes a lot more insights on challenges, hiccups and more. Remember to pay attention to the audience you are targeting through the survey. It’s always good to use a combination of different backgrounds. It will help you MAP out the audiences’ interest vis a vis their responses. 

A 3-Point Strategy to Achieve your Content Marketing Goals

A good content strategy can never fail.
Did you know that nearly 65% of businesses do not have a content marketing strategy? For a successful outcome, the formula is a Good Content Strategy + Targeted Outreach (organic & paid) + Measurement. Without a content strategy, success or failure is just a matter of luck and most of the brands fail in this step.

Here we give a few simple steps in developing and executing a content marketing plan that will help you get successful results without wasting time and money. The steps are:

  • Set your project goals and establish KPIs to measure the goals
  • Understand what the project is about and create talking points that are in line with your project goals
  • Know your audience better, do a bit of research online to get an idea of which channels your audience is most active on
  • Create a content calendar aligned to your project goals and set frequency of posting
  • Create an outreach strategy to increase reach and engagement. Set aside a budget to allocate content for paid ads.
  • Measure results to assess the performance of your content pieces. This will help you edit the content as you go along and finally measure the success of your content marketing plan.

Case study:

Recently one of our clients briefed us on their project goals i.e. to increase registrations for their Student Fellowship Programme. We worked backwards to achieve that goal by first investing time & effort to understand what the values of the brand are, the modules of the fellowship programme and in detail what each subject can offer the students.
Our client is an NGO in Gujarat, India and their target audience was very clear, students between 18 to 24. The challenge however was to achieve all of this in a matter of 2 weeks’ time, with a limited ad budget.

Here is a glimpse of our content strategy for the client:
Since our target audience were young college-going students who are active on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter; our focus was more towards creating engaging and relatable content with stunning, personalised post copy and catchy images, given the super short attention span of today.

As per the communication requirement, we experimented with multiple formats on Facebook and Instagram. In case if we had to measure which post performed well, we focused on looking at metrics such as engagement, reach and link clicks for registration. 

Below are examples of different content formats used in the project.

  • Multi-Image Post

Takeaway points: This multi-image post, was an overview of the fellowship programme. This post got good engagement on Facebook and Instagram both, however, with regards to link clicks, Facebook saw higher clicks on links.

MetricsFacebookInstagram
Engagement189108
Reach3,880456
Link Clicks443
  • Single Image Post

Takeaway points:  This single image post was to communicate the brand’s belief. This post got good engagement on Instagram and got good reach on Facebook. However, Facebook got the higher clicks on links.

MetricsFacebookInstagram
Engagement3852
Reach412320
Link Clicks200
  • Video post

Takeaways: This video format is a testimonial by the ex-students of fellowship programme. The post got good engagement, reach and link clicks on Instagram.

MetricsFacebookInstagram
Engagement792
Reach337390
Link Clicks05

During the 2 weeks, we worked with different content formats for different objectives. Some of the key takeaways from our project experience are:

  • Videos worked better on Instagram than on Facebook. Videos on Instagram has also got good link clicks.
  • Overall, we saw Facebook drive more link clicks than Instagram. Reach wise both platforms have performed equally well.
  • From paid reach to organic reach there is a spillover effect. It boosts organic reach as well.
  • We also did 3 countdown posts closer to the end date of registration and the final countdown posts drove the maximum organic visits to the profile and link clicks on Instagram.

Targeted outreach (Organic + Paid):
Organic:

  • Never underestimate the power of students. One of the student ambassadors took an initiative to post about the programme across student groups on WhatsApp. This gave us the conviction to reach out to more younger audience. 
  • Next step was to identify students, colleges, social cause groups on Facebook.
  • We joined around 6 to 7 of such groups.
  • 13 posts got 20 link clicks through groups. Which was a great achievement as messages in groups garnering clicks on links rather is quite unexpected.

Paid:

While organic methods worked well for outreach, we recommend using a combination of organic and paid in reaching out to a more substantial target audience. It was only possible through a paid marketing campaign in reaching out to a larger target audience.

  • Total number of ads: 7 
  • Amount Spent:  Rs.1,730
  • We experimented with two objectives: Reach and Engagement

Below are the examples of comparing the ad results of similar objectives:

This-image-has-slightly-more-money-spent-and-however-it-has-got-good-reach-and-impressions.

From the above steps we have followed in our project, we were able to reach out to a larger audience and achieve our goals through both organic and paid media.

Measurement of the performance:

The main objective of the project was to get registrations. Considering the landing page, in this case, was a Google form, we couldn’t track using google analytics so we used bitly to track more accurately.

Independent bitly link was used for groups and posts respectively
From organic groups: 13 posts = 20 clicks
For posts: 15 posts = 214 clicks
The best way to track the clicks on links and sources of traffic is through a UTM URL.

A successful marketing plan is a combination of a good content strategy, targeted outreach, and accurate measurement of performance.

Wondering why Facebook rejected your ad?

Well let’s face it, any kind of rejection hurts.

‘What is the reason for my Facebook ad rejection’, has become a common question for all social media marketers. Facebook ad guidelines have become stricter than ever before on how Facebook monitors and reviews the content that users and advertisers promote. As a result, you need to be very careful to ensure your ads get approved.

The 6 main reasons for Facebook ads rejection:

  1. Advertising prohibited products or services: Here are a few products and services you can never advertise on Facebook.
    These are: Weapons, ammunition, explosives, unsafe supplements, adult products and services, Cryptocurrency, Surveillance equipment, Payday loans, Penny auctions, tobacco-related products, Pharmaceuticals, Illegal drugs, malware, and Sensational Content too.
  1. Advertising restricted products or services: Only certain advertisers with prior documented permission from Facebook can run ads.
    Some of these services allowed by Facebook with certain limitations though, are: Political advertising, Alcohol, Dating services, Real-money gambling, State lotteries, Supplements, Financial and insurance services like credit card, Student loan services.
  2. Posting or Promoting objectionable content: 
    Content that glorifies violence, divisive content or one that celebrates humiliation of others is not allowed.
    Content with hate speech or which encourages discrimination against people supported personal attributes like color, national origin, race, religion, sex, age, sexual orientation, identity, family, disability is rejected.
    Content of nudity or related to sexual activity is restricted.
  3. Integrity and Authenticity:
    Misinformation or false news, spam content often gets rejected and even more so lately as such content has created large scale issues in the past.
    Deceiving offers or strategies to gather information about people that compromises their safety will be rejected.
    Cybersecurity: Attempt to gather sensitive personal information by deceptive methods compromises authenticity & integrity standards of Facebook and therefore such ads are banned.
    Sublime propaganda or manipulated content by political parties also has a chance of getting rejected.

Read more about Community standards of Facebook https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/introduction

  1. Mistakes in the Ad creative: Common mistakes advertisers make are: having too much text in the ad image, using incorrect aspect ratios and dimensions, misusing Facebook’s brand, making video ads with disruptive tactics such as flashing screens, and not being relevant.
  2. Made a mistake with the landing page: Sometimes landing page issues could also get an ad rejected: Ad URL doesn’t match landing page URL, landing page lacks business details, the Landing page is misleading, and Landing page includes spammy elements.

CASE 1:
Recently we were running Ad campaigns for one of our clients, a non-profit organization based in Gujarat, India. One of our ads got rejected by Facebook. It was a surprise for us as we didn’t use any political content, infact we were promoting educational content. The rejection stated a reason as our ad didn’t comply with the Facebook advertising policies.

Below is the screenshot of notification from Facebook of our ad rejection:

The detailed reasons we received from Facebook for the ad rejection are:

  • Ads about a social issue that seeks to influence public opinion through discussion, debate, or advocacy for or against important topics like election, social rights, politics, etc.
  • Social issues vary depending on which country we are planning to run ads, including the terms elections or politics.

We deciphered a few reasons internally for our ad getting rejected. It could possibly be the usage of the word ‘Politics’ in the copy. Also our copy was on the lines of how Politics is often misconstrued as a ‘dirty game’, a disguised act of retaining power. But is it really that?

So, we must be careful when running restricted content on Facebook. Your ads and content must comply with Facebook’s community standards of your country. We think this change in ad policy will certainly do good for India, given the country’s political landscape. In times of election particularly, there are high chances of institutions attempting to promote propaganda related content.

CASE 2:
One of the experts named Jon Loomer shared his experience with Facebook ad rejection. He shares why his Ad got rejected and what advertisers should follow to prevent it.

Source: https://www.jonloomer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/facebook-ad-rejection-abbreviations.png

Read more about the Facebook ad rejection by Jon Loomer

https://www.jonloomer.com/2019/08/09/facebook-ad-rejection-dont-abbreviate-facebook-or-instagram/?nab=1&utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

Whether you like it or not, you must follow the rules for advertising on Facebook. A few violations could cost you valuable time.

Facebook Ad policy violations may lead to enforcement action against your Profile, Pages, or even ad accounts. Enforcement actions include: Disabling associated Pages, Disabling existing ads, Restricting the ability to run new ads, etc.

Following these guidelines will get your ads approved quicker and help you build trust with Facebook. Know complete guidelines in the official Facebook advertising policies page: https://www.facebook.com/policies/ads/

Basic Tips for Image SEO to Boost your Traffic

How often do you think of optimizing your content for image search? While it’s common to hear people talk about optimization to rank on SERP, it’s also important for photo centric brands to focus on image optimization, Image SEO.

What if a single image in your blog post can bring a lot more visitors to your website? Sounds good right! But why is it necessary to show the images in your blog/website in Google Search? What is the advantage that you will get out of that?

Basically, if a user searches for a certain search term or as we call it, Keyword, the right optimization of your website images can lead up to the relevant image matching the search term showing up on Google’s top search results. Often, the enquirer will switch to clicking on ‘Images’ for a refined result. Users tend to click lesser on images and use image search option for mainly browsing. This is an opportunity for an image heavy site or an image related business to capitalize on other platforms that allow image uploads. Like Pinterest, Flickr, Instagram.

Our client is from a Photography industry and is based out in Delhi. This picture above shows you a comparison of web search and image search over the last 3 months for their website and as you can clearly see the monumental difference in impressions between both.

Don’t get stuck up with thoughts like only web search will end up in clicks and that only clicks matters, impressions don’t. These are grandma’s tales.

We have shared with you tips on Image Optimisation that you can apply to your website straight away.

First and foremost, use the relevant, good traffic keywords that you have shortlisted or chosen for your brand in every of the below optimization steps.

Image File Names: Use a descriptive file name which represents your images. Avoid the image file name with random numbers and letters. The file names can give Google clues about the subject matter of images.

Alt Text: Give an Alt text that describes your image clearly. And if you own a product website, it is a good idea to add the product or model number in the alt text. Google knows what product you’re looking for based on a search for the product number alone.

–   Use a short text

–   Use the Main keyword but never do keyword stuffing

–   Don’t Use ‘image of’ or ‘picture of’ in your alt text

Description: Give a brief description for your image which serves the relevance of your content. If your images are descriptive enough with proper keyword, it will lead to a click

Title: Give accurate title for the image with your main keyword.

Image Caption: A caption is a small text that is used to define the image attached and is often placed at the bottom of the picture. Don’t miss out to give a caption.

Image Type: JPEG images are more SEO friendly than PNG images

Image Size and Optimization: Image optimization is the way toward making and conveying top-notch pictures in the perfect size and resolution to improve the user experience. It additionally includes Boosting of SEO Rankings. Resize the images and optimize with Maximum width you need. The size depends on your site dimensions. There are some online tools like Imageoptim, Short pixel, TinyPNG which are best for image compression.

Create Image Sitemap: Is there any way search engine discover your images easily? Yes, creating your image sitemap and submitting it to search engines which increase the likelihood of images appearing in search results.

Utilize Schema Markup: Did you know that schema markup is also relevant for Image SEO? Google says ‘If you have images on your site, you can help users with recognizing the sort of content related to the picture by utilizing properly structured data on your pages. This helps users with finding significant content quickly, and sends better-focused traffic to your site.’

Here is the link of what google says about Schema Markup: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2017/08/badges-on-image-search-help-users-find.html

Untitled-1

BetaLabs 04: Webinar Promotion Insights

AARRRmor conducted a webinar on 1st August 2019 on a digital subject that’s useful for small business owners, start-up founders, entrepreneurs. The topic was ‘Google’s Essentials’ for small businesses, that covered the basics of how Google Analytics (GA), Google Search Console (GSC) and Google Adwords work and are interrelated. 

You may find it ironic for a digital media agency to be taking up workshops / training on digital tools. But the idea is to teach our clients to be self-sustained and knowledgeable. Growth works two ways! 

Aarrrmor’s Webinar on Google Essentials

As we move forward, let’s refresh our mind and quickly recall the Essential tools:

  • Google Analytics

GA is a tool with behavioural insights about the users visiting the website. Their journey across the site from the time of landing to exit and everything that happens in between that. Sessions, pageviews, time spent, page wise analytics, devices used, location, clicks on buttons, etc.

It helps you to understand the drivers behind the traffic to your site, which activities, campaigns / ads / content pieces are working better. Also, This will help you to understand which channels and campaigns are working for you.

  • Google Search Console (GSC)

GSC on the other hand is a tool with more of technical insights about the website’s health, and all things happening behind the scenes. Such as which are the links that are connected to your site, which keywords are ranking better for your site, more information on indexing etc. It also provides recommendations on improving them.

The best part about both GA and GSC is its agility and flexibility to merge with third party tools like SEMrush, for better synergy. 

  • Google Ads

Google Adwords and Keyword planner are like soul sisters, they are interdependent and work the magic. Simply put, Adwords is the platform for you to reach audiences that are looking for a product / piece of information like that of your business. The budgetary flexibilities are just brilliant. 

Webinar Promotion Plan

Now the work doesn’t end here. Our work was about getting the word out about the webinar to as many of our target audience as possible through organic reach for starters. 

Platform to conduct Webinar

In our checklist, we first finalised which platform to host the webinar on. After reviewing many websites we shortlisted Zoom and Hangouts as options and even debated the idea of going LIVE on YouTube or Facebook. However, we chose Zoom to host the webinar as it didn’t have a cap on the number of attendees and just Plug and Play. 

Webinar Listing

To promote the webinar organically, its best to start with a simple plan and a list for reachouts – most critical. And so we first listed the event on 2 sites i.e. Townscript and Eventshigh along with Google and Facebook event pages. 

PS: since August end, Townscript and Eventshigh have begun to charge a fee to host free listings. 

We learnt that, even a simple topic like ‘Webinar on Google Essentials’ is something that most new marketers get confused about. However, after attending the webinar, the attendees have learnt to set up their own Ad account, understand GA (Google Analytics) and operating Search Console. 

Our Conclusions

Qualitative feedback from them have motivated us to keep going with another batch of webinars.  The best part was, this webinar converted into a long term lead for us. Therefore to conclude, we would say organic isn’t dead yet. 

BetaLabs 03: Learn Google Essentials to grow your business

Recently Aarrrmor Digital conducted a Live Online Webinar on Google Essentials, where we shared how to use Google Essential tools to grow businesses

This was a basic information session and since we couldn’t cover a lot, we are writing this blog post.

In the webinar, we covered basics and fundamentals on how to setup Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Google Ads.

Did you just start your online journey?

Built a new website and getting started seriously with your online presence?

Go through the webinar recording in the end of the article that shows you how to setup these tools.

Get over your mental block around these tools.

Why should you use Google Essential Tools?

Because they’re free!

That’s the most important reason and they give a good amount of data relevant for most small businesses.

The biggest reason for sharing this post is to get entrepreneurs and business owners started.

We have seen that a lot of businesses miss this important step

And when you don’t have these tools, you don’t have data.

Without data, it’s difficult to work on growing your business, because any marketing, sales activities need data.

Another reason not to miss out on this is that you start getting data from the day you set up the tools.

There is nothing recorded before that, so start recording data today.

And hopefully after a month you will have something actionable.

The 1st thing that Aarrrmor Digital does on onboarding a new client is check their analytics and tool setup. If there’s any imprecations, we fix them and if they are not setup, we set them.

Because we believe in the importance of these free tools for businesses, we recommend you to get started right away for seriously growing your business.

Setting up of tools is not tough!

There’s a common misconception around tools and technologies that they are tough to setup.

But we know that if you’re smart enough to start your own business then this is not your biggest challenge. And if you have any questions or need assistance, we’re always there to help you out.

These tools will give you information about where people are coming to your website from, what are the sources, once they land on website, which pages they visit, how long they stay there for, what actions they take.

Based on this analysis, you can figure out where to make improvements.

Slides for Aarrrmor Webinar on Google Essentials

Google Business Essential Tools: An Overview

Google Analytics:

This free tool is wonderful! It gives details about users, website, page speed and experience & is #1 in the list of tools to integrate for your website.

To begin with, it gives you real time information of your visitors. How cool is that? It tells you where they are coming from, which device and which page they’re on

Next, you can see for any period of time who your audience is. Details about them like demographics, geography, device and technology they use. You will know what channel and campaigns are working for you. You can set up different actions as goals and trace the path that your users follow to complete them. This and many more awesome things!

Google Search Console:

This free tool sounds a bit technical, but it’s not really much. If you want to work on making your website more “Google-friendly”, this tool is a must have.

Check who is linking back to your website, what keywords your website (&pages) are ranking for. Find out any technical issues Google faces in reading your website and get recommendations on how to improve them.

You can work on your website architecture and monitor improvements using your Search Console. All the data here is more than enough for your developer, SEO marketer to improve the visibility of your website for the desired key words and phrases for your business.

Google Ads:

Scared of Ads? Don’t worry many people are…There is a common misconception that they cost a lot of money and how it works is a mystery.

We suggest you get started, and don’t spend money unless you’re ready to. To start with Google Ads, you might have to enter billing information but you don’t have to spend anything if you don’t want to.

So, play around with the tools, check out keyword planner (mini tool) and see what suits you. If you wish, you can run small (INR 100/day) test campaigns, you can pause or end them whenever you like. This way you will get over your fear of the tool and get a better sense of how they work.

Login with your own Google account in all of these tools.

Preferably use your work account, because these tools will send reports which are best if you send it to your business account.

Aarrrmor Webinar (Recorded Version) on Google Essential Tools

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BetaLabs 02: Audience Insights on New Mothers living in India

The success of your ad strongly depends upon the choice of content and the fine-tuning of your audience segment on digital channels.

While you may have heard this piece of advice before, but not many utilise the audience targeting elements that Facebook gives.

We at AARRRMOR absolutely enjoy constructing the audience model to as much perfection as we can, it’s like cooking your best meal for your favourite guest.

We decided to do some market research, understanding the best way to reach prospective customers from different industries and launched this series of experiment with one of our clients.

Why Facebook?

Well for starters, Facebook and Google are the largest, most frequently used ad platforms out there and while their targeting options are strikingly different from each other, we chose Facebook for this as our client’s TG (target audience) is most interactive on the Facebook ad platforms. (Our next post will cover the difference in the 2 ad platforms for the same audience)

For this post, our client is a professional baby and maternity photographer based out of Delhi NCR, who wants to create awareness among the ‘primary’ and partially the ‘secondary’ decision makers for her business i.e. Expecting Mothers, Newly delivered mothers and Husbands of these 2 categories.

Details of Campaign

Location: Delhi NCR, Noida and around
Category: Expecting Mothers, New Mothers, Mothers with kids
Campaign Objective: Drive Leads
Ad objective: Chose ‘Traffic to website’. Wanted to choose ‘Lead Generation’

Ad Placement: Instagram feed and stories

Learning: The client’s website didn’t have a ‘Privacy Policy’ web-page due to which we couldn’t run the lead gen ads. While that page is constructed, we decided to test the waters for a traffic to website conversion.

Recipe to our audience targeting: Facebook gives you the option to choose from Behavior, Life Events, Interests. We strategically used all three.

More details below:

Channel & Objective

Aarrrmor BetaLabs 02: Channel & Objective

Target Audience

Aarrrmor BetaLabs 02: Target Audience

Creative

Aarrrmor BetaLabs 02: Creatives

Instagram Story Ad

instagram ad

Ad Copy

Aarrrmor BetaLabs 02: Ad Copy

Audience Segmentation

Aarrrmor BetaLabs 02: Audience Segmentation

Results

Aarrrmor BetaLabs 02: Results

Conversions

Aarrrmor BetaLabs 02: Conversions

Want to contribute to our BetaLabs Experiment? Send us your ideas, data or research and we’d be happy to publish it.


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How to collect quality data in the real world: Methodology

Very often, us digital marketers resort to online surveys to collect data, in the form of Questionnaire, Facebook Polls, Insta instant questions, or those silent YouTube pre-video survey ads. However, recently we decided to go grass-roots instead to conduct an extensive data collection activity, simply because we realized the need to ‘keeping the data real’ and focused more on ‘quality of responses

Here goes a glimpse of the methodology behind on-ground data collection and hoping you have some takeaways from here.

Project: Increasing voter turnout in the upcoming BBMP elections in August 2020

Objective: Understand the reasons for low voter turnout

Geography: Out of the 198 wards in Bangalore, we chose Ulsoor ward to start off with, due to ease of access

Step 1: File an RTI

We filed an RTI (Right To Information) to get cracking.

Under RTI, very Government Department allocates a PIO (Public Information Officer) and it is the officer of that Department that one needs to work with to get the required information. Usually a timeframe of 30 days is assigned to close the case. 

We handed over the charge to a Journalism and Media Intern working with 101 Reporters to use her local language skills and put her journalism knowledge to practical use. Divya visited the BBMP Head Office situated at the Corporation Circle, at least 4 – 5 times over that month to get the work done. Consistent ‘follow-ups’ is a must and knowing the local language to build a working relationship with the local authorities is a compulsive requirement in this case.

Step 2: Design the Questionnaire

Your survey questions are the foundation to collect good data.

While we already knew this fact, we realised it even so while conducting the survey on-ground.On designing the survey, keep in mind the translation of the questions in the form of a conversation. Keep it smart, simple and relatable. We knew the non-negotiables of the data we wanted (like age, smartphone device owner and language) and designed some of the questions accordingly.

The most critical question was if the member voted before at the ‘Corporator elections’ and if no, what is the reason/s behind not voting.

The Questionnaire went through 2 iterations while conducting the survey. Interestingly, the reason was the reaction of the people when asked if they voted or not. Human psyche often forces us to give the ‘acceptable’ or ‘politically correct’ response. In our experience, some of the people found the question intimidating and the initial response would be a lie or pure ignorance to the respondents.

We then course corrected and eased out the release of the question in the form of a conversation. We first explained why we are here and what are we attempting to do and that our data shows that close to 50% of people living in Bangalore do not vote in the local BBMP elections. This helped us break the ice and demonstrate our genuine intent.

This is how our questionnaire looked:

Step 3: Launch the Operation

We then received from the BBMP office, thanks to the RTI – exhaustive, ward wise data files in a pen drive that seemed like the data was untouched, abandoned before ?

Here’s a sample of how the resident data of the CV Raman Nagar ward looks like:

Our choice of ward i.e. ‘Ulsoor’ ward has an occupancy of over 30000 people and while it’s desirable, it is impossible to interview all 30000 people. So we assigned a team of university interns managed by 2 rotating editorial staff to conduct the activity. The interns were but of course paid for the well-deserved hard work put in.

A Team of 4, a Timeline 2 weeks and 900 responses recorded!

Going house to house was no doubt tiring, however the insights gathered while collecting the data has been incredibly useful. These takeaways will be taken into consideration when we put our thinking caps to design the campaign communication strategy. The lady who relentlessly drove the project’s operations is Rebecca from 101 Reporters. 

Step 4: Data Entry

A tiresome, manual labour part of any data collection drive is to record the entries. 900 responses is clearly not a joke, however we finished it in half a day. (yeayy)

Every step of this drive opens a gamut of loopholes, however accuracy and being conscious is the key to collecting the right data.

We are now all set to launch an informed Beta version of our campaign and create positive impact ? *Fingers and toes crossed

Next update on the BBMP Elections Project coming up soon this Independence Day.

Stay tuned.


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