The Bolt: Digital Tools for Concrete Results

Inside this issue:

• ?? Facebook reveals 5 tips to help your ads perform
• ?? Boost email performance with segmentation
• ?? LinkedIn’s 10 Tips for getting noticed on the Feed
• ?? 6 Mistakes You're Making with Google Ads
• ?? How to go Viral on TikTok

Hey ??

Welcome back to The Bolt.

Today we’re talking about Facebook, TikTok (of course) and mistakes that you’re probably making on Google.

Let’s get to it.

?? Facebook reveals 5 tips to help your ads perform

In case you missed it, a couple of weeks back Facebook released its updated Performance 5 Framework, aka the framework from Facebook where they quite literally outline 5 of the best actionable best practices to help you increase the performance of your ads.

Here they are:

1. Simplify your account structure and put ad creative in one central campaign:

When you create an ad campaign on Meta's platform, the campaign goes through a learning phase where Meta explores which audiences and placements are best for your ad. This learning phase is more effective if you keep your ads account simple, with fewer campaigns and ad sets.

2. Use automation tools to optimise campaigns:

Meta is big on machine learning and AI, which is why over the past few years and months it’s sought to automate most of the ad setup process, from the audience through to the creative. Meta recommends using these automations as often as you can…

We’d personally recommend testing them against ads that you’ve setup to see how they perform and then run with the winner)

3. Differentiate your creative by audience:

We touch on this later on when it comes to email, but it’s true here too. Segment your audience and use different creative that’s most likely to resonate with them.?

Try still images, try Reels, try creator partnerships; try everything until you work out what works.

4. Utilise the Conversion API to improve campaign performance and measurement

Meta’s Conversion API acts as a bridge between Meta’s server and your marketing data. Set it up correctly and it’ll use the data to improves campaign performance and measurement.

5. Measure your campaign with Conversion Lift, A/B testing and marketing mix modelling

This sounds a little complicated, but in short, Facebook recommends you test your ads until you work out the winners. You can read a little more about Conversion Lift here…

Why this matters:?

With all of the changes coming to Meta, we’d recommend sticking to their recommendations to help your ads perform.

?? Boost email performance with segmentation

Understanding your audience is essential for driving engagement and conversions…

That’s obvious. ??

But what do you do when you have more than one audience to cater to?

1. Email blast all audiences and hope for the best
2. Break the audience into smaller segments based on location, interest, purchase history etc. and hit them with an email that they’ll actually resonate with?

The answer’s obvious… It's #2.

Segmentation is absolutely key if you want to have any success with driving engagement and conversions for multiple audiences.?

Let’s take Screwfix, for example.?

Imagine Screwfix launches a new range of VDE Insulated Screwdrivers, and it wants to email its contact list:

1. Without segmentation, Screwfix will send a blanket email to all of its subscribers
2. Segment it one step further, and Screwfix might send an email to just professional trades, rather than DIYers
3. Segment it again, Screwfix might send an email to only electricians
4. Going one step further again, Screwfix might send a different email to different groups of electricians based on when they last purchased a tool through its site.

See how it works?

A DIY carpenter almost certainly won’t care about a new screwdriver that’s been designed for electricians, but an electrician who recently purchased another insulated tool probably will.

Once you’ve segmented your audience, here’s a couple of things you can do to increase the chances of conversion:

• Focus on the differences: Highlight why what you’re offering is perfect for them and make these stand out in the email
• Use different landing pages: What’s the point in sending a unique email, if you’re just going to send everybody to the same landing page? There isn’t. Add the personalised value props from the email into the landing page.
• Use personalised email sequences: If somebody’s bought a product or even just looked at a product on your site, send them an email with an offer to help them convert, or send them an email with a related product (aka cross-sell and up-sell).

The more you can relate to your business, the more likely you are to get a conversion.

?? LinkedIn’s 10 Tips for getting noticed on the Feed

Facebook’s not the only one revealing its secrets this week…

LinkedIn’s at it too.

Last week, LinkedIn revealed 10 tips to help both your posts and your ads get noticed on the feed.

To summarise:

• Interact with your audience: If they leave a comment, reply back. And make it valuable. If they repost, thank them and drop it a like. Engage with your audience and onlookers will be more willing to engage too, helping the engagement spiral
• Be disruptive: Use eye-catching imagery and headlines to stand out from the crowd, not tired, dull square images with black and white text.
• Be inspirational: When posting, tell a story, don’t just share a mundane inspirational quote.
• Understand the competition: Research what your followers are reading and engaging with the most, and imitative and innovate so that your content fits in with what they resonate with most.
• Use the right image sizes: Content with larger images tend to get a 38% higher CTR. An image size of 1200 x 627 pixels is recommended.
• Be a curator: Don’t be afraid to curate content and share something that you’ve learnt from somewhere else. It’s not always about posting new strategies and tactics.
• Test: A/B test your content. Change the headlines, change the copy style, change the image design; keep changing until you find what works.
• Think about the brand: Your posts don’t always need to include a call to action. Instead, use your posts to build your brand instead.
• Get to the point: Concise headlines generally lead to more engagement. When writing ad headlines, aim for 150 characters or fewer. As for descriptive copy, shoot for 70 characters or fewer (anything over 100 characters will be truncated on desktop).
• Connect: Connect with the audience that you want to target and make it easy for them to find your content.

You can read the full article here if you want to dive a little deeper on their top tips.

?? 6 Mistakes You're Making with Google Ads

A few weeks back we had the pleasure of undertaking a full audit of a client’s Google Ads account, with the primary goal of identifying why their paid activity was converting so poorly in comparison to their other channels.

What did we find?

We found that 50% of their ad budget was being wasted on non-converting broad-match keywords, which even if they did convert, had such a low margin that the return on ad spend (ROAS) would have been so incredibly low that they mightn’t have even bothered running the ad in the first place.?

50%...

And they weren’t just spending a couple of hundred ￡ per month.?

They were spending thousands.?

Thousands of pounds being handed to Google every month on ads that didn’t stand a chance in hell of converting a click to a customer in the first place.

So today, to help you avoid churning through thousands of pounds, we wanted to share a couple of mistakes that you should avoid when setting up ads on Google:

• Inaccurate conversions: Whatever your conversion goal is (be it a purchase, a newsletter subscriber etc.), make sure you set it up accurately inside settings. For instance, if you’re running an ad where the primary goal is a purchase, avoid running ads that count pageviews as a conversion, because when you see that the cost per conversion is low, but the actual sales are too, you’ll be in for a nasty surprise.
• Keeping the default geo-targeting settings: When setting up your Google Ad, it's incredibly easy to miss the hidden menu under Location settings. When you click it, you'll see that Google's default location targeting is set to "Presence or interest: People in, regularly in, or who've shown interest in your targeted locations (recommended).". Change this to “Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations.”. Reason: You don’t want to run your ads to people who have shown interest in the UK, but don’t actually live here.
• Negative keywords: If you’re running an ad where the primary goal is to sell a relatively high-end drill, you don’t want your ads showing up for people searching for “cheap drills”, do you? Use negative keywords to stop your ads from appearing for search terms you don’t want your ad to show up for. Also, super important: Monitor your keyword spend regularly and add new negative keywords regularly too.
• Setting your bids too high or too low: Your bids determine how much you're willing to pay each time someone clicks on your ad. If you set your bids too high, you'll waste money. If you set your bids too low, your ads won't show up as often. Simple.
• Poor Ad Copy: Your ad copy is what will convince people to click on your ad. Make sure your ad copy is clear, concise, and persuasive. Include stats. Include value props. Include anything that you think will resonate with your target audience. If you’re struggling for ideas, search for some of your keywords and see what your competitors are doing and steal their ideas.
• Lack of Ad extensions: Ad extensions help to provide additional information to your ads, allowing you extra space to share why a customer should purchase from your business. Use these extensions wisely to help you get more conversions.

And there you have it.?

Now you won’t be wasting 50% of your budget on non-converting keywords ??.

?? How to go Viral on TikTok like Duolingo

With over 3.5 billion downloads since launch, and an estimated 15 Million UK TikTok Users by 2025, it’s pretty clear why we’re so big on construction brands having a presence on TikTok.

Today, however, we’re not here to preach TikTok.?

We wanted to do something different and share some pointers from Zara Parvez, Duolingo’s head of social media (if you haven’t heard of Duolingo, it’s an app that helps you learn almost any language in the world in a very fun way ??).

Here’s the key takeaways of what it takes to grow a channel from 0 to 6.6 million:

1. You need to adapt: People come to TikTok to be entertained. Explaining for 60s what a hammer does and what problem it solves is okay, but it’s really not fun. And you’ll see users swiping away your videos in an instant. Your TikTok content needs to have the fun factor, and it needs to be personable.
2. Track ROI: TikTok’s a great channel for brand awareness, there’s no doubt about it. But beyond that, it’s down to you to track it. Duolingo features a user-friendly “How did you find us?” survey for every new user, which includes all the possible channels. Maybe for you, if your product is more clear-cut you should use Urchin Tracking Module’s (UTM’s). It doesn’t matter how you do it, just do it so you can make sure it’s a channel worth investing in.
3. Break free from the traditional: Don’t get stuck with that very painful corporate outlook of what you can, and cannot be. Duolingo uses an owl that twerks to Dua Lipa songs; about as far away from learning language as you can get… our point is that you need to innovate and think social first. That might not be a dancing animal, but something that people want to watch. A hammer breaking things, to use the example above.

You can read the full interview here if you’re interested.

Or if you want some more actionable tips, check out our last issue of The Bolt, where we share the tips that helped CT1 hit 1m views on TikTok…

?? Rounding off The Bolt?

Again, we’re rounding off The Bolt with a few articles and news stories from the world of marketing to keep those creative juices flowing ??

Here’s our top stories from the past 2 weeks:

• #1: Google just made curating impactful ads across its platforms way easier, and guess what? It’s powered by AI…
• #2: Ready to implement an influencer marketing strategy but not sure on the best practices? Impact.com have got you covered with a ton of great tips, including how to determine which influencer will yield the best ROI.
• #3: Can’t get enough of AI or can’t get rid of it? If you’re the latter, you may like some of the new regulations proposed by the EU parliament.
• #4: Are keywords no longer the word on the street? Maybe! Google are trialling a new system that no longer requires specific keywords and instead can recognise similar words.
• #5: Are your customers getting lost in a rocky mountain pass? Perhaps your customer journey isn’t as straightforward as you thought! Luckily, Salesforce have published a HUGE interactive guide to help.
• #6: Twitter is coming for LinkedIn in what could be the boss fight of the decade as they prepare to unleash a new feature which will allow verified organisations to post jobs.
• #7: We’re calling for action on your call to action’s! If you find yourself overusing the same, uninspired CTA’s, email marketing megamind Chase Diamond has you covered with a huge resource list spanning over 70 different, fresh examples.

?? See you next time on 10th July

Another Issue of The Bolt down…

We’ll see you again in 2 weeks on Monday 10th July with Issue #007.

As always, hit subscribe and if there’s anybody in your network that you would like to see this, then tag them in the comments or forward it on.

Sara and the team at Expert Trades

www.experttrades.com