1. Mindset

Many companies feel that Internet leads are a waste of time. Effective follow-up starts with the proper mindset. Change the term “leads” to “conversations.” Remember, these are “real” people looking to do something now or in the future or maybe do nothing at all.

To be highly successful at making more conversations, you should understand that 80 percent of people registering on your website might never buy or connect with your message, and that is all right.

Focus on the 20 percent of people that need your help. From that, focus on the 5-10 percent who need your help in the next 30 to 60 days.

2. Speed of conversation  

Once you have the proper mindset in place, you will need to make contact, have a conversation and do it fast. There have been many debates on how quick you should follow up.

Our advice is to get back to the person making the inquiry or registering on your website within five minutes or less. This conversation might be by text, phone or email.

Everyone communicates differently. Many companies never follow up — they procrastinate or get busy. The key is to follow up promptly to get the desired information to that person. People appreciate when you get back to them.

3. Customer service

Many companies attempt to sell when following up with people, which can cause distrust. Our advice is always to treat every call, email or text by providing customer service.

Your primary objective is to gather information and provide a solution or a plan for the consumer. Do not sound scripted, be human, real and personable. Remember, most consumers will appreciate and see the difference when you use this customer service approach.

4. Follow up on the follow-up  

To build lasting relationships with all the people you connected with, you will need to keep in contact or follow up many times before they will do business with you.

The key is to make sure all your efforts you built on the front end do not go wasted with poor follow up on the back end. Remember, the buyers of tomorrow are gold in most lead systems.

5. One step beyond  

Follow-up is in the details. After you speak to the consumer, learn about their needs and wants, fine tune their search criteria, and set them on a follow-up sequence, the last thing to do is to go “one step beyond” what every company does.

Our recommendation is to send out a personal note or thank-you card that simply states, “Thank you for using our website to search for marketing services, thank you for talking with us today! Call us at (fill in phone number here) when you need our help!” Send this to every person you connect with, and you will build deeper present and future relationships.

CHECKus Media Group is a full service marketing agency that helps financial companies, with special focus on Forex, Options and telemarketing.  

We introduced a new approach to lead generation that relies on highly targeted traders, on-demand lead generation based on broker’s specifications and high-end service. In short: We can help grow a better pipeline with fresh leads so your sales agents can spend more time selling.

The post 5 tactics for effective lead follow-up appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

From the respondents, 37% admitted that by now, they have used 10% of their annual digital advertising budget on Amazon, while 24% stated that it makes from 10% to 25%. Higher percentage, between 50% and 100% was spent only by a small number of advertisers on Amazon, focusing only on this channel.

Nevertheless, what is important for Amazon, from those 80%, around 20% plan to increase their budget on Amazon by 50% or more. More than 30% of respondents state that they are intending to shift from traditional search ads, while 23.5% will move from display or other non-digital budget (printed materials or standard TV ads). Furthermore, almost 21% will shift from social media and 18% from other marketplaces (see below).

What was an interesting fact about this survey was the finding that 28% of respondents outsource their advertising activity on Amazon while only 24% have a in-house team dedicated for Amazon.

But how about automation? Around 22.5% informed that they are using automation tools for Amazon campaign management and 44.4% of respondent added that they are intending to do so over the next year.

And the products bought? The most popular are still the well-known Amazon’s pay-per-click product search ads, reaching 86.5%. Dispay and video ads are used by 58% and 50% are using both AMS and AMG formats.

Amazon’s product search ad inventory became one of the most popular options on the market over the last years, but the company is not only focused on this offering. It has also special tailored offerings to marketplace sellers with display and video inventory on its owned along with operated properties as well as a DSP so Amazon audience can be targetted properly.

Although Amazon remains far behind Google and Facebook when it comes to digital advertising market share, the company is putting more and more efforts to improve its position. Thus, the company is on the right path to be important partner for more and more advertising agencies,  tool providers etc.

The post 80% of Amazon advertisers are about to increase their budget in 2019 appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

Therefore, LinkedIn is about the do certain tests and launch series of adjustments to its Sponsored Content over the next months for the purpose of assisting the users for high-quality clicks generation for their ads while improving their ROI.

We can use the ads with longer intro copy as an example when mobile clicks on the “see more” callout are designed to expand the intro text and everything therecan be seen. In the previous systems, clicks on “see more” were constantly sending visitors to your landing page or opening any prepared form for lead generation. By the application of this change, clicks on “see more” will be now free as well. This new feature should come in November.

Nevertheless, this change should be useful because of a decline in campaign click-through rates as well as in a CPC increase when comparing it to historical averages. This will result in improved ROI from the campaigns you have run. It will be based on the fact that there will be a greater share of your paid clicks achieved generated by people planning to visit your website, engage with your content, or send you their contact info.

The post Now You can Improve the Quality of Clicks of Sponsored Content on LinkedIn appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

Facebook as one of the top ad sellers is prepared to launch solution for browsers and its users to get rid of annoying third-party cookies. This new first-party cookie option for advertisers, publishers, and developers should be able to measure and optimize Facebook ads while capturing analytics data from browsers.

As Joe Osborne, the spokeperson of Facebook stated:

“We are offering a first-party cookie option for the Facebook pixel to help businesses continue understanding site activity and ad attribution across browsers. This change is in line with updates made by other online platforms, as use of first-party cookies for ads and analytics is becoming the preferred approach by some browsers. The controls people have over ads will not change.”

Last year, Apple launched the Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) in Safari, so any third-party trackers are blocked, thus avoid browsing data for ad targeting to be captured. Mozilla reacted as well, announcing that its Firefox browser will soon limit cookies and block storage access from third-party trackers.

These measures will focus on ad targeting mainly. For the purpose of maintaining the analytics, Apple’s guidance informs the users that they should not rely on third party cookies, but they should adjust their web analytics on their own. Moreover, Apple suggested link decoration to maintain cross-site analytics and ad attribution.

Google was the first of the top global companies to introduce a solution in response to ITP with a first-party Google Analytics cookie in September 2017. Microsoft introduced the Bing Ads solution in January through auto-tagging of the first-party Microsoft Click ID to advertisers’ landing page URLs. Therefore, Facebook could not stay behind.

So what is this Facebook solution like?

Whenever users click on any Facebook-served ad, respective URL of landing page gets a unique string gets appended. When there are opt-in pixels on the site, such URL parameter is going to be written into the browser as a first-party cookie. These pixels will include then the first-party cookie with all events, received by Facebook.

If nay advertiser wants to stay with the third-party pixel, Facebook may do some modeling to estimate conversions from Safari, but the real procedure is not know yet. It should be similar to Google’s approach in relation to advertisers, not linked to AdWords accounts to Google Analytics. Here, statistical modeling is applied to estimate and report website conversions that can’t be captured from Safari.

Advertisers will get the choice to set first- or third-party cookies for the Facebook Pixel. Settings of the Facebook’s first-party cookie is located in the Settings tab in Events Manager at the pixel level. Advertiser can find there the pixel level for his decision whether he wants to use first-party cookies with Facebook.

Since October 5, business clients will finally be allowed to sign into Events Manager. There, they can edit their Facebook Pixel cookie settings. In the event they don’t want to use the first-party excel, they need to opt out by October 24. If not, such pixel will become the default one for new pixels. Nevertheless, the option to change it will stay with them all the time.

Such businesses will be obliged to inform the users how their cookies are used and collected data shared with third parties.

The post Facebook to Follow Google and Microsoft, Releasing First-Party Cookie Option for Ads appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

According to a survey, prepared by the Pew Research Center, with the results found here, number of Facebook users have shown changes in their interaction with the popular website in a year. As reported, 4,594 U.S. adults have been polled between May 29th and June 11^th while 54% admitted any change in their privacy settings.

Moreover, 42% of the users informed that they had stopped using the platform for some time (at least couple of weeks) and even 26% of them have deleted the Facebook app from their phone over the same period. When considering all these users, 74% of those polled had taken at least one of the above-mentioned actions over the last year, albeit there is still no relation between the issue of Facebook related to privacy.

There is also a generation difference confirmed by the statistics. It’s interesting to find that the younger generation reflected these issues more, when 44% of young Facebook users (18-29 years) confirmed that their app has been deleted on their phone, while the older generation saw only 12% of users doing the same (65+ years). Furthermore, the same applied to the change in privacy settings, when even 64% of younger group (18-49 years) has taken the action, while only 33% of 65+ users did the same.

As for the political orientation, Pew was unable to find any significant difference between Democrats and Republicans. Although number of social network platforms, including Facebook, have been accused of supporting liberal groups, there was no difference found between the supporters of Republican and Democratic parties in any of the categories.

The main reason for these privacy issues of Facebook was the Cambridge Analytica scandal when it was revealed that Facebook has gained information about 87 million Facebook users, not providing the company consent thereto. Therefore, Facebook and its privacy policies became the main focus of investigation. For this purpose, Facebook has to implement number of changes so its users could have better control over their data. This included also the possibility to download the data Facebook has already collected about them.

According to Pew, only 9% of polled had downloaded their data since this possibility was allowed to them, albeit acting more carefully when it comes to app. From the group of this 9%, we can see only (roughly) half of the with a deleted app on their phone, while 79% changed their privacy settings over the last 12 months.

The post Facebook users Showing Sings of Change in Social Habits in Relation to Privacy Concerns appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

If you are a sales guys, this is nothing new to you. Customers tend to prefer eye-to-eye contact, where any live event has a huge advantage when it comes to comparison with an internet, non-personal marketing. Meeting in person leaves often an impression what internet can’t overcome (as it focuses more on masses in a less personal way).

However, the cost of such event plays a huge role. Number of companies needs to calculate such costs precisely as they have limited funds for marketing, distributing it between online marketing and live marketing. Moreover, it’s also very hard to estimate the return of such investment into event marketing.

Therefore, companies often hesitate to spend much money of event marketing or limit it significantly to keep their money on massive online marketing. But let’s come to the points why such event marketing is still useful and there’s a reason why to consider it in your marketing strategy.

1. At First, Do Not Forget about Your Staff

First principle is a general one and is emphasized all the time. If you want high quality, you need skilled and motivated people first. In the event of demotivated team, you have no chance to provide good event marketing in any way.

Therefore, the issue is not only about hiring enough people, but those skilled ones who can secure great event marketing at any time. Here, you should not forget about the necessity of appropriate training, so the sales or leads’ results can be improved. Each event marketing needs well communicating people, so you don’t miss the chance.

2. Bring the swag

After the event, all participants should be able to see clearly visible logos on all promotional materials to keep the experience related to your brand in their mind.

Any great swag will support the traffic around your booth, luring attention to your brand. But what to select? It should be something that is at least little useful. Devices related to smartphones (e.g. chargers) tend to be very popular, t-shirts, food related to the topic etc. Nevertheless, these are only recommendations if you are not sure. If you know your audience properly, your creativity can bring the ideal product.

3. Attending first before taking the decision

If it’s the first time you are making such event marketing, check rather any such event, not to waste your funds. Thus, you’ll realize who the right attendees for you are, what do they want in fact, how do they purchase the products etc. You will receive all key information to get the interest of attendees for your business so they will stay at your event. Here, you’ll have the chance to see what works by observing the trade show attendees or having even chat with the exhibitors.

4. Adeqaute success metrics

Another important point is related to the question of quality. Not everything can be measured only in a quantitative way. There are also aspects that may never be measured by number, like business opportunities, whose importance understands everyone of us. There is also the relation with your customers, new products etc.

Here, you have to set a proper metrics focused on the right explanation of success at the event. Such success rate must consider all the necessary aspects, so besides the number of leads or sales, it should include brand exposure or business opportunities formed.

5. Budget for the unexpected

Each budget must count on the situations which you were not able to predict before. Therefore, you must consider such unexpected events as well and dedict portion of your funds for these purposes. There could be even standard costs like bills for utilities, costs related to designing, different permits etc.

Therefore, for the purpose of improving your ROI, you should spend the money on the most important aspects. In particular, the quality of your staff and the place should play the key role to attract your potential customers.

The post Disappointed by Your Leads and ROI? Here are 5 Event Marketing Strategies How to Improve It! appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

This coffee chain has 21 stores, based in Japan and India predominantly, while having its branch now also in the U.S. (Providence, Rhode Island). This chain came up with an idea that any student or faculty member can provide his personal data including the name, date of birth and work experience through an online registration process. Now, the company is planning to expand further within the United States to get even more customers.

Shiru has based its business model on the collection and treatment of personal data as a currency for an exchange of goods. They generate their profit from different sponsors, advertising on their website, interested in potential clients who they acquire through certain events.

In case of Shiru cafe, the sponsors are e.g. Nissan, Microsoft or JPMorgan. This new approach leaves the previous tracking of purchase behaviour and turns to wilful acts of the clients. However, the company informed that it doesn’t share personal information of its customers with third-party companies.

According to Keith Maher, Shiru’s North America general manager, the objective of the company is to „help students make the transition [from academic life to the workplace] easier and empower them to make better decisions.“

Marketer’s appreciated this new “pay with data” business model, hoping that it could help to reveal a new path for the communication with customers. Nevertheless, there are also risks related thereto, in particular due to the privacy, so much discussed lately in connection with Facebook.

The main issue for retailers or financial sector was to achieve as much personalisation of offers as possible. We could see different loyalty programs or branded credit cards, trying to focus on certain habits of their customers. In principle, customer like when brands are transparent about what they offer in return for the data acquired from them and how their data is being used. In such cases, customers are likely to share more personal information.

Now, the issue has a legal point of view as well. The so much discussed E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires companies to request customer consent in case of provision of their data to third parties even before collecting and using such personal data. Now, the company is intending to get into the UK market, paying increased attention to the requirements of the GDPR.

However, Shiru has also informed about its intention to expand to Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Amherst before the end of 2018.

The post A Japanese coffee shop will give you free coffee in exchange for your data appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

Push Notifications are developed by PropellerAds so the needs of advertising subjects can be fulfilled much better, thus narrowing the focus on the rights clients even more, reaching the required audience, while leaving any other auxiliary tools (banners, social media) behind.

Not sure what these Push notifications are? Imagine you client, using a browser on his desktop or playing with his phone, while a short warning message will appear in front of his eyes with an icon. Look at this example of mobile push notifications and try to imagine what your client could see:

What are the Push Notifications for?

As mentioned above, Push notifications are completely new Ad format, however becoming quickly popular. Therefore, let’s take a closer look on how they can help you

1. You get real traffic, not bots

Of course, user must expressly agree to receive push notifications while subscribing to the notifications on respective websites at the same time. This fact should be supportive for the problem of bots as this procedure supports real users and eliminates any bot traffic.

Naturally, there is the question everyone is worried about – the intrusive nature of such feature. Even this problem is solved by receiving only a certain number of notifications per day, while the user can feel that he has it under control as he will have the option to unsubscribe at any time.

Therefore, due to these facts, the quality of such traffic and communication with them is much higher, so your campaigns may target more specific audience.

2. Maximum viewability and high CTR

Here, you don’t need to worry about the customer not seeing what you want. This message will occur directly at their device or browser, thus supporting also the Click-Through Rate (CTR) statistics, being a more problematic area of other ad formats.

Push Notifications are able to occur on device of browser of respective customer even if he is not using his mobile phone or using that browser.

3. Increasing the acquisition efficiency

This is a very valuable tool to provide customer acquisition. With its more specific focus all around the world, reaching beyond the existing clients of your company, you’ll find it very useful in further campaigns.

Moreover, not to limit this feature only to certain area, its developer – the PropellerAds, has developed a full range of options for push notifications, making it possible to target users on each platform and device where also web and mobile push notifications are included.

4. Enhanced retention and audience wanting to interact

The native character of this ad format brings more extensive potential to you as it’s not only native to the website content, but to the interests of the user. Therefore, by using push notifications, the audience you get are people who are really interested in the products or service you are promoting.

But it’s not always only about the new customers. Also the existing ones should be taken care of. Push notifications were demonstrated that they increased the retention rate by one fifth.

5. Options for customization along with instant delivery

There is the potential to send large number of messages all over the world almost immediately. Such speed is comes along with customization options: you can choose where the user may view your messages (this is a key element in case of specific offers or certain events) along with emoji and visual elements.

Web or app push notifications?

They may look very similar, however there is a different system and approach behind you must weigh when using them. In the event of app push notifications, you’ll be sending them from an app, so it must come from someone who has this app.

Otherwise, you can use the web version of push notifications (so even without an app). For this purpose, there is a fresh new Push Notifications service developed.

There is also the possibility that you have developed your own app, which may be updated by any other auxiliary installations through Push Notification Ads.

What can it be used for?

This is a universal ad format, applicable to any type of products or services where also CPA offers may be included. There are different and extensive potentials to promote any kind of content (offer, announcement, website update, brand awareness).

Therefore, whenever you use push notifications, you may weight different content like various e-books, check-lists, special promos & offers, mobile apps, alerts, news, etc. It’ll allow you to provide more diversity to your marketing options, helping your business to improve even further by communication with the right clients.

Campaigns

This new format will be available for CPM campaigns on the Platform of PropellerAds. There you can initiate new campaigns under the “Create Campaign” button, where you’ll select the CPM pricing model and then the Ad Format “Push Notifications”.

The post Another Ad Alternative – Push Notifications How You Can Take Advantage of Them! appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

Product manager for Messenger, Andrea Vaccari informed in a Newsroom post that Instant Games for Messenger will roll out worldwide for iOS and Android “over the next few weeks.”

During F8 last month, engineering manager Calvin Grunewald described the rich gameplay features that are coming to Instant Games in a blog post:

“At F8, we introduced rich gameplay features to give developers more control of the gaming experiences they create. Developers can customize their own start and end screens and integrate new APIs (application-programming interfaces) that can help drive share and connected gameplay. Rich gameplay features are laying the groundwork to support a wider variety of games that extend beyond the lightweight, score-based games currently offered on the platform.”

Vaccari provided more details in her post Tuesday:

“Rich gameplay features such as turn-based games (our most requested feature) can also weave in leaderboards and tournaments and offer more visually engaging and customizable game messages during play. Game bots help re-engage players by calling out new game options and encouraging competition with updates on the leaderboards.”

Zynga’s Words With Friends is one of the first games to jump on board, and it is currently available in Messenger as a “feature-rich, turn-based game,” Vaccari added. Next up, according to Vaccari:

“People will begin to see new features as game developers start to incorporate the new capabilities with one of Instant Games on Messenger’s biggest hits, Blackstorm’s EverWing, being among the first to use game bots. Depending on what device you use and where you are located, there are now up to 50 games titles available on Messenger, with more being introduced almost every week. We’re also excited to be bringing the world’s No. 1 pool game—Miniclip’s 8 Ball Pool—to Instant Games very soon. “

Vice president of messaging products, David Marcus, published a Facebook post:

“Ever since we launched Instant Games on the platform late last year, I’ve loved playing my favorites with my friends. Today, games on Messenger are getting even better. We’re rolling out the ability to play turn-by-turn games, like Words With Friends or 8 Ball Pool, as well as enabling developers to build games bots that will make games even more social. Today, we’re also unveiling nearly 50 new games and making games available globally. Game on!”

The post Instant Games for All Facebook Messenger Users appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.

Hint 1: Take Advantage of Demographic Data 

By using Facebook, you can enjoy multitasking or quick scrolling, while the user absorbs only a minimum percentage of information from large news feed in a single minute. Under such conditions user’s attention lasts only for a second and the next pop up will disturb his attention for sure. 

The way you capture someone’s attention will determine his or her lifecycle as a customer. If your ad strategy on Facebook consists of roping people in with images and slogans irrelevant to your business, you won’t make many sales. 

Here’s the way to set your ads to attract the targeted audience:

Offers Supporting Your Strategic Goals: some offers consist only from discount and the customers are dependent on such discount. After the expiration, such customers will fade away as well and you don’t really make profit on the business like this. Therefore a long-term strategy has to be developed, where your Facebook ads attract the kind of people who are likely to upgrade to your monthly program. People don’t always want to pay the lowest price, but they want to receive something for it. A certain value.

Set Your Copy and Images precisely according to your audience preferences: for a fast attention capturing, some businesses use outrageous images with nonsense for slogans. The idea is that you can work with anyone who clicks the ad. But this doesn’t really work. Much better approach is to create an ad that speaks directly to your target market. For example, this ad from CoPromote uses a funny image to grab people’s attention, but both the ad image and text relate to CoPromote’s service and what its target audience needs.

Hint 2: Collected the Demographic Data

Sometimes you may think that you know your group, like kids, workers, specific nationalities, etc. But for the purpose of improving your ad, narrow your market to a specific group of people so you can be even more effective. If you don’t narrow your market audience, your message will be wide and it won’t probably hit anyone’s attention.

Here are some practical manners how to narrow down your market:

• Don’t forget to add gender to your product checkout page form. Knowing the gender of your target audience is also very important. It is absolutely normal for businesses to have a predominantly female or male market. If you don’t know the gender of your market, you need to find out.
• Use a third-party service to get detailed demographic information about your email contacts. For example, you can send TowerData a file of your exported contacts from your CRM, and they’ll analyze that data, based on your preferred data sets, and will send more demographics on your contacts. This is a great way to learn more about your customers and improve your Facebook ad targeting.

You can get the info from TowerData on the basis of the data sets that are most relevant to your business, product, service, or campaigns. In case you have set a relevant ad but without any successful results, check your demographics if you don’t lack anything in your settings. In case you’re still uncertain about it, try to make wider research for the targeted market on your own or for the demographics, you need to target.

Hint 3: Measure Conversion through Facebook Ads’ Clicks Segmentation

In case you are using a CRM to track clicks on Facebook ads, you should be segmenting everyone who comes from your Facebook ads. If your customers answer a survey or download a freebie, you should segment and tag your customers and thus identify whether they eventually buy your product.

Assuming you’re marketing the same products or services to your Facebook leads that you market to the rest of your mailing list, the only way you’ll know if your Facebook ads are working is if you know how many Facebook clicks turned into sales.

If you’re not capturing leads for your Facebook, you should start with it as soon as possible. It could cost you less money and even could be easier to run Facebook ads that link to your Facebook page; however, to gather leads who are interested in your marketing, send people to your website. This way you can offer them something of value in exchange for their email address.

The post Three Ways How to improve your Facebook ads appeared first on CHECKus Media Group.