9 Step Guide for Businesses Beating The Recession!
***This guide by no means to replace professional business/marketing consultant, we do not and will not take any legal responsibility for any losses that may occurs to your business when practicing any of the tips in this guide. If you do not agree to these terms, please stop reading further.***
Most business owners, we are in a tough time, since consumers are at risk of losing their jobs. prices of things are on the rise and causing consumers to spend less as the fear of a recession may be around the corner. This is a major blow to most businesses as you are getting less revenue and may be forced to cut back on rent, labor, advertising and even face the decision of closing the door to your business.
Below are some tips on how your business can continue to thrive in a slow economy
1) Position your product and service as "essential".
Consumers are spending less on non-essentials and high cost items, most of their spending are on essentials items only.
For example, IDOLCAM used to be marketed as the vlogging camera for everyone, now we have positioned IDOLCAM as the essential marketing camera for businesses. The reason behind this logic is that consumers can delay their buying of a non essential item like a vlogging camera for months to even years. However, it is critical for businesses to find ways to communicate and reach more potential customers to continue to thrive, so there is much more urgency for businesses to find the right camera for their marketing effort.
You want to find the customers that your product or service matters the most to them. Focus your message to ones who are most likely to continue to buy from you even in a recession.
2) Don't try to sell to everyone!
Most businesses are guilty of this, trying to appeal their product or service to everyone but end up selling to no one. This is related to positioning but it's worth mentioning. Unless you are in the business of selling essentials such as rice, noodles, breads, eggs, etc. Your marketing message should cater to the groups of people who really need, or most passionate about your product or service.
3) Differentiate Your Product or Service!
We are in a world bombarded with marketing messages constantly. In order to make a mark in consumers' minds, you have to be special and stand out from the crowd. Also, differentiating your product or service is a way to prevent competition. Especially, If you are an underdog in the market, differentiating is actually a chance for you to break away from competition.
For example, hundreds of giant companies such as Sony, Gopro,Apple, Samsung, Canon, Panasonic and top Youtube camera reviewers are all fighting for the term "vlogging camera" on Google. There's little chance IDOLCAM can win the position for "vlogging camera" among these strong competitors. However, we realize IDOLCAM is not just a video camera, but a camera rig since IDOLCAM is made up of a 4K camera with interchangeable lenses, 3 axis gimbal, lighting, flipscreen, shotgun microphone, so we market IDOLCAM as a "Vlogging Camera Rig" If you do a Google search, IDOLCAM is at the top of the search; at least the last time we check :)
Come up with an extra element or twist that sets your business apart from the rest, so you can be the one and only to consumers.
4) Video Content Creation!
Now, that you have defined your market position, your target audience and differentiate your product and service from your competitors. It is time to create videos that will resonate with your audience.
a) Find out the problems that are keeping your customers up at night and create videos that will provide answers to their questions.
b) Satisfy their curiosity, capture video of the process of how the product is made, or the things that your product or service can create.
c) Talking heads and vlogging videos are sharing your expertise on an issue or topic, the least amount of video editing required.
After you post these videos to Youtube, Tiktok, Facebook, Linkedin and find out which type of video resonates the most with your audience. Then, create more of the videos that resonate with your audience to grow your reach.
5) Create a converting website!
Now you have traffic from the videos you post on social media. Direct them to a converting website, or funnel.
Instead of loosely displaying images and videos on your website without a purpose, your website should serve a purpose, walking your potential customers to the problems that they are facing now, the solution that they need, why your solution is the best for solving their problems, past user testimonials and make it easy to buy from you.
A fine tuned converting website will help customers buy the right product or service to their problem, help your business grow faster and allow you to buy ads to grow your business exponentially.
***You should hire a website team that specializes in eCommerce websites if you have the budget as building a fast website with design, good copy writing and easy to navigate is critical to your success.***
For the rest of us, Weebly is a very simple to use and budget friendly platform to create an eCommerce website that has everything to get your started. Shopify costs more, but has everything you need for building eCommerce websites and supposedly one of the most versatile platforms. Clickfunnel is great for people who are selling a single product with the ability to create up-sells, cross-sell, email marketing and affiliate programs. Maybe the simplest for people who want to easily build a converting website for a single product.
6) Amplify your reach!
Social media platforms usually have limited reach, only a small percentage of video creators can generate enough leads to keep their business growing. For the rest of us, we will rely on buying ads to drive traffic to our website, even if you have a physical location.
***Below are solely suggestions, you should consult a marketing professional before you start media buying, IDOLCAM is not responsible for any losses you may experience***
You should experiment with different ad platforms and see which works best for your product and service and stick with one advertising channel at a time until you master them. From our experience, Facebook has been our go to marketing channel. It is much easier to target the right audience, cheapest to drive website visitors and the only platform we have been able to generate a positive ROI. ***Your product or service may react differently***
7) Testing, Testing, Testing and Testing!
It takes a lot of experience to create profitable ads unless you have a product or service that everyone needs. You need to test many variations with copywriting, video, audience, etc in order to find profitable ads that can scale. Go back to your answer from 1-3 to help you narrow down your audience and message.
Take the best responding videos that you have created for social media platforms and remaster them for video ads.
Ad1) Create a master promo video that every new viewer should see when they see your ad. Approx 70% of ad budget to your target new audience on Facebook.
Ad2) Create, or reuse some of the best responding videos on social media to highlight the core values, or differentiating points about your product or services. Approx. 20% of ad budget for website visitors
Ad3) Create, or gather video testimonials, this will greatly build confidence with potential buyers. Approx. 10% ad budget for shop visitors, added cart and checkouts.
8) How to buy ads on Facebook ( we have no connection with Facebook, just for your reference)
a) Creating a business suite account will give you more ad tools and options to work with. Create more than one account if you can, as Facebook is frequently shutting down accounts with no reasons.
b) Create more than 1 payment options on your website, Paypal, Stripe, Square, etc so people can check out faster, less likely to run into a payment platform freezing your account that can restrict you from running ads.
c) Install a Facebook pixel, so Facebook knows who visited your website.
d) Have a newsletter signup on your website for visitors who are highly interested in your product and service.
e) If you have limited budget and need to have ROI right away, run "Conversion Purchase Ads". If you need more exposure to more potential customers and you can wait for the sales a couple of weeks or months later run "Traffic Ads" to reach more people for cheaper. Traffic ads are usually 5x times cheaper to drive website visitor than conversion ads. However, Conversion ad visitors are much more likely to make a purchase on your website. If you have the budget, or if your product value isunder $50, you can run both types of ads and see which type of ads generate more sales, or leads.
f) Selecting the right audience is most critical, Go back to 1-3 should give you a very good idea of who to target.
g) Age range will depend on your product's target audience. usually 25 and up will have more buying power.
h) For start, you can test $10 per ad and see which ad and audience works best. You should only have one variable per ad.
For example, same audience and video but different title, Same audience and title but different video, same title and video but different audience.
Each variable should have 3-5 different ads for a total of 9-15 ads. You can spend more if you want to get faster results.
This way, we can pinpoint which audience, video and title works best to reduce ad cost.
i) We usually start with targeting only "Facebook Feed", and only expand to story and Instagram if we have winning ads needed to scale to a large pool of audience.
j) Make sure your Facebook pixel is selected.
K) Make sure your landing page is correct, then hit publish. The first ads may take up to 24 hours to get publish as Facebook is probably doing a lot of background checks on you and your website. Just be patient.
L) Compare the performance of each ad and find the best performing ads. Mostly likely you won't have any purchases from spending $10. So, you can only gauge the performance of the ads by comparing the CTR(Click Through Rate), CPC (Cost Per Click) and Initiated check outs. "Initiated checkouts" is the best indicator beside "purchases" that your ads will likely to convert.
M) Then you can also compare CTR and CPC. Usually a CTR over 2% is good, CPC under $1.5 is normal for conversion campaigns. Traffic campaigns CTR are usually around 2X higher and 1/4t he CPC of conversion campaigns. (Your product, service and industry may have very different ad costs, only a rough ballpark for reference).
N) Kill the ads that are performing really bad, CTR under 1%. Keep the ones that are okay as you need to give it more time. Facebook claims that their algorithm needs 7 days to learn the best people mostly likely to become your buyers.
Also, we typically scale ads that are performing exceptional well by increasing from $10 to $20.
***Also if the increase of ad spend is too aggressive may put the Facebook algorithm back into learning phrase, so you want to gradually increase ad spend***
O) Another way around is just to copy the winning ad if you need to increase the ad spend significantly without disrupting the winning ad performance.
P) Just keep on testing. If you are not comfortable, then is best for you to find a Facebook Ad Agency to help you with media buying.
9) Fight back and stop the bullying!
We need to stop feeling powerless, take action and control. We hope the above steps will give you
some ideas on how you might be able to turn your business around and start thriving again!
***This guide is by no means to replace professional business/marketing consultants, we do not and will not take any legal responsibility for any losses that may occur to your business when practicing any of the tips in this guide. If you do not agree to these terms, please stop taking on any of the tips described above.***
