If you are not marketing digitally or are spending money ‘flying blindly’ in the digital abyss without seeing measurable results, we have good news: that can change! 

Here are a few of our team’s suggestions:  

• Work with an agency or partner that doesn’t just overpromise, but shows you, in real time, the measurable results you are getting from your budget spent with them.
• Ensure that all of the necessary tracking tools are in place across your website, social media, email marketing and other platforms.
• Take time to upskill yourself and your team around the Google Analytics dashboard and what the various metrics mean.
• Insist on intelligent insights from your agency and take part in a tutorial where your team is taught how to read the numbers and understand the metrics. 
• Do not, we repeat, do not have a stagnant digital strategy. Your digital marketing approach must be able to pivot, and pivot quickly, as the digital landscape changes (the necessity of this we have seen first hand during Covid-19).

Set aside a set amount that you want to allocate purely to your festive season digital marketing. Bear in mind that if you are maximising what you already know is working for your business (as per step 2 on this list) then your budget will be an investment that will be paying dividends after the festive season. Once you have your budget clearly defined, then begin to apportion this between your digital marketing channels giving the most budget towards your most successful channels.

If you are not using custom audiences, lookalike audiences or advanced audience combinations, then we need to chat because you are missing out on what we would deem the best way to see advert success. Custom audiences let you target previous website visitors or upload email lists of clients and target these individuals via social media platforms whilst lookalike audiences (you guessed it) let you target people who look like your website visitors or those on your email list. Advanced audience combinations include combining custom audiences, lookalike audiences and a few of our other *secret* ingredient audience types to get the ultimate bang for your buck.

Advertising is not just what you say, but who you say it to, and speaking to the right audience, whether it be broad or niche is vitally important. Once your business manager profile has been set up as well as your tracking codes, a world of new advanced audience targeting combinations opens up to your business. From custom website and email audiences to lookalike audiences, take time to carefully map out your audience, and then we recommend using A/B testing of your audience segments to discover which is working best before backing the audience with the bulk of your campaign budget.

This now poses the question of ‘is Facebook marketing even worth it?’ and ‘how do I reach my target audience?’ The answer to the first question is a resounding yes, and we have the research and experience with our clients to back up that claim. The answer to the second question is: Advanced Facebook advertising. We do not recommend utilising the Facebook platform as a marketing tool unless you are willing to allocate a budget to paid advertising in order to promote your campaigns. What paid advertising (when done correctly, there’s an art to this) allows your business to do is place your content and campaigns in the newsfeeds of people you specifically target, regardless of whether they have ‘liked’ your page. These ads let you completely bypass your page’s followers and get under the noses of the exact target market of your business. 

Disclaimer: We do not advise boosting your posts as a means of advertising, the advertising we are referring to is advanced Facebook advertising tactics.