Establishing a Marketing Mix for High Growth Stages

Ada Pally was the first to speak to us at this conference. Ada has an incredible 15 years of experience in digital marketing, with a focus on omnichannel strategies to grow businesses of all sizes. Today she gave tips and advice for businesses that are in the early growth stages.

First, she enlightened us on proper data management. Often, businesses make rapid changes to how they retain their data, which causes their data to be unreliable. Ada advises to ensure the integrity of your 1st party data, and to commit to the way you manage it. Consistency is very important for the early growth stage of a business.

She then warned us against analysis paralysis. We can make decisions with enough confidence in our data. We can try things without having perfect attribution. Relative attribution is enough to justify a test, and there really isn’t such a thing as ‘perfect attribution’.

Regarding structure of AdWords accounts, she recommended a nested targeting approach, and utilizing SKAG’s (single keyword ad groups) in order to map queries on a 1:1 basis. Also, that the most unused remarketing tactic is a suppression tactic. It is important to exclude certain audiences from each other in order to provide relevant ads to your users.

Ada taught to never over-optimize something, at that often will cost efficiency and produce poor results. Also, anytime a test is running, the test should not end early, and that a decision should only be made based on statistical significance.

For SaaS companies, she said that it is ideal for the website to have excellent UX and CRO testing. If someone feels the website is clunky and gives a poor experience, they will have that perception of your product as well.

Set Your Metrics in Motion with Facebook Video Ads

Akvile DeFazio was next, teaching us how to improve our Facebook efforts with video ads. Akvile is the President of AKvertise, Inc, which is a social media agency. Akvile’s experience encompasses ecommerce, mobile apps, and lead gen, through social media platforms.

The purpose of using video instead of static ads, is that video stands out against the stillness of the news feed. Video is much more likely to get high engagement rates, it requires less attention commitment for users, and is more memorable.

Viewers retain 95% of a video message, instead of only retaining 10% of a message that is in text. People who have viewed a product video are 85% more likely to buy. For B2B spaces, we learned that 59% of executives would rather watch a video instead of reading text.

Akvile's three tactics for success:

• Brevity – Keep it short, and put your best foot forward in the first 10 seconds. Goldfish have longer attention spans than us, so keep that in mind when making your intro.
• Captions – 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound. So, use captions, and you may want to think like a silent film artist when making your video.
• Design – you can make low-cost and low-effort videos that drive amazing results, by using simple effects such as: overlay text, slow motion, time-lapse, stop motion, and cinemagraphs

Not sure what tools to use? Akvile gave us a list of great editing apps for videos taken with a high-end smartphone, including Quik, Boomerang, iMovie, Flixel, VidLap, Stop Motion Studio, InShot, Legend, and FilmoraGo.

To finish it off, Akvile let us know that 52% of consumers say they are more confident in a purchase when they have watched a product video.