Digital Marketing Blog

Want to see what your competitor’s Facebook and Instagram ads look like? It’s easier than you think!

How to See Your Competition's Ads Using Facebook's Ad Library ToolWant to see what your competitor’s Facebook and Instagram ads look like? It’s easier than you think!I want to share a quick tip that can help you kick and get some ideas flowing when it comes to a social media advertising campaign. One of the questions I field often when it comes to talking to people about how to put together a social media campaign is they're not really quite sure how to figure out what the competition's doing. A lot of people want to address and understand what the competition's doing so that their ad campaign can be appropriate. It's super important. I totally agree. Looking at what the competition is doing is a vital step when you're putting together an online advertising campaign. I want to share a really awesome resource that can help you achieve that. The Facebook Ad LibraryFacebook has a tool called the Facebook Ad Library. You can go into their ad library and search based on what kind of industry or right down to even a certain page.If there's a competitor that that is on your radar and you want to see all of their ad creatives, head to the Facebook Ad Library tool, and you'll be able to see all of their active and inactive ads that they're running on Facebook and Instagram. This is a treasure trove of information that's presented to you and available to you very quickly. It's a no-brainer for you all to go out there and use this tool as a source of inspiration and information, when you're putting together your social media ads. The tool is the Facebook Ad Library, available here: https://www.facebook.com/ads/libraryTake a look and if you want chat about what you find, or if you want to chat about how to put together a social media ad campaign, feel free to drop a comment below or reach out to me directly. Thanks. Stay healthy and stay safe. Talk to you soon.

Posted by Sandbox Media on Thursday, June 18, 2020

Avoiding Losing Retail Customers To Competitors As Economies Re-Open

Avoiding Losing Retail Customers To Competitors As Economies Re-OpenIf you don't do this, you're risking losing that customer and them going to a competitor because that competitor is giving them the reassurance and the information that they need to go ahead and buy whatever they're looking to purchase.Hey everyone, as things open up and more retail businesses are allowed to open and operate, it's important for you to properly educate and inform your customers on what's going on at your retail location. If you don't do this, you're risking losing that customer and them going to a competitor because that competitor is giving them the reassurance and the information that they need to go ahead and buy whatever they're looking to purchase.Some of the information that you need to provide to your clients or your customers includes, whether you're open or not. What kind of delivery delivery options do you have? Are you open just for curbside pickup or are you open for in-store visits? If you're open for in-store visits, what do your hours look like? Are they different from your regular hours?You need to clearly communicate that to your clients. For those of you that are offering curbside pickup, notifications are super important.Curbside Pickup NotificationsWhat do your notifications look like? Are you telling customers that they can expect their orders in a certain amount of days? Certain amount of hours? If not, you need to do that because people may not want to buy something if you have to wait a week or if they don't know how long they have to wait for something to come and be ready for curbside pickup or, delivery to their homes.Properly managing their expectations for curbside pickup and then notifying them on-time (example: order received, order being prepared, order ready for pickup, etc...) These are notifications that you need to be sending out on time, effectively and clearly so that there's no confusion on the customer side on what they can expect.In-Store VisitsIf you're open for in-store visits, let customers know what to expect. What has changed with your staff or what has changed in your retail location to make things safer and to comply with guidelines that are set out by the government?What You Expect from CustomersAt the same time, inform customers of what you expect of them when they visit your store. Do you want your customers to wear a mask when they come into your store? If so, provide them with this information so that they don't get surprised if they do show up at your store and find out, well, you need to wear a mask inside and "oops, I didn't bring a mask, what do I do now?"Ensure that you're informing them on what they need to do; things like, are you guys requiring people to be spaced out? Are there rules or paths they should follow when they navigate your aisles? All of this information needs to be conveyed to your customers. If your competitors beat you to it, those customers that are on Google looking to go buy whatever it is they're looking to buy are probably going to follow the path of least resistance and go to the business that's giving them the information that's answering their questions proactively.There's two areas where you need to focus on when you're considering conveying this information to people right now. Your website and your Google My Business profile listing.Make sure your website's up to date and make sure you log into Google My Business and update your COVID-19 note if you have one, update your store hours and any other notes that you have shared for people there, because a lot of people will bypass your website and just go to your Google Maps profile to find somewhere to buy something and just go from there.If you have any questions on how to do any of these things or want to talk a little bit more about what you can do to improve your customer experience in light of these changes that are happening, please feel free to drop a comment below or give me a call.

Posted by Sandbox Media on Thursday, May 28, 2020

Are you a Service Provider - Essential Tips As the Economy Reopens

Are you a Service Provider - Essential Tips As the Economy ReopensWith all this stuff that's changing right now with businesses being allowed to open up or being allowed to open up in a certain partial manner. If you have a service type of business, you need to inform your customers on what's going on and how your business is operating at the moment. With all of this information being released from various sources, there's definitely some people out there that are unclear whether a business is open or not, or whether it's choosing to open or not. If you’re a service-based business that’s going to a customer or business’s location, you need to inform that customer what measures you're taking doing to protect them, in light of COVID-19. What kind of PPE are you using? What kind of protocols are your team members using? What kind of changes your customer could expect in terms of how you're delivering the service or what that service actually is. Will you be delivering that service differently?Is what they can expect going to be the same as before, or is that going to change, due to limits that you have to operate within?How should the client prepare for your visit?Beyond that you should also consider sharing what you're doing to expect or require from the customer to ensure the safety of your when they get to the job.Is there anything that you need to do as a customer to help your staff do better, or for your staff to be safe, whether you need to leave the premises, whether you need to vacate the premises, sanitize something, whatever it is.Let Your Customers Know What to ExpectIt's super important that if you're in the services space, you let your clients and your customers know what they can expect and what you expect. If you want to do business together, now, this is especially important. How’s Your Availability?One last thing I want to touch on is availability. If you are the type of business that takes bookings or schedules your services, inform potential customers what your availability schedule looks like. Are you booking next day? Or are you backed up and booking three weeks or three months out, because of staffing or supply challenges.Use Your Website and Google My BusinessIf you are a service business, inform your customers on these items and use both your website and Google My Business as a place to post this information. Keep this information up to date so when customers are either going to Google to look for a service provider such as yourself, or whether they go to Google maps to find a service provider such as yourself, they have the information they need at their fingertips, and you avoid the risk of them finding that information better presented, at a competitor's website, potentially losing a sale with that customer.Need Help? We’re here to Help!If you have any questions on how you can execute any of these items or what you need to do to better improve your client customer experience online, feel free to drop a comment below. I'd love to chat about it some more. Take care and be safe!

Posted by Sandbox Media on Tuesday, June 9, 2020

Do Better With Email Marketing By Avoiding These Mistakes

Do Better With Email Marketing By Avoiding These MistakesI’m seeing all sorts of email marketing campaigns circulating. Some good, some could use some help. Here’s some tips based on what we’re seeing.Today, I want to talk about some of the email campaigns I'm seeing going from some businesses and offer some perspective and some suggestions on how you can do better with email right now in light of what's going on in the world. They look like an email blastOne of the things that really caught my attention was some businesses are sending out these emails that look very obvious that they're just bulk email blasts. They're just very generic.There’s no contextThere's nothing in the messaging that shows that they're really aware of anything that's going on right now in the world. It's just business as usual. They're sending out this email, these emails that are not personalized at all. The content isn't relevant with the present situation. The worst thing is they're sending them out too often and they're repetitive.Do it wrong and people will tune you out, or even unsubscribe!If you're getting emails from a business that are repetitive and don't make sense to you and don't really feel relevant or important right now, you're probably just going to delete them. If you keep getting them, you might actually end up unsubscribing or blocking the sender altogether. On the business side, that's a big, big loss because you just lost a subscriber on your email list because you weren't doing things right. Start With PersonalizingSo here's some suggestions on how you can do email right during the pandemic, during the situation we're in right now. A suggestion, number one, keep your emails small and personalized. Segment Your ListIf you've got a big list, figure out a way to separate this list into logical groups that make sense and create a message that's going to be relevant to each group. You don't have to go too, too crazy with how you're personalizing, just changing a picture and changing a heading goes a long way.Promote The Right Products and ServicesIf you're promoting some products, figure out which products that the people in the group will actually be interested in will go a long way in actually catching someone's attention when they receive your email right now rather than just kind of drowning in the noise and getting read and deleted and so on. Small campaigns that are hyper-personalized. People Are Distracted Right NowWe have to remember that a lot of people are working from home right now. Great! Because they have more time to read your emails and surf the net. Not great because they're also at home, very likely with their families, their spouses and their children. This means distractions are at an all-time high. If someone's interacting with your website or an email, it's more likely right now that they'll drop off because they get distracted by something else that's happening at home, whether they're working from home or are living with family members.Adjust To The CircumstancesWe need to adapt and adjust knowing that people are distracted right now and they may not actually follow through and complete that customer journey at the rate that we initially thought of when we planned our campaigns. Be Smart with SendingWhat you can do is you can adjust the sending frequency of your campaigns depending on how people are interacting. For example, if you notice somebody clicked on an email and went to your website but didn't follow through, they might be a good person for you to re-engage with a couple of days later to touch base with because they know, you know that the action took an interest with you. Follow Up with Abandoned Cart OwnersAnother thing that's a really good tool if you're in e-commerce, abandoned cart emails. People are adding stuff to their carts, getting distracted and not completing the purchase. So by leveraging an abandoned cart email, you can send an email to this person and say something like "Hey sir. Or Hey ma'am, we noticed you added this product to your cart, but you weren't able to complete your purchase, can I help you get it done?" It shows that you're being personal in a world right now that is losing its personal touch because we're all at home with many stores closed. Reach out to people with some abandoned cart emails to help them get through any obstacle they may have had checking out. Maybe they're new to making online purchases, maybe they got distracted and they just needed a reminder. These abandoned cart recovery emails can be a great way to try to get somebody to complete that transaction that stopped when they got distracted. How To Get Email Addresses EarlyOne challenge that you may have is many eCommerce sites ask for that email address when people are checking out. So people add a bunch of things to their cart but nobody asks for that email address until they hit the checkout button when you're asking for payment information cause that's when it logically makes sense. The problem with that approach is you don't capture the email address of a person until they actually are about to pay and complete the purchase. Which means you're going to have a huge chunk of people that had stuff in their carts but you can't engage with because you don't know what their email address is.Some Ideas – Add a Fun Game Paired with an OfferI've got two ideas you can use to alleviate that problem. One is just implement something that asks for an email address right when they hit the add to cart button, make it sound fun and informal so that it doesn't look sleazy or look pushy. Try to make it fun or a funny interaction for them to give you their email address. Another thing you can do is use some form of gamification, right? A lot of sites are using some kind of discount spinning wheel or a promotional offer when people get to their website. I'm sure you've seen these before, you'll get to a website and like this wheel of fortune style wheel will pop up and say, slide this wheel to get your discount. Just give us your email address and there's a bunch of cash discounts or percentage discounts or whatever offers that they have gets people excited and gets their guard down so that they're excited to give you their email letters since they want that discount! Not only have you gotten their email address, you've now given them a discount. That kind of builds a little bit of sense of urgency in that they want to take advantage of this and they're more likely to complete that purchase. So those are two ways you can increase the amount or increase how early you get that email address from people so you can recover or try to recover that sale with an abandoned cart recovery email.Let's all remember that everything is different right now. People's priorities are different. People are consuming content online differently. And our email marketing campaigns need to adjust so that we're able to do the best we can in terms of meeting our business objectives. But more importantly, maintaining or improving that relationship, that loyalty and that trust that we've worked so hard to build with the clients in our email lists to date. So I hope you're able to get gain some insight from this tip and implement something in your business. If you need some help and want to just discuss some ideas, feel free to drop a comment below. I'd love to chat about it some more.

Posted by Sandbox Media on Tuesday, April 21, 2020

Free Email Marketing Now Available For Your Shopify Online Store

Free Email Marketing Now Available For Your Shopify Online StoreIf you have an eCommerce store and have been looking to start using email marketing to boost sales, here’s an opportunity! Shopify store owners can use Shopify Email for free til October 1st.If you're selling online using Shopify, then Shopify has some great news for you. Shopify just rolled out Shopify Email for free across their platform for everyone that's using Shopify right now for their online store. This is great for if you're looking to get into some email marketing, What is Shopify EmailWhat Shopify Email will let you do is create email marketing campaigns natively within Shopify's marketing toolkit. You'll be able to customize your emails, embed your products in your email campaigns, and it's a solution that's going to integrate very well with Shopify.Shopify Email ReportingThey've even covered reporting through their Analytics portal. You can get data such as your open rates and your click-thru rates to see how your email campaigns are performing. Shopify Email Free Until October 1stYou have to remember that this free service is only offered until October 1st. After October 1st, I believe they're going to be limiting Shopify stores to 2,500 free emails per month after which you'll have to pay a fee to send out more emails using their platform.Not a Substitute for Marketing AutomationI want to emphasize that this is not a substitute for marketing automation. It doesn't offer some of the complex capabilities that you can leverage when you're using an automation platform such as Active Campaign, for example.It's definitely great for those businesses that are in the eCommerce space, looking to get their feet wet with some email marketing. I encourage you all to check it out today. Visit your Shopify admin portal and enable Shopify Email. Hope you have some good luck with it. If you have any questions on how to get an email marketing campaign set up within Shopify for your online store, feel free to drop a comment below.

Posted by Sandbox Media on Friday, April 17, 2020

Maintain Customer Confidence By Communicating Thru Your Website

Use your website to keep your clients updated and confident about the futureMaintaining confidence with our clients. That is probably, for most of us, the number one priority in our businesses right now. I want to talk about how you can communicate with your customers through your website to help maintain that confidence in these uncertain times.You have different types of people that you work with, and they're uncertain based on different information that they're seeing on different media sources. So what are they doing? They're worried about your business or concerned, they go to your website for answers. It's super important that you use your website as a method to communicate with your customers and you know, people that are working with you to make sure they're fully aware of anything that's changed with your business. What should they do? What’s changed?In terms of how they're interacting with you, whether you've got meetings scheduled with different people, you've got projects on the go, you've got commitments or deliveries to make, you've got changes to the service that you're providing. If you're an essential service or if you're in a service operating right now, you need to use your website and clearly communicate what your customers can expect and what's changed as a result of the pandemic that we're all living through right now. People turn to a website firstUse your website as that tool to communicate and build and maintain that confidence with your customers. We’re here to helpIf you have any questions on how to do that, feel free to drop a comment below and we can chat about building a communication strategy through your website.

Posted by Sandbox Media on Thursday, April 9, 2020

Review What You're Saying With Your Marketing Automations In Light of COVID-19If you’re using any form of automated messages going out to your clients and prospects, it’s vital that you review these messages in light of the COVID-19 pandemic to avoid a potential PR nightmare.Hey everyone, today's post is for those that are using some form of marketing automation in their digital marketing strategy to help them communicate better with their prospects and clients. This is especially for those that haven't reviewed the messaging in their automations lately. Chances are that some of these automations may have been built a few months ago or even a year or longer ago. We need to adapt and adjust based on the pandemic that we're in right now as a global community. When you're reviewing the messaging that's going out as part of these automations, take a look at the context and the wording that you're using in your messaging and make sure it doesn't come off as being insensitive, greedy or selfish and just make sure you're showing some compassion to people that are reading your messages today. Some things that you can do is adjust what you're saying based on how people are feeling.When we typically build marketing automations and communication strategies with messaging, we build customer avatars and profiles that define how people are feeling, what their values are, what their problems and challenges are, etc so that the communication we're delivering resonates with people. Well guess what? All of those, or many of those parameters have changed for most of our clients and our target markets. You want to review those customer profiles and make sure that the messaging that you're delivering is compassionate and takes into account that people's moods and enthusiasm may have changed, and their priorities may have changed. What they're trying to achieve with your brand or your products or services may have changed. The change could vary depending on what you're selling. It could mean just doing more research now for a purchase that they're going to put off for a couple of weeks while they wait things out.Or it could be a greater, more significant change, which, would require you to put some thought into how you're communicating. One other thing is look for some opportunities to adapt and find a new need that your customers or target market may have as a result of the pandemic that we're in right now. Find a way to position yourself with your automated communications and your messaging so that you're able to deliver a message that resonates well with your target market and hopefully drive some positive objectives for your organization and helps your customers and your target markets' lives improve. If you need some help or need some more pointers on how your marketing communications can adjust based on the COVID-19 pandemic, feel free to leave a note below. I'd love to take a look and chat with you and see what kind of insights we can deliver for you to help your organization deliver better messaging during this pandemic.

Posted by Sandbox Media on Tuesday, March 31, 2020

Reassure Your Clients with a Good Communication Strategy

Communication is Crucial During this COVID-19 Crisis to Instill Confidence and Reassure Your Clients As They Face Information Overload, Flow of Misinformation & Fear. Here’s an example of what a B2B and B2C Business can do.People are ConfusedI'm speaking to some of my clients, a lot of the challenges that they're facing right now when with their customers and other stakeholders stems around confusion and lack of information. They're getting mixed messages from different news sources, from social media, from memes that are circulating, etc...All of these mixed messages and confusion are leaving people very concerned, worried and uncertain about the future. It's not hard for us to understand that when someone's in a panic situation, they're getting confusing and misleading information.It's Human NatureThey really just don't know what to do and they're freaking out. The natural response is to freeze and wait in place until you have a reassured understanding of where to go. As businesses, when we're working with our clients and customers, it's our job to help them feel safe and help them feel reassured and help them really have a clear understanding of what they can do. Communication From a Trusted SourceOne of the things you can do to help kind of keep things moving is set up some form of communication with your customers and clients and share updates on where your business is and where their projects are what/how COVID-19 may impact their projects. You know what their fears or worries are and you should be in a position to offer them some solutions or some work-arounds to alleviate their fears and keep things kind of moving.I'm going to give you two examples. I'm going to talk about what a B to C a business to consumer business can do and what a Business 2 Business organization can do. An Example of how to use Communication for a B2C BusinessFor a B to C business, I'm going to choose one of my clients who is a mortgage broker. I was speaking with him yesterday and one of the challenges he's having with client mortgages closing: his clients are worried (some downright refuse) about going into a bank brand to actually sign on the dotted line and complete the deal. In speaking with him, the solution is clear... communication would alleviate this worry and reduce the time he's spending on the phone answering the same questions repeatedly. One solution is to set up a page on your website that's got some COVID-19 FAQs and updates, talk about what kind of safety precautions somebody can take when they're going to a bank, when they're about to sign the dotted line, whether it's wearing a mask, wearing some gloves, bringing your own pen, bring some hand sanitizer so that you're able to sanitize before and after or during the meeting.There's various different steps he can take to inform and reassure clients on what to do when they're in that situation so they don't feel lost, confused and worried. An Example of how to use Communication for a B2B BusinessNow when we're talking to B2B businesses, the approach can be a little different. Usually businesses contacts are better informed, and not as fearful of the unknown. We've got a client that sells industrial lift tables. These lift tables that factories use them so their workers can lift heavy stuff and move things ergonomically, safely and effectively.Being Proactive is ImportantHe is reaching out to his clients and his clients actually are reaching out to him as well to ask about what kind of solutions his company can provide their businesses really quickly to help them meet their material handling needs. Whether they've got employees that are moving heavy things, they're used to doing things in groups of two or three and now they want to separate and help people distance themselves. These are some of the opportunities that he was able to see. His products and services can actually help businesses get past this crisis because he's got the tools to help them with certain areas of their business.Summing UpIn a nutshell, what I want you to remember that is communication is crucial at this time right now for your businesses and your customers. Show your customers you're on top of things. Show your customers that you care and that you're taking care of all of the factors that they may be worrying them and give them that reassurance through either your website, through your email newsletter, or whatever other communication mechanisms you have at your disposal. Communication is very important right now. If you need any help thinking about how to communicate with your clients, feel free to reply to this message, or give me a call at 416-613-1638 ext. 101. I'd love to chat about it. Take care. Be safe, everybody.

Posted by Sandbox Media on Friday, March 20, 2020

Collaboration and Communication Tools During The COVID-19 Situation

Let's take a minute to talk about some of the ways you can deal with the challenges that COVID-19 is presenting to your business.Let's focus on how to stay ahead and how to keep your business running, in terms of your clients and your team members.Tools mentioned in video listed below.Video conferencing tools: https://zoom.us/https://www.gotomeeting.com/Video recording tools:https://www.gotomeeting.com/Shared document tools: https://gsuite.google.ca/https://products.office.com/

Posted by Sandbox Media on Thursday, March 19, 2020

3 Items to Consider Before Starting With Facebook Ads

If you're considering running a Facebook Ad campaign for your business, I want to share 3 key items you need to consider before you start any Facebook Ads campaign.

Posted by Sandbox Media on Sunday, March 8, 2020

Avoid This Mistake When Adjusting Marketing Budgets During COVID-19Make smart, calculated decisions when you’re assessing your marketing budget during the COVID-19 crisis.I want to talk about one of the more common questions or topics I'm discussing with my clients this week. Most of them are thinking about making some decisions around their marketing budget, in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. Avoid Rash DecisionsThey're seeing changes in store traffic, declines in various areas and they're trying to figure out how they can cut costs and where it makes sense to cut costs, which makes total sense. The one piece of advice I'm giving them all, and I want to give you all is to resist the urge to make rash decisions. It's very easy to just start cutting based on the most expensive or highest cost items that you're spending money on when you're marketing your business. Social media, for example. I think it's important to always remember to make these types of decisions based on some forms of metrics and KPIs.Watch the Trend LineYou want to really pay close attention to that trend line. When you're looking at your search traffic, you want to look and see how people are behaving on your website. Is traffic going up, going down? How are your goals and conversions performing? Same thing with social media. Look at that trend line in terms of the impressions your posts are getting, what type of type of clicks and engagement that they're generating.If you're doing some online advertising, take a look at your CPM and CPC; is it going up? Is it going down? Are more people coming to your website or more people converting or less people converting? Depending on what your goals are, you could see an increase in impressions page views etc, but see a tapering off or a decrease in the number of conversions.We have People’s AttentionWe have to remember that people right now are at home and they have nothing to do. We have their attention. They may not be buying right now because of the uncertainty, but they're definitely looking and researching what they're going to be buying or paying attention to in the coming months when normal life resumes. Not the Time to Disappear OnlineChances are they're looking and doing their research. The last thing you want to do is to totally disappear during this time where people are actually doing some more research and spending some more time online.Look at your customer, look at the people that you're trying to do business with and depending on how these different social media channels or marketing channels rather, are performing in comparison with your budget. Review Your Metrics & KPI’sDecide based on some metrics and make the cuts where they actually make sense. That's my message for you all today. Just you don't want to disappear right now because that will be the worst thing you could possibly do. Feel free to drop a comment below if you've got any questions.

Posted by Sandbox Media on Friday, March 27, 2020

Getting Started With Writing Your About Us Page

The About Us page gives our clients the most difficulty when they're trying to figure out how to go about putting together some content about their business. So I want to share a couple of pointers that are going to hopefully help you out.

Posted by Sandbox Media on Thursday, March 5, 2020

Serving Online Ads to People Who are In-Market & Interested

Serving Online Ads to People Who are In-Market & Interested, and what that is going to do, potentially lowering your cost per click, and conversion.

Posted by Sandbox Media on Tuesday, March 3, 2020

Top 5 Things You Can Do To Optimize Your Website Menu

Here are 5 essential items your website menu better be doing in order to get the most out of every visit.

Posted by Sandbox Media on Thursday, February 27, 2020