Marketing Strategies That Work For Small Businesses
There are a number of marketing strategies that work differently for different businesses, from large corporations to small family-owned operations, not all marketing techniques or strategies will work for everyone and their business. For example, when looking at brick and mortar vs. eCommerce stores there are different techniques that can be used to drive traffic to in-person stores or to landing pages online. In this article, I will be sharing some tips and tricks, as well as lessons that we learned at CADMEN when first advertising our business, including do’s and don’ts and what worked best for us.
Facebook and Social Media Advertisements
When we first began to advertise our business on Facebook we used stock images for our advertisements as the visual component. These stock ads consisted of caucasian men in generic positions, settings and posings. These ads did not relate well or click with our target audience, they did not display real-world results of our business and as a result, they performed poorly. The cost per conversion for these ads was exorbitantly high, at around $50/lead, much higher than what it should ideally be. You can see examples of our original advertisements that were unsuccessful below.
After seeing these less than desirable initial results we evaluated our choice of imagery and made the decision to change the images we used from stock photos to real clients’ successful results. With this simple and small change, we were able to see drastic improvements in a short amount of time. After only 3 days of this change, our cost per conversion decreased by a whopping 45 dollars from $50 to $5. Below our new and updated ads that we used with real client imagery to greatly improve our client attraction and retention are shown.
From this advertising experience, we learned some very valuable lessons; viewers engage more with authentic imagery. They want to see the real results, what it might look like on them, and what they can expect from the treatment. They also want to see diversity and people who like them, who actually frequent our establishment, as opposed to stock images that don’t match our vibes. In this instance investing in things like graphic design was not needed, as just a simple picture change made all the difference in the successful targeting and conversion of our ads.
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