YOUR 2016 MARKETING RESOLUTIONS

It’s almost time to ring in 2016 (am I the only one who still doesn’t know all the words to Old Lang Syne?) and with the new year los angeles social media marketing come new year’s resolutions. From going to the gym to reading more books, resolutions span the length and breadth of personal improvement. But what about professional improvement? With each new year, we’re given the chance to refresh and evolve our marketing strategy, and there’s no time like the present to prep for the year to come. Here are three resolutions to consider:The days of brands getting by with an occasional Facebook post or tweet are long gone. If 2015 taught us anything, it’s that social media has the power to convert or alienate potential customers. In 2016, amp up your social strategy and make a plan to actually interact with the customers who like and follow you. Demand for personalization is at an all-time high, and it’s time to exceed expectations.We’ve all been there – a new batch of insights lands on our desks and yet somehow doesn’t quite make it into strategy planning because of time, budget or outside expectations. “Don’t reinvent the wheel” is no excuse to ignore the information your DMP has gathered for you. Don’t be afraid to reevaluate what you’re doing and how you’re doing it. The new year means a new start, and that can include finding different ways of looking at how you strategize. Same old/same old may be working well enough, but listen to insights that tell you something else may work better. Why settle for “good enough” when a little social media marketing university review extra time and brain power can deliver the best?

Stop pretending that people click on ads.

At the current rate, advertisers worldwide will lose $6.3-billion (U.S.) to fraud in 2015, according facebook social media marketing to a recent study from White Ops Inc. and the Association of National Advertisers. Fraud happens when hackers create networks of “bots,” pretending they’re human Web users to fake out advertisers. Companies pay to place ads on websites that appear to have good traffic, and some of that money is going to criminals. Why does it happen? One reason is that a common way marketers measure the effectiveness of online ads is woefully primitive. Advertisers pay by the number of “impressions (people who see an ad).” But they also often set click-through rates, a percentage of impressions that lead to clicks to their website, that campaigns must achieve. “They don’t really measure the quality of the placement; they’re just measuring a response. And those are the types of responses that feed into fraud: auto-clicking robots, invisible impressions, those fraudulent responses feed into imperfect measurements,” said David Katz, executive vice-president of EQ Works, a digital media buying company. “Today’s advertiser needs to be concerned less with disadvantages of social media marketing impressions and click through rates, and start measuring metrics that really matter like viewability [whether an ad is actually seen], engagement and video completion.”

Sort out your bookkeeping and accounts

Cloud-based accounting programmes such as Xero, Freshbooks and Wave can save your sanity hotel social media marketing if you are not good at keeping up to date financial business records. Are you still relying on an Excel spreadsheet to keep your invoicing records, or use Google docs to keep track of your expense account? If you have been promising yourself each year to hire an accountant, or keep better records, then an affordable or free cloud-based accounting solution is your way forward this year! Many of these new accounting systems are specifically set up to help the small business owner with too much on their plate, and include handy programmes such as automatic client invoices, expense logging, overdue payment reminders, online payments, and so much more. To fight online fraud, advertisers need to stop believing that the benchmarks set by bad players are achievable. Legitimate websites that invest in creating content can’t promise the moon. Marketers need to be willing to reset their standards – including how much it should cost to reach the number of people they want online – and demand better measures of success from their agencies. Clicks and impressions can be gamed. Measuring purchasing behaviour (including offline) and how it relates to online campaigns, is harder to do, but also harder to fake for fraudsters looking to siphon off billions from global marketing budgets.“These are expensive [measurement] tools, they’re harder to employ,” said Andrew Casale, vice-president of strategy at Casale Media. “But if we don’t start pushing the boundaries of the atlanta social media marketing measurement of media online, we won’t fix this problem.”