Recently, Jacob and I attended our first Entrepreneurs Circle event. The MD Nick is a regular at these events, but we wanted to attend so
that we could fully experience the day and get a great understanding of what happens.
The whole event was well structured and included 6 talks as well as the opportunity for us to run a stand (as we are a Trusted Supplier). Within the event, we ran a stand promoting our latest service, The Digital Toolkit. It was a great success with lots of interest.
Winter is coming!
This specific talk was hosted by Nigel who ran through various slides and explained how email marketing is on the decline. Conversions are at an all-time
low and the average open rate of newsletters is 24% with the average click-through rate being 3.5%.
Although email marketing can benefit some businesses you need to try other means of marketing to reach out to new and existing customers.
The talk then led onto, what alternative platforms can be used to promote news & offers. The obvious platforms included Facebook, Twitter & Instagram.
However, YouTube is a great way for small-medium businesses to promote online.
"Audiences are the new mailing list. - This means that you would rather have people know about you than you know about them.
Split Testing
Split Testing is where you run different adverts or emails with slight changes to identify which one has a better conversation rate. They showed an example
of two Facebook ads that were almost identical other than the title. The first ad uses "Free training‚ & got 58 leads costing £8.61 per lead. The
second used "Double your profits and got 215 leads costing £2.32 each.
Other examples included how important imagery is and how different button styles can affect conversions.
Facebook Algorithms
We were shown some examples of various algorithms that Facebook has introduced. The one I found most interesting was how Facebook's
computer can identify exactly what is going on in a picture and therefore identify if adverts are suitable for you.
For example, a bright picture outside with multiple people smiling is a great picture to use. They also have a list of their top 100 good words to use
and their top 100 bad words. You want your ad to include as many good words so that it is shown to a wider audience.
Are you safe online?
The final presentation of the day was a discussion on how secure people's usernames and passwords are. They had a couple of guys crawl the dark web and
90% of businesses in attendance at the event had more than one email address and password listed. One business had more than 50 usernames and passwords
available for people to find and use. This showed how easy it is for people to access this kind of data and highlighted the importance of regular password
changes.
The whole event was a great success, myself and Jacob learnt a lot and we were also able to promote our new Digital Toolkit. The Digital Toolkit gives you
the tools and understanding to market your business correctly. It enables you to have total access 24/7 to monitor your marketing online. You can read
more about that here
