SMM (save my money), or How to spend a lot of money on Internet marketing and get nothing but experience
In the middle of December 2014, we already published material on the topic of comparing the effectiveness of Internet sites in terms of advertising about the children's science book “ Simple Science ”. The material provoked quite heated discussions, to which both the representatives of the resources indicated in the note, and their readers, and experts from other areas were connected.
The benefits of this material turned out to be colossal: first, Adme changed the work with advertising materials, which, as an advertiser, provided us with sales of 1 million rubles. Secondly, several really interesting directions for our further marketing work were proposed. Among them are new advertising platforms (thematic sites), and thematic LiveJournal (in our case - mummies), and GR, and retail platforms for sale. Work in these areas has been done and there are already results (especially in the LJ part). But today is not about that. Today, about how we spent the money on the smk-campaign VC and much lost. I want to tell you what and how we did and ask the smm professionals: what did we do wrong? And how to do?
We were also approached by several smm specialists, who for much less money that we paid Adme (which was, I remind you, 120 thousand rubles) promised sales. Very good sales. Smm-schiki offered their services not in the comments, but in personal messages (on the “CPU”, as you know, authorization through social network accounts, so it’s quite easy to get to the author of the article directly - through social networks). So, the fishing rod was abandoned to us, the prospects were painted, the sales revenue was promised, and we signed up to try.
')
Next, I will make one small remark: in the ensuing failure of smm we are the only ones to blame. I will not call the person to whom we have entrusted to promote our product on the social network VKontakte. I will only note that this was our choice, our costs and we agreed on the proposed action plan. For the sake of justice, I will note that we did not reach the end of the road, we finished it in half. Because before the start of the campaign, we had a weekly schedule - expenses / income (return). And what was on paper was completely different from what happened in reality. We considered further financial investments both in advertising and in the smm-executor unreasonable and completed the cooperation.
I also have no doubt that the smm-performer “spent the day” and spent the night thinking about our project. But all these experiences and efforts are completely meaningless, if not transformed into sales.
Of course, all - how much the question interests how much? How much did we pay directly to the performer, how much did we spend on promotion, how much did we get at the exit and how long did it take?
Let's take it in order. We transferred 15 thousand rubles to an advertisement in the VC; we did not spend this money to the end. This is how the VC advertising campaign looks like in our case (2 lines are not covered by this advertising campaign):
In addition to this money, we add 1,200 rubles for advertising in the community "I love the Russian language."
The fee of the smm-performer is 36,819 rubles, which were paid immediately, since the performer has set such a condition - full prepayment. Just do not think that we have chosen a lover. No, this person leads several smm-groups, regularly demonstrates that his articles on smm get into the top of search engines, etc. etc. In general, in terms of the “wrapper” everything was (and still is) very good).
By the way, we realized for the future that we would no longer take that risk. We will pay for such work in stages - as the campaign progresses.
And most importantly - the return on the campaign. We had two sales facts. Not a very good result, right? Let us now understand and think what has been done wrong. I would like to hear a few opinions and specific recommendations. Moreover, it is not so today tomorrow, and not so tomorrow in a month we will launch smm on Facebook. Artist this time found on Lepre. And there karma and reviews do not allow performers to declare the services that they are not able to provide. But so far we are confused by this “not entirely positive” VC experience.
This part is written by an smm-specialist, I tried to keep the text in its original form, allowing small stylistic corrections and complementing some actual data, marking these fragments in italics.
So, to start, we took a number of steps that were aimed at monitoring the effectiveness of the tools used in the future. In particular, we are talking about such tools:
1. Targeted advertising Vkontakte. Clipping by interests, by communities where the target audience lives, etc. Central Asian segmentation and verification of each of the segments separately.
2. Retargeting - the collection of bases of the active target audience that have shown interest in the communities in which they belong.
3. Organic advertising (advertising promotional posts in the communities of VK, in which the target audience lives).
4. Inviting. Creating an event with a promotion and inviting potential target audience to this event.
It was assumed that the traffic as a test “pour” both on the landing page and on the VK community created specifically for this purpose: https://vk.com/knigi_prostaya_nauka . From scratch and during the campaign, the group managed to increase to 356 people.
What actions were taken at this stage:
1. The site contains scripts that track and collect into separate databases for subsequent retargeting (from VK and FB social networks).
2. Put two-step goals in Yandex.Metrica on a subdomain. There was an idea to completely alter the system of metric codes, but decided to do this after the tests.
3. When advertising is a prerequisite was the use of UTM-tags for subsequent analytics.
4. Created a community for receiving traffic (decorated and filled with primary content).
There was no clear portrait of Central Asia. It is only known that there are more men than women. Therefore, we set out to create a clear idea of ​​the target audience. For the analysis, we used Yandex metrics, internal CRM (already existing customer base), to analyze profiles of people already in the VC group, etc.
The first segment was 24-35 years old, 60% were men, 40% were women. The second significant segment that bought books was men and women 45+, i.e. Grandparents who love to read and have time to study with their grandchildren.
After analysis and brainstorming, these segments turned out:
• Popes - representatives of IT-professions, with average incomes, from 24 to 35 years old (programmers, various techies, web designers, etc.)
• Parents caring for the development of children (both father and mother) 24-35 years old
• Active moms subscribed to mom's publics, female, 24+
• Popes subscribed to research papers, 24-35 years old.
• Grandparents, 45+ from the same segments
Why 24-35 years old? Books are intended for children from 5 to 12 years old. Logically, their parents can be in the approximate age range of 24-35 years, which was confirmed by the metric data. For greater efficiency and avoidance of extra budget expenses, we decided to start with point marketing - each of the segments had its own ad groups set up.
Here are some of them:
Coincidentally, at that moment, a wave of banning ads with a yellow fill went in moderation. And the most conversion examples of teasers on “Simple Science” were hacked by moderators, although some, with a different advertisement, for some reason, skipped - a huge number of such announcements were broadcast. And to make such ads in Photoshop, it takes a lot of time, and when you make them a few - even more so.
The reason for the rejection of such layouts, perhaps, lies in the human factor: which moderator will you get on? It is a pity, it is impossible to predict, but, ultimately, both the customer and the performer suffer.
And so, when you get such a refusal, it just makes you angry.
Here it should be noted that you will get to which moderator, apparently it depends on many parameters, because we are all people! But why this should have an effect on my time and the customer, who remains so small (in the courtyard on January 26 - for a second), it is not clear.
Locked Layout:
The reason for the deviation was explained as follows: the image is of poor quality and the text takes up more than 50% of the teaser, although there is no 25% point blank. It is important to clarify that you are waiting for a response to your appeal for several hours, or even a day or two. So I had to abandon this idea and test further in order not to lose precious time.
There were other reasons for failure. For example:
An example of such an announcement:
Let's return to the topic. At this stage, it became clear that the measures taken are not enough: landing, which is today, does not convert traffic into purchases. It happened because it is very cold, not prepared. Here is a man sitting, drinking tea with cookies, scrolling through the news line, a tiny block with announcements is spinning to his left, he goes over it - and there a picture of a New Year's set of books pops up in full screen, in which there is no transfer of benefits that should be in the first scroll screen. I tried to pour on other “anchors” of the landing sector to calculate the most effective ones, but the results did not please me.
Page that you get through the banner:
You start to think that the matter is in the wrong audience. You put forward hypotheses and are looking for new segments or correcting old ones. As a result, new segments were launched:
1. Reading parents (collected an active audience of people who committed interactions and subscribed to the book communities of retail and online stores (network and smaller). Ozone, Labyrinth and their ilk. To do this, go to Google and began to look for a selection of those stores offline which are in large cities of Russia).
2. The base of parents subscribed to scientific publications was reassembled and put into circulation.
3. Parents-geeks, subscribed to communities with gadgets (mainly fathers).
4. A hypothesis was put forward about popes who signed on communities of extremes and those who participate in various projects for survival.
5. A base of parents who took their children to various shows, such as a soap bubble show (the book has experiments with soap bubbles), is also collected.
Banners within the framework of the “Papa Geeks” campaign:
In the meantime, the New Year came and went, the first days of January came around, people woke up after the New Year's euphoria, the children had holidays, and Christmas was ahead - you can have time to give an original gift. These all ideas were embodied in a new wave of ads. But even here our results were not the best.
Therefore, it was decided to stop all of Kazakhstan and focus on making a more conversion landing page specifically and narrowly done under social networks. And traffic from them. In parallel with the stop of the advertising campaign for the landing, the next platform for traffic was launched in test development - organic advertising in communities.
An analysis of people subscribing to the commercial community of books, as well as an analysis of the profiles of these people showed that most of them subscribed to one of the communities the admin of which was known by the smm specialist, was confident that in this community the audience was recruited organically, without markups bots and other "black" methods.
When posted in communities, there are 2 options. First: go through the VC advertising exchange and pay 25% + (this has already been reduced, it used to be 45%) more money, but still have access to statistics on the coverage of the post (frankly, far from perfect, but for bezrybe ...) . Or accommodate directly through admins. It is cheaper, without statistics, but indirectly allows an experienced marketer to draw up a picture of the effectiveness of the placement.
Post cost 1200 rubles, the traffic was sent to a specially created new, properly designed and filled with primary content community. The basis of the advertising post was a specially created wiki page, in which an advertising post was inserted following the example of a post in ADMI, only adapted for the VC social network. In addition, a similar format of an advertising post allows you to see the number of views of the post.
We agreed on the time of placement, launched the post and received the first sales immediately, within the first half hour after the placement. People began to join the community willingly, and we immediately received more than 200 subscribers. But in the social network VK are much more active than people buy, if they interact with them immediately after joining through the PM. Not everyone likes it, but it gives results. There was a question about who would do this?
This work was assigned to one of the employees of "Simple Science" - he was told what to do and how. But there was little joy for him: it turned out that the appeal to people began at around 23 o'clock on MSC on a weekday. Also, the account from which the appeal was made was banned for spam. The fact that before such a distribution, you need to create a left account, which is not a pity to donate, no one warned. As a result, the person dropped out of work on the social network for a week.
Another employee of the company came to replace the banned person, but they could not find a common language with him. Further, the leadership of "Simple Science" was disappointed in everything that was done. More precisely - in the fact that no result (and the result in this case - sales growth), all these manipulations did not yield.
... All further communication with the smm-performer faded. We were busy, smm. Two months have passed. We have an interesting offer for SMM on Facebook. I want to try, but stops the experience of VK. It would be interesting to know the opinion of respected smm experts:
1. Is VC a bad sales ground in principle?
2. Is the book (ours in particular or the product in general) not suitable for smm in VKontakte?
3. smm-strategy was ill-conceived and poorly implemented? How then was it necessary to do?
Our experience with Adme has shown that you can achieve excellent results if you get down to business as needed. Previously, we did not work with smm, and after the first attempt it seems that this is not quite our way. But maybe dear smm-ps will tell you what and how we should do in order to achieve tangible results using this method?
At the "CPU" expressed the point of view that the smm-artist did everything right and his work gave good performance. Why there were no sales? They explained this as an unsuccessful landing page - that is, the page where the potential buyer falls is not suitable.
And what will the respected people say they read "Hiktames"? To be honest, we were surprised that many owners of book sites, libraries, smm-specialists wrote to us, who offered to test their resources as an advertising platform for free - see the returns.
We did the landing ourselves, as well as the online store. And they agree that they are far from ideal. I will cite the following statistics: it is believed that a satisfactory conversion should be at least 5%, normal - 10%, excellent - 20%. We have a conversion of only 1.5-2% despite the fact that all visitors to the site are Central Asia, there are no random visitors.
Hence the question - what should the site be? Online store? We can do it by specific instructions, but we need these very instructions. Add photos of children with books? We have them. Not suitable? Let's make a new photo session. Make a video for the store? Let's do it! But what needs to be done?
We need a person, maybe without experience, but with a “chuika”. Which can not just say that, guys, everything is bad for you, but also to say HOW you need to do so that it is good. Find a trial and error method of working site and online store to raise the conversion at times.
For example, Marat Mukhametov knows how to give info on the Adme site so that it is useful. Denis Kryuchkov knows how to deal with Habr. So “Simple Science” needs such a person - who knows how to make us even better.
The benefits of this material turned out to be colossal: first, Adme changed the work with advertising materials, which, as an advertiser, provided us with sales of 1 million rubles. Secondly, several really interesting directions for our further marketing work were proposed. Among them are new advertising platforms (thematic sites), and thematic LiveJournal (in our case - mummies), and GR, and retail platforms for sale. Work in these areas has been done and there are already results (especially in the LJ part). But today is not about that. Today, about how we spent the money on the smk-campaign VC and much lost. I want to tell you what and how we did and ask the smm professionals: what did we do wrong? And how to do?
Social marketing
We were also approached by several smm specialists, who for much less money that we paid Adme (which was, I remind you, 120 thousand rubles) promised sales. Very good sales. Smm-schiki offered their services not in the comments, but in personal messages (on the “CPU”, as you know, authorization through social network accounts, so it’s quite easy to get to the author of the article directly - through social networks). So, the fishing rod was abandoned to us, the prospects were painted, the sales revenue was promised, and we signed up to try.
')
Next, I will make one small remark: in the ensuing failure of smm we are the only ones to blame. I will not call the person to whom we have entrusted to promote our product on the social network VKontakte. I will only note that this was our choice, our costs and we agreed on the proposed action plan. For the sake of justice, I will note that we did not reach the end of the road, we finished it in half. Because before the start of the campaign, we had a weekly schedule - expenses / income (return). And what was on paper was completely different from what happened in reality. We considered further financial investments both in advertising and in the smm-executor unreasonable and completed the cooperation.
I also have no doubt that the smm-performer “spent the day” and spent the night thinking about our project. But all these experiences and efforts are completely meaningless, if not transformed into sales.
Issue price
Of course, all - how much the question interests how much? How much did we pay directly to the performer, how much did we spend on promotion, how much did we get at the exit and how long did it take?
Let's take it in order. We transferred 15 thousand rubles to an advertisement in the VC; we did not spend this money to the end. This is how the VC advertising campaign looks like in our case (2 lines are not covered by this advertising campaign):
In addition to this money, we add 1,200 rubles for advertising in the community "I love the Russian language."
The fee of the smm-performer is 36,819 rubles, which were paid immediately, since the performer has set such a condition - full prepayment. Just do not think that we have chosen a lover. No, this person leads several smm-groups, regularly demonstrates that his articles on smm get into the top of search engines, etc. etc. In general, in terms of the “wrapper” everything was (and still is) very good).
By the way, we realized for the future that we would no longer take that risk. We will pay for such work in stages - as the campaign progresses.
And most importantly - the return on the campaign. We had two sales facts. Not a very good result, right? Let us now understand and think what has been done wrong. I would like to hear a few opinions and specific recommendations. Moreover, it is not so today tomorrow, and not so tomorrow in a month we will launch smm on Facebook. Artist this time found on Lepre. And there karma and reviews do not allow performers to declare the services that they are not able to provide. But so far we are confused by this “not entirely positive” VC experience.
In order
This part is written by an smm-specialist, I tried to keep the text in its original form, allowing small stylistic corrections and complementing some actual data, marking these fragments in italics.
So, to start, we took a number of steps that were aimed at monitoring the effectiveness of the tools used in the future. In particular, we are talking about such tools:
1. Targeted advertising Vkontakte. Clipping by interests, by communities where the target audience lives, etc. Central Asian segmentation and verification of each of the segments separately.
2. Retargeting - the collection of bases of the active target audience that have shown interest in the communities in which they belong.
3. Organic advertising (advertising promotional posts in the communities of VK, in which the target audience lives).
4. Inviting. Creating an event with a promotion and inviting potential target audience to this event.
It was assumed that the traffic as a test “pour” both on the landing page and on the VK community created specifically for this purpose: https://vk.com/knigi_prostaya_nauka . From scratch and during the campaign, the group managed to increase to 356 people.
What actions were taken at this stage:
1. The site contains scripts that track and collect into separate databases for subsequent retargeting (from VK and FB social networks).
2. Put two-step goals in Yandex.Metrica on a subdomain. There was an idea to completely alter the system of metric codes, but decided to do this after the tests.
3. When advertising is a prerequisite was the use of UTM-tags for subsequent analytics.
4. Created a community for receiving traffic (decorated and filled with primary content).
There was no clear portrait of Central Asia. It is only known that there are more men than women. Therefore, we set out to create a clear idea of ​​the target audience. For the analysis, we used Yandex metrics, internal CRM (already existing customer base), to analyze profiles of people already in the VC group, etc.
The first segment was 24-35 years old, 60% were men, 40% were women. The second significant segment that bought books was men and women 45+, i.e. Grandparents who love to read and have time to study with their grandchildren.
After analysis and brainstorming, these segments turned out:
• Popes - representatives of IT-professions, with average incomes, from 24 to 35 years old (programmers, various techies, web designers, etc.)
• Parents caring for the development of children (both father and mother) 24-35 years old
• Active moms subscribed to mom's publics, female, 24+
• Popes subscribed to research papers, 24-35 years old.
• Grandparents, 45+ from the same segments
Why 24-35 years old? Books are intended for children from 5 to 12 years old. Logically, their parents can be in the approximate age range of 24-35 years, which was confirmed by the metric data. For greater efficiency and avoidance of extra budget expenses, we decided to start with point marketing - each of the segments had its own ad groups set up.
Here are some of them:
Coincidentally, at that moment, a wave of banning ads with a yellow fill went in moderation. And the most conversion examples of teasers on “Simple Science” were hacked by moderators, although some, with a different advertisement, for some reason, skipped - a huge number of such announcements were broadcast. And to make such ads in Photoshop, it takes a lot of time, and when you make them a few - even more so.
The reason for the rejection of such layouts, perhaps, lies in the human factor: which moderator will you get on? It is a pity, it is impossible to predict, but, ultimately, both the customer and the performer suffer.
And so, when you get such a refusal, it just makes you angry.
Here it should be noted that you will get to which moderator, apparently it depends on many parameters, because we are all people! But why this should have an effect on my time and the customer, who remains so small (in the courtyard on January 26 - for a second), it is not clear.
Locked Layout:
Post Comment: Please remove the color fill below the text from the image.
Violated the design rules, the image in the advertisement:
2.2.1. must be of high quality. When using text in an image, it is important to pay attention to the readability and clarity of the text; the text should not occupy more than 50% of the total image area.
The reason for the deviation was explained as follows: the image is of poor quality and the text takes up more than 50% of the teaser, although there is no 25% point blank. It is important to clarify that you are waiting for a response to your appeal for several hours, or even a day or two. So I had to abandon this idea and test further in order not to lose precious time.
There were other reasons for failure. For example:
An ad cannot be launched because it does not comply with the Advertising Rules.
The following restrictions are not considered:
4.6. The use of images of individuals in an advertisement is permissible only if there are documents confirming the consent of the person. Documents and a link to an advertisement can be sent to Support.
An example of such an announcement:
Let's return to the topic. At this stage, it became clear that the measures taken are not enough: landing, which is today, does not convert traffic into purchases. It happened because it is very cold, not prepared. Here is a man sitting, drinking tea with cookies, scrolling through the news line, a tiny block with announcements is spinning to his left, he goes over it - and there a picture of a New Year's set of books pops up in full screen, in which there is no transfer of benefits that should be in the first scroll screen. I tried to pour on other “anchors” of the landing sector to calculate the most effective ones, but the results did not please me.
Page that you get through the banner:
You start to think that the matter is in the wrong audience. You put forward hypotheses and are looking for new segments or correcting old ones. As a result, new segments were launched:
1. Reading parents (collected an active audience of people who committed interactions and subscribed to the book communities of retail and online stores (network and smaller). Ozone, Labyrinth and their ilk. To do this, go to Google and began to look for a selection of those stores offline which are in large cities of Russia).
2. The base of parents subscribed to scientific publications was reassembled and put into circulation.
3. Parents-geeks, subscribed to communities with gadgets (mainly fathers).
4. A hypothesis was put forward about popes who signed on communities of extremes and those who participate in various projects for survival.
5. A base of parents who took their children to various shows, such as a soap bubble show (the book has experiments with soap bubbles), is also collected.
Banners within the framework of the “Papa Geeks” campaign:
In the meantime, the New Year came and went, the first days of January came around, people woke up after the New Year's euphoria, the children had holidays, and Christmas was ahead - you can have time to give an original gift. These all ideas were embodied in a new wave of ads. But even here our results were not the best.
Therefore, it was decided to stop all of Kazakhstan and focus on making a more conversion landing page specifically and narrowly done under social networks. And traffic from them. In parallel with the stop of the advertising campaign for the landing, the next platform for traffic was launched in test development - organic advertising in communities.
An analysis of people subscribing to the commercial community of books, as well as an analysis of the profiles of these people showed that most of them subscribed to one of the communities the admin of which was known by the smm specialist, was confident that in this community the audience was recruited organically, without markups bots and other "black" methods.
When posted in communities, there are 2 options. First: go through the VC advertising exchange and pay 25% + (this has already been reduced, it used to be 45%) more money, but still have access to statistics on the coverage of the post (frankly, far from perfect, but for bezrybe ...) . Or accommodate directly through admins. It is cheaper, without statistics, but indirectly allows an experienced marketer to draw up a picture of the effectiveness of the placement.
Post cost 1200 rubles, the traffic was sent to a specially created new, properly designed and filled with primary content community. The basis of the advertising post was a specially created wiki page, in which an advertising post was inserted following the example of a post in ADMI, only adapted for the VC social network. In addition, a similar format of an advertising post allows you to see the number of views of the post.
We agreed on the time of placement, launched the post and received the first sales immediately, within the first half hour after the placement. People began to join the community willingly, and we immediately received more than 200 subscribers. But in the social network VK are much more active than people buy, if they interact with them immediately after joining through the PM. Not everyone likes it, but it gives results. There was a question about who would do this?
This work was assigned to one of the employees of "Simple Science" - he was told what to do and how. But there was little joy for him: it turned out that the appeal to people began at around 23 o'clock on MSC on a weekday. Also, the account from which the appeal was made was banned for spam. The fact that before such a distribution, you need to create a left account, which is not a pity to donate, no one warned. As a result, the person dropped out of work on the social network for a week.
Another employee of the company came to replace the banned person, but they could not find a common language with him. Further, the leadership of "Simple Science" was disappointed in everything that was done. More precisely - in the fact that no result (and the result in this case - sales growth), all these manipulations did not yield.
Instead of conclusion
... All further communication with the smm-performer faded. We were busy, smm. Two months have passed. We have an interesting offer for SMM on Facebook. I want to try, but stops the experience of VK. It would be interesting to know the opinion of respected smm experts:
1. Is VC a bad sales ground in principle?
2. Is the book (ours in particular or the product in general) not suitable for smm in VKontakte?
3. smm-strategy was ill-conceived and poorly implemented? How then was it necessary to do?
Our experience with Adme has shown that you can achieve excellent results if you get down to business as needed. Previously, we did not work with smm, and after the first attempt it seems that this is not quite our way. But maybe dear smm-ps will tell you what and how we should do in order to achieve tangible results using this method?
First reaction and admission of mistakes
At the "CPU" expressed the point of view that the smm-artist did everything right and his work gave good performance. Why there were no sales? They explained this as an unsuccessful landing page - that is, the page where the potential buyer falls is not suitable.
And what will the respected people say they read "Hiktames"? To be honest, we were surprised that many owners of book sites, libraries, smm-specialists wrote to us, who offered to test their resources as an advertising platform for free - see the returns.
We did the landing ourselves, as well as the online store. And they agree that they are far from ideal. I will cite the following statistics: it is believed that a satisfactory conversion should be at least 5%, normal - 10%, excellent - 20%. We have a conversion of only 1.5-2% despite the fact that all visitors to the site are Central Asia, there are no random visitors.
Hence the question - what should the site be? Online store? We can do it by specific instructions, but we need these very instructions. Add photos of children with books? We have them. Not suitable? Let's make a new photo session. Make a video for the store? Let's do it! But what needs to be done?
We need a person, maybe without experience, but with a “chuika”. Which can not just say that, guys, everything is bad for you, but also to say HOW you need to do so that it is good. Find a trial and error method of working site and online store to raise the conversion at times.
For example, Marat Mukhametov knows how to give info on the Adme site so that it is useful. Denis Kryuchkov knows how to deal with Habr. So “Simple Science” needs such a person - who knows how to make us even better.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/374851/
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