Five on Friday: Social Media Ad Trends, PowerPoint, Landing Pages and More

Five on Friday this week explores social media ad trends, using PowerPoint powerfully, benefiting from mobile, using free content and landing page conversion.

 

Five on Friday with Diane Pierson

Photo Credit: Creative Commons

As the curator of the INSIDER Guide to New Product Development (NPD), I’m constantly keeping an eye out for bite-size information that will help you develop and scale better subscription products.  Here’s my “Five on Friday” compilation for June 24th, featuring the five best trends, tips, quotes or stats from my reading this week.  

1. Social Advertising Data Trends from eMarketer

If you’re evaluating whether to get into a specific social media platform, need to justify ongoing spend or just want to compare your experience to some national data, this statistics-rich report is worth giving up your email address for. Learn how users interact with twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and more. One milestone? This year, for the first time, over 50% of the US population will use Facebook.

2. Using Powerpoint Powerfully

Powerpoint isn’t always a familiar tool to subscription businesses. Yet, creating effective presentations can mean success or failure in everything from funding to acquisition.  This 2-part webinar from 99designs is a solid primer on Powerpoint 101.  Need a quick tip?  If you’re creating a Powerpoint for use in a large room presentation, get up from your PC and see what the slides look like from five and 10 feet away.  Make sure your audience sees something engaging!

3. How Subscription Businesses Can Benefit From Mobile

A recent post on cio.com offered several mobile tools that small businesses can benefit from.  While some of them (e.g., geo-targeting and payment tools like Square) aren’t the likeliest fit with subscription businesses, others are tools we can use.  Collaboration tools like Slack make it easy to continue working on the go. Zendesk has a native mobile app that allows you to monitor customer service requests 24/7. Mobile extensions of our day-to-day working tools are a boon to the startup or smaller business.

4. (Free) Content is Still King When Converting Website Visitors to Email Subscribers

Most of us understand that it’s unrealistic to expect large numbers of first-time (or even third-time) visitors to our website to purchase a subscription.  A good way to keep these visitors in the pipeline is getting them to sign up to receive emails from you.  This article, worth a read in its entirety, offers a dozen best practices for using email to deliver newsletter subscribers and followers – a vital step on the road to new subscriptions. 

My favorite? The curated list of downloads. It pulls a visitor’s eye and offers something for everyone, while also creating the understanding of email registration upfront before the content is clicked on.

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5. Improve Your Conversion Rates with These Landing Page Ideas

 A quick scan of this post from 99designs.com will inspire you to create conversion-centered landing pages.  One of my favorite recommendations is the use of “Urgency and Scarcity.” While not for every market, there’s nothing like a countdown clock to accelerate a buying decision.

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” ‘Buy now.’ “Don’t miss out.’ We’re used to hearing these types of phrases. Statements of urgency are used to coerce us into making a purchasing decision right away. Amazon and Ticketmaster, for example, use this technique very effectively.”
99designs

 

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Summer has officially arrived! Enjoy every minute of it, and have a great weekend, everyone.

Diane

 

 

 

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