If you’ve spent any time on social media site such as Facebook, you’ve likely come across plenty of brands offering you a chance to win something just for entering a contest. What you have to do in order to win — answer a trivia question, post a photo or simply like a post — or what you can win will vary, but one thing is constant. Companies run contests to engage their audience and grow their social media base.

While some people might think that running contests on Facebook are tacky, the truth is that they can be an effective social media marketing tool — if done right. Here are a few things to consider before you dive into the world of social media competitions:

New Facebook Rules Impact Contests: At the start of 2015, Facebook instituted new rules attempting to keep contests that are simply driven by “liking” a page from showing up on News Feeds. Instead, Facebook wants brands to create contests that engage their customers and create an exchange of information rather than just asking for likes.

Have a Clear Goal for Your Contest: As with any other online marketing campaign, you need to have clear objectives in place before you start planning your competition. Are you looking to get more people signed up for your newsletter, or is the ultimate goal to get them onto your site and looking at your products? The results you want to achieve will dictate what type of contest you run.

Pick the Contest That’s Right for You: You have many different types of contests that you can choose from when running a contest. Asking people to submit photos through Instagram is a great way to boost social media sharing and increase your followers. Having an instant “lottery” prize drawing pulls people in immediately and is an outstanding way to get them to sign up for your marketing newsletters. You can work with a social media marketing consultant like eVisible to determine which type of contest is right for your brand and objective.

Make the Contest Easy to Understand and Enter: If you can’t explain the contest to followers in more than one or two sentences, people will be too confused or bored to enter. Remember: being creative is great but being overly complex only drives potential entrants away. In addition, you don’t want to give people too many steps to undertake in order to enter your contest — asking them to fill out a large questionnaire is only going to serve as a barrier to entry.

Set a Fixed Time Limit: People will likely only enter a contest when they know that they deadline is approaching. It’s human nature to want to be a part of something that is ending soon. Set relatively fast deadlines so that people don’t get bored with your contest and you can wrap it up and start a new one.

Have Your Contest Engage Your Audience: Using custom banner ads, images and other concepts are great ways to move beyond text and get customers to notice your contest. It’s great if you can show potential entrants some of the best entries that you’ve received so far — this spurs their interest and makes them think that they can do better. This is one reason why contests that require creativity and that ask a customer to explain why they love your product can be so effective.

When you are creating an AdWords campaign, you have a limited amount of space to reach potential customers. And you need to accomplish this with many competitors also running PPC campaigns that are trying to reach the same audience. Making your ad campaigns stand out from the crowd with only a few characters to work with is challenging but creating successful and measurable PPC campaigns can be done.

Here are a few tips for how to get the most out of your PPC campaign:

Highlight Results

Since your PPC ad will appear when someone searches on a keyword, you don’t need to use your headline to remind them about what your company does. Instead, focus on the solutions that you provide and the end result that a customer will get by clicking through to your site. Make it very clear what you are offering in return for a click.

For example, a headline such as “Learn More About Fat Reduction” is weak because it gives you no unique information about the product. Instead, a headline that says “Use Laser Liposuction to Painlessly Lose Fat” tells the reader exactly the type of treatment (laser liposuction) being offered and the unique benefit (pain-free treatment) that they can get.

Motivate Action Through Time Sensitivity

People are motivated by thinking that they are going to miss out on a special deal or offer if they don’t act immediately. One way that you can spur people to act quickly is to add a countdown clock or timer to your PPC ad. Google now has given advertisers a way to insert a countdown timer into their text ads by simply adding a snippet inside the headline or description of the ad. This gives you the ability to let people know that a sale is ending or that a special is only good for a few more days (or even hours).

Use Specific Numbers to Add Credibility to Your Claims

It’s one thing to tell your customers how much money you can save them or how many customers you’ve proved services to over the years. It’s another thing to attach specific numbers to these claims. Using figures instead of broad terms such as “many” or “countless” gives your statements credibility in the eyes of potential customers. It’s also been proven that people respond better to exact numbers (like 1,512) rather than rounded numbers (such as “more than 1,500.”)

Keep Ads in the Present

One way to improve your PPC campaigns is to take specific numbers and apply them to the amount of customers you’ve provided services for or products you’ve sold in the last month or year. Doing this creates timely and relevant ads that will make readers want to learn more.

Personalize and Localize Your Pitches

Customers want to feel like you are talking directly to them and that they aren’t just receiving a generic pitch. You can accomplish this goal by using phrases like “you” and “your” as part of your pitch and headline. Another way to personalize your advertising is to localize it by mentioning the reader’s local area or directing them to call a phone number with a local area code.

The purpose of performing a successful PPC campaign is to get clickthroughs — and a lot of them. In many cases, a person will execute a PPC campaign and immediately see very high clickthrough rates only to see the clickthroughs drop significantly after a few months. Unless they are carefully paying attention to their clickthroughs, a campaign can completely bottom out before they realize that it isn’t working anymore.

In most cases the campaign didn’t stop getting clickthroughs because something went wrong — it stopped getting clickthroughs because all PPC campaigns stop getting clickthroughs after a certain period of time. The longer you run the same PPC campaign on the same sites, the more likely you are to see diminishing returns — sometimes happening very rapidly.

In order to plan for successful PPC campaigns, you have to understand that the effectiveness of campaigns will decay over time. This happens for several reasons:

The Novelty Factor

Readers have never seen a PPC campaign when it first launches, which means that the graphics, text and calls to action are fresh. They might click on it out of novelty or because they are intrigued by the content of the ad. But if they’ve seen the ad and clicked through once, there’s little reason for them to click through again. The longer you keep your same ad campaign on the same site, the faster your clickthroughs decline.

The Copycat Factor

If you have a successful PPC campaign, it’s not just your customers who will notice. Your competitors are tracking your ad successes (just like you should be doing with them) and will see what elements of your PPC campaign are attracting customers to click on your ads. Once this happens, there is nothing to stop them from integrating similar elements into their PPC campaigns to attempt to also get positive results. Unless you keep your PPC content and presentation fresh, it will quickly get lost in a sea of copycats.

The Qualified Customer Factor

In order to have a truly successful PPC campaign, you need to make sure that you are reaching the right customers. If you have a successful campaign, this means that qualified customers are reading your ads and clicking through to find out more information. But this also means that the qualified customers will have quickly already clicked through your ads, leaving just low-level and unqualified customers as the only people who haven’t clicked on your campaign.

The solution to this problem is to consistently monitor your PPC campaigns and be ready to either keep the content fresh or advertise in new avenues after a certain period of time. Doing A/B testing will go a long way in helping to determine if your PPC ads are still working or if you need to change things up.

It’s extremely important to include frequent content updates as part of your small business search engine optimization strategy. Google places a high emphasis on fresh content in rewarding sites with higher search engine placements. However, many small businesses struggle to come up with content on a regular basis because they lack the resources or ability to write and create content consistently.

However, content marketing isn’t out of your reach as a small business. With the right planning and foresight, you can manage your content marketing process and create pieces that will accomplish two goals: increase your reputation with Google and attract new customers. Here are some steps you’ll want to take as you building your content marketing strategy.

Make a Content Calendar

One way to combat this is to create a content calendar that lays out a month’s worth of content ahead of time. This saves you the headaches associated with feeling rushed to create content and lets you work ahead. If you have content on a calendar, you are less likely to not do it because you are busy with other tasks.

Do Your Research

Want to know what you should be writing about? Find out what is already popular. You can do research through Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools to see what sites people are visiting and the type of content that is on those sites. You can also visit social bookmarking sites and do research to see topics that are getting buzz on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites.

Understand Newsjacking

If a story is trending on Twitter or Facebook, chances are people are interested in reading different takes on it. Be agile and ready to post stories about trending topics – even if your take is different than the mainstream. Trendsmap is a great resource for understanding the topics that are generating interest in localized areas.

Create Visual Content

You don’t have to be stuck doing nothing but writing. Infographics, photo slideshows and other types of visual content are very eye-catching and viral. Utilizing visual content can help you get out of a “content rut” and make your content stand out from other text-based items.

Get Interactive With Surveys

Web users want to be engaged and make connections with content. One way to do that is to survey your audience about trends in your industry or their preferences. You can use this to generate even more content and get some outstanding market research – something that always comes in handy when you are doing marketing for small business.

Try Video Blogging

You don’t need a fancy production studio to have your own video blog. Modern cameras and even smartphones have high-end video cameras. With some basic video editing equipment, you can post to YouTube and reach out to a new potential audience.

Look at Repurposing Content

If you still don’t have time to create new content, be creative with existing content. Take lots of information from different stories on a similar topic and turn it into an overview. Or revisit an old blog post and update it with new information.

If you are selling products online, you need to have landing pages instead of simply directing customers to your website’s home page. Why is this? It’s because your home page has to do many things – tell customers about your entire business and your entire product lines along with creating an atmosphere that tells the story of your business.

A specific product can get lost on a home page. Landing pages give you one place to direct customers to when they are searching for something particular. A great landing page creates a seamless flow to the product page from the ad or other point of entry that the customer used to get to the landing page. It should all feel like a natural extension of the same campaign.

Conversion rate optimization is all about finding out how to utilize landing page design to get people who visit your site and turn them into customers. But how do you do this? At eVisible, we use our years of experience to help customers develop powerful landing pages for their websites. Here are just a few of the practices that we’ve found can seriously improve a company’s website conversion rate:

BOOSTING CONVERSION RATES CAN BE A LAUGHING MATTER

Too many times, marketing experts translate their serious need to boost their conversion rates to the types of marketing they do. While it’s important to focus on letting customers know how you will solve their specific problems, this doesn’t mean that you can’t use humor to do it. In fact, when done correctly, a humorous marketing campaign can make deep connections with customers and lead to extremely successful viral campaigns.

Here are just a few of the ways that you can use humor in your marketing campaign with an eye on boosting conversion rates:

Use the truth: Customers often expect to get marketing speak and fluffy but pointless copy when they read a website or ad campaign. You can shock them out of this by appealing to them truthfully. Admit that your breath mint won’t cure athlete’s foot, make them wealthy or help them to marry a supermodel, but that it will make their breath smell better.

A matter of extremes: You can also take the opposite approach to attacking your conversion rate. Use playful exaggeration to showcase exactly how great your product is or counteract the claims of your competitors.

Two things that shouldn’t go together: Much comedy consists of humorous situations that arise when two things that should never go together suddenly come together. Think about Charlie Chaplin’s “Little Tramp” going somewhere like the opera. You can use incongruities to showcase key elements of your product.

The power of real people: Sometimes all you need to do to create compelling content is let real people be themselves. Some of the most powerful stories can come from customers or employees in unscripted settings talking about the strengths of your company and your products.

Parody for fun and profit: Don’t be afraid to make fun of elements of your business or your industry to make your point. Customers – even those within your industry – want to laugh at familiar things. They even don’t mind laughing at themselves if it’s done right.

Just have fun: Sometimes the best conversion tools are just plain fun. This can be a simple video game, a coloring book or some other fun gadget on your site that attracts attention.

SQUEEZE PAGES DON’T HAVE TO BE A DRAG

Squeeze pages aren’t listings for anacondas that are available to rent at children’s parties. They are landing pages that are specifically designed to solicit opt-in email addresses from potential subscribers. These emails can be used to send out newsletters, email announcements or prospect for new clients. However, just giving away some free information with the promise of more “if you send us your email” doesn’t work – people are just too jaded and protective of their privacy to give up their information.

Instead, you need to be sophisticated with how you construct your squeeze page. It needs to address a specific topic that you know your customers are interested in – in many cases, you want to propose a solution to a common problem. If you can back this up with specific numbers of how you solved the problem, this provides more credibility to your claims.

You need to construct the squeeze page thoughtfully. Start with a powerful headline that speaks to a customer’s problems. Add a call-to-action near the top that lets people know what to expect from the site. Informative videos can help to capture people’s interest. Make sure that you have several ways for people to opt-in at different points on the page. In short, give them a reason to opt-in and there’s a good chance that they will.

FIND YOUR UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION AND RUN WITH IT

Studies show that you only have 10 seconds to convince a customer to dig deeper into your website. This means that you have to hook them quickly if you want to convert clicks to cash. The best way to do this is to clearly communicate the Unique Value Proposition of your business – that is, what makes your company a clear choice ahead of your competitors.

How can you do this? Here are a few things to consider:

• Think about what you want customers to feel about your business and convey that immediately.
• Use language that addresses the customer directly and that avoids marketing slogans and jargon.
• Along with discussing the features of your products, lay out how these features will benefit the customer.
• Use real world examples of benefits and uses whenever possible.
• Don’t use tired superlatives touting your business – no one believes these things unless you can back them up with proof.
• Understand the problems that have led customers to search for your company and address these problems – and your solutions to these problems – head on.

Once you have a Unique Value Proposition identified, make that a key component of your entire website. From your home page to individual product pages, reinforce this value proposition over and over again. You should even do this on action pages such as shopping carts to ensure that you close sales. And make sure that you evaluate what your competitors are doing – if their value propositions are vastly different than yours, it’s a sign that either you or them are not connecting with your customers.

Remember that context matters just as much as content when it comes to landing pages. You need to make sure that customers understand exactly how your products will benefit them in real-world terms. Telling them how you can help them is one thing – showing them is something far more powerful. No matter how you attack it, a powerful landing page is the best way to show customers what you are all about.

Social media activity is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your site. As a marketing tool, posting on sites such as Twitter and Facebook can help you mitigate possible deviations in your organic search results and create a deep connection with your customers. Of course, many other companies recognize this as well, making it often difficult to stand out in a crowded social media landscape.

Fully understanding the capabilities of different social media platforms allows you to maximize your use of them. One example is with Twitter Cards, which allow you to add rich media, calls to action and other addition content to your tweets. Twitter followers can view this content and click on links without having to leave their feed. This leads to an integrated Twitter experience that is more pleasant for customers can cuts out the steps between them and your content.

Twitter offers eight different types of Twitter cards that you can implement by adding some simple meta tags to your page. Choosing the right type of Twitter card for your content can go a long way in helping them be as effective as possible.

The eight variety of Twitter cards are:

Summary Cards: They provide information about your web page including a title, description (such as product information) and a Twitter handle. They also include can include a thumbnail image or a larger image.

Photo Cards: These cards act much like Summary Cards but instead of having a small thumbnail image, the photo is larger. This is perfect if you want to make a picture the focal point of your tweet.

Gallery Cards: You can take photo tweets to the next level with Gallery Cards. Instead of just having one photo embedded into your Tweet, Gallery Cards let you have up to four.

App Cards: If you sell apps, an App Card is a must. Any time someone posts a Tweet about your app on a mobile device, the App Card automatically embeds a link into the tweet to download it.

Player Cards: Add audio or video into your tweets with a Player Card, which lets people listen to or view media content directly from a tweet.

Product Cards: Much like Summary Cards, Product Cards let you put basic information into a tweet; however, they offer the ability to add product information such as price and availability.

Lead Generation Cards: With one click of a button embedded in a tweet, users can send you their email address to get further information about your goods and services.

Website Cards: Unlike Summary Cards, Website Cards are designed to draw traffic to a home page or other specific landing page.

Need help implementing Twitter cards as part of your Twitter campaign? Turn to the experts at eVisible for help. Our social media marketing services are catered to the individual needs of our clients. We’ll review your business and goals and come up with a social media campaign that drives visibility and leads to sales.

Website visitors react to what they see in very predictable ways. Study after study has shown that how a person encounters a website will have a significant impact on how they react to it. Even with the exact same content, one website layout can increase the chances of conversions while another can make the site more vulnerable to high bounce rates.

A good rule of thumb to follow throughout your entire website layout and design work is to focus on what you want people to do on the page. A big part of conversion rate optimization is to understand the purpose of the page and getting people to have a laser-like focus on the page elements that will push them to do the task you want them to do. Whether it’s signing up for more information or making a purpose, every element on the page should drive a visitor to do just that.

So how do you do this? Here are just a few of the ways that you can increase your likelihood for conversion rate success:

Limit Choices: Too many choices can leave website visitors paralyzed by options, so they wind up doing nothing. Instead of giving visitors multiple different forms to fill out, limit them to one choice. Instead of having all of the different social media sites listed with sharing buttons, limit the page to the few sites that make the most sense for your customers.

Top to Bottom, Left to Right: People read websites like they read newspapers. This means they expect the most important information to be “above the fold”, i.e. above the first half of the page. They also are used to reading left-to-right, which means that you want to make sure that valuable information is on the left side of the page. Keep calls to action and other secondary content on the bottom half of the page. If a person scrolls to this part of the page, chances are that they are ready to take the next step.

Headline Sizes Matter: People are attracted to big, bold headlines that spread across the screen from the top of the page. Design your site so the most important information is encapsulated within a headline at the top of each page.

Use Images: Especially of people. Studies have shown that website visitors react particularly strongly when they see pictures of people on a website.

Think About Usability: If a person can’t navigate your website, they’ll click away rather quickly. Avoid this by utilizing a clean layout with a solid color contrast, plenty of white space and an avoidance of overstuffing the pages with too much clutter.

Keep Ads and Sidebars Away From Main Content: Whether you are selling ad space on your site or have internal links to other pages on your site, you want to keep these elements apart from your main content. Have a clear delineation between the main content and any sidebar content that might pull people away from your main message.

If you are running PPC ads, you need to be performing A/B testing on a regular basis to ensure that your ads are performing as well as they should. A/B testing gives you a way to test different elements of an ad to see if changes improve or harm the clickthrough rate. Doing this is a critical step to keeping your ads fresh and improving your performance. In fact, when you hire a PPC management expert to help with your program, A/B testing is one of the first things that they will likely recommend.

A/B testing might seem complicated, but it’s something that anyone can accomplish. We’ve put together some easy steps to help you to do your own A/B testing and improve the performance of your PPC ad campaigns:

1. Determine the highest-performing ad from an ad group that generates a high amount of traffic for you. You’ll want to focus on ads that have already proven to be successful to see where they can be tweaked.

2. Put the original ad on hold and make a pair of duplicate copies of this ad. From there, make a pair of tweaks to perform the test you want to accomplish. This can mean changing the text from “all caps” to all lowercase, using different images or color elements.

3. Halt all of the other ads in your ad group so only the ads that you are running A/B testing on are live. Make sure to label these ads with their date and the changes made in AdWords.

4. Make sure you have “Optimize for Clicks” selected in AdWords to get the most accurate results.

5. Let the ads run for a lengthy period of time before you start to try and collect any conclusions. You’ll want to get several weeks’ worth of data and hundreds of ad impressions before you have a data sample size that is large enough from which to draw conclusions.