This is the year of ‘Paid Social Advertising’. The evolution from ‘banner ads’ to new ‘native ads’ has arrived.

If we see paid search as a ‘demand converter’, which helps prospects to find your business; then Facebook paid social ads can be seen as a powerful ‘demand creator’, which helps businesses to find prospects. How? By allowing businesses to access its extensive audience data, and target the audience down to a very specific, granular level.

Paid social ads have proven to be one of the most effective digital marketing channels, yet we are seeing a lot of businesses who are struggling to get it working for them. Below are a few tips to look out for, to perhaps make your paid social advertising budget work a little harder for you.

Your Goal

Before starting on the tools, first identify your Facebook objectives. What do you want your Facebook ads to achieve? It is to increase brand awareness? To increase brand favorability? To drive traffic to your website? To download Apps? Or even, to generate leads, or generate sales?

Ideally, your Facebook goals should be realistic, and can easily be linked back to your marketing objectives.

In some cases, your marketing goals could be driving offline sales. When the goal cannot be linked back and directly track through a Facebook campaign, your Facebook goal should be redefined accordingly, and stay as close to your marketing objectives as possible. I.e. is post engagement equal to an offline sale? Or would website visits on ‘store location’ get your closer? How about claiming a Facebook offer? Which method encourage a stronger, closer relationship to your marketing objectives? Identify your goals clearly before actioning, it is the first step to success.

Sophisticated Targeting Strategy

With Facebook’s great wealth of audience data, it allows businesses to create very targeted campaigns and reach audiences that are more likely to be interested in your product or service. There can be thousands of combinations, but what works best for your brand?

You can limit your ad target down to very well defined level – for example, a 25-year-old women interested in parenting, living in Tauranga, and online everyday during 6-9pm. You CAN be this specific.

However, how do you know, if your ideal audience are the ones that really convert? From what we have seen in the past, in many cases, due to a limited budget, businesses may define their audience way too specific and reach only a very small percentage of people. It is great when it generates results, but at same time it could also limit business growth by not discovering other potential markets – as other audiences out there were never targeted.

The art of audience defining is to narrow it down, make it well defined, but not too targeted that its limiting potential growth. There are some smart targeting options that can be built in the Facebook platform to duplicate your convertor profile regardless what age or gender they are. Having a well leveled targeting strategy can be an ideal way of finding the balance between your ideal market, and develop your potential market.

Test, test, test!

The next step, is to find out what works and what doesn’t. But how? By testing, a lot of testing. Start testing with a well thought-out test strategy – What to test? How to test? And what to conclude. Limit variations and be firm on the control, so the results are valid and easy to read. Once figuring out what works the best, it is a matter of applying the learning, optimising the results, and test again to improve further.

Performance solution is about effectiveness – cost effectiveness and result effectiveness. This effectiveness comes from science - the process of identification, defining your audience, optimisation, refining and measuring. Success won’t come in a day. With a well defined performance strategy, success will be well on it’s way. What is your Facebook result like? Are you paying it right? Tell us about your experiences and your views.

With a population of 1.35 billion, China has become the land of opportunity for New Zealand businesses. With its market scale and potential, there is also the degree of market complexity.

In China, there are thousands of marketing messages being pushed to the audience every second. Navigating through to the desired audience is not an easy task; businesses need a well thought-out communications plan to tackle this extremely competitive market.

Even so, the required marketing budget to break into the Chinese market is still a big risk for small to medium sized New Zealand businesses to take. However, we can still find a solution to open up the gateway to the Chinese market in an effective and affordable manner – and that is to connect to overseas procurement managers (OPMs) in New Zealand.

OPM is a new business service that was born in recent years from the phenomenon of a ‘rich China’. It opens up channels to introduce products that have not yet been made available in China to Chinese consumers. Due to the lack of quality and authentic local products, Chinese consumers turned to OPMs to get their offshore shopping made.

Also, with strict web censorship and language barriers in China, accessing international sites has proven to be a big challenge for Chinese consumers. They rely heavily on OPMs to provide the recommendation, purchasing, and shipping to access foreign products, and this also contributes to the success of an overseas procurement business model.

OPMs are not a minor channel. With e-commerce giant Taobao’s mass buy & sell platform, since 2011, this easy access, low risk and high return business model has intrigued many Chinese overseas students and immigrants to jump on the bandwagon and start offering their procurement services to Chinese consumers.

From luxury brands to confectionery items like milk powders, OPMs cover a wide range of product categories and have become an important channel for Chinese to access high quality, authentic products abroad.

Influential BuyersThe truth is, when breaking into china, OPMs can play an influential role in business strategy. Take Australian brand Blackmores as an example – although the brand has yet to officially enter China, with the benefit of Cross Border E-Commerce Comprehensive Test Area and the push from OPMs, Blackmores’ 2015 sales revenue soared 36% to A$471 million, with a net profit increase of 67%.

The Chinese market alone, has contributed to the revenue by approximately 40%, and OPMs were a key driver for the growth.

Read more: CHART: Around half of Blackmores sales are being driven by China grey market.

In the past, OPMs primary used e-commerce platforms to do their buy & sell. With the convenience and emergence of social media – Weibo and WeChat – OPM are now relying less on e-commerce platforms.

They are now dealing with Chinese customers through their personal accounts on social media. With their extensive network and customer base, they have become important key opinion leaders in introducing overseas products to Chinese consumers.

Biggest Bang for Buck/Best Marketing StrategyAbout 4-5% of the population in New Zealand are Chinese. Every one of this community of 200,000 people, whether they are an overseas student or an immigrant, could be potentially linked to thousands of customers in China and this could open up significant revenue potential for New Zealand businesses.

Being able to connect with OPMs and tap into their network is a key strategy for New Zealand businesses when considering the Chinese market. After all, they are the personal shoppers for Chinese buyers, and have the deciding vote on what ‘star products’ are worth pushing to their loyal Chinese customer base.

Entering China is not an easy task. Evaluating your options before breaking into the market is recommended. Learning from many successful examples, tapping into the Chinese market locally and raising OPM’s interests on your product, could be your first step to a winning strategy and opening up the gateway to China.

As Featured on M+AD!