Skyscanner

I’m sure you have all heard of Skyscanner, or use a similar service like expedia.com to search across all airlines for the cheapest available flights on the dates in mind. Although there’re a couple of features that I find particularly helpful when planning an upcoming vacation.

Whole Month

This feature allows you to view the costs of flights on every day of the month, so you can easily find the cheapest dates to travel.


 

Cheapest Month

If you only have a destination in mind you can easily use the “cheapest month” feature to check the cheapest time to travel to your destination throughout the whole year.

Airbnb

Airbnb is a fantastic international service that allows you to rent out properties directly with the owner instead of booking a hotel. Its 100% safe – your money goes to the Airbnb platform so you never pay the owner directly and most of the time you don’t even meet the owner of the property. Unless it’s to collect the keys at the beginning of your stay and give them back at the end (Although sometimes not even then, I stayed in one place in Canada that just had a keypad to let you in).
Airbnb has completely changed the way I travel, I can’t remember the last time I stayed in a hotel in the past 4+ years, excluding 1 month in Morocco last year, and I have used it all over the world. Plus, if you like to cook or are on a budget it’s great because you have cooking facilities to make your own food, saving you the money of eating out 3 meals a day that you would spend at a hotel. Even if it’s just breakfast at home, every bit counts towards your budget!

House Sitting

The basic idea of House Sitting is free accommodation in exchange for taking care of their house, and usually their animals or gardens as well. The part I particularly like about housesitting is being able to assimilate with other cultures. You are very much lead by where the availability of the house sit is – so you end up travelling to areas in countries that you may never have thought of going to.
The requirements are also so varied so if you keep your eye on the availabilities you could find a week long stay in NYC, a weekend in London, or 1 month in a beautiful house on the southern coast of Turkey with 6 dogs & 4 cats.

House Sit in Kas, Turkey (4 weeks)

View from the back veranda of our house near Granada, Spain (6 weeks)

Woofing

If you’re up for a little more of an adventure, love the outdoors and aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty then Woofing is a great option. Another international service that will help prolong your budget by giving you free food and accommodation in exchange for work (the arrangement varies per agreement, although ours was 3-4 hours of work per day Mon – Fri). Of course, there are some horror stories floating around so do your research, but everyone I have spoken to has had a similar great experience to me, met some fantastic people and learned a lot of new skills – I now know how to heard 40 odd sheep.

Lonely Planet Guidebooks

Never leave home without one, they’re completely invaluable. With their suggestions for accommodation, restaurants and itineraries this can help you save so much time and money. Plus, after travelling for 18 hours on a bus and finally arriving at your accommodation the last thing you want to do is sort through rubbish Tripadvisor reviews to find a terribly overpriced restaurant.

Happy Travels!

The post Your cost-effective traveller’s guide appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

1. The planning stage

The first and most important thing is to carefully plan your Facebook page. Don’t create a page during a whirlwind of inspiration only to abandon it after a while because you’re not sure of what to do with it.
Before you get started you’ll need the following :

– A well-designed eye catching logo and cover photo which are the right dimensions.

– Brand guidelines with a clear outline of what will be posted, the tone used, and even the type of colours or images to include.

– Knowledge of your audience – what kind of posts would interest them? Work around your audience’s needs.

– A clear ‘about’ section and contact details

2. Own It.

Someone needs to be responsible for the page, this person will be accountable for what goes on and will be the go to person should anything happen. Having one person dedicated to the page means there will be less confusion and more consistency.

3. Build your following

You can now start building your following. Of course the first people to go to would be friends and family, encourage them to like the page as a show of support. You could consider an official launch in order to spread the word. Encourage colleagues to share the page, and also list it as their place of employment – bringing them in on the process will boost company morale!

4. Create Connections

Use your page to like other companies with similar aims. Just make sure you’re liking from your page and not from your personal profile.
To do this go to your newsfeed and click on the tiny arrow near the security options and select your page.
Liking other businesses through your post will improve your connections (as they might like you back) and will also keep your newsfeed up to date with what other businesses are up to.

 5. Boost your page

You might consider investing some money into your Facebook page by boosting it. Facebook allows you to promote your page, targeting specific audiences and allowing the ad to run for a specific period of time.
However if you’re going to spend money, do it wisely. It’s best to consult someone who knows the ins and outs of Facebook and can direct you to the best kind of advertising strategy so that your investment will reap tangible rewards.

6. Quality over quantity

It’s useless having 10,000 likes on Facebook if your post engagement is low. Work towards having high engagement on posts since this builds your brand and builds your relationship with followers. It’s far better to communicate with a few who care, than to shout out to thousands and get hardly any response!

7. Humour is your best weapon!

People generally react more to things which make them laugh and put a smile on their face. Use witty and cheeky humour in your posts to give your content life and show your fun side! Just because it’s business it doesn’t mean it has to be boring.

8. Facebook is not a catalogue

We keep saying it but yet it still happens. Facebook shouldn’t be used to advertise products the way you’d advertise in a magazine. Be creative with posts about products or services and market yourself in a way that makes people warm to your brand.

9. No one likes a Drama Queen

Handle complaints properly. Remember to always be polite and courteous. Offer to call the person up to resolve the issue over the phone, and never delete someone’s comment!
Don’t forget about the Big Brother nature of Social Media. When commenting online there could be a hundred people following the thread, reading everyone’s replies, you wouldn’t want to make any negative impressions!

10. Post sensibly

Once you’ve figured out what kind of posts to put up, you can move on to planning out a schedule. Be consistent with your work, but be willing to learn from your audience and adapt to what they like. It’s great to have a brand identity, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t grow!

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1. Check the Facebook Guidelines

Let the eye-rolling commence. Yes, this is absolutely the first thing you need to check about when creating not just your cover photo, but every item of content on your page. Before you ask – no, Facebook doesn’t actually say what will happen if you violate the Facebook guidelines, but it’s probably not a good idea to risk having your page taken down over your cover photo, right?

2. Make sure it’s the right size

851 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall. You’ll want to get that right from the start when designing a photo, because why would you want to spend time getting a new image designed only to have it look funny once you upload it? You can view our full template for Facebook image sizes right here. (We’ve included a full image size guide in this post – scroll down to see it now.)

3. Keep mobile in mind

The Facebook mobile app doesn’t re-size your cover photo to fit everything in. Rather, it only displays the middle-to-right portion of your cover photo. If you’re targeting mobile users on Facebook, you might want to keep this in mind when including text or certain images in your desktop cover photo.
Keep the important information center- or right-aligned, or you could have large parts of it cut out to look something like this:

4. Lay out your content carefully

Be aware that your profile picture covers a section of your cover photo in the bottom left corner when the user lands on your page.
The part of the cover image that lies behind the profile picture won’t be visible until the user clicks on it, so be sure to keep that area clear of any text or information.

5. Keep it visual

This time last year, Facebook had finally done away with the 20% rule on text in cover photos.  This means that you have more freedom when designing the layout for your cover photo, but you should still be careful when including text in your designs.
Keep your copy concise and focus on the visual element of the design. That’s what the cover photo was designed for and will make your page much more engaging, even at first glance.

6. If you’re using text, make it count

When Facebook revoked the 20% text rule, they also allowed people to use calls-to-action in their cover photos. CTAs, key text and striking visuals – if you want your cover photo to help you convert, that’s all you need.

7. Speaking of text… got a hashtag?

If you’re promoting an event or product through your cover photo, be sure to include the relevant hashtag, where applicable. You can include it in the design of the actual image for recall purposes, but more importantly, remember to include it in the description to make your photo more discoverable.

8. Don’t forget the description

The calls to action on your cover photo won’t be clickable buttons, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still direct people to your landing page. Be sure to include clickable links in your cover photo description so that anyone clicking on your cover photo will be able to take the next natural step to wherever it is you want to take them!

9. Change your cover photo regularly

Make your cover photo work for you by changing it whenever you have something new to talk about. Highlight current campaigns, seasonal trends or special events by creating cover photos about them to build awareness or drive more traffic via the link in the description.

10. Own your content

You know by now that Facebook have removed most of the restrictions for page cover photos. In fact, they’ve dropped them all, except for one:

All cover photos are public, which means anyone visiting your Page will be able to see it. Cover photos must follow the Pages Terms and can’t be deceptive, misleading or infringe on anyone else’s copyright.

Simply put: be truthful, own your content and don’t make people change their cover photos to match yours.  Fair enough, right?
One last thing – keep other, non-Facebook regulations in mind when promoting something on your cover photo, especially if gifts and prizes are involved. The Maltese Lotteries and Gaming Authority (LGA) has specific regulations for any form of lottery or luck-of-the-draw competitions – even those held on Facebook or other networks – so keep that in mind before you start pumping your precious marketing budget into your next competition.
As promised earlier, here’s a handy guide to all image sizes you’ll need to consider when running a Facebook page. We’ll be sharing one of these for all the major social networks over the coming weeks, so keep an eye out!

The post 10 Tips for creating Cover Photos that work appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Monthly Revenue

One of the most important metrics to measure is your monthly revenue. This can be calculated by multiplying the price of your products or services by the quantity you’ve sold over a particular month.

This is a very important metric to calculate as it allows you to assess the performance of your business month after month. By calculating your monthly revenue you can analyse trends such as dips in revenue during a particular period, prompting you to dig deeper to find out exactly what’s causing that drop. On the other hand, you could also spot a welcome increase in revenue, which should lead you to find out what caused it and, more importantly, how to make it happen again.
By working hard to replicate positive results you’ll be laying the groundwork for a sustainable business – one that draws in more revenue each month. You would also need to plan your revenue forecasts around this figure. This guide will help you out in preparing your forecasts with the help of a few additional bits of information, such as costs and profit margins.

Churn

If your business gets repeat customers, you should know who they are by calculating repeat custom. This metric goes both ways – you will also need to calculate the churn, meaning the number of customers that stop buying your product. This figure will give you valuable insight into whether or not your clients are satisfied with your product.
If clients are dropping out after making the first purchase, for instance, it could indicate that something’s not quite right with your product. At this stage you should focus your efforts on improving your product rather than try to attract new customers.

How? Ask!

You could get all the answers you need by speaking to both your existing and past clients and asking questions along the lines of:

“We really miss you! Is there something that we can do to get you back?”

“Would you suggest our product to your friends and relatives? If yes, why would you do so?”

You could even go a step further and ask for feedback before the client walks out on you, just like Starbucks did in coffee shops across the world:

If you don’t happen to have coffee shops in every corner of the globe, you can still get in touch with your clients to ask questions and get feedback by sending them a short email questionnaire, for instance. Online tools like Surveymonkey or Surveygizmo make this quick and simple.
You also have another option that’s closer to home – you can get customer feedback through your site itself! Check out Olark or Qualaroo – these tools make it easy for you to ask questions to your website visitors as soon as they go to specific web page or behave in a certain way.
Most importantly: If you really want to lower your churn you need to better understand your customers. Forget about what you think about your company and start thinking about it from your customers’ perspective. What do they want from you? Which problems are they trying to solve? Does your product address these problems? Find out, and modify your product accordingly.
Keep in mind that this is not a one-off exercise, but a process that should be implemented in an on-going manner. It’s crucial if you’re looking to build a sustainable business in the long run.

Lifetime Value

The client lifetime value (LTV) applies for businesses that either sell a subscription based service or get repeat customers. It is the projected revenue that you will get from each customer for his lifetime. There is a simple way in which you can work this out. Take the average revenue per sale and then multiply it by the number of repeat transactions and average retention time. The diagram below will make this easier to wrap your head around:

So let’s say that you get a total number of 2000 repeat customers per year for your online store that spend on average $200 for every transaction that they will make. The average number of transactions per year is 3 whilst the retention rate is 2 years. To work out their LTV you need to do the following:

In this case the LTV would be $1200. So in other words each customer is getting you $1200 before he stops buying from your site.
LTVs vary according to the type of traffic that you are attracting to your site. For example you can compare different LTVs for the different clients that you get from online marketing campaigns and then focus on those that have a higher LTV. You can also compare the different LTVs based on geography – which regions have the highest LTVs? Once you find that out you can start focusing your strategy on attracting more clients from those regions.

Conversion Rate

This metric will help you to measure the success rate of your website. In order to improve your website you need to know how many sales or leads you’re generating from your current web traffic. If for example you want to work out the sales conversion rate for your website you will use the equation below:

This will give you the percentage of unique visitors that are making a purchase from your website. In order to improve your conversion rate you will have to analyse every step that each visitor is making before purchasing your products.
A lot of CMOs are discouraged when they calculate their conversion rate because the real situation would be that from, say, 100,000 unique visitors they can only convert something below 2% into sales. However, keep in mind that not all of your visitors are ready to buy and most of them are still at the beginning of the buying cycle.
You should look at it this way: if you improve your conversion rate by just 1% you will increase your sales by 50%. So rather than discouraging yourself, focus on continuously improving your conversion rate by optimising your website. These tips will help you to convert more sales from your website.

Cost per Acquisition

This metric is one of the most important ones that is ignored by a lot of businesses, unfortunately. The cost per acquisition is the price that you have to pay to acquire a new customer. This means that it measures the cost of advertising to convert a visitor into a customer.
You need to know exactly how much a customer is costing you when using different advertising channels, such as PPC (pay per click) advertising. This will give you a clear indication on whether you should continue to invest in advertising or else use other means to generate business that will cost you less money.
So let’s say you have an option of choosing whether to continue running PPC ads or invest in SEO – what you would need to do is to calculate how much it is costing you to acquire a new customer through these channels. With PPC, this is quite easy to calculate since all you need to do is to divide the total cost of your PPC account by the number of sales that you’ve generated for that particular month.
On the other hand, to calculate the CPA from SEO you need to calculate the monthly service fees of your web-marketing agency and any additional costs that you might incur when running an SEO campaign and divide them by the number of transactions generated from SEO for a particular month. The latter can be easily obtained by logging into your Google analytics account and finding the total number of transactions generated by organic traffic. Find this under the Acquisitions > Keywords tab as shown below:
 

And there you have it!

The metrics above should keep you focused on increasing your sales. Do not see them as separate data sets – they all tie in to the same goal. It is important that you share this data with your team members so that they will be able to visualise the bigger picture.
After all, the more they know about the business, the better it is for them to come up with ideas on how to improve the process of acquiring new customers!

The post The top 5 metrics to consider before making business decisions appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.