5 marketing hacks which will make your life easier

In the first episode of marketing hacks, you could learn how to track an offline conversion. Right now I would like to take a step back and present to you some basic hacks and tips which will for sure make your life easier and save some of your time.

1. Checking Facebook Ads of your competition.

And right now you’ll say that’s an obvious thing because you can navigate from Facebook fan page to Infos and Ads…
but Facebook turned off that function recently.

Facebook lets every user see all the ads which BusinessPage is running in resolution to bring more transparency around Facebook Ads. This can be used by anyone who wants to learn more about huge companies or just competitors’ advertising strategy.

To see the Ads which an official fanpage is running, go to the main page and click “Page Transparency” on the right sidebar of the screen.
You will get a popup with various info about the Page. Go to the Ad Library to see all the ads that are currently running.
(You can also search it directly from an Ad Library by a Page name to find the ads for every business page you want to check.)

Until a few weeks ago we could also see the engagements of the Ads with likes and comments — it was pretty cool to check what people like and on which types of content there is more engagement. Unfortunately, Facebook turned off this functionality around two weeks ago. Probably some changes are going to happen so if something changes I will update this section for you.

2. Creating really engaging designs

I learn several interesting tips which will increase your CTR. If you want to learn more, I recommend Nick’s Kolenda Blog:(https://www.nickkolenda.com/visual-attention/).
But let’s focus on a few tips which for sure, increase your click-through rate.

• Dynamic imagery

Experiments and researches claim that …static pictures that are evoking more (vs. less) perceived movement are able to draw attention more quickly, resulting in an earlier fixation.

• Including people

Images of people capture attention.
The most important features are:

• Faces
  Faces activate distinct brain regions.
• Bodies
  Just like the face, bodies capture attention through geometric composition.
• Body parts
  There is a direct relationship between brain activation and hand realism. Activation and engagement are greater when the hands look more realistic.
• Eye Gaze

Through the ages of evolution, people developed the ability to detect eyes more easily. Implement in your designs images of people who are looking in the eyes of the recipient to get attention instantaneously or let your character look at CTA or text in the image.

Practise:

• Pointing

Similar to the eyes gaze gestures have an influence for capturing attention.
Psychologists measured the effects of multiple hand gestures. The isolated index finger generated the strongest impact on attention.

3. How to download Facebook videos from other’s pages.

Have you ever seen such a great video on Facebook that you want to download and don’t know how? There are many ways to do it including some basic software which provides that option. But I learned a really easy way to do it very quickly and without any obstacles and use of external programs.

Step 1.

Choose the post with the video you want to download.

Step 2.

Click on the date or hour of publishing the post. (It will open the post with separate URL).

Step 3.

In this step, we have to make some changes in the URL.
Let’s put “mbasic” instead of “www” at the beginning of the URL. Click Enter

Step 4.

Right now Facebook opens in a slightly different form and design. Don’t worry. Click “Play” and video should open in another card.

Step 5.

On a separate window, you will see your selected video with 3 buttons in the right bottom corner. Click on the shown dots and click “download”.

That’s it! You’ve just downloaded your video from the Facebook page!

4. Chrome dev tools hacks.

In this paragraph, I would like to present a few tips with the usage of “Chrome dev tool” which is a set of web developer tools built directly into the Google Chrome browser. DevTools can help you edit pages on-the-fly and diagnose problems quickly.

There are many ways to open DevTools, because different users want quick access to different parts of the DevTools UI.

• When you want to work with the DOM or CSS, right-click an element on the page and select Inspect to jump into the Elements panel. Or press Command+Option+C (Mac) or Control+Shift+C (Windows, Linux, Chrome OS).
• When you want to see logged messages or run JavaScript, press Command+Option+J (Mac) or Control+Shift+J(Windows, Linux, Chrome OS) to jump straight into the Console panel.

Some of the things which I will share with you now is called “dirty user testing”. It’s trivial but sometimes can be very helpful and time-saving.

“Dirty” user testing

I always use it in case of preview some of the things on the page — for example, fonts, colors, titles.

When you ask others to choose the best title for your new blog post, of course, you can show a list of titles on a scrap of paper and present it but what about mocking up the titles, fonts, and colors in the content itself? So people can easily appreciate them in their intended place on the page/website?

How?

1. Hover over the text you want to change.
2. Open the element tab in Chrome dev tool.
3. Double click on the text you want to change.
4. Make the change and hit enter.

You can easily change the background color:
Press the Right arrow key, add a space, type

style="background-color:red"

If you want to test more you have to dig more into HTML or Google lessons about Chrome devTool.

Example:
Now you can choose which colors or titles the best fits your page.

Mobile devices preview

This one is useful to check how your or maybe competitor’s website looks on mobile without the need to take the phone in your hand.

While cross-device testing can be painful, it’s very crucial to know how your site looks across devices, especially when most of the traffic now is happening on mobile.

How?

• Open Chrome dev tools
• Click ‘Toggle device toolbar’ or press Ctrl+Shift+M (in the image below)

• At the top of the view, you should see your selected page in the mobile view.
• Now you can choose which device you want to check. Chrome device tool has a variety of phones and tablets from blackberry to the newest iPhones.

• Select your device and see how your webpage renders across a range of mobile devices. Check your responsive design, check how your mobile-specific webpage is working at certain screens.

5. Checking engagement of bit.ly links

Have you ever wondered how many visitors have specific shortened links?

I will present to you now a 1-second trick to easily check it.

Find a bit.ly link you want to measure:
Example: http://bit.ly/2YqwV3e

Paste it in the browser research bar and at the end of the URL add a “+” sign. Click enter.
It will redirect you to bit.ly page and show numbers of link clicks and even locations (when you are logged in to a bit.ly account).

This was pretty easy, right? But believe me, it can sometimes save a lot of your time and efforts! So use these hacks as you wish and let me know if you have some comments or doubts.

Remember that this is the second part of our marketing series, so go and read the first one too!

If you’re interested in more blog posts like this please visit our Visuality Blog or our Medium Page.

More cool stuff coming soon!