WORK PLAN Introduction …………………………………………………………………… ... 3 Essence ...
This is not only a fundamentally different ad format, but also an opportunity to reach out to those people who go to VK only through the mobile version or have installed adblocks for themselves that hide ads.
There are practically no projects where we do not use promotional posts. In addition, it is often the most effective channel for providing the largest number applications.
The promo post looks like this:
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The setup process is pretty much the same as the ads on the left. We just create a post, choose an audience, and launch ads. The main difference is that they are shown not on the left, but in the news feed, regardless of whether a person is subscribed to our community or not.
Another plus - you can choose platforms for displays - computers or mobile devices... Sometimes this is necessary. For example, when a client's site is not mobile-friendly. Then the traffic can be divided - people from the desktop version can be sent to the landing page, and from the mobile version to the community.
But in general, if your client still does not have a mobile version for some reason, you need to urgently create it. More and more people use their phones to access the Internet.
You can attach video, audio, photo, documents to the recording, which allows you to transfer information in the most convenient way for your future clients.
The proposal should be as clear as possible and aimed at the target audience.
The post can be short, then we immediately within a couple of seconds make it clear to the person that he will receive by clicking on our ad. No vague wording, specific benefits. Example:
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It can be long, selling smoothly, through history. An example is a post on travel public subscribers:
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Such posts most often get more shares, viral reach and group joins, but writing them requires experience.
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There are many ad writing models - AIDA, ACCA, selling stories, etc.
In short, we attract the user's attention with the help of a banner and a headline. For example, asking an important question for him. Next, we arouse interest and desire by describing the benefits that he will receive using our offer, and how they will positively affect the realization of his desires. The latter is a call to action. Here we persuade a person to leave a request, download a manual or book a seat.
ACCA - Attention → Сomprehension → Сonviction → Аction. The model is similar to the previous one, only here we use logic more than emotions.
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The choice of model depends on the project we are advertising.
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When creating posts, I always keep in mind the following formula:
- The purpose of the banner is to hook and make the headline read
- The purpose of the headline is to make you read the first sentence
- The purpose of the first sentence is to make the second read.
- The purpose of the first paragraph is to make the second read.
- The purpose of all the text is to make you click on the link or perform another action we need.
This approach allows you to write without water and get good conversions.
One of the main components is the title. Give them special attention. The headline should be clear and clearly convey the essence of the proposal. At least a third of the success of a post depends on the title. You can read more about writing headings in my articles. "4U headers" and "30 Ideas for Headlines"
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Here are 10 proven formulas that I most often use when writing headlines for promo posts on social media.
Heading in the form of an intriguing question:
- See you tonight?
- Can you repeat it in the shower?
- Why did I pay Yandex 300,000 rubles?
Title containing reasons:
- 5 reasons to connect retargeting to your website
- 3 reasons why you shouldn't jog in the morning
News headline:
- A new type of VKontakte advertising. Use it first!
- Yandex introduced the Baden-Baden algorithm. What will happen to SEO?
- 8 out of 9 will miss their chance now. What will you do?
- I will not write any more articles
Title showing the value of the material:
- Improve your eyesight with this video tutorial
- How to increase your height by 10 cm at home?
A header containing numbers:
- 57 chips of doing business with China
- 23 targeted advertising cases
Personalized headers:
- Arbitrazhnik? This article is for you!
- 17 useful books for the raw foodist
Testimonials and Results Titles:
- How did our student Sergey earn 3,000,000 from VKontakte advertising?
- How did a 100 kg woman lose weight with algae and become a model?
- Why does my every morning start with Jacobs coffee?
Stunning headlines:
- Headless body in strip club
- The dying billionaire reveals the secret of his fortune
A title describing how to do something:
- How to make repairs in an apartment with your own hands and save 70% of the money
- How to teach a dog to give a paw
- How to master the profession of a manager from scratch social networks and start making money on the Internet from 50 thousand rubles per month
After the title, the reader moves on to the text.
- Facts and Figures. People tend to trust numbers and facts. It's hard to argue with them. Give in the text real numbers regarding your product.
- Benefit and transformation. When writing text, remember that people don't need your product. Most often they are looking for transformation. They buy a new iPhone / BMW X6 / muscle mass gainers not because of its functions / comfort / health improvement, but simply to amuse the feeling of their own importance. The entire advertising industry is built on this.
- Relevance and scarcity. Explain to the person why they need to act now. Why now is this the best time to purchase your product. And why then can he be very sorry if he does not take advantage of the offer and miss his chance.
- Authoritative opinion. If there are reviews from famous personalities about your services, use this in the text. Especially when you show ads to their followers.
- Melting benefit. For example, it can be a discount that decreases every day - today 30%, tomorrow 25%, the day after tomorrow 20%, etc. Or special bonuses that are received by the first paying.
- Guarantee. Give people a guarantee. Show that they can get their money back if they don't like the quality of the advertised product. This is important, because many of them see your site / community for the first time and do not know what kind of person is behind this business.
Don't be afraid to write big posts and long stories. If the post is really interesting and useful, then it will most likely be read to the end. In addition, such an audience is warmer and more likely to leave a request and subscribe to your public.
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Use bright photos. They get attention.
Both people's faces and graphics work well. If appropriate, use photos of the company founder or brand face. You can take one image or attach up to 9 photos.
Incidentally, I am doing this, it gives additional interest and friend requests. See example post above.
Show your audience symbolswith which she associates herself.
Show the transformation from using your product.
Remember that n Not always good design = high conversion. Sometimes a regular selfie or photo from a phone will work much better than an image bought on a stock photo.
The more the picture resembles an advertisement, the more it meets visitors' rejection. It is simply blocked by our internal anti-ad filters. And vice versa - ordinary photos from the phone resemble those posted by friends, and do not meet such rejection.
Sometimes you can use pictures with small details. For example, tables with salaries. People habitually click on the map to enlarge it, but instead they go to the site.
The main disadvantage of this approach is that there is a lot of inappropriate traffic.
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2. Click on the "Advertise" icon in the post itself
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It is important to consider:
- An ad post may be rejected if it does not match the theme of the community on whose behalf it is being promoted.
- Only one ad can be created per post. To launch the same post to different audiences, you need to copy this post in the ad account. It will not be displayed in public. Only in the news feed of users who have ads configured.
- Only the community administrator can advertise and create a post. If you're setting up ads for a client, ask them to give you community admin rights.
- You cannot promote reposts from other communities or profiles.
How do I customize my ad?
What bets should you place?
It is also possible to set the frequency of impressions per person from 1 to 20. In most cases, I limit myself to one impression, but at the same time I launch 2-3 different variations of posts for one audience.
If the frequency of impressions is more than one, the same ad is shown in the user's feed no earlier than 12 hours later.
How to evaluate effectiveness?
In order to assess the effectiveness of the entry, you need to click on the ad in your account and go down to the "Statistics" section.
In the screenshot above, you can see that VK gives quite detailed statistics for each post, but this is not enough to track the cost of the application.
Please note that in clicks on links, all clicks only on external links specified in the record are counted in total. If the post text contains direct links to wikis, communities, applications, and others, they will not be counted in conversion statistics.
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I wish you good results, Pavel Shiryaev.
Last fall was published new format advertising "VKontakte" - "advertising record" (although among experts it is often called a "promo post"). Initially, advertisements were only allowed in closed testing with a budget of 100,000 rubles or more and through special moderation. Now this format is available to a wide audience with a budget of 1000 rubles or more.
When the format was released, the reach was cheap: users were not used to such ads and responded well to them (provided that the ads were shown really thematic). There was a negative, but mainly, with thematic advertisements of large brands.
Literally 2 months ago "VKontakte" added new opportunity targeting separately for mobile and desktop feed. Considering that some audience segments (for example, “moms”) enter the social network, mainly from mobile devices, this format opens up even more interesting opportunities for advertisers.
In this article, I want to tell you how working with this format can help small businesses and how small and large companies use this format now, six months later. I also tried to highlight the main nuances of work and pitfalls.
Let's start with the pitfalls:
1. Very complex statistics and performance metrics... When the format first appeared, the post statistics were displayed with a very large error... Now VK has more or less adjusted the situation, but I recommend in advertising campaigns, first of all, to focus not on the internal statistics of the post, but on the indicators of the cost of targeted actions in Yandex.Metrica.In campaigns aimed at attracting new subscribers, the situation is much more complicated: the internal statistics of a post takes into account only a part of subscribers, and if there is another advertisement, statistics on the growth from this source have to be calculated manually.
Approximate formula: gain per day - (organic gain + gain from other sources) = gain from fasting.
2. We cannot create many posts at once to test different audience segments. This will disrupt the content plan, or the VK moderation will not like the abundance of advertising content.In addition, the audience and the cost of the targeted action from each of them can be calculated only by testing the sources one by one. This creates quite big difficulties when we need a lot of traffic - for example, for an event in a short time. Thinly segmenting will not work here.
If the goal is to get followers, there is still a way to make it easier. This will help the application "Comparison of group audiences".
The essence of the idea: upload targeting to many publics at once into the promo post, having previously measured the intersection of the target public and those that we uploaded to the target. Then repeat the procedure daily. The dynamics of intersection will be our growth from this public per day. And this can be recorded in the Excel plate.
The error of this method will be about 20-30%, but it is much better and faster than testing each public in turn.
Although VKontakte has already promised a hidden publication of "promos", so far they have not added it.
If we ignore the above difficulties, then this advertising format is the very case when 20% of efforts bring 80% of the result. A promo post may well bring 80% of the required campaign result.
Case
Case No. 1
The first was an online dress store. At that time, I didn't think about composing individual posts for advertising, I just downloaded a bunch of posts from the public, published as part of a regular content plan (more than 30) and looked at which ones worked.
And only one worked. 12,000 rubles were spent on the post, about 1,500 subscribers were attracted (unfortunately, there is no exact figure).
As you can see, there is a difference in statistics, but the transition price shows how well and cheap our traffic was. I mostly spun on competitors and publics with a target audience.
Case number 2
An example is more interesting and substantive - we drove traffic to the site and, using promo codes, tracked real customers who came to the restaurant and bought at least a sandwich for 150 rubles (but I believe that average check was higher).
We have posted a Burger King promotion in one of our publics. The promo code could be reactivated (or transferred to another person), we mentioned this in the post. The advertisement was actively circulating for about 3-4 days among the fast food audience: Burger King, Macdonald’s and KFC. The promotion lasted for about 2 weeks, and even after advertising company turned off, we were still getting steady traffic.
As a result, we received about 700 promo code activations with an activation cost of about 12 rubles per client.
Case No. 3
The promo post for the beauty salon was aimed at a wide audience of women aged 21-35 from the city of Izhevsk with a favorable offer.
We received 56 applications and 48 clients who actually came to the salon with 2,000 rubles spent in 3 days of spinning - that is, the client's price was about 40 rubles.
- A short text (several sentences) describing the essence. It is important that the person understands their benefits from your proposal in a couple of seconds.
- Intriguing subtext that makes you follow the link: i.e. a person must understand that this is a teaser, but there is a "main" page, where everything is described in more detail.
- Multiple links per post, especially when targeting mobile devices. It will help the person to quickly click and not miss the link.
- Loud, screaming headline and bright picture. It will help to focus the person's gaze and draw his attention to the proposal.
By the way, the main mistake of all people who considered promo posts ineffective is that they perceived them as posts, as a unit of content that gives useful information... Whereas a promo post performs the tasks of an ad and requires the same approach as when creating an ad.
Svetlana Shiryaeva
Reading time: 8 min.
Today we'll talk about one of the most popular and, as practice shows, the most effective ad formats on Vkontakte - about promo posts.
It appeared around the middle of 2015: spying on the European brother (of course, Facebook), Vkontakte allowed advertisers to promote community / group posts in the news feed for a fee.
The format immediately fell in love with marketers, because compared to teasers, it provides much more room for experimentation. We will talk about them in this article.
When creating a hidden post, you have all the same options as when publishing a post on the community wall:
you can use pictures, videos;
add audio recordings, polls;
add products to your record, etc.
Therefore, you can experiment and collect, for example, feedback through polls, or gain an audience and increase the reach of the community through your favorite music or movie selections.
And all these countless experiments will not be visible to your subscribers.
The promo post is ideal for promoting short activities - contests, promotions, collection feedback after the event, and to promote content longreads (large posts / articles).
There is one more important option - the ability to add a link in the "button" format. Those. your link will not only be loaded under the post, but will be displayed with a button:
The button label is also variable.
However, this format has limitations:
The size of the picture must be 537x240 pixels (or proportionally)
The text of the post itself is no more than 220 characters with spaces, which makes it impossible for you to make content posts, and makes the format somewhat "blind"
What can you advertise with promo posts?
In fact, almost everything!
You can also provide a link to your Vkontakte group and thereby attract users to your community. In practice, promoting a group using a promo post format is many times more effective than a standard strategy for promoting a community through a teaser format.
The wiki format can also be used as a landing page:
Life hacks for setting the target itself
About the budget:
When promoting posts, only one strategy will be available to you - payment per 1000 impressions. Therefore, it is better to set the rate according to the following scheme:
if the audience is small (for example, you are launching retargeting or targeting competitors) and in total does not exceed 100 thousand users, set the recommended rate (you can experiment and reduce it by 10-20% of the recommended rate)
the optimal audience size is from 100 thousand to 300 thousand - we take about 30-40% of the recommended rate
if the audience is wide and its size is more than 300 thousand - we indicate the minimum possible (the rate at which VK will show your ad - you can start from 50-70 rubles per 1000 impressions)
About the group:
The most logical thing is to promote the post on behalf of your community. In this case, even if you direct people to the site, you can count on the “additional effect” in the form of growth in your community. But sometimes it is worth resorting to a little trick - to create a separate external “thematic” group and launch promo posts on its behalf. The topic of the group, accordingly, should be somehow related to your product.
For example, if you are promoting courses of English language then you can create a thematic group - "English by Film" and promote your courses from this group. Typically, this strategy is resorted to when the effectiveness of promoting on behalf of your group has begun to decline over time.
How does it work with users?
First, promotion from an external topic group creates a sense of something new for the user - a new product, a new company. If you work for the same audience for a long time, then the content and even the group itself will still “get boring”, even if you regularly change materials.
Secondly, when promoting from a thematic community, and not from a branded one, a feeling of nativeness is created, and the user gets the feeling that the community is recommending the product. The effect is somewhat similar to the seeding effect in a thematic group.
Chains of promo posts
Another thing that can be done with promo posts is launching sequential chains.
This is a kind of conditional analogue of mailing chains in e-mail marketing when you send the user a series of sequential and content-related emails.
Almost the same can be done on Vkontakte using promo posts.
This is a great option for promoting complex products that take a long time to make a purchase decision.
For example, this is how you can promote educational courses, trainings or conferences.
And a little more about the features of the format
Let's list the main features:
- When promoting the community, this format shows more effective than standard format promoting the Vkontakte community (teaser format).
Works both in the mobile version and in the desktop (unlike teasers - they are only on the desktop).
Practice shows that when using the format to drive traffic to the site, you still get an additional profit - an increase in subscribers in the group.
When we try to attract subscribers to the community by white methods, it does not always come out cheaply and well. We look disappointedly at the extremely low CTR and calculate the losses. In a target, it is difficult to describe in a few words all the goodies in your group - and this is one of the main problems.
Promo posts "VKontakte"
There are two ways to promote a VKontakte post:
- make targeted advertising for the published publication;
- buy a repost in a community whose audience you are interested in.
In this article I will tell you about the second method. How is it convenient? There is no need to set up specific audience parameters in the advertising office, it is enough to find good sites at an affordable price and buy a publication there.
In addition to new members, you get organic reach and brand recognition. We get it for sane money. Isn't it wonderful?
We select sites
A competent choice of a site will provide a high-quality target audience who will see your post. Basically, you are buying back a community audience for one hour. The community filter on the exchange is built conveniently and allows you to select pages with the desired audience.
Indicate the most important - the cost of placement, the age of the desired audience and the topic. The rest of the metrics are secondary (since they are not sufficiently representative in terms of the quality of the community).
Choose the topic of the community according to the potential audience that will be interested in the post. That is, if the target audience of your product is women of 30-40 years old all over Russia, and in the post - funny picture with a cat, it is logical to be placed in a community dedicated to humor for an adult audience.
When choosing sites, don't be fooled only by the number of likes under each post. Here's a little cheat sheet:
- if posts in the donor community are published every 15-30 minutes, your post after an hour in the top will instantly fall down. Better - less often.
- give preference to communities with big amount comments - they are livelier.
- if the community has few likes for each post, but there is a lot of suggested news from users, it means that they are actively involved in the life of the community. This is a good sign.
- if there are no comments, no likes, no reposts - slag. Do not buy, no matter what coverage you are promised.
Choosing a post
Post for promotion can be written individually, or you can pick up from those already released. Today we'll talk about already released posts - in other words, buying a repost.
This is convenient because you can evaluate the quality of a publication even before purchasing an advertisement: how people reacted, whether there are likes or comments. Choose a post that is well received by users - this will increase the chances of virality and organic reach.
For example, this post is not bad. You can promote it.
Let me remind you that we choose a post for promotion in order to attract new subscribers. Our goal is virality, coolness, interest. Purely advertising posts like "buy a watch" will not work: the post should be useful, even if it is humorous (neighing is also useful).
Coming up with a comment from the donor community
When we buy a repost, we can ask the community to add a comment on their own - roughly speaking, express their own point of view on our publication. Sometimes the quality of this comment can affect the quality of your entire advertising campaign.
The donor community can act as an authority on trusting advice to its subscribers. Take advantage of this.
How to hook subscribers with a comment?
- hook their "pain". Ask a rhetorical question, and your publication will partially answer it.
- invite them to find in their community what they secretly want.
- create intrigue around your community that your post will partially reveal.
Determine the placement time
What time to post? Looking to accommodate during rush hour? You will have extremely high competition with other lovers of fasting at lunchtime and after 20:00.
At rush hour (lunch and evening), it is worth posting only posts with extremely bombastic pictures and themes. They should be visible in the general stream.
If you just have a solid, competent post, I recommend posting it during off-peak times (for example, at 11 am).
What are the results?
Promo posts allow you to attract a large number of subscribers in a short period of time. For example, here - 300 subscribers in two days, at a price of 28 rubles per subscriber. For comparison: the average cost of a subscriber from a target is 70 rubles.
How to make a promo post on VKontakte?
So, to summarize. To get a good profit from placing a promo post through the VKontakte exchange, you need:
- release a high-quality post and evaluate its prospects even BEFORE publication in donor groups;
- select groups with suitable topics and audiences;
- come up with an enticing comment from the donor community;
- choose the most favorable placement time.
Successful campaigns and high Engagement Rate! You can ask questions in the comments under the post or in
Today we will talk about promo posts on Vkontakte, or advertising in the news feed - how to place them, where it is better to use them, and also share tips on how to increase conversion and, accordingly, bring more customers for less money.
Promo posts appeared relatively recently: about a year and a half ago, but have already managed to win the trust of advertisers and affiliates, as well as those who independently promote their communities and even online stores.
This is what a promo post looks like in the Vkontakte news feed. As you can see, a promo post differs from a regular post by the presence of the mark "Advertising post" and the absence of comments on them, even if they are included in the promoted community.View promo posts of competitors, find suitable ones keywords, by popularity and other indicators, you can use the service for monitoring advertising records
What is their advantage?
What benefits in relation to the side banner:
- works both in the mobile version and in the desktop (teasers work only when you are sitting with a computer)
- scrolling through the feed, users perceive such posts as native content, and not as advertising, respectively, they pay more attention to them
- promo posts can be used for different purposes: both to attract subscribers to your public, and to drive traffic to the site
- this format gives you more room for experimentation: you can use audio, video, polls, etc.
What benefits in relation to placement in public:
- you can segment the audience and customize to those who may be interested in this news
- you can edit the post depending on the response of the audience: change the text, picture, add music, etc.
Naturally, there were some pitfalls:
First, there are very complex statistics and performance metrics.
When the format first appeared, the post statistics were displayed with a strong error. Now Vkontakte has managed to adjust the situation a little, but the system is still far from perfect. For the most accurate analysis, we recommend using indicators of the cost of targeted actions in Yandex-Metric.
For those who create such campaigns in order to attract new subscribers, the situation is even more complicated: the internal statistics of the post takes into account only a part of the subscribers and, if advertising from other sources is also conducted, the statistics on the increase must be calculated manually.
Approximate formula: gain per day - (organic gain + gain from other sources) = gain from fasting.
Second, you can't create many posts at once to test different audience segments.
Moderation "VK", most likely, will not like the abundance of advertising content.
In addition, as mentioned above, the audience and the cost of the targeted action from each of the campaigns can be calculated only by testing the sources one by one. This can be a big problem if we need a lot of traffic in a short time - for example, to attract people to an event, etc.
If the goal is to get followers, there is still a way to make it easier. The application "" will help you with this.
The bottom line is to upload targetings to the promo post at once to all the publics in which we advertise, having previously measured the intersection of the target public and those that we uploaded to the target.
Then you will need to repeat the procedure daily. The dynamics of intersection will be our gain from this public for the day. And you can fix this, for example, in Excel or Google Dock.
Of course, this method is not accurate - its error will be about 20-30%, but it is much more effective than testing each public in turn.
Nevertheless, both in the success of a creative and in an advertising campaign in general, a lot depends on the actions of the affiliate himself.
How to make and run a VKontakte promo post
To create a promo post, you need to have your own public or VK group with a normal design and minimal content. Previously, the requirements for communities allowed to use this tool were very strict, at least 5,000 subscribers and a budget for an advertising account from 1,000 rubles, but now these requirements are not.
There are two types of promo posts:
- Promotion of an existing post in a group;
- Promotion of a hidden post on behalf of the group (subscribers will not see it, only yours will see it in their feed the target audience on which the advertisement was launched).
To create a promo post, go to the VKontakte advertising booth at the address, click "Create ad", then select "Post in the community" and copy the link of the post from your group that you want to advertise in the news feed of VKontakte users. To copy the link of the desired post, right-click on the date and time the post was posted and select "Copy Link".
You can also create a new post in the advertising office, in this case it will not be seen by your subscribers and it will not be in the group, but in the users' news feed it will be shown on behalf of your group. This can be useful if you want to test a large number of similar posts, or to create different promo posts for different audiences.
You can find examples of ready-made promo posts for your topic in the service It saves promo posts that have already been shown, you can find interesting ideas to advertise and see the ads of competitors.
Now we will tell and share our observations on how to make a promo post as effective as possible:
Life hack first: video format or gifs
About 90% of the feed are various pictures and photographs, so videos or gifs will attract more attention - such posts are still new to people.
And if the video is not just downloaded from the Internet, but also cut using video editors (for example, Sony Vegas or Camtasia), then there will be no price for it.
On average, at the moment, video or GIF format converts 1.5 times better than a picture (although, of course, it all depends on the creative itself in the first place).
Life hack two: user generated content
The so-called “user-generated content” is very effective. That is, not professionally taken photos or videos, but taken, say, on a smartphone:
Such techniques increase the trust of the audience: people have always liked to "spy" on what other users are doing. This also explains the demand for vloggers.
Nevertheless, this method has not yet gained wide popularity - we spied this idea at one of the conferences
Life hack the third: "useful" content
Another good idea would be a post with some culinary recipe inviting you to subscribe to a group of relevant topics or, for example, a musical selection: 
Advertising "head-on" with a large inscription KUPI-KUPI has not caused the audience response we need for a long time, because such offers have been pouring down on users for at least a decade as if from a cornucopia. Our task is to interest the client, and then carefully offer him the product. Such a scheme can be successfully done with the help of well-made promo posts.
Output:
Promo posts took all the best from both targeted advertising and publics. However, they have their own specifics and weak sides: difficulties with analytics and moderation, as well as high cost per click. But, with proper use and a creative approach, they can also become an effective tool for promoting any business and communities.
Watch this video to find out how to launch promo posts on VK:
