Dmitry Kovalev

The article will be useful to those who want to promote goods, services or communities using VKontakte publics, but do not know where to start. After reading, you will learn how to select groups with a target audience and compose posts that help achieve maximum conversion.

Audience Revealing

Before looking for communities, find out who your potential buyer is and make a portrait of him.

Identify Needs. Find out what need your product or service satisfies. It should be one thing that brings the target audience together. Polls and forums will help you figure out what customers want.

Learn about interests. Find out about the interests of your audience to determine the topic of the group.

For this task suitable tool to search for the Cerebro Target audience. It allows you to analyze the interests of potential customers of the selected community.

In the "User Analysis" section, insert a link to the group in which, in your opinion, the target audience is a member.

Cerebro will well complement another tool located in the Facebook advertising account - audience_insights. He shows Family status, position, as well as the top favorite sites of your audience. And if you are studying the market in the USA, then in addition to the above, the level of salaries will also be available to you.

Determine gender and age. Firstly, these parameters will help you select groups with the right audience. Second, make the message in your post more personal. The service from Mail.Ru will help to find them out.

Community Selection

After compiling an avatar of the audience members, collect as many pages as possible that potential customers can follow. For this:

1. Use the "Community Search" "VKontakte".

1. Find groups through " Market platform» in your account.

1. Use third-party tools for working with VK groups, such as Pabler. In order to start the selection, go to the "Publics / profiles" section, subsection - "VKontakte publics".

Community analysis

When you have a decent list of groups on the same subject, check each of them against five criteria.

Presence of target audience

To find out if your potential customers are in the community, check the gender, age and geography of its members. These data can be viewed in the "Statistics" tab.

By gender, age and geo, check the presence of an audience in the group

Member activity

If there are people of the right age and gender in the group, we check it for involvement. This indicator is denoted by the abbreviation ER (engagement rate) and is calculated using the ratio of actions to coverage.

To understand whether ER is normal in a group, compare it with the indicators of leading communities in this topic.

Bots

You can find out the percentage of bots through the VKontakte application: Search for "dead" members and subscribers". To do this, go to the application, paste the link to the community and click "Scan".

The presence of bots is also shown by Pabler.

Usually there are 10–20% of bots in groups. Anything more is cheating

Another way to check the community for "dead souls" is to look at the outflow of subscribers. To do this, in the statistics of the page, look at the number of unsubscribes. A high spike in the unsubscribe graph is a clear sign of a high number of bots.

Coverage

Reach refers to the number of times a post has been viewed in the news feed or community wall. This metric only counts unique users. Moreover, VKontakte does not count the fast scrolling of the entry in the tape. The person must keep their attention on the text or image. You can also see this indicator in the group statistics.

The normal reach rate is 10-20% of the total number of subscribers. If a million people subscribe to the group, the reach should be 100,000 - 200,000.

Advertising entries

If competitors posted only 1-3 times, most likely their advertising did not bring results. It is worth checking it for professional suitability (read about this in the “Composing a post” block).

If advertising posts of competitors are published regularly, then most likely the group has the audience you need. And to get a piece of it, stand apart from the competition with creatives and unique selling propositions.

Accommodation

Through administrator

To post directly:

1. Find the administrator's contacts on the page. If there are none, write your offer in a message or in a suggestion on the wall.

1. Agree on the price, time and conditions of placement. By purchasing a package of accommodations at once, you can agree on a discount. But you should buy more than one advertising space at once only in already verified communities.
2. Choose the time of posting based on the activity of subscribers. If the seats are only available for a low activity period, ask the administrator to reduce the price a little. You can view the activity in the "Pabler" in the "Detailed statistics" tab.

1. Submit your post for approval. Please note that you may need to make changes. Therefore, it is better to send the entry in advance so as not to redo it five minutes before publication.

Through the exchange "VK"

Publication through the VK advertising exchange is 10-15% more expensive. Suitable for those who do not use third-party community search tools, as the service itself offers accommodation options. And also for those who do not connect third-party metrics to analyze the effectiveness of advertising, because in your personal account you can see detailed statistics after the campaign.

To place a post through the exchange:

1. Create an ad and submit it for moderation.

When the post passes the test, it will appear in the "Active" tab - it can be posted. If it doesn't pass - "Rejected". In this case, the moderators will definitely indicate the reason, after correcting which, the ad can be sent back for moderation.

1. Based on the given parameters, find groups to place. You can search for them based on topics, budget, coverage, number of participants, etc. However, you won’t be able to find a specific community by name - the service itself will offer options.

1. Submit a placement request. Your ad will be automatically placed within the time range you specified.

Compiling a post

After you have agreed on the publication, prepare an advertising post.

1. In the ad, take into account the needs of the audience, tell how your product will solve their problem.

1. Analyze competitor ads, if any. Then come up with a unique offer and post style to make your creatives stand out from the crowd.

1. Examine the content of the public in which you plan to post. By learning which ones are the most popular, you will better understand the interests of subscribers. This will help make more interesting and less advertising post.

1. Fill the text with emoticons to make it more noticeable and focus on the main thing. Just do not overdo it, the post should look natural, and the emoticons should fit the meaning.

1. Shorten long links in the text with vk.cc or Google URL Shortener. So the record will take up less space, look neater and, most importantly, inspire more confidence.

1. The image should be catchy to get your post noticed in the feed, but still relevant to the offer.

1. Write a catchy headline. To do this, make it the main benefit. If it does not interest the target audience, then no one will read your text, even the most useful and selling one.

Working with comments

Negative. After the publication of the entry, comments will be left under it, and not always positive. Therefore, try to work out all the negativity.

Informational. Also, people can ask questions: “how to order”, “how much does it cost”, “what is the advantage of the product”, etc. They also need to be answered in time.

Outsiders. Any off-topic remarks can be asked to remove the administrator.

Evaluation of results

To make it convenient to keep statistics and analyze the results, create a table in Google Sheets or Excel with the following fields:

• name and link to the community,
• advertising post,
• placement cost,
• date and time of posting,
• administrator contacts,
• number of transitions
• the number of applications
• ER group,
• profit.

See data on transitions and applications in Yandex.Metrica. And to distinguish between your sponsored posts and the communities you host, add UTM tags to your links. Dmitry Dementy opened this topic in more detail in the article: "".

If placed through the VK exchange, in the advertiser's personal account after the RC you can see:

• the total number of users who viewed the advertisement, and their distribution by gender and age;
• the number of unique users who clicked on at least one link in the post;
• the number of users who shared, commented on, or liked the post;
• the number of subscribed users, if the community was advertised;
• number of applications per group.

To open detailed statistics, click on the corresponding icon in the section of the corresponding advertising campaign.

If you sent an application directly, but there is no way to connect the metric, ask the administrator for the statistics of the post before deleting it. She shows:

• overall reach and subscriber reach;
• likes, reposts and comments;
• the number of users who have hidden a post from their newsfeed;
• the number of complaints about the publication;
• The number of people who clicked on the link in the post.

Re-placements

If your first few community posts were successful, keep posting. But keep in mind that over time, ad conversion will decrease. Most members will notice your ad after a few placements, so next time they will ignore it. To overcome banner blindness, update your post every few placements.

• Test the new header.
• Change emoticons.
• Change the structure of the text.
• Post with a different image.

Give your post a new look and people will start noticing your post again.

For example, I posted several times in the community with this announcement:

The first placement brought ten leads, the second - eight, after the third placement only two applications came, after the fourth - three.

I changed the photo, came up with a new headline, added different emoticons, and the next day I posted in the same group.

Re-placements with a new post brought eight, and the second time - seven applications. Despite the fact that the text of the ad remained the same, only its visual part and title have changed.

Search for new communities

To increase coverage, you need to constantly look for new groups to place. To find similar communities, use an audience intersection tool such as Cerebro Target. In it, you can follow the link to the public in which you have already successfully advertised, find similar ones, where part of the same subscribers will consist. To do this, go to the "Audience search" section, the "Groups with target audience" subsection and insert a link to the desired page.

Groups can be filtered by the parameters you need and download links to them in a text document or in Excel.

To find audience intersections, you can also use free analogues, for example, the application "

Just so you know, this article will be accompanied (with pictures and quotes) by the Pulp Fiction movie. Why? Yes, because for me advertising on the Internet is like a Tarantino movie - all parts of the plot are separated, mixed up and shown in the "wrong" order. Why then am I writing about it? To prove: if I figured it out, then anyone can.

Really can't stand introductory articles. It's often hard to start somehow normally, without any of these “Well, well. Let's move from theory to practice."

Mia: Do you hate it too?

Vincent: Hate what?

Mia: Awkward silence. Why do people necessarily need to freeze some nonsense, just to feel at ease?

Vincent: I don't know. Good question.

(c) "Pulp Fiction"

First, briefly for those who like to read only the beginning of the article

Imagine, now you can get your ads not only with the help of Direct and Adwords. Now (after reading this article) you will be able to spam any posts in your users' news feed. Any users. A! What an idea!

Making your advertising entries, you can take advantage of all the hospitality of VK: attach songs, polls, and anything else. You can also set up the target audience in the best traditions of online advertising: select users by interests, by city of residence, age, etc. And you can also use special services (for example, Cerebro) to parse an audience from communities of interest: find the specific people you need, and even get their friends.

Relatively cheap, easy to make, suitable for any (except elite) business. All in all. must be taken!

But that's it in a nutshell :)

You don't have to "think" about anything. Need to know. (p.) "Pulp Fiction"

1. Your ad will hang in the feed of your target audience just until you're blue in the face (well, or whatever you want). Well, or until the user does something with it (clicks, hides, etc.).
2. And there is also such cool thing: You can embed additional pixel codes that can then be used to track cross-channel marketing campaigns.
3. You can also file a VK retargeting pixel and watch how the number of people who see your post grows (or does not grow).

pros

• No need to worry about the type of ad. Thanks to VK, your posts will look equally great both on the tablet and on the big screen.
• By the way, about different platforms. It is very cool that users of various gadgets will see one ad.
• More likely to get into the halo of attention of a person who rarely hangs out in your community.
• You do not hit in the forehead with your advertising. Advertising entries are very nice and neatly fit into the user's feed. Plus, they also alternate with the usual ones: VK will show ads no more than once every 25 posts.
• If you correctly target, then the click will be impressively cheap.

In what cases it can be used (usually others use)

Creating and setting up an ad

I think when all this shit is over, you'll understand. You will understand that everything is fine. And you will fucking smile at yourself from the mirror. (c) "Pulp Fiction"

Important!

1. You can only promote posts that are published by the community. That is, no personal ads about “Selling a garage”.
2. It is logical (just in case, I will say) that it is impossible to promote records of closed groups and events in the news feed. Because they are closed :)
3. One entry = one ad. And even the other one won't work. There is more here important point: if you have archived your pk, you will not be able to create a new ad on an already used one. Don't be lazy.
4. You can only promote posts of communities for which you have admin rights. By the way, in the near future VK was going to be generous with special advertiser rights.

Community Requirements

• The description of the activity should include the name of the brand/company and general information.
• Community avatar logo.
• Contacts: phone, website, mail, office address, or at least one of the above.

How to start promoting community posts in VK

Let's start together, hand in handpromotion of your community posts in VK.

Not so difficult, agree?

I will explain for the smart ones. I'm not here to ask for anything. I'm here to tell you what to do. And, if the instinct of self-preservation is not alien to you, come on, start running. I'm here to help. But, if my help is not appreciated - good luck, gentlemen.

(p.) Woolf “Pulp Fiction”

In a previous publication, we made an overview of a tool that appeared in service with marketers relatively recently - native advertising.

One of the platforms where you can independently and very quickly launch native advertising (the one that is shown in the news feed) is the social network VKontakte. Today we will talk about how to set up native VK advertising.

How to set up native advertising in VK?

There are two ways to create native VKontakte ads.

The advantage of the first approach is that a post from the community will gain likes and shares, and all this will positively affect the attractiveness of the community.

The second approach should be used when you do not want advertising posts, for example, due to the fact that there will be a lot of them, do not spam the news feed.

On the page that opens, select "Post promotion".

A window will open where you will need to click "Create Entry".

After choosing the community that you will advertise, you can proceed to the creation of the advertising post itself. Write text, insert a picture and a link if necessary.

Finally, you can choose which button will be displayed in the post. If you use the button maximum length text in the post - 220 characters. If the button is not needed or you want to place a longer text, click on the cross to remove the button from the entry.

All about Vkontakte advertisements

We continue a series of articles on promotion through targeted advertising on Vkontakte. You can find out what targeted advertising is and how it is used in our article - link.

Two types of Vkontakte ads

Moreover, each of the types has several formats that are created for a specific type of advertising. To select the one you need, enter your advertising account, go to the tab " Targeting» - « Create ad».

Advertisements in the news feed

As you can see, it differs from the usual entry only by a small signature in the upper corner “ Advertising entry».

Advantages:

This view is displayed directly in the news feed, which increases the number of views. Accordingly, a large coverage of subscribers.

Displayed as in full version site, as well as mobile applications and mobile version.

Vkontakte offers a choice of three types of ads for the news feed

Let's look at each of them in more detail.

Carousel- the type of advertisement that is suitable for the promotion of services or goods. You can use from three to 10 links per ad. In addition, each link will be a card of a product or service. Such an entry looks like this:

Ad requirements:

- The number of cards of goods or services should be from 3 to 10

- Header length for each card from 3 to 25 characters with spaces

- Image at least 400 px in width. Animations are not supported.

- The price of the service is from 0 to 10 billion rubles. In this case, the price is indicated either for all cards, or for none.

- You can attach a button with a call to action (“go”, “open”, “order”, etc.) to each card. All cards must have buttons or none.

- You can't attach other attachments to the post

- The statistics show the total transitions for all cards. To get statistics for a specific card, you can use UTM tags.

2) You must select the community on whose behalf the entry will be posted. If you do not have a community, you need to create it and fill it with content.

3) Now you need to create the ad text and add product cards.

4) Fill out the page of this card.

- Upload an image that must be at least 400 pixels

- Enter a title

- Add the old price (if the product has a discount)

- Add the price of the product

- Adding a button

5) After that, create at least 2 more cards by selecting " Add card».

6) Proceed to setting up the target audience. Set the parameters you need and you can send the entry for moderation.

Universal notation

Universal notation - a type of Vkontakte advertisement that is used to promote any product, product, application, community, post, etc. By choosing this format, you can use all the features of the social network: attach photos, videos, polls, etc.

2) Now you need to create a new post for advertising, or select an existing one.

When creating a new entry, you must specify the community on behalf of which it will be posted. If you do not have it, then create and fill it with content.

After that, click on the button " Create».

4) Set up your target audience and launch your ad.

This type of ad may contain a button with a call to action (Buy, Download, Order, etc.). It is worth noting that when choosing this type, only payment for ad impressions will be available.

3) You need to set up an ad.

- Upload an image

- Create a title (from 3 to 80 characters)

- Select the button to record. It is worth noting that when advertising different products (website, group, etc.), the names of the buttons will be different. You can also remove the button by clicking on the cross next to it.

4) Save the post and set up the target audience. After that, you can start the ad.

This type of ad is suitable for promoting third-party sites, applications and Vkontakte communities. The main disadvantage is that posts are shown only in the full version of the site. An example of such an ad is shown in the screenshot below.

Vkontakte offers 3 types of ads on the site pages.

External site

2) Select " External site».

Image and text

big image

5) Set up the target audience and send the ad for moderation.

Community

3) Choose one of available options ads

Image and text

big image

Community promotion

4) Set up your target audience and launch your ad

Application

Suitable for promoting games and applications hosted on a social network. If you are the administrator of the application, you can pay for its advertising with Vkontakte votes.

square image

Image and text

big image

Special

Application showcase

4) Set up the target audience and run the ad

Let's start our today's tutorial on setting up advertising in the news feed VKontakte from the direct creation of an advertisement. To do this, go to Personal Area and click on the "Create announcement" button and in the window that opens, select the value "Community post":

Next, you need to select the post that you plan to advertise. We have already created in the previous article and will use it. Click on our finished post and copy its link as shown in the image below. We return to the page for creating an advertisement and paste it into the field. Click on the "Continue" button.

Or you can create a new post. The whole process is similar to creating a post from your community page. However, in this case, your group subscribers will not see the finished published post: it will be available only to you for further advertising. It is this method that we recommend for our clients, since it is quite convenient not to interfere with advertising posts in your group.

The only nuance that needs to be taken into account is the minimum price value when paying for impressions of 30 rubles. If you choose less, the ad won't run. Do not forget to indicate the number of impressions per person in order to avoid annoying him and to get a larger final coverage.

Select the “Create new” item in the “Advertising campaign” column, name it and click on the “Create ad” button. Ready!

After you get the first results for your ads, you can view detailed statistics at the link:

In the window that opens, you will see statistics in numbers, namely:

• How many people viewed your ad.
• How many saw your post thanks to the reposts of other users of the Vkontakte system.
• How many people moved to your group from the post.
• How many joined the group.
• How many people followed the link to your landing page.
• Feedback: User interaction with an ad post.
• Hiding entries. It is normal if this indicator is different from zero. It is important that it is not too high. Otherwise, you should reconsider your ad.