What is the best way to advertise your products and services? What are the best strategies for getting value out of your marketing dollars to drive customer acquisition and engagement? These are the questions marketers are tasked to resolve on an ongoing basis and in a dynamic and fluid market. Of course Google has been the biggest beneficiary over the last few years of the rise (and rise!) of search advertising making the organisation billions of dollars a year in revenue. However the huge rise in the number of people using Social Networks like Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare brings a challenge to Google’s hegemony over ad spend. With 450 million people on Facebook, spending on average 55 minutes a day on the site, surely advertising in social networks will take a huge slice of Google’s ad revenue? When you consider that social networks hold a lot of information on their users that companies can leverage to better target their advertising – such as location, interests, demographics – you can start to see why Google is getting so worried. The last week alone has seen reports from multiple sources about the rumours that Google is investing heavily into a project to come up with a rival to Facebook. One would hope that the search giant comes out with something more successful than their last foray into social media with the much maligned launch of Google Buzz.
The reports of paid advertising placement being the singular focus of the way marketers will use social networking platforms misses in my mind a very important vector……
Social networks are by their design platforms that stimulate viral sharing. Users expect to connect and share. It is why they use the platforms. This means that if brands offer things that people want to share, then they can advertise products and services in ways that are not dependent on paid advertising. Of course it will always be a combination of paid ads and viral promotions that drive good campaigns, but clearly there needs to be a shift in the way marketers think about how they can reach people across social networks, and the impact on existing budget allocations. More focus and investment needs to be channelled into campaigns that leverage the inherent desire to share on social networks. Creating great content is of course one way, and there has been much said on this subject. And it is difficult. A much easier route to follow, is to tailor campaigns to formats which users think are fun, such as contests, polls, quizzes, and sweepstakes……
These formats are proven to drive viral promotion and can bring many more people into the reach of your campaigns, without having to pay to target them with advertising. Additionally, campaigns that are packaged in ways that speak to people’s eye for a deal such as coupons and time based offers, are also great strategies to get promoted virally. All of these are campaign formats that are ‘social web’ friendly i.e. they are structured to foster interaction and spread from person to person. There have been some astounding success stories, take Starbuck’s social media promoted ‘Free Pastry Day’ that drove 1 million people to their stores, covered here in Mashable
http://bit.ly/971ah7. Using promotions that are spread by users can drive huge increases in your marketing lists – getting more Fan’s on your Facebook page, and more Twitter followers – as well as building fresh new contacts for your email marketing activities.
Best in class companies are working out how to move from what I call a silo based ‘online channel presence’ strategy – ‘we must have detailed product and services information on our website, interact with people on our Facebook page, and broadcast marketing messages via our Twitter account’ - to thinking about how to re-package content and offers into promotions that are ‘social web friendly’ and then running them as co-ordinated campaigns across every digital touch-point an organisation has with the consumer, including the website, Facebook and Twitter. This not only gives the best chance of viral success, but it also promotes ‘social bridging’, which is the interaction between all the online channels, increasing engagement, and expanding ways in which you can reach your consumer.
Is the monopoly on ad revenue over?
As marketers get to grips with the impact of the growth of social networks, and start to adopt ‘social web’ friendly formats for campaigns, we predict that 30% of what today is spent on search advertising will be re-purposed to investing in creating and running campaigns for social networks. The ad-spend trends support this. Overall eMarketer estimated US online ad spending fell by 4.6% in 2009, to $22.4 billion, but grew on social networks by 3.9%. Facebook which accounts for 25% of overall ad spend on social networks, is predicted by eMarketer to increase it’s ad revenues by 39% globally in 2010. However we are only at the start of this process. Should Google be worried? Absolutely.
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