Tag Archives: Social media marketing

January 10, 2018 · 12:10 pm

What Has Happened?

Maybe it’s because the start of the year is also a time of reflection, but I continue to be appalled at the state of the online advertising business. It’s not so much about the fact that 2 players – Facebook and Google – gobble up the majority of money spent. In fact, in terms of ad revenue, Facebook by itself is twice as big as the newspaper business, according to eMarketer, and will be bigger than the entire print business shortly. Google is twice as big as Facebook. There’s a third player – Amazon – on the way to suck up a huge share of the ad pot as well.

While that isn’t the problem, it does mean that the rest of the industry is fighting over relative crumbs. When you’re desperate, you might do things that you know are wrong or foolish and that’s where I think we are. In fact, I think we’ve gone way over the line from foolish to criminal.

Some examples. Yesterday while I was reading an article via the web browser on my phone, up popped the screen you see on the right. Those of you who have an Android phone know that what you see looks very much like the Google Play store and it seems as if there is a critical app update I need to make. It is an ad, of course, trying to get me to install what I assume is malware. Had I not noticed that it was in a web browser and not in the native Play Store, I just might have clicked.

This is why the online ad business is doomed or at least the part that’s outside of the big 3. On the consumer side, people are forced to use ad blockers to prevent malware from infecting their devices as well as interrupting their tasks with annoying popups. On the business side, publishers keep pushing ads knowing that some percentage of them are scams or worse yet unable to do anything since in many cases they’re not the ones selling the ads. They’ve offloaded that to third parties and 74.5% of US digital display ad dollars transacted programmatically will go to private marketplaces and programmatic direct setups.

Speaking of those third parties, they might just be the worst thieves in the bunch. They claim to be there to help publishers increase revenues or marketers to buy efficiently yet they inject numerous fees, both known and hidden, into the process, siphoning off at significant (upwards of 25%) amount of the available money in the transaction. Those hidden fees, by the way, might just violate any number of local and federal laws.

So what has happened to the ad business in which I grew up? What has happened to agencies being honest brokers and nearly full transparency on all sides? Where is someone in the ad chain (looking at you, ad networks) saying “no” to scams, malware, and the other crap that serve no purpose other than to encourage adblocking or to harm someone? Anyone?

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November 27, 2017 · 11:14 am

Lost In The Flood

Today is Cyber Monday, which is, of course, another “Hallmark Holiday” – something made up by marketers to sell stuff. It’s the first Monday after Thanksgiving which, as we all know, exists only to let us know that Black Friday is the next day. That might even be a bit untrue since Black Friday now seems to start after lunch on Thursday.

In any event, there are lots of deals to be had (available while supplies last). I did a little counting and my inbox received 324 Black Friday emails announcing sales, deals, specials, and other marketing miracles. I’ve received 88 Cyber Monday emails promoting today’s deals but the day has barely begun so that number is low. My business account received far fewer which I guess means that neither day is as huge for B2B selling.

I don’t know about you, but I deleted the vast majority of these emails without even opening them. It wasn’t that they had crappy subject lines. They all just got lost in the flood created by the breaking of the holiday dam. Interestingly, Amazon, from whom I get a daily mail about something I might have been checking out in the last week, only sent a single missive for each sale day while several other retailers sent multiple emails every day.

What’s a marketer to do? The next month is a prime selling window for nearly every brand so sitting it out isn’t really an option. There needs to be a recognition, however, that the noise level is at jet-engine levels and something needs to help your marketing efforts get noticed. If you’re thinking that moving to social channels is the answer, it’s probably not. Sure, it might be easier to get in front of the customer but, as a McKinsey study stated:

E-mail remains a significantly more effective way to acquire customers than social media—nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined. That’s because 91 percent of all US consumers still use e-mail daily,1and the rate at which e-mails prompt purchases is not only estimated to be at least three times that of social media, but the average order value is also 17 percent higher.2

I’d suggest avoiding the flood as best you can. Start your holiday season in early November (or maybe even late October if you can avoid the Halloween noise) by teasing offers to come. Get your customers in the mood to buy. Who wouldn’t want to have their holiday shopping done early? Obviously, if you’re not checking your outbound mail across every platform to be sure it renders properly you’re committing marketing suicide. Responsive design is a must!

Finally, go local and get personal. Whatever you can do to tailor your messages to each location and/or each customer will greatly increase your conversion rates. I’m always surprised when I get what is obviously a generic email when even minimal segmentation would get me to read it. There are dozens of retargeting technologies out there. Speak as if you were at a cocktail party – one to one – and not with a bullhorn.

To paraphrase The Boss, have you thrown your marketing to the war, or did you lose it in the flood?

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October 23, 2017 · 10:43 am

Getting Social

You might think that after a decade or more of social media as a legitimate channel through which marketers can engage consumers we’d be doing a decent job of it. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s true for the bulk of the marketing world. In the interest of improving both results and the quality of the messages with which we’re all deluged, here are a few things I’ve found to be helpful when engaging in social media marketing.

First, research has shown that the vast majority of brands today invest most of their paid social media budgets into brand awareness marketing. I get that the sales cycle has to begin with lead generation and that begins with awareness, but if you’re spending all of your budgets on the news feed and not enough on conversion, retention, and service than you’re doomed to massive churn rates and ultimate failure.

Next, ask yourself how engaging you really are. The news feed, whether Facebook, Instagram, or elsewhere, is a place where consumers go to interact with their friends and to be entertained. It’s also becoming a primary news channel for many. Nobody is there to interact with you. Let me repeat that. Nobody is there to be sold to; they are there to be entertained. Are you doing that or are you the guy at the cocktail party who keeps asking all the guests if they have car insurance because that’s what he sells?

Whatever messages you’re sending out, how are you deciding about targeting? The holy grail of marketing is the right message to the right person at exactly the right time. It’s extremely tailored. If you’re buying big, untargeted audiences (Men, Women 18-34, People living in Maryland), you’re using a wrench as a hammer. It’s a misuse of a tool.

Finally, are you being you? Has your brand created a distinctive personality or is it all corporate ad speak? People don’t want to engage with robots so don’t sound like one. Be real and listen a lot more than you speak. Let your customers guide your marketing. Don’t respond to a question just with a “that’s on the FAQ page of our website.” Use it as the basis for your next blog post which then goes through the social channels.

I’m a fan of social media marketing even as I recognize that it’s full of landmines. You don’t want to be the company that “goes viral” for the wrong reasons (DiGiorno, Red Lobster, and many others) due to some social media faux pas. You want to be unique, interesting, relevant, inspiring, authentic, and entertaining while staying focused on your target audience and your own goals. Doable?

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