If An Ad Appears For Your Market And No One Wants To Click On It…
We know the philosophical question of a tree, falling in the forest. If no one hears it, does it make a noise? Of late I’ve been pondering the same thing regarding ads on social networking sites. The trade press makes great arguments that the ability to precisely target your customers make them invaluable, but I wonder if you gain much value of putting ads in an environment people don’t come to to buy.
SOCIAL NETWORKING: EXPLOSIVE GROWTH—In the past year or so we’ve seen the explosion of social networking. TechCrunch has a nifty graphic on the growth of LinkedIn for 2008 that shows a growth from under four million unique visitors at the beginning of 2008 to nearly eight million by the end of the year, doubling in size in 2008. That’s pretty impressive—until you consider that from January 2009 until the present LinkedIn has grown to 67 million users in a little over a year.
Or consider Facebook. In their blog archive, Facebook reports some 150 million users at the beginning of 2009. Today they report over 400 million active users. And this doesn’t even get into their recent coup to take over the Internet.
New kid on the block, Twitter, has grown from 18 million users in 2009 to 75 million this year and Ashton Kutchner and Brittney Spears are in a race to gain five million followers.
MARKETING OPPORTUNITY—This kind of growth has naturally been of interest to marketers. It is difficult to quantify the effectiveness of buying an ad on television, in a newspaper, or other traditional media. You may get a decent idea of response and a general idea of how well you’re reaching your target demographic but even with best efforts traditional advertising remains as much an art as a science and in the recent economic downturn, it’s been vitally important for marketers to prove they are pulling their weight. That’s another thing that makes social networks attractive to marketers. On a site like Facebook, where its members voluntarily list likes, dislikes, interests, hobbies, age, marital status, and a host of other demographic information, you have the ability to precisely target your customers, making the idea of advertising on Facebook a bit of a darling to marketing pudits.
THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT—But what is the value of being able to reach your customer if he or she isn’t buying? The truism of the telemarketer, calling during dinnertime became such an issue that the Federal Government created a “Do Not Call” Registry in 2003. If you’ve ever been to Facebook you’ll no doubt be familiar with the string of targeted ads that appear in the right column. While not perfect, they do a pretty good job picking out products that should appeal to me. But in the year or so that I’ve been on Facebook I think I’ve clicked on maybe two ads. So does it really make sense to be able to touch your target market if they aren’t buying?
In creating Privateer I tried a number of Internet marketing tactics: Google Adwords, Yahoo! Marketing, and Facebook Ads. Of the three, Google Adwords generated by far the most traffic. Yahoo! generated some site visits, but nothing compared to Google, and the effect of advertising on Facebook, where theoretically I can dial my marketing campaign in to my exact customer base, I got virtually no response.
On the plus side, with Internet marketing you only pay for what you use. You aren’t making the multimillion dollar gamble of buying 30 seconds during the Superbowl, where the money is gone whether it drives response or not, but I’m inclined to say that the benefits of precise targeting are offset if you’re making your pitch in an environment where the customer isn’t shopping.
EPILOGUE—As I mentioned, I got my best response in online advertising through Google Adwords, but you want to know what the overall best ROI was? Spending two afternoons at the annual pirate festival, handing out stickers with the company URL on the back. As tempting as the promise of Internet marketing may be, marketers still need to be able to drive traffic in the good old fashioned real world.
Tags: marketing, targeted marketing
