Digital Prof: Thoughts on Digital Marketing

As anyone with an eye on marketing or the stock market could tell you, Facebook has recently been facing stormy waters.  Between losing a major advertiser, dealing with the IPO fallout, and news that approximately 8.7% of all Facebook accounts are fake; Facebook now has to contend with reports that paid traffic from Facebook may be delivering astonomically high levels of fruadulent traffic.  

While reports vary, I've heard theories of what the cause could be that run from clickbots to bored users to accidental click levels.  Regardless of the true cause, the claims of inefficiency, coupled with the recent loss of GM as an advertiser, speak to a true weakness in Facebook's advertising platform.

In my current role as a lead generation specialist in a direct response industry, these stories certainly give me pause when I think about giving Facebook ads a larger role in the name acquisition toolbox.

Bottom line: By all means, give Facebook (and Facebook ads) a shot.  I've heard strong success stories that counter these arguments, so it certainly isn't impossible to succeed.  

The Web giant announced Tuesday that it plans to follow the activities of users across nearly all of its ubiquitous sites, including YouTube, Gmail and its leading search engine.  For detailed information, please read the full article.  My assumption is that this has a two-fold purpose; it will aid Google in ad targeting for business, and will help them provide more personalized search results/offerings for Google+.  

For our purposes, I want to examine what this will mean for digital marketing.  I see this as a good development, if consumers react as I suspect.  Consumers are increasingly vigilant about privacy, and for a large number of users, I expect to see more logging-out behavior. 

SEO

Ever since the (not provided) debacle launched with Google Analytics, there has been a deluge of webmasters and search marketers flooding the forums with complaints about the lack of information.  If users react to this news by more frequently signing out of Google, then these marketers will be very happy, as this should mean fewer (not provided) keywords will be visiting their sites.  This will make all the search marketers I know very happy.

Social

I also anticipate that when users log out of Google more frequently, this will slow down the active adoption of Google+.  While sign up rates are high for Google+, most users within my circles are limited users, if they use it at all.  And considering that one of the top reasons people leave Facebook is due to privacy concerns, this limits the advantage that Google (supposedly) offered.

PPC

This is the one area where I see the biggest impact, assuming users DO NOT move to a system where they more frequently log out of Google.  The massive amounts of data will allow Google to more closely target ads to consumers who are likely to respond to them.  As I'm sure all marketers are aware, this is pure digital marketing gold. 

Search Market Share

A less likely, but still possible situation, is that Bing will take advantage of consumer uproar to switch users to Bing.  This coincides nicely with their "ing" campaign as well.  With enough of a push in mainstream media, I could see Bing growing their market share slightly this quarter. 

I was very excited to see this article in my news feed earlier today.  But once I dug into it, I was couldn't feel anything but a bit of a let-down.  Or rather, that the title was mis-leading.  Since Google Panda, we have of course seen greater influence from content creation, honest online reputation management/pr, and social media signals.  

However, in my mind, and in my actions (as well as those of many of my colleagues), this has been a successful tactic for many years.  Similar to branding and brand positioning, when we, as marketers, focus on the authentic, actionable, and distinctive characteristics of our products and websites, the result is a strong online presence that is rewarded with strong positioning and visibility. 

So to label this a "creative" approach seems a bit overblown.  I won't argue with the recommended action items for how to approach SEO, since the tactics recommended make perfect sense.  I just disagree with the presentation.

eMarketer reports that advertisers are becoming more aware and interested in Social Media Advertising.  However, sites that are less well known or older are lagging in both awareness and rating, while Facebook and Twitter dominate the field.

This data is not a true measure of awareness, however; but more a measure of willingness to launch an advertising campaign on a particular social network.  This can be a result of the lack of knowledge of the effectiveness of targeting, the tendency to lead to conversion, the cost of advertising, and other features that are more complex than this article and chart can demonstrate.  

For example, Zynga is a popular social gaming platform, and might offer an extended reach - but I have not heard how well they are able to target their ads, or any real statistics on performance.  I hear often about how Facebook and Twitter ads work, and strategies for improving performance.

Additionally, as with all advertising, my product or brand will influence what platforms I am willing to attach my brand to.  The products that I would advertise heavily on LinkedIn are different than the products I would advertise on Twitter.  While overlaps in market do exist, it becomes a matter of choosing the right site.

Personally, however, I think the key barrier to getting social advertisers to utilize social platforms like Meebo, Zynga, and Gowalla will be overcoming the data / familiarity barrier.  I know that many people are using Facebook and Twitter, and can provide recommendations on how to budget for these platforms, what to advertise, and whether they are even worthwhile to begin with.

This is a very interesting and honest read regarding buying behavior in the ereader and tablet markets.  With the understanding that both of these products offer great potential, the article also offers an opinion on the drawbacks in both the markets and the products themselves.  

Personally, I was surprised at the percent of readers who read via their smartphones; this percentage is greater than the percent of readers who read via ereaders (only slightly, but still greater).  I've always appreciated the larger screen size of an ereader compared to my phone, not to mention the e-Ink technology, but for publishers, this a critical statistic to understanding the market.

One factor that I believe will play a crucial component in the development of both these markets is the behavior of brands and marketers in regards to making digital assets (websites, social media, etc) not only available for these devices, but in optimizing content to be consumed via specific devices.  Additionally, as brands make decisions regarding which devices they believe that their content should be available on, they will begin to slowly influence the buyer behavior in these markets.

Takeaway: Mobilizing content and making it available to users through a variety of devices and digital channels will become an increasingly important and complicated process that marketers will need to master.  As marketers, we will need to develop methods to really become attuned to our audience needs; partnering with our web analytics team will be fundamental to ensuring that we can derive the strongest insights into how users are discovering and consuming our content (insights necessary for optimizing content, developing brand equity and guiding consumer perception).

The anticipated removal of brand profiles has become apparent on Google+.  While some brand pages still remain (stated as the tests of the business profiles), Google is urging brands to turn over brand pages to dedicated, personal users.  Additionally, Google has stated that the business profiles will be coming down the pipeline for all brands within the next few months.

With so many qualified candidates expressing intense interest in business profiles, we’ve been thinking hard about how to handle this process. Your enthusiasm obligates us to do more to get businesses involved in Google+ in the right way, and we have to do it faster. As a result, we have refocused a few priorities and we expect to have an initial version of businesses profiles up and running for EVERYONE in the next few months. There may be a tiny handful business profiles that will remain in the meantime solely for the purpose of testing how businesses interact with consumers.

While I'm sad to see that this prediction has come true, I am happy that I recommended to my clients that they wait for the official brand profiles.  I'm still dismayed that Google did not dedicate the resources to developing a brand profile before they launched, but I'm happy that they are taking notice now of the demand.

This article, posted on Mashable and originally from the American Express OPEN Forum, explains why contests should be a part of your social media toolkit.  

These reasons include the following:

Contests Are a Great Tool for Building Your Fan Base

Contests Enable You To Engage Your Audience

Contests Are a Rich Source of Data

Contests Empower Customers To Do Your Marketing For You

While I agree that contest can be a useful tool in gaining fans/follwers, engaging your followers, and all the rest, I think there are some crucial elements missing from this analysis.

First, while contests can drive a huge fan base, you have to have a strategy for maintaining engagement levels with this newly increased fan base.  As well, we have to understand that a large portion of these new fans will never become active users of our social media platforms.  While this is certainly not a reason to avoid contests, we need to aware of this reality when calculating our decision to run a contest.

Second, a contest along is not enough to provide engagement or empower customers to do your marketing for you.  I've seen many failed UGC contests (such as a photo or video contest), and I think the key to success is that you must already have developed a strong relationship with your followers.  My experience has also led me to believe that you need a fairly substantial level of followers to begin with in order to really see a high level of success.

However, there are ways to deal with this.  A two-part contest can work wonders.  The first half is a giveaway of a hot item (say, an iPad), and then once you have that number of fans and they are avidly awaiting results, you launch a UGC contest with a more relevant and engaging prize.

Lastly, while contests are a rich source of data, we must be aware that the amount of data we collect must be minimal, or we will scare aware potential entrants.  So, as marketers, we have to carefully plan not only the prize (which should be attractive and relevant to our audience), but also design (and maybe even test, if we're able to) an entrance form that encourage users to move to the next step - submission.

Recently I've been delving into digital marketing in the international arena, so I was excited to stumble across this infographic on Facebook usage in Asia.  

I'm sure it's no surprise to anyone that China is not ranking high on this list, but this is definitely a good cheatsheet to jumpstart your research on how to reach out to your Asian audience.

I note with interest that Indonesia is the top Asian market - one of my old colleagues was from Indonesia, and from the way he posts, I was not surprised to see Indonesia on this list.  

Personally, I have noticed a significant increase in the CPC for Facebook Ads.  I'm not surprised to hear that this is a widespread trend, as I anticipated that more and more brands would jump into Display on Facebook.

Increased presence from advertisers pushed up Facebook’s cost-per-click by 22% in the second quarter, following a 40% jump in the first quarter, per a new report.

While this statistic is based on a subset of clients for Efficient Frontier, an advertising agency, combined with my experiences, I'm inclined to believe that this is the case.

What is interesting in this trend is that historically, Facebook display ads under-perform compared to banner ads.  While the costs remain lower than traditional display/banner advertising, I will continue to view Facebook ads as a valuable portion of the marketing mix; however, once this value proposition is gone, these ads will lose their value.  

Since analysts are indicating that Facebook will take the top spot for display advertising for 2011, I wonder when we will see the price disparity even out?

One additional highlight I would like to share, for all my fellow search marketers, is that Facebook ad spend is not currently cannibilising search, although I would keep an eye on where spends are coming from.

Facebook spend currently is mostly incremental and not cannibalising search. Budget for Facebook is mostly coming from offline media such as TV and print. Efficient Frontier believes that Facebook will show the strongest growth in the months ahead.