Sunday, November 28, 2010
Leaders who understand Social Media Marketing
Mashable profiles five business leaders who, according to them, understand the value of Social Media and the strategies they adapt. Each of them has a different lesson on how to get the best out of SMM. Click here to learn from them.
Friday, November 26, 2010
Facebook Ads Vs Google Adwords
Keying in the above headline on Google will return thousands of articles, posts, comments, links and videos on a topic that could decide the eventual winner in the great FB Vs Google battle. It could also define how big and how fast you can grow your business with a small marketing budget.
It is an interesting debate, especially as both Facebook Ads and Google's Adwords have provided marketers never before access. Adwords is successful primarily because the ads are linked to keyword searches. So if the search term happens to be: "cannon autofocus camera, Mumbai" and you happen to be a dealer in Mumbai and have selected these keyword(s) your ad will show up. With the almost perfect mapping of intent to purchase and you, that is a match to die for. However, that is in theory. In practice, adwords' incredible success could also be the cause of its downfall. Most popular keywords have been purchased at very high CPC rates, therefore your cost of buying the keyword gets more expensive every day. You could look to analyse the long tail and buy cheaper keywords...but that is a time consuming task best left to experts...in other words more cost.
Adwords began as a perfect solution for small businesses, but have since been swamped by multi-billion dollar budgets of the big corporates. In the example stated above, you could be competing for the same keywords with Canon, Nikon, Sony, Samsung, Croma...thereby increasing the cost. Still, Adwords unique ability to serve up relevant ads to its searchers and connect audiences with business is unprecedented. With over 60 billion searches happening everyday Adwords is not going away anytime soon.
So where do Facebook Ads come in? Facebook offers another unique ability...that of narrow targeting. Because of all the information we provide Facebook--at the time we set up our profile--the company is able to offer unprecedented targeting options. Continuing our earlier example of the cameras, if you want to target 20+ something professionals in Mumbai, male or female, you can exactly get your target audience. This level of targeting has not been available before, and is the USP for Facebook ads.
But you are reaching a passive audience. They might not be in the market for a digital camera. Another drawback with Facebook ads, is the state of mind of the user. When we are facebooking, we might not be there to purchase a product or service, we are probably only socializing. An ad at that time will not achieve very high click through rates (CTRs). Facebook has partly solved the passive problem by providing both CPC and CPM ads. So if you are looking for camera buyers, the CPC option would ensure that only those seriously interested in your product will click...and therefore increase ROI. CPM ad world be more useful in a marketing campaign where visibility, not leads is a priority.
Another advantage of the Facebook ads is the fact that you can use the ad to build up fans to your company/product page. So if you have a page on FB, you could actually use the ads to increase the fan base. Why? Simple enough. A fan of your FB page is a long-term prospect. Getting one person to like your page also increases the potential of their friends circle becoming aware of your page...therefore increasing the networking impact. On the other hand, Google Adwords have no such impact. They will drive traffic when on and its back to square one when your campaign ends.
Eventually your ideal platform depends on your campaign objective and budget. While you're working that out, one quick clue...Facebook ads are relatively new and therefore cheaper than Google adwords. But that could change very soon. So hurry.
CPC: Cost per click. You only pay when a user clicks on your ad
CPM: Cost per thousand impressions. Irrespective of a click you pay.
It is an interesting debate, especially as both Facebook Ads and Google's Adwords have provided marketers never before access. Adwords is successful primarily because the ads are linked to keyword searches. So if the search term happens to be: "cannon autofocus camera, Mumbai" and you happen to be a dealer in Mumbai and have selected these keyword(s) your ad will show up. With the almost perfect mapping of intent to purchase and you, that is a match to die for. However, that is in theory. In practice, adwords' incredible success could also be the cause of its downfall. Most popular keywords have been purchased at very high CPC rates, therefore your cost of buying the keyword gets more expensive every day. You could look to analyse the long tail and buy cheaper keywords...but that is a time consuming task best left to experts...in other words more cost.
Adwords began as a perfect solution for small businesses, but have since been swamped by multi-billion dollar budgets of the big corporates. In the example stated above, you could be competing for the same keywords with Canon, Nikon, Sony, Samsung, Croma...thereby increasing the cost. Still, Adwords unique ability to serve up relevant ads to its searchers and connect audiences with business is unprecedented. With over 60 billion searches happening everyday Adwords is not going away anytime soon.
So where do Facebook Ads come in? Facebook offers another unique ability...that of narrow targeting. Because of all the information we provide Facebook--at the time we set up our profile--the company is able to offer unprecedented targeting options. Continuing our earlier example of the cameras, if you want to target 20+ something professionals in Mumbai, male or female, you can exactly get your target audience. This level of targeting has not been available before, and is the USP for Facebook ads.
But you are reaching a passive audience. They might not be in the market for a digital camera. Another drawback with Facebook ads, is the state of mind of the user. When we are facebooking, we might not be there to purchase a product or service, we are probably only socializing. An ad at that time will not achieve very high click through rates (CTRs). Facebook has partly solved the passive problem by providing both CPC and CPM ads. So if you are looking for camera buyers, the CPC option would ensure that only those seriously interested in your product will click...and therefore increase ROI. CPM ad world be more useful in a marketing campaign where visibility, not leads is a priority.
Another advantage of the Facebook ads is the fact that you can use the ad to build up fans to your company/product page. So if you have a page on FB, you could actually use the ads to increase the fan base. Why? Simple enough. A fan of your FB page is a long-term prospect. Getting one person to like your page also increases the potential of their friends circle becoming aware of your page...therefore increasing the networking impact. On the other hand, Google Adwords have no such impact. They will drive traffic when on and its back to square one when your campaign ends.
Eventually your ideal platform depends on your campaign objective and budget. While you're working that out, one quick clue...Facebook ads are relatively new and therefore cheaper than Google adwords. But that could change very soon. So hurry.
CPC: Cost per click. You only pay when a user clicks on your ad
CPM: Cost per thousand impressions. Irrespective of a click you pay.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
10 Pointers to a good Social Media Marketing Plan
Susan Gunelius lists 10 must-dos when building out a social media marketing plan. While some of them are obvious point 7 (the 80:20 rule) would at first glance would seem to be counter-intuitive. In this point she actually advocates that only 20% of the posts should be self-promotional while the rest 80% should be on activities that are not. Personally, I feel the 80:20 rule can be more like 60:40, but that is besides the point. I do agree that most social networking concepts work best around a theme. Your own marketing message can tie in to the theme either directly or indirectly. For example: a weight-loss clinic hosting a page on health and then promoting its activities as a part of the overall health topic will work well. You can read all 10 steps here: 10-Steps to Getting Started in Social Media Marketing
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Targeted advertising driving FB revenues
Came across an interesting article on Fortune on how Facebook is creating a unique ad environment that allows for an unprecedented level of consumer targeting. They can do that, thanks to the personal information most of us willing give, when we join the site. Read the full story here: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/11/22/how-facebook-fixed-the-social-advertising-problem/
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Quality trumps Quantity
One of the early lures or promises of internet marketing has been its ability to reach out to huge volumes of users for a fraction of offline marketing costs and do this instantly. A billion emails ids is a small marketing campaign, as is a billion pageviews.
However, as most of us discovered these numbers do not really translate into substantial business gains. Marketing emails quickly became spam and most of us either deleted them or built elaborate spam filters around our email IDs. Most websites promise and indeed continue to deliver massive amounts of pageviews, but ad click through rates do not match the expectation of most marketers. The problem again is one of relevance. Marketers are generally unable to get to their target audience, as audience profiling on the web is still far from mature. In this scenario marketers have little option but to try and reach as big a base as possible…expecting some of the reach to be relevant. One of the most successful online advertising options is Google adwords.
This program is at the heart of Google’s revenues and works with the simple premise of providing relevant ads based on keywords that users search for. So if your business deals in cameras, all you have to do is buy the relevant keywords and users typing those keywords would see your ads. Simple, yet the system has its flaws. For one thing, most of the popular keywords are very expensive, so the cost of each conversion goes up. Second, even keyword mapping has not proved to be as relevant as it seems. Bounce rates from SEM campaigns can be very high. Basically means you paying to drawn irrelevant audiences to your site.
In this environment, Social Media Marketing takes the best of online marketing, which is the volumes, and adds loads of relevance to create a killer marketing tool. The fact that you can do it for minimum cost is a tremendous bonus. The main advantage an SMM marketing campaign is its ability to attract and hold relevant audiences. This is because an SMM campaign would actually require the user to participate…thereby creating an environment of active consumption, not the passive consumption mode that is the norm for most marketing strategies. For example on twitter of Facebook, you will have to either “follow” the product or campaign or “like” it. This indicates a first level of interest on what is on offer. A good SMM campaign will then ensure a high degree of user engagement to get the message across.
This brings me back to the SMM campaign for compareindia.com, which is underway on Facebook. It has been two months since we began a page on FB, which we populate everyday with information on products and prices. The number of “likes” per day has gone up from about 25 to 27-28, people liking our FB page. We have also seen an increased level of user interaction on the page. For now the interaction is between users and compareindia staff. Our target is to get users to interact among themselves, thereby creating a great buyer community. That has not happened yet, but that could also be due to the low number of fans. We have a little under 1500 fans, and as this number goes up, I expect the level of interaction to also increase. As stated earlier our objective to set up this page, was to drive traffic to our website. The numbers from FB continue to increase impressively. While the base is still low, current pageviews growth is at 75%, the highest among all other traffic sources to our site. Also the quality of this traffic is much better than what we get from search engines. By quality, I mean users from our FB page do more on the site and spend more time there, than users coming to us from searches.
User behavior on compareindia of traffic from FB Vs Google
* Bounce rate refers to users coming to the site and leaving it after viewing just one page. So a higher percentage is not good news.
All in all, SMM is helping compareindia reach out to a wider audience. The only problem we have is with the pace of this reach. It would be great if we could get more users to “like” our page everyday than the current 27-28 users.
This article first appeared in the November 2010 issue of Entreprenuer. It has also been published online on biztech2.com. The link is here: http://biztech2.in.com/blogs/editorial-blogs/quality-trumps-quantity/95382/0
However, as most of us discovered these numbers do not really translate into substantial business gains. Marketing emails quickly became spam and most of us either deleted them or built elaborate spam filters around our email IDs. Most websites promise and indeed continue to deliver massive amounts of pageviews, but ad click through rates do not match the expectation of most marketers. The problem again is one of relevance. Marketers are generally unable to get to their target audience, as audience profiling on the web is still far from mature. In this scenario marketers have little option but to try and reach as big a base as possible…expecting some of the reach to be relevant. One of the most successful online advertising options is Google adwords.
This program is at the heart of Google’s revenues and works with the simple premise of providing relevant ads based on keywords that users search for. So if your business deals in cameras, all you have to do is buy the relevant keywords and users typing those keywords would see your ads. Simple, yet the system has its flaws. For one thing, most of the popular keywords are very expensive, so the cost of each conversion goes up. Second, even keyword mapping has not proved to be as relevant as it seems. Bounce rates from SEM campaigns can be very high. Basically means you paying to drawn irrelevant audiences to your site.
In this environment, Social Media Marketing takes the best of online marketing, which is the volumes, and adds loads of relevance to create a killer marketing tool. The fact that you can do it for minimum cost is a tremendous bonus. The main advantage an SMM marketing campaign is its ability to attract and hold relevant audiences. This is because an SMM campaign would actually require the user to participate…thereby creating an environment of active consumption, not the passive consumption mode that is the norm for most marketing strategies. For example on twitter of Facebook, you will have to either “follow” the product or campaign or “like” it. This indicates a first level of interest on what is on offer. A good SMM campaign will then ensure a high degree of user engagement to get the message across.
This brings me back to the SMM campaign for compareindia.com, which is underway on Facebook. It has been two months since we began a page on FB, which we populate everyday with information on products and prices. The number of “likes” per day has gone up from about 25 to 27-28, people liking our FB page. We have also seen an increased level of user interaction on the page. For now the interaction is between users and compareindia staff. Our target is to get users to interact among themselves, thereby creating a great buyer community. That has not happened yet, but that could also be due to the low number of fans. We have a little under 1500 fans, and as this number goes up, I expect the level of interaction to also increase. As stated earlier our objective to set up this page, was to drive traffic to our website. The numbers from FB continue to increase impressively. While the base is still low, current pageviews growth is at 75%, the highest among all other traffic sources to our site. Also the quality of this traffic is much better than what we get from search engines. By quality, I mean users from our FB page do more on the site and spend more time there, than users coming to us from searches.
User behavior on compareindia of traffic from FB Vs Google
| Parameter | FB Traffic | Google Traffic |
| Pages/Visit | 3.04 | 1.83 |
| Average time on site | 3 mins 57 secs | 1 min 28 sec |
| Bounce Rate* | 53.14% | 60.41% |
All in all, SMM is helping compareindia reach out to a wider audience. The only problem we have is with the pace of this reach. It would be great if we could get more users to “like” our page everyday than the current 27-28 users.
This article first appeared in the November 2010 issue of Entreprenuer. It has also been published online on biztech2.com. The link is here: http://biztech2.in.com/blogs/editorial-blogs/quality-trumps-quantity/95382/0
Marketing for Free
Mark Zuckerberg has probably made it to the top of every traditional Head of Marketing’s black books. Even as these venerable gentlemen were coming to grips with the power and reach of the online medium, Mr Zuckerberg hits them with Facebook. This online phenomenon, along the more cryptic twitter and smaller cousins like linked.in and orkut are rapidly rewriting the rules of marketing.
I could throw a bunch of numbers at you to show how fast Facebook and twitter are growing, but you already know that. What I want to do instead is to focus on how these two have emerged as amazing powerful marketing tools…especially for companies where having a marketing budget itself is a bit of a stretch.
Social media works on the principle of six degrees of separation. So in theory, if you know the right six people on say Facebook, you will be able to connect to everyone on the site, and you can do this at virtually no cost.
In preparation for this series, I actually ran an experiment to see if it was possible to do this for free. We set up a Facebook page for compareindia.com about two months ago. The idea was to try and grow pageviews for the site through the FB page. Initially Sharon Khare, the editor of the site and I, sent out requests to our friends to “Like” our FB page. That got us to about 60 followers in the first week. We also put up a Facebook widget on the compareindia to drive our regular users to “Like” our FB page. Sharon would regularly update the page with the best prices on a variety of products and I would respond to any queries from users.
Initially we had about four to six users “Like”ing our page everyday. While it was difficult to trace where these users came from, it was most likely from the compareindia website itself. The first set of users would generally not comment too much and all you would find on page would be updates from Sharon. However, over a period of time the number of “Likes” started going up every day. We currently average around 25 likes a day. We also noticed a growing willingness on the part of our users to engage in relevant dialouge.
We are also well on our way to achieving our initial objective of driving traffic from FB to compareindia. Month-on-month traffic has increased over 60%. While this has been over a low base, the continued growth of fans on FB gives me the confidence that this will become a major source of traffic for compareindia.com
- Like in traditional marketing, having a single uncomplicated message works best: Our message has been: “find the best prices on compareindia”. We could have chosen to go with a lot of others including our standard “compare products to figure out which is best for you.” But we choose the price angle and it is working for us.
- Keep your page open: A lot of pages on FB only have posts from the page owner. Users can only post comments. We have chosen to go the other way. Anyone can post on our page. This has encouraged users to ask us questions and interact with us and other users. On the flip side we do get some unwanted spam as other marketers try to take advantage of our user base. So far the number has been manageable and we simply delete their messages.
- Social media and viral are twins: FB and twitter are the fastest way to spread an interesting viral.
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