Is Social Media worth any amount of marketing spend?

Currently social media websites are receiving more visits than any other website. Recent figures show that Social Media delivers around 3% of its traffic to retail websites.

The 3% highlights that social media has influenced or persuaded a few people to click away from the social media site to the retail site; the main reason for this is because of brand identity. They were on the social media website and click from this, on to brand logo or a marketing message that is of interest – therefore landing on the retail site.

What might retailers take from this? The obvious point being there is positive connection between the social media and your website. However, is there enough of a connection between the two before any marketing investment is added? Do marketing teams feel that this new market of social media is still in its beginning stages and still needs to mature before the marketing budget gains another addition headed Social Media?

So, while this medium is very powerful and has a huge audience, there is still an obstacle when linking the social networking site and the retail website. So far, brand awareness seems to be the best link. This is a clear message that any social media advertising has to be linked in to the existing marketing as the brand name or logo is very receptive to the social media audience.

To involve social media into your Marketing spend – your strategy needs to be integrated with SEO, PPC and any promotional emails. Running a social media campaign in its own will not be fruitful.

Lets not deny that there is a new audience that can be targeted, but there is no real guarantee of clicks and ultimately sales.  While we admit that any good strong online marketing campaign needs to have a blend of SEO, PPC and appropriate positioning, at present social media does need to be considered and have an amount of spend for exposure, but must not be relied upon for conversions or sales.

Is your Online Marketing Campaign ASA Compliant?

Should companies that use Facebook and Twitter to advertise have their adverts screened as they already do with traditional media? The advertising that is done offline is monitored by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), but online social media adverts are not. From March/April 2011 both online and offline campaigns will be monitored by the ASA – what impact will that have on a business message or website.

The ASA rules cover all statements on a website that can be interpreted as marketing even if they are not positioned or linked in an advert. Prior to this point, the ASA where only able to check out the content and the intent of paid for ads that were placed online.

Since 2008 the advertising watchdog received in excess of 4,500 reports and queries about appropriate text on websites, but unfortunately they could do nothing about it. The watchdog did notice that the reports and complaints from the online adverts were very similar to the public reports from viewing advertising in TV, National Press and on the Radio. The ASA spokesman stated that this new power will allow them to change and turnover a lot of issues that are put in front of them. The overall rule is that the UK advertising code states that all none paid for statements must not harm, mislead or offend, just like paid for adverts were in the beginning.

The ASA will primarily search for harmful, misleading or offensive details on the .co.uk domains. However, many .com domains will also be reviewed such as Facebook.  The difficultly is that an advert on the internet can be visible for 1 week or 1 minute, cause widespread harm or be misleading (particularly on a sales add), then withdrawn.

User content that is posted such as Facebook is not going to be investigated but the ASA will examine company adverts. If a company ad on a social networking site is in breach of the advertising code, the ASA will incorporate a name and shame process.

However, all intentions so far seem to be in the best possible nature.  The ads have to be clean and appropriate and clear when delivering their message.  However, with Facebook and MySpace growing and companies utilising the massive audience, the enforcement of the code might be difficult. If you are deemed as non compliant the results could be very damaging. There are talks about excluding companies from any advertising medium including search engines and PPC campaigns.

So, ask yourself this, are your marketing messages ASA compliant?

Google or Facebook – Who’s Better at Plying Their Trade?

Who is better at playing their own game, Google (Search Engine) or Facebook (Social Networking)? What would happen if one decided to have a go at doing what the other one did? For example: Google start a social networking site.

Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, are moving into Google’s turf and trying the advertising game as well. Google’s business began from the Pay per Click Advertising that in 2009 accumulated $23 billion. Facebook would now like to have a bit of that – and they are big enough to try.

Facebook and Google are alike in some ways and almost opposite in another. So, they operate alike by targeting small and medium enterprises using a self-serve advertising system. We know that Facebook has taken $1.86 billion in worldwide advertising. Most of that revenue was accumulated from the self–serve tools therefore, not getting into agency fees and additional charges.

Also, $1.21 billion of the $1.86 billion was earned in the US, so Facebook had a 4.7% share of the total online advertising spend.  Based on this information, and normal trends that have been seen before, Facebook will be at 8.8% in 2012. That additional percentage has to come from somewhere.

Despite that, MySpace lost serious ground, members and advertising revenue. In 2012, MySpace ad revenue fell from $470 million in 2009 to $156 million. In the background, Facebook was gearing up to compete with Google. As we now know, Facebook and Google are fighting for market share, as each percent could equal thousands and thousands of pounds.

If Facebook is going to keep chipping away at the percentage share within the market, they will have to get some things right. There is a lot of discussion within the marketing environment that Facebook is almost perfect at attracting/targeting a large audience. However, in doing so, it is not as specific.

This fault with Facebook does not really affect the large companies that post the large brand advert. The ad is seen by massive audience, and the brand will be known almost instantly by its users. The smaller and mid-sized enterprises (SME) however will have a disadvantage.

The smaller and mid-sized companies don’t generally have an instant brand identity, so to a large audience, the message is lost and therefore the advert will not be noticed and received. Google’s key word advertising is specific (hence keyword).  This is where the keyword based advertising is more appropriate. The Google keyword search will be more specific and is more efficient with a better ROI for a SME.

If Facebook wants to challenge Google it must get the SME advertising right.

Improve Your Google Clickthrough Rates with Longer Ad Headlines

Google constantly strive to improve the experience for users and advertisers and are always testing new variations to try and improve performance.  In a similar vein, advertisers are always trying variations of online adverts to ensure they get the best message across to consumers.  In an attempt to make optimize performance, Google has made a change that will allow certain ads to display more information in the headline.

Google will be adjusting the placement of the text displayed in the first description line of certain ads.  Where ads appear to have a distinct sentence and end with the correct punctuation, the description line one text will be pushed up into the headline and spaced out by a hyphen.  This is probably easier to show you than explain so we have a mocked up example below:

Interestingly, Google has discovered that the change has resulted in increased clickthrough rates where the headline is relevant and longer.  The move should provide browsers with a better experience as more information is highlighted for them.

Advertisers should re-visit their online ads to try and accommodate this change and increase their clickthrough rates.  You will need to ensure the add is a distinct sentence that ends in proper punctuation such as a full stop or question mark.

Europe On Target To Overtake the US In Online Ad Spend Next Year

A recent report by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) showed that during the first half of the year, online ad spend had doubled in growth.  At the current growth rate it is anticipated that Europe’s online advertising spend will exceed the US next year.

The figures revealed the following increases:

* United Kingdom – 10%;
* Spain – 20%
* Poland – 18%
* Italy – 15%
* Hungary – 11%
* France – 10%
* Bulgaria – 10%
* Romania -8%

During October we revealed that digital ad spend in the UK for the first half of 2010 was close to £2bn.  The report produced by the Internet Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCooper, detailed a UK online ad spend of £1.98bn for H1 of 2010 which accounted for 24.3% of all advertising in the same period.

President and CEO of IAB Europe, Alain Heureux, said, “Every day there are companies planning online ad campaigns for the first time, encouraged by reach, return on investment and consumer engagement. Those that are already online are allocating a greater proportion of their ad spend to the medium. And the type of campaigns has evolved. We’re seeing great results for branding and targeted marketing using performance-based techniques.”

He added “At this rate of growth, Europe’s online ad industry’s market value could overtake the US’s by the summer next year.”

The audit of each country, with the exception of France, was carried out by PricewaterhouseCooper.  France Pub provided details of the figures for France.

At this point, Germany has yet to be audited but their growth is expected to be in the region of 10-15%.

Mobile Search

Research has revealed that individuals would rather search using a mobile browser than using an app but brands don’t seem interested in benefiting from this upward trend.

Mobile advertising in the UK is growing at speed and mobile search is the fastest growing area.  Figures produced by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) show £20m was spent on paid internet search in 2009 which represents an increase of 41% compared to the previous year.  Whilst mobile web search represents 54% of the total mobile advertising, it’s only a mere 1% of the online search market.

There has been a 70% rise in smartphone owners since last year meaning that a quarter of the UK population now own a smartphone.  This puts the UK at the centre of a rapidly growing market for mobile paid and natural search.  A report recently produced by an eMarketer suggests the mobile search sector could be worth $500 million by 2011.

A different report produced by the IAB forecasts that the mobile advertising spend will double from £38 million (2009) to £86 million by the end of 2011.

With a lot less competition for keywords, it begs the question, why aren’t brands taking advantage of mobile search?  We suspect it’s just because it’s a new aspect of marketing and it won’t be long before businesses catch on to the opportunities……………..watch this space!