Facebook Business and Marketing Solutions

I am now sitting in the session ,Facebook Business and Marketing Solutions, by Kent Schoen. The session starts out with the video by Rhettandlink.com.

How do you take advantage of the social graph?
Let your customers market for you.

Tools Facebook offers to drive engagement

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• Events: Facebook sends 66 million invites monthly compared to 16 million sent by Evite. Invite product not the best invite product in the world but utilizes the social graph.
• Pages: There are 150,000 pages and more than 85,000,000 fan connections. Hotels, brands and local businesses are creating pages on Facebook.
• Applications: e.g. Open Table and Fedex applications. There are more than 24,000 applications on Facebook. Some applications are created to bring rich content to users, others are using it to promote a product or service. There are 400,000 developers and over a billion installs.
  

If you put things out there that are useful to people, they will use them.

When someone adds an application, an item gets posted to news feed which helps in generating an automatic referral. There is a single digit percentage of your friends that are going to see an action you perform.

Facebook ads show up in either news feed or on left hand corner and allow marketers to accelerate activity by using precise targeting.

What is a social ad? Social actions combined with content. Example provided was of iThink application.

There are plenty of applications that primarily exist to drive traffic off of Facebook to their own site.

Is there a revenue driver for pages? People buy advertising to promotes pages. Also, the more exposure / traffic a page generates, the more possibilities to monetize exist.

Gimme Book: Thinking Beyond the Unique Selling Proposition

Gimme! book is an eye opening book for marketers as it touches on the long ignored aspects of marketing: "how human beings are wired and how they work emotionally." For too long, marketers have been taught to focus on unique selling proposition (USP). Now John Hallward tells us about the reality of USP and how it is "not a consumer-centric view."

The "wired" part is especially interesting to me as it touches on the hidden powers of socially targeted advertising and marketing.

“Consumers do not want one characteristic or one USP. Consumers want it all.Why should a consumer have to choose between the longest lasting pain reliever versus the fast acting, or the safest, most gentle, or the cheapest priced? The concept of marketing a USP is not a consumer-centric view. It is not a realistic, relevant reflection of how consumers operate. Furthermore, a USP for a brand is limiting in appeal by the very definition of trying to sell one main benefit to the sub-segment of consumers which most values that one benefit. Consumers want pain relievers to be fast-acting, and safe, and strong, and inexpensive and more.”

I have just started reading the book, "Gimme! The Human Nature of Successful Marketing" and I have already found the "wow" factor that's all over this book. If you'd like to preview the contents of Gimme! check out the "lessons learned" section of the book's website. Highly recommended!

Email Marketing ROI

Email marketing is taking online marketers by storm thanks to the incredible ROI it promises.

“ ... email [marketing] ROI will hit $45.65 for every dollar spent in 2008, more than twice the ROI of other mediums including search and display.” - Datran Media's second annual survey of online marketing professionals (conducted Dec. 2007)

Of all the respondents to the survery:

• 55 percent expect ROI from email marketing to be higher "than any other [marketing] channel
• 67 percent state "email has helped boost sales through other channels."
• 80 percent indicate "email was the strongest performing media buy ahead of search (70.6%) and display (37.6%)."
• Among the lowest ROI generators were mobile (1.2%), RSS (2.4%), Cable (7.1%), Broadcast (10.6%) and Print (16.5%).
• 80 percent send targeted email campaigns
• 82.4 percent expect to increase use of email marketing in 2008 compared to 2007
• 55.3 percent expect email marketing ROI to be higher than other channels in 2008
• 25.9 percent expect email ROI to be 'roughly equal to other channels'
• 71.8 percent think that search complements the email marketing channel followed by display advertising (51.8%), direct (41.2%) mobile (24.7%), broadcast (17.6%) and cable (10.6%)
• 80 percent plan to employ email to send newsletters followed by 78.8% to drive sales, 70.6% to enhance customer relationships, 67.1% to increase upsell or cross sell opportunities, 64.7% to increase brand awareness and/or lift, 50.6% to send transactional messages and 52.9% to send messages to reactive dormant customers.
• 63.5 percent plan on integrating marketing messages in transactional emails in 2008.
• 69.4 percent currently use and/or plan on using an outside vendor for email marketing.
• Of the companies that currently send targeted email campaigns, 63.5% target based on demographics and/or geography, 56.5% target based on actions, 4.12% target based on psychographics or interests and 20% don't send targeted campaigns.
• 90 companies participated in the survey including OgilvyOne Worldwide, Avenue A/Razorfish and Stamps.com
  

Email marketing serves as an excellent way to keep in touch with customers in industries where otherwise the contact would only happen once or twice a year.

How to run successful online video contests

Video contests generally are most effective for websites with a very specific demographic. According to a Marketing Sherpa report, "the tighter your niche, the younger and more Web savvy your demographic, the more sense it makes" to run an online video contest.

Why use online video contests?
- To benefit from the power of user generated content
- To break barriers associated with traditional video contests
- To better connect with your younger audience
- To keep costs under control

When running video contests
- ask yourself if you really need to run a video contest as contests based on other media can be less expensive
- utilize the power of social networking sites to get the message out there.
- advertise the contest on all important pages of your website, including your home page.
- use newsletters to announce contest
- advertise contests on sites that cater to the same niche
- think of contest page as a landing page -- optimize for conversion
- reward all submissions with at least something to avoid negative press by users who didn't win

Choosing a partner destination site to run your contest

By utilizing the power of established video focused destination sites such as YouTube, you can significantly increase participation rates. Also by using the social networking features of such popular destinations, viral marketing becomes much easier for contest participants.


Companies like Votigo now allow marketers to create co-branded or white label video contests complete with comments, rating rules and social networking features.

Case study: Online video contest by Nestle for Nesquik brand



Nesquik online video contest on YouTube with a grand prize of $10,000.


On its home page, Nesquik featured its "happy place" video contest very prominently.


Nestle using the power of search advertising to advertising its Nesquik online video contest.

Online Display Advertising ROI Effectiveness

According to this chart published by Marketing Sherpa, Online display advertising gets the best ROI.

"The key takeaway for advertisers is that the context in which an ad is served is at least as important as the ad itself. It’s no different than traditional direct marketing; the list is the most important variable in a successful campaign.

An impression is wasted if the consumer is not in the proper state of mind, or simply does not fall into the group of people who would have reason to consider the offer. From an ROI perspective, eliminating wasted impressions, then making a good impression by serving up great advertising, is consistently the best option for advertisers."