AppId is over the quota
Jonathan Beeston explains what marketers need to know about integrating search and social media
As social media budgets increase, the pressure’s on to prove return on investment from marketing on social channels. Facebook advertising is still remarkably good value and is emerging as a serious contender to other performance marketing channels. Its use by brands is almost doubling each year (Efficient Frontier's quarterly analysis into the state and costs of digital marketing show that Facebook ads cost 22 per cent more in Q2 of 2011 than they did in Q1, and over the year, Facebook advertising is set to increase by a massive 80 per cent).
Of course, it’s still a small percentage of other marketing channels: currently brands advertising on Facebook spend about five per cent of what they spend on search campaigns. Yet Facebook offers great targeting, and measurement based on hard financial metrics that brands want in a time of tightened marketing budgets.
Surfing the channels
Working out the return on investment from social marketing isn’t just done by comparing it to other channels (most notably search). It’s done by assessing what combination of channels will give the best return. And not always just online.
Marketing channels have a significant impact on each other. Efficient Frontier's research earlier this year showed that a TV campaign can result in an uplift on both site traffic and searches (up to 80 per cent in some cases). Online campaigns can drive offline sales (figures from Yahoo! indicate that this could reach 63 per cent). If a consumer researches the purchase of a new car online, they’re more likely to buy it from a car showroom, and will want to see the same prices as they saw shown on the car brand’s website.
Inconveniently, consumers channel hop. They’ll access the same website from three or four different devices, search on a mobile for a store they plan to visit on the high street, research a new phone by asking networks of friends on Facebook. It’s becoming harder and harder to divide up marketing departments (and budgets) into neat silos and compare results in order to plan and assign next year’s budget.
Social influence impacts the performance of marketing campaigns. Our searches are not limited to Google, but extend to our social networks (including a brand’s own pages within these networks). That means that as marketers, we have to respond with much more agility than traditionally we’ve been able to do. We have to react quickly to consumer response on social campaigns and redirect budgets accordingly. The days of ‘this is my TV spend for the year, and this is my social spend’ may be over, replaced by ‘this is my marketing spend, and I’ll re-allocate it according to how it performs through the year’.
Tracking the journey
That agility will need to span different channels. Understanding the journey a customer takes before they buy your product or service lets you put marketing budget where it’s most effective, rather than just at the last point before a consumer clicks through to your website. Traditionally, search and display have always been judged on the performance of this last click. But what happens when you factor-in direct brand engagement on Facebook? Or the result of a consumer asking their friends within a social network? The customer journey might start with a generic (non-brand specific) search, then move through a social network, be influenced by a TV ad, put aside for a few days and ended with a branded search that leads to a sale - possibly over the phone.
What campaign would that phone call be attributed to? Would a marketer know that that person is a brand fan on Facebook and has been interacting with the brand over multiple channels? To assign marketing budget effectively, you need to know which keyword, ad or channel had the most influence in directing the consumer towards your site. It’s likely to be more than one.
Between them, social media and search give marketers a gift: an almost-complete view of the customer, from what they’re looking for online through to how they respond to brands, either through straightforward advertising clicks or through engagement in social media campaigns. We can see what they like and want, and what they reject. We’ve always known which products and services sell and which don’t - but now we can see why.
Scaling up
Human engagement and analysis is, of course, an incredibly important part of social marketing. But it is only by using technology to support it that it is possible to segment and target audiences effectively on social channels and use the insight that can be garnered from social campaigns to inform future spend as the campaign develops, not after it’s all over.
It is following the same pattern as search. Searching is a human activity and brands have to respond with relevant results; technology has developed to assist brands in managing their responses and optimising their campaigns. In the same way, technology has developed to support social campaigns, to segment customers and show them only what they want to see from the brand, and to optimise social engagement over Facebook, Twitter, etc. Using this technology on social media (and Facebook specifically at the moment) has the potential to amplify a brand’s message through the social influence of each of that brand’s fans, through their network of trusted contacts, on a scale we could hardly imagine a few years ago.
Since the early days of paid search, it’s been possible to only pay for advertising that works (measured by clicks on the ad). Now, technology can be used to divert budget instantly towards the highest performing channel, campaign or target audience group (and away from the lowest-performing), across different channels. Automating the bidding process so that you pay the lowest possible amount for the best result whatever the channel means that spend can be adjusted constantly to give the highest possible ROI. Predictive modelling techniques let budget be set based on predicting ROI (with up to 95 per cent accuracy), so you can set an accurate budget and know in advance what the return is likely to be.
That makes looking at performance marketing in the round - not just in silos of search and social media - a very attractive option.
Jonathan Beeston, Head of Global Marketing, Efficient Frontier
www.efrontier.com
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