Internet Marketing Clinic

The Economist has a briefing on the future of the Internet that makes very interesting reading. It is not an article about marketing on the web, although it touches on that topic, but one comment in particular caught my attention as I was reading the piece.

“Take Facebook, the web’s biggest social network. The site is a fast-growing, semi-open platform with more than 500m registered users. Its American contingent spends on average more than six hours a month on the site and less than two on Google. Users have identities specific to Facebook and communicate mostly via internal messages. “

Two points here hit me; Facebook has 500 million users, and they spend 3 times more hours on Facebook per day than they do on Google. That is a big market to be in contact with, and Google is not the best way to reach them! If they are your demographic target, you need to be on Facebook to get to them effectively!

In our clinic, we have had much discussion about the pros and cons of using Facebook as a marketing tool. There are definitely legitimate concerns about spending a lot of time investing in a Facebook based marketing strategy, but there is no denying the numbers and their import. In marketing, you have to go where your audience is.

Using Facebook as a marketing tool is a different proposition from marketing pages on your web site. It is a different tool with different characteristics and requirements. The audience is also different in how they interact with the platform and what their expectations are while they are engaged. Good marketing has to take all these factors into account, but the principle remains. You have to respect your prospects and their preferences, and you have to go where they are in order to reach them!

For more information, read some of the material we have collected on this blog about Facebook and using social media for your marketing.

Marketing on the Internet is constantly changing, and it pays to stay in touch with what the changes are as they happen. eMarketer featured an interview about changes in retailing marketing that will be of interest to businesses in this market segment.

One interesting comment in this interview is, “I’m seeing retailers spend less in paid search and invest more in search engine optimization.” That indicates that ranking on organic results may get more difficult as more attention is paid to this method of getting attention on the Internet. That emphasized the importance of staying in  touch with the latest techniques for promoting your business on the web, and of continually working on your site to maintain the competitive position that you have achieved. As the saying goes, “Never look back, someone might be gaining on you!” Even if you are doing a great job and out-performing all your competition, you cannot afford to let up in your efforts.

Another comment that jumped out at me is, “It’s still a bit of a mystery as to how to monetize Facebook.” This is a medium that business has not mastered yet. That says two things to me. One is that if you don’t quite understand how to make use of this tool, you are not alone. The second is that if you can figure out how to make it work for you, you will be ahead of the pack!

Now this is not going to work for everyone, or for all kinds of businesses, but if you are in a position to benefit from the audience that you can reach through this tool (Note: I am specifically thinking of Facebook as I write this.), it can prove to be a powerful tool for you.

The way I am seeing this used to some good effect is for a business to create a Facebook Page for their business. It could be useful to create multiple pages for different product lines(?) Creating a page is not a big job and does not require a huge investment of your time or energy.

The next step is to get the page in front of an audience. You must have people who are willing to become  a fan of the page. When you have created this audience, what you do is post something of interest periodically to keep yourself and your business in front of your audience. The people who have signed up to get your information will see that while they are browsing their pages for information about their friends.

What kind of business might this be a good vehicle for? An easy answer might be restaurants. Restaurants are social businesses, and people are always interested in learning about new and interesting restaurants, and would be happy to learn about specials that a restaurant might be running or a new menu item they are introducing. And people are always interested in getting referrals to restaurants from their friends who like a place. If your business fits this kind of pattern, this could be a great tool for you to utilize. If your business is oilfield equipment, it could be a completely different situation!It all depends on you and how you can make this work for you!

Two recent articles present some interesting information about how the Internet is changing. One is in a eMarketer and the other in an article in Wired magazine.

The first talks about demographics on social media and points out how it is changing to an older crowd. In the group between 50-64, 47% use social media. This is a substantial representation. In the prime age group of 30-49, over 60% use social media. Facebook logged its 5oo millionth user in June of this year. That is a huge audience. And this is a worldwide group. Remember that this is more people than live in the United States.

These age groups tend to use the media in different ways from the younger group, an important consideration for marketers. Older users are involved in Facebook and Linked In, and have other differences in their pattern of use.

Ad spending for social media is also changing. This indicates that bigger companies recognize the appeal of this size audience and are working heard to find a position in it where they can capitalize on the attention that people pay to this medium. If you are in a retail business, you have to take this market seriously.

In the other article, the emphasis is on how traffic on the internet is changing. Keep in mind that there is a distinction between the web and the Internet. In broad terms, the Internet is the highway, and the web is destinations. That is an oversimplification, but useful and easy to remember.

This article points out that the volume of traffic on the Internet that is devoted to the web is now only 23% of the total volume of traffic! Keep in mind, this point is about traffic, not visitors. As marketers, we are interested in visitors. Traffic that comes from watching videos or listening to music consumes more bandwidth than traffic going to and from web sites, and that accounts for some of the huge change in where the volume of traffic comes from, but it still points to big changes in how the Internet is used.

What do these changes mean to your business, both in terms of threats and in terms of opportunities? It will certainly depend upon what segment of business you are in and what the demographics of your audience are, but no one will be unaffected by these changes. Pay attention so you will be on the bus instead of under it!

We have recently had several discussions about the advisability of using Facebook to promote your business. There are clearly some differences of opinion around, so I wanted to add a few thoughts that may be of some interest.

First, I have to say that it appears to me that if you are marketing to a particular demographic, and that demographic is heavily represented on Facebook in terms of presence, time spent on site, and ability to be influenced, Facebook is certainly a strategy that you should consider. Whether it is worth the effort required to become effective is a judgment call that different businesses might decide differently.

Several important things to keep in mind when considering your own strategy are:

• Facebook is relatively new and “unstable”, in that many features are being added constantly and changes are being made to how the whole system operates. This makes it hard to get a clear handle on how one should best utilize the application.
• Users’ familiarity with the features of the application vary widely from those heavily involved in their interactions with it, to many others who are basically just there to see what is going on, to everything in between. To be effective, you have to understand who you are targeting and where they fit on this spectrum.
• With all the changes taking place, you could easily find that on any given day, something has been done that wipes out all the effort that you have invested in establishing yourself in the community. In the near past, Google changed its policy about hosting their blog content on different servers and dramatically altered the benefits of using the free Blogger software that many of us depended upon.

As an interesting aside, I know several people who have recently complained that their involvement with Facebook has become a compulsion. Others have commented that being on Facebook is so involving that it takes away from work time. If the people that I want to reach fall into these groups that just can’t stay off of Facebook, I want to be somewhere on Facebook!

With that as perspective, I offer a couple of links that people might find helpful in getting some explanation of what Facebook might do for them. The first is a blog post describing new features that Facebook released in 2010 that are oriented toward business use. This is a good brief description that will help people who might have an interest in digging into this further. In that same post, they provide references to other sources of information, one of which is a Facebook Product Guide, which I thought was also useful and interesting. This is a PDF file that you can download to your computer (or read online, as you prefer).

I received a newsletter from Hubspot with a short list of reasons to use social media in your business. The list was very concise and to the point, so I found it hard to summarize. Here it is in its entirety:

“Why Social Media and Blogs Can Help Your Business

1. Start Fast. You could launch a page on Facebook today and get a blog going in a couple days.

2. Low Cost. You can get started in social media and blogging for very little or no money.  They are among the most cost-effective methods of reaching your audience.

3. Instant Interactivity. Both blogs and social media can give you nearly instant market feedback – good or bad.  We get all kinds of feedback through the comments on our blog, and people also leave reviews and other comments for us on Facebook and other social media venues.

4. It’s the Search Engines, Silly. Surveys indicate that 90% or more of people begin their purchasing process in search engines.  Blogs and social media make it more likely that your prospects will find you online when they search.

5. Inbound Marketing. If you read our blog, you know that we’re all big fans of inbound marketing at HubSpot.  Outbound marketing is telemarketing, direct mail, email blasts (not lovely nurturing emails like this one to you), TV and print ads – all the things that buyers tend to block out more and more.  Social media and blogs are essential inbound marketing tools.

6. First Mover Advantage. For blogs and social media, there is an advantage to moving first.  If you don’t jump into the conversation, your competitors, competitor’s customers or your customers will (if they have not already) and then you’re fighting an uphill battle to become influential in these online conversations.  Start now, and claim the virtual conversation-ground to your advantage.”

Hubspot is the same group that published the Facebook Guide that I referred to in a prior blog. They seem to have some good information and might be a good place to check in from time to time.

Facebook can be a powerful tool for marketing your business, but, like anything else, you have to understand how to use it and you have to put some effort into it. Many small business owners are just taking the first step in getting acquainted with Facebook as a tool.

I have just come across an eBook on the web that provides a great introduction to setting up Facebook. I recommend it to anyone who is looking for a short course to get them started with this powerful tool.

The book is a free download and it contains links to other materials provided by the people who offer this guide.