…and they won’t necessarily turn up. From the great marketoonist Tom Fishburne…
…with added impact from Facebook’s IPO being in the news.
(As an aside, tying in your marketing to something topical will often increase the impact and results. It both adds to the relevance…see “Cutting Through Marketing Clutter”…and connects with what people may already be thinking about…the “Robert Collier Principle”.)
Full post at “our facebook page” where Tom not only discusses the fiasco (from an investor’s perspective) of the Facebook IPO (last closing price as I write this was $27.72, down from the listing price of $38)…
…but also the continuing lack of understanding from mainstream marketers about social media.
“The same lesson holds for brands and social media in general. Social media can generate a return, but we need to keep the emphasis on the right place. It’s not about getting rich quickly. It’s about deepening the connection with our audience.
We need less gold rush and more long-term community building.”
Of course, the long-term community building is only worthwhile if it forms part of a coherent strategy to generate leads and then convert those leads into paying customers.
As I’ve commented before, social media is a source of traffic, it’s a way to get in front of people, ideally people who are your potential customers.
It’s unfortunate, but the vast majority of businesses (even large corporations) really don’t understand how to market effectively. As a result, they get seduced by the latest fad as they search for the “magic bullet” that will somehow solve all their problems.
Of course, when they spend a lot of money and get dismal results, not surprisingly disillusionment sets in.
Seems that’s happened to the once-great General Motors…
“GM Says Facebook Ads Don’t Work, Pulls $10 Million Account”.
Note that this refers to the paid ads on Facebook. GM appears to be continuing with its pages and content marketing.
I found this interesting…
“GM has been re-evaluating much of its advertising strategy over the past year, consolidating its global advertising and media-buying agencies in a bid to cut $2 billion from its marketing budget while improving the efficiency of its advertising.
The Journal, citing people familiar with GM’s thinking, said the carmaker began to question the effectiveness of its Facebook ads earlier this year and GM marketing executives, including Ewanick, met with Facebook managers to address their concerns but remained unconvinced that advertising on the website made sense.”
Think about those comments for a moment.
The implication is that GM has no idea of what results are being produced by their advertising! If they did, the evaluation process would be clear-cut because they would know what the ROI (“Return On Investment”) is.
GM is clearly not conducting direct response marketing and appears to be ignoring the principles of “Scientific Advertising” set out by the great Claude Hopkins. I guess this should come as no great surprise, given the disaster area that GM has become (what would the great Alfred P. Sloan think?).
Back to social media. First get clear about your core marketing funnel and system. Then consider how social media fits in with that.
Most businesses struggle with social media because…
1) They don’t have an effective marketing strategy in place to start with
2) If they do, they focus on the “bells and whistles” of social media and as an after-thought (if at all) then how it fits in with making sales and creating customers.