Читать книгу Social Media Marketing For Dummies - Shiv Singh - Страница 24

When it comes to buying online advertising (also referred to as digital media planning and buying) on websites where your customers spend time, social media marketing plays an important role. Online advertising is about identifying websites that your target customers visit, buying ad space on those websites, and then measuring how much those ads are viewed and clicked. It’s as much an art as it is a science because knowing which sites your customers visit, where they’re most likely to engage with an advertisement (where on the site as well), whether the site charges the appropriate amount for the advertisement, and how much that advertising affects purchasing is not always easy. We work with media buyers all the time, and their jobs are harder than you think, especially in the world of digital ad exchanges, data management platforms, and remnant inventory. (Books could be written on each of those terms alone.)

But the online advertising space is important even in an economic downturn. The reason is simple: It’s one of the most measurable forms of advertising, especially in relation to print and television, along with search engine advertising. You can track those who view the advertisement, what they do with it, and in some cases, whether they eventually buy the product based on that advertisement. It’s no surprise that the relationship to social media marketing is an important one as a result.

This relationship with social media marketing takes various forms. Here are some of those connection points:

 Market to the social influencers who surround the customer, as well as the customer.One of the ways in which you market to those influencers is using display advertising. So rather than just placing advertisements on websites that your customers visit, you place some advertisements (doesn’t have to be a large percentage of your budget) on websites that their social influencers frequent, too. Is this as measurable as those advertisements targeting your customers directly? Maybe not, because these influencers are less likely to click the ads and make a purchase. But nevertheless, they remember the brand and influence your customers.

 Communicate and advertise on the social platforms — such as Facebook and YouTube — that your customers frequent.Most social platforms accept advertising in some form, and this serves as an important part of their revenue model. Figure 1-5 shows an eBay display advertisement on YouTube.Granted, display advertising on social platforms used to produce bad results (users didn’t notice the advertisements and didn’t click them), but the ad formats for social platforms are evolving, and today Facebook is the second-largest advertising platform on the Internet after Google. One example of the evolution, is video-based advertising in the Facebook newsfeed itself. Another innovation that has been honed over the last two years is where consumers are asked to like the ads that they’re viewing on Facebook, resulting in their action appearing more aggressively in the newsfeeds of their friends. This helps the platform target ads more appropriately to them in the future.

 Use interactive social advertising.Think about this scenario for a moment: You visit a major website like www.cnn.com and see a large advertisement on the right side. The advertisement asks you to sign up for suggestions about local deals in your neighborhood. That’s an example of the ad unit becoming a platform for social interaction. There aren’t too many examples of social ads online, but we’re seeing more companies experiment in this space. Figure 1-6 shows how an ad appears on CNN’s website.

FIGURE 1-5: An eBay placement ad on YouTube.