Mindless ‘buying of fans’ without understanding users
While assessing the user profiles of fans of a luxury car brand, it occurred to me that the problem of ads bringing in the wrong audience mix and thus diluting the essence of the brand is more deep rooted than I had initially imagined. The whole gamut of Indian brand pages out there which use ads to ‘buy’ their fans and artificially bloat up the community, while ignoring user behaviour.
Why would they do this?
Because the more fans they buy, based on a cost per fan basis, the more would be their outlay. Now what this has done is majority of the brand pages have the wrong audience. So if you are starting a new community page (say on travel deals) and want to run ads to spread awareness and register presence among the right audience, the brand page and interest targeting doesn’t help because even the existing pages (e.g. Expedia, Yatra, GoIbibo) do not have the right audience mix. Then you start modifying the content to appease this mass audience, because you have told your manager that.. hold on to your breath.. ‘NUMBERS ARE EVERYTHING’. And you end up diluting the essence and the connect of the brand.
Understand users first, ads are only to register your presence in their minds
However, ads are not bad if we understand their specific role which is to register presence in the minds of the consumer. It is foolhardy to spend tons of money just bringing an audience to your page, rather spend it in research work that helps you understand your audience better. Even the level of granularity in targeting that Facebook offers can only be leveraged if we make an attempt to understand user behaviour.
So how do we do it?
We have taken the example of a brand and detailed a basic approach of how targeted ads can be used.
Ad Strategy Overview
- Identify the online audience for your brand. Now it is important to understand your audience as one person i.e. understand their online behaviour in the light of their behaviour in the physical world. You cannot segregate their virtual identity from their real world one.
- The basic advantage of search ads over Facebook ads is that the former is based on what people are actually searching for. Therefore analysing search behaviour (using tools like Google Insights) for key terms related to your brand gives you an idea of the relative popularity of those terms, related searches as well as the geographic distribution of the search traffic. This knowledge can be used in figuring out the demographic and interest based targeting for the Facebook Ads.
- Create different target segments and tailor the messaging accordingly. The image should be understandable and relevant to the copy and the message should have a clear call to action. The landing page should be relevant to the ad copy.
- Create separate campaigns with each one catering to a specific target segment and within each campaign have a mix of 4-5 adverts trying out different combinations of image and message.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day it is about testing different permutations, closely assessing the profiles of the individuals who are joining the page during the ad run, see if they fit into the audience profile you had in mind and reorient your strategy based on these insights. Continuous research is the key to getting it right and that is where most stumble.
I do not want to come across as another social media commentator. At Shack we are profiling users from different platforms and trying to understand their online behaviour. We are taking cues from fields like ethnography, behavioural economics as well as the work of other researchers (such as Paul Adams, Kristin Scott) to help broaden this understanding. For example, we are exploring how the concept of ‘campaigns’ in the social web doesn’t tie with our social structures that have been evolving for thousands of years. We have taken up users as the starting point since it helps to decide the campaigns, platforms, messaging and so on. It’s an ongoing project and we shall keep updating our findings here.
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