Why do companies invest so much time and
money into social media at present?
As mentioned in my previous post companies
are using consumer information and data from digital platforms, such as social
media, to develop marketing strategies and thus grow their business and
customer base.
Not only is there lower costs associated
with advertising on social media to product your product and attract customers,
but there are also the ‘back of house’ performance measures that companies
track and monitor.
Have you ever wondered how many people
have seen your ad? Or how many people actually clicked onto your website form a
Facebook or Instagram post?
Well, companies are now investing big
money into web analytics and social engagement metrics. Through this they can
create new business models that add value, build customer relationships and
increase profit (APM Study Guide, 2014).
To establish a brief and simple
understanding on the methods of performance measuring, I will explain the
concepts of digital attribution and tracking to give us a start.
Previously companies used spreadsheets,
VLOOKUPs and pivot tables to understand the length and depth of attribution
their digital marketing campaigns had for the company. As more social media
channels have developed and the path to purchase is more complex companies
needed better ways to obtain performance measures. This would allow companies
to see what content would drive clicks and fuel conversation via other channels
such as paid search (Nissim, 2013).
Greg Nissim explains that the concept of attribution helps to understand the
effect different advertising channels have on each other. The benefit of this
technology is to strategically invest your money in advertising channels which will
work best for your marketing campaign and help establish the path to purchase
across channels and devices rather than just within one channel (Nissim, 2013).
As you may have noticed, over the past
couple of years there have been many more companies established that specialise
in web analytics. They help clients understand, as mentioned above, where their
advertising dollar would be better spent and pinpoint the best channels to do
so. Not only does ‘Digital Attribution’ help clients but also ‘Tracking’ is
another important performance measuring tool for your digital advertising
spend.
Tracking is seen through the use of
‘Cookies’, which help advertisers reach and track customers through digital
channels. In 2014, browsers such as Apple’s Safari, Google and Microsoft are
possibly talking about dropping all cookies.
A cookie-less environment can be taken negatively by advertisers,
however, Greg Nissim believes it will
provide advertisers with more information than they had before, and it is
privacy advocates who should be fearful.
The new systems being implemented, such as
new tracking techniques (like tracking people who are logged in – Google - or
using related devices or platforms - Microsoft) can be more difficult to detect
or disable (Nissim, 2013). The
biggest win for marketers is being able to track customers across devices. A
new technique, which is in the pipeline, is digital fingerprinting. This shows
the unique information which each consumer carriers when on the Internet.
Mobile devices and phones are an essential
component of the research in many consumer purchases but there is still a lot
of work to be done in proving that the purchase chain between mobile research
and desktop purchase is broken. At the moment mobile received a lower percentage
of overall marketing investment then desktop devices based on the above
information not yet being proven by marketers (Nissim, 2013).
For many companies competing in the digital
marketing environment, there are competitive advantages such as ‘attribution
and tracking’ which can help companies better develop their digital marketing campaigns.
However, marketers for companies also have to be prepared for any changes, such
as the removal of cookies tracking, to adopt the changes quickly and stay
competitive in the world of marketing.
