By Todd Parsons, Founder and CEO, Aditive
Social media is a powerful, proven tool for building brand equity and awareness. And now, we are beginning to see the tangible ways it can be used to make sales.
The recipe: Add a “social profile” to each audience members’ data, and pair those new attributes with your advertising experiences. Ideally, this profile will add social attributes (likes and connections) and social actions (such aslikelihood to share, influence and purchase) to the data you’re already collecting on browsing behavior.
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But how do you obtain social profiles? Start with normally targeted advertising, both “paid” across the Internet and “owned” on your sites, including your social media pages. Use these ads to draw individuals into experiences designed not only to sell, but to be shared for the benefit of others. And make sure to have a redeemable offer for all participants at the end of the process.
Do this right, and consumer sharing will ripple outward in an organic fashion, creating pools of “likers” and “non-likers,” friends and followers, key sharers, major influencers, and — yes —consumers who redeem your offer!
For example, L’Oreal recently ran an ad campaign in paid and owned media featuring a simple game that consumers could play for a chance to win a free sample. Players received extra opportunities to win when they successfully invited friends or followers to play via Facebook, Twitter and email.
The campaign spurred a strong social distribution, with L’Oreal receiving hundreds of thousands of requests for free product coupons to be redeemed at brick-and-mortar locations. L’Oreal also collected opt-ins and social data for future remarketing efforts.
Such re-marketing efforts can now be based on analytics that create rich audience segments from opt-in consumers and millions more “look-alike” consumers who are more likely to participate, share with their social networks, and influence their friends and followers to opt in themselves. Most importantly, certain segments will be more likely to result in actual purchases.
Thus, by combining social actions with social attributes, brands can advertise to entire sets of relationships rather than just to individuals. They can combine the value of their ad spend with the value of their social network audiences. And they can recruit an army of social influencers who become “living ads” by sharing brand offers with friends and followers.
These types of results and consumer insights unlock the business value that’s been missing in the brand world’s rush to social media. Rather than the current social media “arms race” — which really amounts to little more than amassing likes and followers for their own sake — the combination of social actions and social attributes attained by adding social utilities to advertising experiences opens a much more satisfying race — to higher ROI.
Todd Parsons is the founder and CEO of Aditive, a media solution that combines the power of paid and social advertising. Previously a co-founder of BuzzLogic (now Twelvefold Media), Parsons began his media career developing algorithms for influencer identification and ad targeting on the web.
