If anyone promises new customer acquisition and increased brand loyalty by helping your brand “engage”, “interact” and “have a dialogue” with people - run. They’re spouting complete and utter nonsense that’s simply not correlated by human nature.
“Any marketers who believe they’re having a conversation (with brand’s fans on Facebook) are delusional.” - Nate Elliott, VP/Analyst, Forrester Research
Think about it. People have a hard enough time maintaining relationships with people, thank you very much. For all the hype and promise about two-way conversations and deep, branded experiences, the numbers simply don’t add up. There simply aren’t enough people with lives so empty and meaningless they’re desperate enough to want a relationship with a brand.
- Just .34% of all online Black Friday sales were generated by social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube - a decrease of more than 35% since 2011, Source: IBM
- In any given week, less than 0.5% of Facebook fans engage with the brand they are fans of, Source: Ehrenberg Bass Institute for Marketing Science
- Only 0.3% of followers on Twitter interact with brand posts, Source: Forrester
- 77% of consumers admit they have no relationship with a brand whatsoever, Source: Corporate Executive Board
- In Europe and the US, people wouldn’t care if 92% of brands disappeared, Source: Havas Media
- Email remains a more effective way to acquire customers than social media - nearly 40 times that of Facebook and Twitter combined, Source: McKinsey & Company
- 90% of people don't share, Karen Nelson-Field, Source: The Science of Sharing
- “Almost every app built for a brand on Facebook has NO usage. Heavy immersive experiences are NOT how people engage and interact with brands,” Paul Adams, Facebook’s Ex-Global Head of Brand Design
- Over 90% of WOM happens offline, Source: Keller & Fay
- Over 40% of a brand’s Facebook page fans “unlike” the page as soon as a campaign ends, Source: DDB
- “For the top 50 global brands, on average, less than one tenth of one percent (of visiting Facebook users) like, share or comment with content.” Source: Forrester
The reality is if your marketing strategy is based on social media engagement you’re going to see little if any return for the effort. Here’s why:
- Deep brand engagement does not happen on a mass-market scale
- The vast majority of people don’t want time-intensive, interactive brand experiences
- Assuming people want to engage with brands is bad strategy
Still not totally convinced people don’t want to have a relationship with your brand? Here’s something that’s undeniable. People hate advertising. The reason is all advertising is an interruption – including social media, native advertising, video pre-rolls and especially those damn pop up ads. And great advertisers know – have always known – that the best way to get your ads to work is to make damn sure the interruption is worth it. To accomplish this we set the creative bar unrealistically high. Our ads must be more interesting, entertaining or informative than the medium in which they appear. If it’s an online ad, it must be the most compelling thing on the page. If it’s print, it needs to be the best thing in the publication. If it’s a billboard, we want it slowing traffic down. Impossible to ignore, hard to forget and delightfully surprising are standards our communications must live up to so our clients can outsmart, outdo and outlast their competitors.
Research has unequivocally proven, people pay more attention to creative ads, recall them better and talk about them more. Clients who utilize them spend less on media and sell more. According to research conducted by Peter Field for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA), creative ads are 11 times more efficient at selling stuff than other ads. What’s more, consumers have more positive feelings about companies and their products that utilize more creative advertising. *
So instead of assuming people want to befriend your brand a much better approach is to assume people don’t want to have anything to do with you at all. Doing so will:
- Compel you to find out what your customers really want and need
- Focus your messaging around things your customers really are interested in
- Force your creative executions to work harder – after all it’s much harder to get the attention of and leave a positive impression with someone who doesn’t want to have a relationship with you at all.
Bottom line, give people a reason to talk positively about your brand not to it.
To find out how we can help you create the right brand platform and integrated campaigns that will surprise and delight your customers, click here.