1) Facebook’s Unique Selling Proposition (USP) as an advertising and marketing platform is that it combines the objectives of reaching a large audience while ensuring that the people who are exposed to a brand’s communications are the intended target audience. Thus, by allocating marketing budgets for Facebook promotions is similar to Television advertising (the medium that is the most expensive, but also with the greatest audience reach), while costing comparatively less in terms of ROI, and instead of ensuring that an ad is seen by the largest number of people possible, Facebook ensures that the ‘right’ people, more likely to buy a product or service, see the ad . The reason why Facebook is able to do this is because it is the most extensively used social network in the world with almost 1.3 billion users; not just that, it is also the platform on which users, especially mothers, spend a large chunk of their daily leisure time on in browsing through what is new in the market. Using the personal profiles of its users, along with the pages they have visited or liked, Facebook marketing strategists are able to develop a list of the target audience to whom a particular message should be shown. Thanks to the diversity of features that it offers, brands can have advertising posts in the news feeds of selected users and even have brand videos uploaded on Facebook, similar to having a TVC .
2) For an advertising campaign for a booklet that offers discount vouchers for food, clothing, personal grooming and traveling, in addition to digital advertising, I will opt for brand activation (BTL activities) in shopping malls on the weekend. This is because this is the venue where the brand’s target audience (males and females with substantial disposable incomes who enjoy eating out and are appearance conscious) mostly spend their days off. While digital advertising is helpful in introducing the product and explaining how it works, the in-person interaction gives people a chance to hold the booklet and see the vouchers for themselves, creating brand trust. I will also use billboards and other Out of Home (OOH) advertising platforms, but only on primary thoroughfares that are mostly used by people commuting to work. This ensures greater brand visibility, increasing chances of the targeted audience noticing the brand.
3) Currently, with the exception of a few large organizations, the majority of advertisers on Facebook and other social media platforms are small brands or start-ups that typically do not have millions of dollars to spend on Marketing. However, with Facebook proving that it can offer the best of both conventional mass media and modern digital advertising, this trend will likely witness a shift . Also, as data mining and audience profiling companies are able to deliver a highly targeted message to a niche audience at lower costs than ever before, large multi-national corporations will not only start advertising on social media, but those that are, are likely to increase the social media budget. The benefits of targeted advertising, greater audience reach using more sophisticated analytics tools and increased audience engagement, and with more people looking at social media to find products and services, the share of social media in the marketing budget mix will definitely increase substantially in the next few years.
Works Cited
Ganguly, Sonny. "Why Social Media Advertising Is Set To Explode In The Next 3 Years." 17 March 2015. Marketing Land. Online. 25 April 2016.
Goel, Vindu. "How Facebook Sold You Krill Oil." The New York Times 2 August 2014. Online.
