8 Cutting-Edge Marketing Tactics That Work Better Than Facebook Ads

No doubt you’ve heard that Facebook social ads are an essential form of advertising and that every business should use them to be compete in a digital world. But that notion is the purest fantasy, made particularly ridiculous by the fact that most people aren’t clicking on them.

Facebook marketers assume a situation where ads + eyeballs = sales. Naturally, Facebook has ads and eyeballs, but is it delivering on sales? Sometimes. Marketers impassively and with reason conceive and devise flim and flam ads in an attempt to fool us into clicking on them. Most of these ads can be categorized by one of two scripted forms: “shock value” or “hint value”. The users that click these ads are either duped into it or accept the imminent sales pitch after the click.

Yes, some (I’d estimate 5%) marketers understand how to make Facebook ads work, but they need to stay on top of it, and require teams of expensive people that are constantly creating ads to fool, cajole and trick us into clicking on them. And user memory of the ad is gone in seconds.

Alternatively, the research is abundantly clear: once a product is recommended by a person that influences you – you are 16X more likely to buy it. And if you have an emotional connection with that person and perceive them to have expertise on the subject, that number jumps significantly.

Further, if that influential person is a celebrity or athlete with large social engagement or email lists the numbers are off the chart. Why? Because emotionally invested people are more likely to buy products that influential people use. There’s an expertise bias that acts as a heuristic for purchasing decisions. That’s why sponsors invest so much in their NASCAR drivers.

But why are startups, midsized companies, and large corporations spending increasing amounts of money on Facebook ads? Because the tools to measure influencer marketing haven’t evolved to the level of Facebook analytics. So it’s difficult to gauge ROI.

Moreover, the current approach for influencer marketing is spray and pray. Where it should represent one of eight forms:

 1.      Event driven: Influential people are invited to participate in an event like a dinner, corporate function or hosting an online event. These events are typically meant to impress a client, motivate a workforce or drive attendance. Check out what Seton Hall did with Kobayashi and Thuzio.

2.      Social promotions: We’ve run several tests and promoting a product giveaway, discount or content about a product or service using an influencers social and email channels nearly always beats the ROI of a Facebook ad. That’s because they can engage in discussion, answer questions and are shown using the product. There are many financial and strategic variables at play here, but your average ROI will be much higher working with an influencer and you’ll have the additional benefit of a positive brand association.
 
3.      Endorsement: When an athlete or celebrity uses the product and likes it so much, that a brand hires that person the endorse it. Because of the inherent social proof, fans of the influencer are much more likely to try the product. Do you remember the Skittles & Marshall Lynch example?
4. Auto-generated: Still relatively a new concept, an athlete or celebrity endorsement that’s digitally auto-generated based on buyer behavior. Think of product endorsements appearing in an online shopping cart, a product page or on a mobile device at a local retailer.

5. Co-created content: Where brand and athlete/celebrity create content together to further each other’s goals. I like to use the Got Chocolate Milkcampaign as an example of an industry leveraging athletes to promote the health benefits of chocolate milk.

6.      Influencer swarm: Perhaps you can’t secure or can’t afford a tier 1 athlete that’s in the news every other day. As effective and sometimes more effective are getting 30-50 lesser known but socially influential sports influencers (trainers, athletes, bloggers, pundits, etc.) to promote a product, event or social cause within a short time frame. When prospective customers see 50 people promote the same thing, it gets noticed.

7.      Digital and instant sponsorships: While major sponsorships of athletes will still be managed offline for the foreseeable future, new opportunities are emerging to sponsor athletes for short periods of time, during an event, and online (link to Raynforest comedian article) in the form of Twitter TWTR +0.26% takeovers, webinars and branded social properties. 
 
8.      Community building: Influential people in sports and celebrities are great for social proof and will help drive awareness and sales. But they typically are not willing to help you build an engaged community around your product. The best approach is to have a mix of celebrity and lesser known influencers. The former to draw massive awareness, the latter to nurture them into advocates for your organizatio 

Remember, Facebook ads don’t connect with people emotionally, they’re like one-trick robots that are trained to do one thing. Get you to click. People don’t spend hours discussing how they clicked that Facebook ad, but they will tell their grandchildren how they had an online discussion with their favorite athlete.

 Unlike Facebook ads, Influencers can change course when they see something is not working. You can launch a bunch of single use ads to see which has the highest conversion rate, but the ads can’t take feedback to adjust their message nor have discussions with people.

Facebook ads can’t appear at social functions and they don’t score touchdowns. The emotional connection with an ad is zero, while the emotional connection with someone like LeBron James is phenomenal.

New research this week shows that consumers are 68% more likely to share native ads than display ads and 53% more likely to absorb native ad messages.

You can argue that Facebook has more distribution potential than anything else – but that’s wrong. Email is hands down the winner. And email is ultra-targeted and accepted by those that have opted in to receive it.  So running a multi-channel influencer campaign that includes email is much more effective than plastering an unwanted banner on a prospective customer’s wall. Significantly more people open emails than click on banner ads.

Even if you find that banners are effective for you, adding an influential person to it will increase conversion rates drastically.

To be fair, working with influential people can be challenging and is tough to measure. That’s changing. Soon both of these issues will be easier for both influencer and brand. Expect to see solutions emerge over the next 12 months. It’s going to get interesting.