IN TWO weeks, we will enter the Philippine Christmas season.
With the popularity of social media, we can expect a lot of campaigns and promotion to happen during this period until December.
Companies will invest in having an online presence, Facebook, Twitter and the like to generate awareness and buzz. When it comes to measuring effectiveness, results should be felt directly at the bottom line.
I have seen online campaigns by companies where success is based on the number of fans, videos, photos, blog posts, members and other similar metrics. On one hand, that has value but at the end of the day, it is also about how it translates to actual revenues.
This is the reason campaigns have to be planned well, where there is dialogue on how to provide value and organize activities that will translate to revenues.
One example can be a hotel investing on online promotions through blogs, sponsorships and video competitions and then measure its effectiveness based on the number of hotel room reservations generated.
It’s the same with a videographer whose effort to disseminate educational videos online result in corporate or event bookings and advertising.
Another campaign can be of a cosmetic company who develops an online game where a player has to remove pimples. Top scorers can get a product as prize, therefore creating awareness about it among a targeted audience who wants it the most. One measurement can be the number of players. But more importantly, how many of those lead to purchases.
A sample execution also is having a special or expensive prize to be raffled for any purchase made at a particular period of time online or simply giving a discount coupon that can be used on a specific date. The number of purchases generated versus amount invested will ultimately show what went well and not.
In any online campaign, its influence will have to be looked at based on bottom-line result in order to justify the investment.
While this may be tough for campaigners, it gives us the challenge to be realistic and creative in our approaches, especially in social media where users don’t like direct sales pitches.
The Internet and Mobile Marketing Summit 2010 (http://www.immapsummit.com) starts today. The winners of the Boomerang Awards 2010 will be announced tonight. I look forward to sharing lessons learned from it with you next week.
(http://digitalfilipino.com)