Social marketing startup Linqia has just completed a $3.5MM round of venture funding, according to TechCrunch. Linqia's goal is to connect advertisers with potential customers in the many small, niche online communities. By targeting these small, passionate groups, Linqia claims to achieve average click-through rates of 2 percent: 40 times the industry average click-through rate for display ads.
Their strategy for serving ads involves placing curated, sponsored "stories" among the normal posts on niche community blogs. These sponsored posts are fully disclosed by the blogger so as not to appear disingenuous, and according to CEO Maria Sipka, because "it actually gives them credibility and recognition to be associated with a brand. They want to make it known." Linqia claims that they have identified more that 100 million different "interest communities" on the internet, while most major brands have difficulty managing campaigns across more than 10 or 15 different communities.
It will be interesting to see how successful their strategy ends up being over the next couple years. It is certainly possible that community members will simply ignore these sponsored posts. Even worse, users could even begin to resent the fact that their once-pure communities are being tarnished by intrusive ads and respond by turning their browsers elsewhere. However, Linqia is claiming impressive results where they have already deployed their service. Only time will tell if their strategy ends up paying off.
My take is this will not be effective in terms of the actual long-tail KPI's - conversions (ie buy my stuff). These communities are finicky and view such content suspiciously. There may some short term good feeling from a click through but the ultimate conversion is what matters.
ReplyDeleteA more effective strategy than a blogvertorial is to have a credible person from the company participate in the community. So the Dir of Marketing for Fedex joins and talks about his experience doing XYZ. He tries to legitimately participate as a peer vs talking down to the community.
This can help w brand perception and consideration, but it's decidedly up funnel activity and showing how it may lead to conversions is also wrought w some longer term questions.