Digital marketing firms take to Facebook to run brand, ad campaigns

Increasing levels of acceptance of Facebook (FB) as a major force in branding and advertising is having a momentous effect on the advertising industry. The digital and interactive marketing industry is making use of FB page almost like a business portal (like a replica of websites) and deriving business advantage out of it.

Sample this: When Mumbai-based interactive marketing solutions provider Contests2Win, which developed FB applications for Cadbury, NGC and ICI Dulux, ran a campaign for Future Group's hypermarket format Big Bazaar, the latter got 10,000 fans on FB in just three weeks.

“2010 was the year when Indian brands discovered FB. In 2011, most brands are allocating money on FB for experimentation ... they are dipping their toes in the water by acquiring fans/likes and hiring specialist agencies to run social media campaigns. FB will soon become an integral part of most Internet media plans just as Google, Yahoo! and Rediff are,” says Rajagopal Menon, chief operating officer of Contests2Win.

Menon says brands will go where the consumers are, and with 20 million-odd consumers on FB, the social media site will replace a lot of ‘Brand’ sites. “Sony Pictures, for example, keeps updating its FB page with its latest international and national releases. Hollywood fans can comment and share this content with their friends, thus giving the brand a readymade viral platform. Very soon, we will be releasing India’s first branded social game on FB on the lines of Farmville for a major TV brand,” he adds.

According to Suresh Reddy, chairman and managing director of Hyderabad-based digital marketing solutions provider Ybrant Digital, in India FB has the highest reach with 24 million people accessing it, followed by Google’s Orkut with 18 million. Together, they cater to 90 per cent of the users of social media sites. It is estimated that Rs 85 crore was spent on social networking sites last year and is expected to grow by 25 per cent this financial year, he adds.

Ybrant Digital, which was declared as the biggest advertiser on Facebook Social Ads outside of the US in August 2010, has developed an enhanced advertising solution christened ‘FBM’, which allows it to target users that have not clicked the FB ad and present them with relevant banners on other websites.

“We currently serve roughly 4 billion impressions and 55 million clicks per month around the world. In the next couple of years, we forecast 15 per cent growth in our business with Facebook,” Reddy says.

Online ad spending was pegged at $61.18 billion worldwide in 2010, which is forecast to leap to $96.8 billion, growing at an 11.9 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) despite the slow, uneven and fragile global economic recovery. In India, online advertising is estimated to have reached Rs 785 crore last year, and expected to grow 26 per cent this year.

“Much of this increase in spends will revolve around FB and Twitter. Typically these would be about 40 per cent of total digital marketing spends. While FB leads the pack as the ‘place to be’ for most brands, there is a limited understanding of how really to use the medium,” says Chris George, founder and chief executive of EBS Worldwide.

EBS Worldwide’s services around conversations on FB are driven by its Online Reputation Management (ORM) services, where it provides brands with an audit of ‘who is saying what’ about their brands in the online world.

George says brands, quite often, will spend well on creating a digital presence but totally ignore what is happening to the brand on social media. “Our ORM services provide brands with a dash board of where their brands stand, followed by a comprehensive plan to engage in those conversations. Our social media solutions to the brands we work with are not just limited to the number of ads we have executed on FB for them. We are seeing brands spending more and more on social media like FB and we see this rising to about 80 per cent of the total new media marketing budget in the coming two years,” he adds.

Non-profit organisations like Wildlife Reserves Singapore (WRS), which manages a majority of the zoos in Singapore, are also taking to FB by opening fan pages to increase sustained attendance of visitors to its zoos.

WRS, which served 3.6 million visitors across the Jurong Bird Park, Night Safari and Singapore Zoo of which Indian tourists accounted for a low double-digit percentage, has over 25,000 fans on FB — close to 80 per cent are active fans. Of this, fans from India make up almost 3 per cent.

“In a landscape filled with millions of organisations and billions of messages, sometimes we have to make our presence known so we run social advertisement campaigns on FB to reach out to those who are unaware of us. In the last month, we had almost 600,000 page views and we expect to break the 1-million barrier soon,” says Isabel Cheng, director (sales, marketing and communications) of WRS.

Source:        http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/digital-marketing-firms-take-to-facebook-to-run-brand-ad-campaigns/435644/