Recently, a client asked our opinion about trying to send prospects to a branded Facebook page as one of our calls to action. My response was, “With the right incentive, I’m confident we could use offline marketing to drive traffic to Facebook. However, I question whether this effort would translate to incremental sales.”
Here are a few reasons why I answered the way I did …
A study by ExactTarget published in eMarketer listed the primary reasons why people “like” a specific brand on Facebook:
- 1. People want access to discounts and freebies
- 2. People want information about upcoming products before products hit stores
- 3. People want to have fun and be entertained
- 4. People want to learn through interesting, exclusive content that adds value to their lives
In other words, consumers have a transactional, do-this-get-that relationship with the brands they “like” on Facebook. And this is not the type of relationship a prospect has with a product until they are a customer. Most branded Facebook sites are geared towards current customers. They engage by promoting content, features, and events and don’t specifically address why someone not currently a customer should purchase or switch. It fulfills the four items above, but I question the value and the relevancy for a prospect.
Experience tells us that adding calls to action usually robs from the primary call. For example, if the current primary call to action is to generate a phone call, adding an online call-to-action will typically take sales away from the call center. Since sales center conversion is typically higher than for other response channels, for every call we lose, we have to generate many more responses in the alternative channel.
Unfortunately, the conversion rate for Facebook sales is likely to be very low when there is no obvious pathway to purchase from Facebook. Are you willing to trade the certainty and the ability to covert from proven sales channels to something less certain?
Testing shows that we can add scant Facebook messaging (without a specific call to action) to our direct mail without impacting calls. However, we have no way of measuring the benefit of adding such messages.
Although seemingly a small point, you should not overlook that the transition from an offline medium like direct mail to an online medium is not optimal. You are not just a simple click away. Rather, you have to take the time to enter a specific URL and potentially log in to Facebook. It’s a bit clunky and I’m afraid you will lose them and they will not enter the sales pathway.
However, driving traffic to Facebook does have its place! I’ll talk about that in another post.