YouTube, FaceBook, and American Food…

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I admit it. I’ve been slow on the up take with this.

If you’ve been following me or my work, you know that I’m a pay per click and direct response marketing evangelist.

I love it because it brings me and my clients measurable, accountable results. The kind of results businesses can be built on and financial projections can be made.

However, a couple of things recently have sparked my interest. Here’s how it happened…

FaceBook and direct mail marketing.

Back in October I was at a get together in Chicago with Perry Marshall and his other coaching students. We were talking over lunch about marketing on the internet and the subject of FaceBook came up while we were waiting for our food…

Now, until then I never really “got” FaceBook, MySpace or any other social networking sites. I couldn’t really work out how they made their money, or how me or my clients could make money from them either.

Then, as the waiter was serving me the biggest burger I’d ever seen (I’m not used to American food), Nicole from Chocoley asked if I’d heard of FaceBook Flyers. I said no. She went on to explain that they could well be the next big advertising thing on the internet.

Here’s how they work: FaceBook flyers (or FaceBook Ads as they are now called) are best decribed as a combination of Google Adwords and targeted direct mail. You only pay on a pay per click basis (just like adwords), but you can target your audience with terrifying accuracy, like with direct mail.

So for example, this means you could target Women in Southend on Sea who are engaged and aged between 18 and 40. This means that your advert would show up in these peoples profiles and you’d only pay when they clicked on your ad. Pretty good if you were in the wedding business in Southend eh?

This can be done for all sorts of groups of people and markets.

I think as sites like FaceBook grow, this could give Google a serious run for its money.

That said, I don’t think the response rates will be as good as search engine marketing (pay per click) ads. This is because ads on a search engine are always right in front of the reader at the very moment they’re thinking about that subject.

Adverts on Google Adsense and Facebook, although they are targeted, aren’t what the reader is currently thinking about. These type of adverts need to grab attention and divert the readers thoughts towards the ad and away from what they are curerntly reading.

Either way, it’s too early to tell. I’m going to be doing some testing with my website, and will also test some FaceBook advertising with my clients as well. I’ll let you know how it all goes…

The next thing that’s really hit be recently is the power of YouTube. The traffic it can generate is enormous. I think online video is going to be pretty big in the coming years. I liken it to the early days of the internet, when it was easy to get a first page listing on Google. Online video is still a free-for-all and there’s money to be made if you know what you’re doing.

I’ll be discussing YouTube and how to get your business on there in the next post.

Until then, happy marketing!

Cheers,

George.