Corporations not investing in Social Media Marketing - Why?

[BlahBlahBlah]

Hi,

I notice several corporations and big companies with really little following on Social Media, why is this?
Let's take Facebook for example, I work 9-5 for a corporate American company here in Ireland (home based) that only has about 10k followers. I also have an e-Commerce store since March and I started advertising on Facebook just about 6 months ago and now I have well over that amount and only spent around 1.5k $ for it so far and Facebook is driving a lot of traffic to my website, likes cost me an average of 11c each and I advertise across Western Europe, USA and Canada. USA/Canada likes are just 5c each, so Facebook advertising is overall pretty cheap and especially for big companies it would work out super-cheap and definitely have some sort of financial return even if they are mainly B2B and acquire customers in other ways. I could obviously say the same for other platform like Instagram, but I am particularly interested on Facebook.

So I wonder if I am missing something, or it is simply bad marketing strategy on their side? The same for medium-size companies.

 

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[juan917]

Lack of knowledge, ignorance etc.

A lot of times these decision makers lived in a different time and simply don't 'get' the times we are living in. Let me give you an example - my mom refuses to sell clothes online because she does not think that people buy anything online. I'm serious

 

[BlahBlahBlah]

Lack of knowledge, ignorance etc.

A lot of times these decision makers lived in a different time and simply don't 'get' the times we are living in. Let me give you an example - my mom refuses to sell clothes online because she does not think that people buy anything online. I'm serious

that's what i thought and the to be honest the more i see small/medium/big businesses not using social networks and being successful despite of it, the more optimistic I become for the future of my business

 

[lowtek]

There are a number of reasons.

Large corporations typically don't sell off their website, and are looking for large deals that are closed by person-person contact.

They also don't need social media. Social media is a cheap and low cost way of interacting with your fans. Large corporations have large budgets and so they can blast the airwaves (remember, avg people watch 4 hours of T.V. a day) to create brand awareness.

The last thing a large company wants to do is interact with its customers - which is why they outsource customer service to the lowest bidders and provide the least possible training. Don't ever call Google support expecting anything remotely helpful, or really even anything accurate. I have been given misinformation by Google support for AdWords. Ads get cancelled by Facebook? Good luck talking to a human about that. Same thing with Amazon, etc.

 

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[BlahBlahBlah]

They also don't need social media. Social media is a cheap and low cost way of interacting with your fans. Large corporations have large budgets and so they can blast the airwaves (remember, avg people watch 4 hours of T.V. a day) to create brand awareness.

On this point though, a lot of the TV people watch nowadays is by recording their favorite programs and watching them at their on time, skipping through commercials. And the ones that do watch a program "real time" they probably go on Facebook during commercials anyway, I would have thought that for most part TV advertising is dead, and with the same budget they can really do great targeted advertising (ie. target CEO/Directors of big companies, etc. etc.), find it really hard to see why a company would still regularly advertise on TV.

I agree that customer supports of most corporations are awful, I found Facebook and Google support much better than Amazon though (total rubbish) or eBay, especially because via Business Manager you can actually chat with an agent without waiting forever for an email reply (today is officially 25 days I wait for a reply from Amazon on a simple question which is preventing me from selling there ).

I see investing on Facebook ads like creating an assets - if I ever run out of money I will always have those follower to work on, whereas Google Adwords (that i use by the way, but with a much smaller budget) or a commercial on tv is once is done is gone...

 

[PoGOOD]

I am the CEO of a polish branch of a medium size Co. present in 9 countries. We have in total over 5'000 clients, 1'200 employees and... not much revenue from social media. Of course it's a way of rising brand awareness, but our actual clients find us thru referrals and sheer market presence. For us the numbers of followers, likes etc are more "vanity factors" than actual business indicators. Simply - there's not much connection between "likes" and "sales"
Maybe that's the point of your present employer as well?


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[CycleGuy]

My post is going to be on mid size and small businesses. Think "Franchise Car Dealer" size business. I don't have any experience in or with a large national corporation.


Social Media has worked well for us since we really started pushing it about 18 months ago.
We're a small regional business so targeted regional marketing that facebook offers has helped a lot.
We get about 35% of our website traffic from social media. Mainly facebook, but I run an Instagram and twitter account as well.

The one thing I've noticed on competitors and people locally here is that they refuse to "pay to play" on facebook.
Sadly I think it's a bit of an ego thing. Like "Pay for facebook ads? That's crazy facebook is free and we can just make lots of posts and still get exposure".

That's not the case. If you want a presence on social media you have to have a combination of things.

-Social Proof: You need likes. These same people who don't want to pay for ads don't want to buy likes. I understand this though process and trust me it "feels" like you're getting screwed running a campaign for likes. The truth is "Social Proof" is huge. Have a multi-million dollar company that deals with consumers who has under 1000 likes is a complete turn off to those consumers. Some people just simply refuse to run "Likes Campaigns". You can target the "likes" in detail as well. It's very handy if you know what your consumers' demographics. Especially if you have niche products.

-Consistent original content. Some managers refuse to consistently post original content. Boring stock images and reposted industry links are cancer to people's facebook feeds. People like photos of the actual products in different settings. They don't even have to be professional photos. Just a clean background or unique background featuring the real product. Videos of products are also important in my opinion. If the product has a function it's always good to have a video of the product in action or even a walk around. I personally lack video skills but still manage to get videos on my iphone and edit them with splice. I need to purchase some better equipment. CUSTOMER PHOTOS are huge imo. People love seeing people buying/using/wearing the products. I have a friend who specializes in clothing. He's got a couple of good looking women who he gave some of his gear to for the use of their photos. It's been an awesome investment for him. He has used their pics for ads all this Christmas season.


-Targeted Ad Campaigns/Boosted Posts. This is what some managers/business marketers have a hard time justifying the costs. This is where it baffles me. You look at the cost of mass marketing vs targeting marketing and there is a huge difference. Someone can run a week's worth of radio ads for $750 or a month's worth of Facebook ads for $750. Just an example radio is much more expensive in most cases. The real advantage of the facebook is the targeting of your specific customers. Even if it's just regional that's perfect for some small/mid size businesses. Then you take it a step further if you know their demographics. The return on investment for NICHE products is so much better with targeting marketing than mass marketing in my experience. The problem is most managers just want to boost something for $20 then complain how they didn't sell something. The same ones then don't care to spend $3000 on a failed TV campaign that doesn't produce results. The problem is the shift in managers and marketers understanding the value paid targeted boosts.

Pay to play is here to stay. The faster businesses play by the rules and adopt stressful strategies the more successful they will be in the market.

 

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[theag]

Because its not effective for them. They get reach cheaper on TV if they need it.

 

[Niptuck MD]

after working for 3 distinct corporations i can tell you they are stubborn, sluggish and lax when it comes to change and mindset shift. People there are your typical slow laners and it takes a lot of pull and tact to get things done.

 

[Canuker]

Hi,
I also have an e-Commerce store since March and I started advertising on Facebook just about 6 months ago and now I have well over that amount and only spent around 1.5k $ for it so far and Facebook is driving a lot of traffic to my website, likes cost me an average of 11c each and I advertise across Western Europe, USA and Canada. USA/Canada likes are just 5c each,.

How is your ROI on that 1.5k?

I'm all with you when it comes to social media marketing being a powerful tool. But I don't think it's being utilized to its full potential unless you have a way to track your results. How else can you appropriately test, optimize, and scale? If you aren't tracking how that traffic converts to sales then you're not using FB ads to their full potential.

I've met people who have tried and were not fans of FB marketing for this reason. They just put a budget into an ad and failed to track results using things like coupon codes and contests etc. They didn't know if they were actually generating a worth while amount revenue off the ads or just driving meaningless traffic.

Just a thought.

 

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[BlahBlahBlah]

How is your ROI on that 1.5k?

I'm all with you when it comes to social media marketing being a powerful tool. But I don't think it's being utilized to its full potential unless you have a way to track your results. How else can you appropriately test, optimize, and scale? If you aren't tracking how that traffic converts to sales then you're not using FB ads to their full potential.

I've met people who have tried and were not fans of FB marketing for this reason. They just put a budget into an ad and failed to track results using things like coupon codes and contests etc. They didn't know if they were actually generating a worth while amount revenue off the ads or just driving meaningless traffic.

Just a thought.

My ROI is positive, around 2k on Sales converted from Facebook visits in the past couple of months (a large % of my sales as I am still a small business and inflated by the Christmas period, I sold less prior to October), but even if I had a negative ROI it would be wrong to assume that investing in Facebook Ads does not have a positive expected ROI because those 10k+ fans that I have got now are mine forever. I could stop advertising on Facebook tomorrow if I wanted to and will still be able to advertise to those 10k+ fans for the years to come, and that should be taken into account when looking at the ROI. Different story for Google Adwords for example.

I mainly invest on Facebook to gain Page Likes, however I put around 10% of Facebook budget to Boost Post to target people who normally have no interest in liking/following my page but that I want them to see a specific post (ie. they are looking for a Christmas gift for a friend of relative).

Funny that just this very morning I saw a video on GaryV Facebook page discussing this exact topic (first video at the top), he must have read my post uaahahaha https://www.facebook.com/gary/

 

[BlahBlahBlah]

Because its not effective for them. They get reach cheaper on TV if they need it.

Could you elaborate please? How can be cheaper and more effective on TV?

 

[BlahBlahBlah]

@PoGOOD

Thank you for replying first of all. My question really is, on a company with 1,200 employees why not make it 1,201 and a little social media budget to really get it going? Keep a Facebook/Twitter/Instagram page going does not really take huge effort and there is a potential reward with basically zero risk for such a big company. I can understand that you get the business from other channel but I don't think it is easy to quantify if you could potential have had even more business coming through with a proper Social Media presence. I am pretty sure that even just a 1% Business increase will already have a positive return on the additional resource required. Of course there are a lot of other factors that I am probably not considering, but I see this a win-win for pretty much any company out there. I am actually really surprised when I see the Facebook page of this very forum not paying for likes or update the page regularly at least.

PS: I couldn't quote the original post as I was getting error messages.

 

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[Canuker]

My ROI is positive, around 2k on Sales converted from Facebook visits in the past couple of months (a large % of my sales as I am still a small business and inflated by the Christmas period, I sold less prior to October), but even if I had a negative ROI it would be wrong to assume that investing in Facebook Ads does not have a positive expected ROI because those 10k+ fans that I have got now are mine forever. I could stop advertising on Facebook tomorrow if I wanted to and will still be able to advertise to those 10k+ fans for the years to come, and that should be taken into account when looking at the ROI. Different story for Google Adwords for example.

I mainly invest on Facebook to gain Page Likes, however I put around 10% of Facebook budget to Boost Post to target people who normally have no interest in liking/following my page but that I want them to see a specific post (ie. they are looking for a Christmas gift for a friend of relative).

Funny that just this very morning I saw a video on GaryV Facebook page discussing this exact topic (first video at the top), he must have read my post uaahahaha https://www.facebook.com/gary/

Whats the video called? Can't seem to find it.

**Edit** I love GaryV. That video was great.

 

[Jake]

USA/Canada likes are just 5c each

This is using the promote page AdSet? Are you targetting relevant people to your niche?

Seems very cheap so if you want to share more of your technique I'd be happy to listen!

 

[Raoul Duke]

Because its not effective for them. They get reach cheaper on TV if they need it.

http://www.german-retail-blog.com/t...molishes-another-round-of-marketing-myths-365
https://techcrunch.com/2012/11/17/o...ok-ads-versus-tv-does-social-media-no-favors/
https://pando.com/2012/11/05/resist...-ave-wastes-clients-money-by-denying-reality/
http://www.sirfs-up.com/downloads/SIRFs_Up_book_part2.pdf

page 72 fom SIRFs

"If marketers understand how important social media is, why haven’t they turned the ship? Why doesn’t spending reflect the rhetoric? There has to be some pretty deep-seated reasons for the lack of meaningful movement by marketers.

A study published in the Journal of Advertising Research and conducted by McKinsey, Deloitte, and Professor Corstjens from Instead, entitled “The Power of Inertia: Conservatism in Marketing Resource Allocation” provides an independent assessment of marketing spending to compare with Marketing Evolution’s database. The authors conclude that marketers are severely misallocating their budgets in virtually every industry they examined. The most common over-investment is in pricing promotional schemes.

From my vantage point, it is more than just conservatism. It is a superficial understanding of how marketing investments translate into profits.

I say superficial because marketers do seem to sense that content and social media are important, but the knowledge doesn’t run deep enough to fundamentally alter investment strategies. Perhaps no one has explicitly connected the dots to show how various marketing tactics work together to produce changes in customers’ attitudes and behaviors and ultimately produce revenues and profits.

Maybe it is our fault in the research industry because we should be connecting the dots. Shiv Singh, Head of Digital at PepsiCo Beverages and an advocate for content and social media-based marketing, shared with me that it is in marketers’ human nature to return to the past when confronted with uncertainty and pressure.

Shiv posits that the overreliance on pricing discounts and traditional advertising occurs because it’s what marketers are familiar with. When the pressure of making sales goals increases due to a tough economy, many marketers revert to old habits—even if they don’t work as well as social media—simply because the marketer is more familiar with them. In other words, old marketing tactics may be less effective, but their results are more predictable, at least on an intuitive level, for the traditionally trained marketer.

I’ve been struggling with a sense that the advertising and promotions-centric marketing framework that most marketers know so well doesn’t add up. It’s not to say that advertising and price promotions can’t influence people and generate sales. Advertising and price promotion can. It’s a sense that marketers have the sequence wrong. Many marketers start with advertising and price discounts as a given, and then work out what else they should do to round-out the marketing program. But that doesn’t optimize ROI—it erodes profits.

In big companies that do advertising and promotions, advertising and price promotions have their own perpetual engine. If you spend on advertising and promotions, stop, look, and listen. The SIRFs show us that the old approach isn’t optimal. The best analytic minds in the industry can’t make the ROI logic of an advertising and promotionscentric marketing framework succeed in the long run. That’s right— the dominant advertising and promotions-centric framework used by most marketers doesn’t square with all the empirical data from the last several years on how marketing creates value for a company."

 

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[PoGOOD]

The last thing a large company wants to do is interact with its customers...

Sad but true


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[BlahBlahBlah]

This is using the promote page AdSet? Are you targetting relevant people to your niche?

Seems very cheap so if you want to share more of your technique I'd be happy to listen!

Hi! Yes, until 6 weeks ago I only had about 2k likes on my page as despite of running split testing, etc. I never managed to get it under 25c-30c per like, however at the beginning of November I start running ads again and change from "Pay per impression" to "Pay per like" and the magic happened.

I am running the same Ads (2 per Adset) across different countries, my plan was to then make changes to optimize it along the way but now I am pretty scared to touch it as I am not sure it can get much cheaper of this anyway. "Likes" from Ireland and the UK are particularly important for me (90% of my Sales come from these countries), however I have started getting sales from other Euro countries and some from US lately which is very good. I target only Men 25-55 years old with interest in my niche and in Ireland if we remove woman and men outside of that age bracket we only have probably around 1 million potential customers as the country is pretty small, so UK is really critical and as people start speaking more and more English across Europe and get more and more comfortable with only shopping I think it makes a lot of sense to target all Western Euro countries. I haven't targeted Eastern Europe countries yet but I will be adding them soon, main reason is that the average income/spending in Western Europe is much higher than in Easter Europe, but things are slowly changing.
I also added some other countries based on this research: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/252539

Here are the details of the Christmas Campaign so far and to be honest I have NO IDEA why US/Canada likes are so cheap, but I like it!
Some countries may not have a big spending but can also bring some indirect benefits to me: for example if I have some users never buying but liking every single post I make (there are some of those!!!) they increase my engagement and help getting a bigger reach across other users, who may actually buy. So it is really hard to have a full picture of the real ROI.
My plan in 2017 is to invest 10k in Facebook likes and reach the 100k likes mark, after which I should be able to get many more likes organically and running competitions (share post/tag/etc), rather than buying more likes. I also want to use Facebook to help growing my Instagram page (only 2.5k followers so far) and Twitter (only 1.5k followers).

 

[PoGOOD]

@PoGOOD

Thank you for replying first of all. My question really is, on a company with 1,200 employees why not make it 1,201 and a little social media budget to really get it going?

Don't get me wrong - we do have our social guys in place and they do their job. The issue is - knowing the way we get our leads (person-to-person / referrals / tenders) the job for them is brand awareness only.
In my previous businesses (automotive, sport goods retail) we were using social media all day long, as our efforts were aimed at B2C sales.
Today we targeting professionals within rather large companies and our focus should reflect that. In 2017 we will move more effort to LinkedIn and similar local sites - but again - we will work on brand awareness, not direct sales.
In my opinion typical social networks could be well utilized for direct sales / offering in B2C businesses. For B2B they're not "that sexy"



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[AlphaWulf]

I think social media is still "new" in terms of being used as a sales channel so big companies with established practices are still catching up.

I also believe a lot of it has to do with social media generally having a longer advertising cycle making it harder for companies to track ROI. They don't see the value of a "like" when it doesn't directly equate to a lead or sale.


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[BlahBlahBlah]

This week I ran my first Facebook competition. I had about 11k likes on my page and decided to give it a go and see how the audience will react - the product I am giving away has a cost to me of about 20$ and if I add 10$ shipping the promotion will cost me around 30$. A little Christmas present for one of my business page fans.
My goal was to get around 50-100 likes organically (I put paid Ads on hold for the past couple of days to better monitor if I get any organic growth) and get the fans to engage.
The results have been absolutely ridiculous! In 3 days my page had an increase of 850 likes, the giveaway post had a 100% reach...I am speechless. Technically by giving away this product each new "like" cost me 0.03€, way cheaper than paid advertising, which is already really cheap. I got 200 people entering the competition. I could technically run a give away every week and it would be incredibly +EV for me - however I am not sure whether this would be a good idea in the long run for the brand (or maybe it is?). But certainly once or twice a month is worth it!
For sure I want to leverage Facebook to increase my following on Instagram, Twitter (tough one) and possibly kick off with Snap Chat soon. I knew people love giveaways, but I didn't know up to this point! Really excited for 2017!

 

[PoGOOD]

I knew people love giveaways, but I didn't know up to this point! Really excited for 2017!

Great to see such results as well as your enthusiasm.


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[CycleGuy]

This week I ran my first Facebook competition. I had about 11k likes on my page and decided to give it a go and see how the audience will react - the product I am giving away has a cost to me of about 20$ and if I add 10$ shipping the promotion will cost me around 30$. A little Christmas present for one of my business page fans.
My goal was to get around 50-100 likes organically (I put paid Ads on hold for the past couple of days to better monitor if I get any organic growth) and get the fans to engage.
The results have been absolutely ridiculous! In 3 days my page had an increase of 850 likes, the giveaway post had a 100% reach...I am speechless. Technically by giving away this product each new "like" cost me 0.03€, way cheaper than paid advertising, which is already really cheap. I got 200 people entering the competition. I could technically run a give away every week and it would be incredibly +EV for me - however I am not sure whether this would be a good idea in the long run for the brand (or maybe it is?). But certainly once or twice a month is worth it!
For sure I want to leverage Facebook to increase my following on Instagram, Twitter (tough one) and possibly kick off with Snap Chat soon. I knew people love giveaways, but I didn't know up to this point! Really excited for 2017!

That's great! I think supplementing giveaway items is a solid way for low cost exposure. One small company I follow does too many unrelated giveaways. They get lots of engagement but their overall like growth has stagnated. It's to the point of where they aren't growing because the only people that follow their page are only interested in freebies. Which are unrelated to the product.

I think the home run with giveaways would be to give your own product away once you had the audience.



Unrelated: I'm so sick of the fake pages saying "IF WE GET 100,000 FOLLOWERS WE'LL GIVE AWAY A 2016 LEXUS!"

 

[BlahBlahBlah]

That's great! I think supplementing giveaway items is a solid way for low cost exposure. One small company I follow does too many unrelated giveaways. They get lots of engagement but their overall like growth has stagnated. It's to the point of where they aren't growing because the only people that follow their page are only interested in freebies. Which are unrelated to the product.

I think the home run with giveaways would be to give your own product away once you had the audience.



Unrelated: I'm so sick of the fake pages saying "IF WE GET 100,000 FOLLOWERS WE'LL GIVE AWAY A 2016 LEXUS!"

Oh yes, I only give away my own products, to start I picked one that I have a good number of pcs in stock