Marketing your Marketing

Chalk this up to another example of why Marketing STILL doesn’t get social.

Social Times reports that the way to get more “Likes” on Facebook is to offer coupons to satiate the what’s-in-it-for-me hunger of an increasingly discriminating social networker.

This might well be that moment in social media marketing history when we look back and say – “what were we thinking??”

I quote:

A recent survey conducted by Ad Age/Ipsos Observer finds that coupons are the number one reason consumers “like” brands on Facebook.

We’ve all seen the popularity of daily deal sites like Groupon, but it turns out that good ol’ retail coupons are a great incentive for Faebook users to “like” a business page. The findings of the survey make sense: Facebook users are not typically willing to share their information and their network with just anyone, but it seems they’re more willing to do so if they get something in return

Basically, entice your visitors to ‘Like’ your business page by throwing them a discount coupon.

Look, I’m a big believer in in-bound marketing on the social web, done right. I’ve gained tremendously from it in my own work. It’s opened gigantic doors for me to communicate and sell the promise of social and collaborative business as a way to accelerate performance. But increasingly there’s data emerging about the hype that is social media marketing from a lead generation standpoint. And this kind of stuff just adds to the exuberance.

I never thought I would do a whole post on a single social networking gesture but this is about the larger issue of not getting sucked into the social vortex without careful thought and resource implications.

A ‘Like’, simply, is designed to imply that I like your product. In marketing lingo, that is supposed to mean that I’m at minimum an unqualified interested party, and sends a message back that I might be a candidate to move up the engagement funnel or spiral or what have you. And ultimately towards a pre-defined call-to-action.

Throw in a coupon and you’re playing with allegiances now. Sure, your ‘Likes’ will go up but does that really translate to likes? Or was it just for the coupon? Seems like nothing’s lost but is it worth the time of your marketing and sales teams to deal with the scores of follow-ups? This looks like a knock off of trade show marketing where we are duped into believing that 1000 interested prospects came to our booth where in reality 700 just wanted to drop their business card in the till for a chance to win an iPad2.

In traditional marketing this may fly as the cost and effort to send out a 1000 follow up emails is minimal. To do in-bound marketing right, you need to engage and the manual nature of this gets really expensive when you do more enticing to attract unqualified buyers. That ends up in your organization topping off marketing with even more marketing.

Get off the treadmill. Make sure you’re not marketing your marketing.

(Cross-posted @ Pretzel Logic - Social and Collaborative Business)