A while ago I published a post sharing data from a site I run showing that two popular macro social sites are just a tiny sliver of traffic to a well-marketed brand. And this is a good thing!
[Note: I took a fresh look at traffic to this site since the original post linked above — and it hadn’t changed all that much, not even worth re-creating graphs – which shows why building a sustainable, platform-agnostic brand is a good idea.]
You want a diversified amount of traffic because if someone, anyone, changes the rules you do not want to be at their whim for visitors or conversions. This is dangerous just like putting your entire portfolio into one single investment would be. You aren’t diversified and are playing a dangerous game where you can easily be cut off from increasing future revenue, or even worse, lose everything you depend on today.
So it was interesting to see two recent broader studies on social traffic in particular support the need for diversification and focus on efforts across tactics. Not just hyped ones (like the obvious macro social sites).
First up, McKinsey and Company published some great research on the effectiveness of different channels over the last several years:
Insights from this? We know search rocks. But the really interesting thing is email — it’s unsexy, unloved and misunderstood by many marketers. Yet it continues to be a high conversion and ultra-efficient marketing channel. Note, despite many social marketers / tech hipsters who have disdain for email: all of the major social players including FB, Twitter and LinkedIn use email as a hook to bring users back. So, forget the pundits, look at what the data says and what the smartest tech firms do. They all love and use email (as you should). Email (and RSS at a lower adoption rate) is still the best example of opt-in at the source.
One more, this time from Custora. According to their data, organic search, CPC (SEM) and email continue to be the online marketing channels driving most e-commerce purchases this holiday season — with social being a tiny sliver (see bottom right chart):
This data is from over 70 million online shoppers and over $10B in e-commerce revenue across over 100 US-based online retailers.
And while yesterday’s post on social ROI does a good job showing how to value social appropriately (there is value here) note it is not, and nowhere in the future will it be, a channel that sits at the bottom of the marketing funnel.
Human behavior in a social setting has not changed for ages. And it is no different ‘online’ (in fact, if you think of ‘online’ as some magic place different than ‘offline’ you’re wrong: it’s just a reflection of the real world, they’re the same). Imagine going to a friend’s house this weekend and bringing with you a bag filled with perfumes and colognes you wished to sell to your friends. You setup a table to try and sell them. You’d be ridiculed. Totally inappropriate (and ineffective). However, imagine a different scenario where a friend discusses how wonderful a nice cologne they purchased was — or even better was complemented on their smell and this was overheard. This is more aligned with how social actually works, and the data reflects it.
Working on a strategy that creates awareness (social, display, content, etc) wins the fulfillment points (search, email, etc) and has the right push in addition to pull is the right way forward. But in my opinion from a strategy perspective you have to nail the conversion-oriented channels first. Without that you can scale up awareness all you want and never make economic impact as the above studies show.
Additionally, unless you want to sell out and go for high-bounce traffic from low-value, disinterested users macro social sites probably won’t send you the highest volume (let alone quality) traffic anyway. Build connections and community with smart, niche and passionate audiences. You’ll win every time.