frankly speaking

Pick Your Poison - Where To Send Offline Traffic

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while, and to be honest, don’t have a firm grasp on the solution. Having said that, there’s an interesting problem facing marketers these days. The problem boils down to where do you send your potential customers that you are advertising to via television and radio - do you send them to your facebook page or do you send them to your website? 

I’m sure you’ve noticed that a lot more brand advertisers are sending traffic to their facebook pages lately. For example, in a lot of commercials you’ll see brands list www.facebook.com/xxxxx as the address they want consumers to visit. Likewise, I’ve even seen some advertisers have a graphic on their commercials that simply says ‘Follow us on twitter @xxxxx’.  I find this fascinating.

One of the jobs of a marketer is to reduce the ‘clicks to conversions’ metric, that is, you’re supposed to cut down on the number of clicks that it takes a consumer to convert. This makes the case for sending a consumer directly to your website most logical. By intervening and giving the consumer an additional step before getting them to your website, increases the probability that your potential consumer will become distracted and not converting on your website. 

On the other hand, there is tremendous value in adding a new Facebook fan (to find that exact value, do the analytics internally :). Each of your fans will see your updates, links, coupons on deals and has the ability to spread that information with his or her own network. The virality of facebook is part of what makes the platform so unique and a very important strategy for all marketers. 

At the end of the day, brands have to decide for themselves what is most value. I would imagine conversion rates from traffic sent directly to their website is higher, but lifetime value of fans sent to a brands facebook page is much greater. 

Thoughts?