The Benefits of Advertisements, Years Later
Do you ever wish you could get more out of those old advertisements for which you paid so much money? They were so darn expensive, and now they are just sitting in storage, collecting dust! Once again, social media is here to the rescue. Here are some great reasons to put your old ads online:
- Search Engine Optimization - Adding content to social networks can do wonders for your search engine optimization. For instance, when we add pictures to Flickr or video to YouTube, we make sure the content is tagged with the right keywords. We also make sure that descriptions and titles include the brand name, keywords and links . All of these things increase the amount of content a company has on the web, and therefore increases the search engine optimization.
- Another way to reach your audience- Just because there are 240 million Facebook users doesn’t mean you should focus all of your attention on that medium. Yes, uploading multimedia to Facebook is an great way to provide your friends and fans with content, but plenty of people use flickr and YouTube on a daily basis.
- Increase online footprint- The more content you are putting out on the web about your brand, the more users are going to find you, and the more comfortable they will be with your product or brand.
- Provides opportunities for two-way communication – Uploading multimedia is great way to incite commentary and get feedback. Having imput can help brands track the success of their marketing efforts. Knowing that your customers think “This commercial is hilarious,” or “This ad stinks” is valuable knowledge. And unless you are sitting on the couch next to millions of TV viewers, you can’t get that kind of feedback with traditional advertising. In addition to getting feedback, sites such as YouTube and Flickr also allow opportunities for brands to join the conversation, by talking with viewers or answering their questions.
Robert Andrew Salon & Spa, a client of The Cyphers Agency, has a Flickr account that we set up for them. As you see circled in the screen shot below, the brand is mentioned several times for one picture. We have hundreds of pictures uploaded to the Robert Andrew Flickr account. With every single picture tagged and described appropriately, viewers are exposed to the brand name more frequently. The particular set of pictures featured below was viewed more than 40,000 times!
If you’re thinking that 40,000 views is measly compared to the millions of views you can get through advertising on television, you’re right–if you’re just comparing the numbers.
People are opting into the brands message, they are actually interacting with the content (instead of sitting on the couch with glazed eyeballs), and you (the brand) can speak directly to them. Their comments also give you insight into your target audience, and their behavior (clicks, time spent on page, what sites they came from) is highly track-able which also contributes to further understanding of your audience. You don’t get any of that with a TV ad. Unless it’s that old TV ad that you just uploaded to YouTube 
