Here’s an interesting item, published last week by eMarketing.com.

When ad agencies decide on the ways to publicize their own companies, a full 87% choose not to advertise on Facebook.  Agency ads appear on even a smaller percentage of the other major B2B social media sites–LinkedIn and Twitter.

Here’s the chart showing the percentages:

“Overall,” eMarketer concluded, ” most companies prefer to focus on marketing on social networks, rather than spending money to advertise.”

To read the entire article, click here.

Who would have thought that the word “sale” wasn’t always a sure-fire customer-grabber? Certainly not me.

Yet a new report from Buddy Media shows that people relate to the word with below-average engagement in social media.

According to the report, written up in MarketingVOX, “[t]he keyword ‘dollars off’ in a retail offer-related Facebook post provides the highest user engagement– 55% higher than average — out of 10 popular choices, according to a September 2011 report from Buddy Media. And ubiquitous ‘coupon’ ? It had an engagement 39% above average.

“On the other end of the spectrum, seemingly popular keywords, such as ‘sale’,  ‘save,’ ‘deal,”% off’ and ‘bargain’ have lower-than-average engagement rates –  30% lower in the case of ‘sale.’”

To read highlights of the interesting study on what works in social media, click here.

While every marketer tries to figure out the way to turn smartphone presence into big bucks, an interesting survey just indicated  the best way to get smartphone users to click through to your Website or your product. The answer: personalization.

Upstream, a  global mobile marketing technology company, and research company Luth Research, checked in with smartphone users to see what they responded to in messages sent to their phones. Interestingly, respondents indicated that mobile advertisements “that are tailored to their “tastes and interests” far out-performed other offers based on time, lifestyle or location.

The research polled more than 2,000 American adults and found that feature phone users ranked the appeal of personalized offers at 59%, compared with offers that focused on timing (18%), lifestyle (16%) or location (8%). Smartphone users responded similarly:  60% preferred personalized offers over promotions based on timing (17%), lifestyle (10%) or location (14%).

“‘Comparing the importance of personalization versus location in receiving mobile ads is especially interesting, given the hype around location-based players such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Facebook Places or even Google+ with its Latitude check-ins,’ said Assaf Baciu, Senior Vice President, Product Management, Upstream. ‘While location remains an important factor in delivering mobile ads, tailoring interactions via mobile to consumers’ tastes and interests’ clearly presents much greater potential for driving higher response and conversion rates.’ “

At the end of last year, we wrote a post that covered experts’ predictions about marketing trends for 2011.

One of the trends mentioned was “gamification,” or marketing messages or brand awareness in the form of games. Every day, it seems,  another company jumps on the bandwagon, announcing a new game that has prizes of free products, or a chance to win a trip, or some such.

Now, apparently, health experts are turning to games to promote the idea of healthy lifestyles and wellness.   In an article in HealthLeadersmedia about the 5 big ideas to come out of a recent major health care conference, author Margaret Dick Tocknell named gaming as “Idea Number 5.”

Health care organizations are racing to develop games that use audience engagement techniques, social interaction,  rewards, and multimedia presentations to get people involved in taking better care of themselves.

Tocknell quotes Microsoft’s Dennis Schmuland, who clearly sees the value in such an approach:  “[F]un always takes precedence.”

She reports:  “Aetna is set to launch…a social game to promote wellness that will be accessible through mobile phones, email and social media channels. There’s even a group…looking at how digital games can be used to help motivate treatment adherence and manage chronic health conditions.”

Here’s hoping that this marketing strategy succeeds where so many other attempts to improve our nation’s health have failed.

To read the item, click here.

Image Source: dailymail.co.uk

If you’re planning a small business marketing strategy that includes signing up for Groupon, LivingSocial, or one of the roughly 500 other social buying plans, you may want to think more about it.

According to an article on ClickZ,  Utpal Dholakia, a management professor at Rice University’s Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Business, has found that only 20% of people who use such deep-discount coupons ever return to pay full price.

Here are some other key findings of Dholakia’s study:

• 36% of deal users spend more than the voucher value when visiting a merchant.
• 22% never redeem the vouchers they’ve bought.
• 56% of businesses reported making money on their promotions, 27% lost money, and 18% broke even.
• 48% of all businesses planned to run another daily deal promotion, 20% said they would not, and 32% weren’t sure.

How might you do? It depends on the type of business you own, the study found:

Roughly 70% of marketers in special events, health, and services reported making money on their promotions. Conversely, only 44% of surveyed restaurants were as fortunate.

Perhaps most telling, only 36% of restaurants/bars and 42% of salons/spas that had run such promotions said they would do it again.

To read the study summary, click here.