Facebook's Ted Zagat: 6 Key Trends in Local
Facebook has made huge strides in local the last couple of years, driving significant geotargeted mobile revenue and integrating efforts with hundreds of thousands of SMBs. Speaking at Street Fight Summit West in San Francisco today, Local Product Marketing Manager Ted Zagat said the company is building its local efforts base on six key trends.
The first is personalized marketing, which provides for targeted campaigns that are 91 percent accurate. The second trend is mobile, which accounts for 59 percent of Facebook revenue- up from zero just two years ago.
“Everything at Facebook is mobile first, with mobile engineers integrated in every product team so we can think consistently across every platform,” said Zagat. Twenty two percent of all mobile time spent is spent on Facebook and its sister company, Instagram,” he noted. “That’s bigger than all the others combined. It is mind boggling how fast it is happening and the broader implications for every business.”
The third trend is to follow local best practices, including use of analytics. Major advertisers have done very well with Facebook by posting rich photo posts, which provide an 8x median return on ad spend. Small local advertisers should “try to do exactly the same thing,” said Zagat. They need to move from physical engagement to reach,” he said, noting that the counter intuitive wisdom that clicks don’t matter; actions do.
“There is zero correlation between online clicks and ROI,” said Zagat, citing a Datalogix study showing that 89 percent of people who saw a Facebook ad and then bought a product in the store did not click on the ad. The fourth trend is Reputation, which to a small store, represents brand awareness. It is really important but progress still needs to be made in this area. “We haven’t figured this out,” said Zagat.
Trend 5 is to engage in light weight communication, such as mobile messaging. The U.S. is limited in its adoption of light weight services such as What’s App due to legacy pricing practices of the mobile carriers. But countries such as Spain and Brazil are showing the way. “Businesses frequently communicate with their customers via mobile messaging,” he said Trend 6 is location based marketing, which Facebook is leveraging via its “Nearby Friends” feature.