What Types of Social Media Ads are Most Effective for Brands? [Stats]

Here's a summary of that article:

Takeaways:
If your goals are brand awareness and positive associations, sponsored content may be your best bet.
If you’re trying to increase purchasing and loyalty, go with profiles that allow people to become fans and add logos to their own profiles.
If you’re targeting purchasing and the best ROI, good old banners and newsletters rule.

And you can find the article here.

How effective is online marketing? - This is a question I've had difficulty answering during my recent talks on Digital Marketing and Social Network Marketing with Executive-MBA and MBA students from Asian Institute of Management (AIM). I was invited by a client to talk about this with his class.

I always start off by saying that online marketing would give you the best metrics of any of the traditional media which advertisers are used to. If your new to digital marketing I'll just list down a few of what we an track with digital marketing:

Website:
1. How many people visit your site
2. Which pages on your site people land on
3. What pages they like to visit
4. How long they spend on your site
5. How many pages they look at

Banner ads
1. How many impressions you get
- per site where the ad is placed
2. How many people actually click on the ad
3. What site is the most effective in etting you clicks

Social Media (Facebook)
1. Number of fans
2. Number if interactions
- and most data similar to that listed on Websites above

With all this data depending on the service or type of product you can actually compute ROI with your ad spending. This can apply to airlines, hotels and e-commerce sites because online ads can lead directly to sales.

If you are a fast moving consumer product I still do not have hard data to tell you with conviction that online will drive sales. Early indications of though of a promo were running for our client Greenwich may finally give me a case to talk about but let that be the topic of another post. Clients that are used to spending with traditional media already know what to expect in terms of sales. But with they are still not convinced in trying online even though it is SUBSTANTIALLY LESS than TV, radio and print. In the IMMAP Summit last year speakers from P&G and Unilever have already started embracing this medium and expected more advertisers to follow suit.

But to answer the question does online marketing work? - since online is only part of your marketing mix we can not solely focus on this medium to deliver sales. What online will show you though is how much your brand have interacted with your target consumer and how much they have embraced your brand. At the point that you have them engaging your brand you can now think of strategies to move this interaction to actual action which is to drive them to purchase.