Eloqua Releases the Grande Guide to Social Advertising

Eloqua recently released the Grande Guide to Social Advertising to help marketers navigate Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, SlideShare, and Geolocation. The free e-book also highlights common pitfalls among advertisers.  

"There is no one-size-fits-all for social advertisements," said Leslie Poston, co-author of Twitter for Dummies and one of the guide’s main authors, in a statement. "People interact with various social networks in different ways, so understanding the costs, structure, and user experience of these different platforms is crucial if you want to succeed. The Grande Guide to Social Advertising provides the framework for seeing a social advertising campaign from conception to launch."

"Social media has emerged as a must-have in any integrated marketing campaign,” added Brian Kardon, chief marketing officer at Eloqua, in a statement. "But while there are numerous resources for advertising in search, email and through online display ads, few guides exist that dissect how to approach Facebook, or LinkedIn, or Twitter. With this guide in hand, marketers are no longer advertising in the dark."

Joe Chernov, vice president of content marketing at Eloqua, said he had been most surprised by the "absence of ROI information on social ad platforms."

"I think some of it is a difficulty of measuring advertising in general. But I also think companies are still dabbling in social adverting and rare is the company that has fully embraced and double-downed on that strategy," he says.

Chernov encourages markets to "start to rethink what the word interactive means," proposing instead that companies think "about interactivity as more than just what happens in the ad itself.”

"An interactive ad also can be a social ad that triggers offline interaction using creative in a way that gets people talking about the ad whether they are talking about it on their Facebook feed or they are talking about it in person," he adds.

Remembering that advertisements are "unwelcome" is also important. "People don't go to social networks to receive ads," Chernov says. "So if you enter the venue with the idea that you have to earn people's attention and you can't just buy it, then your ads will be better and more consistent with the ethos of that community. Stop thinking of ads as paid media and start thinking of them as earned media."

The Grande Guide to Social Advertising is available for free on Eloqua's Web site and others social outposts, including SlideShare, Facebook, and its revenue marketing blog.