I have always been on the lookout for an ideal context to do some Facebook Advertising. Not that I have not done before – done it many times. But I always found the results or effectiveness very questionable. While it is true that Facebook possesses the most detailed profile of their customers, the true trick lies in understanding a customer whether they are on social media or off it.

I obviously am for a lot of Google Advertising – especially the PPC kind and also the remarketing kind. It is a simple belief that you should be present where the consumers are searching for you. But over a period of time, I have realised that apart from the usual demographics, communication objectives, et al, there is one thing that we should definitely consider – whether something is a planned purchase or an impulse purchase.

This distinction came into a sharp focus recently for a small campaign I had to do. The logic I had was this. For a Google PPC campaign, it is assumed that consumers are ‘searching’ for something – which means they are planning to buy or purchase or consider something. However what if they do not even know that they are supposed to search for something that will like – a ‘latent need’. Would it then help to push the message to them and hope that they will, on impulse, go for it?

A client of mine was conducting an event that is generally not expected by people – meaning it is not it is scheduled to happen at regular intervals and neither are the consumers expecting it to happen that way. The event belongs to the sports genre. Of course, it is common knowledge that consumers do have an interest in sports. So how do we take that interest and create leads for the said event was the task.

A small amount of money was spent on Facebook to create awareness for this event along with the convenience of online registration. We had a remarkable response to this campaign – to say the least.

Now in comparison, if we had done a campaign for their regular activities, it would not have fetched the same response as it will be perceived as an ‘advertisement’ on Facebook – even though it is the same thing that happens on Google when they search for it!