BY: CLAIRE KIM
Since Facebook is one of the largest social media platforms in the world, it’s a given that many companies would love to partner up with them for their advantage. P&G is one of the many companies that have been working with Facebook for many different purposes. The main objective of the close relationship between the two is mainly for P&G’s advertisement marketing plan.
For a long time, P&G have been using Facebook as their media outlet to reach out to many users who are involved in social media. With the presence of about 1.7 billion active users on Facebook, it really benefits P&G’s marketing plan greatly.
The most recent marketing strategy that P&G has been initiating with Facebook has been proven ineffective, so it seems like they have made a decision to change it up a bit. Instead of targeting specific consumers, they plan to target “subsets of shoppers” directly. With this change in strategy, they hope that it will bring more customers to them unlike before.
Honestly, I completely understand why P&G decided to change its marketing strategy after testing Facebook ads for a while. Since the first strategy did not help the business that much in profit or stock rise, it probably made them realize that maybe taking a different route would be better. One plus, for this change in strategy, is that now its not as expensive as before. Since the first strategy required more in-depth targeting it made the price of the ad rise higher.
There are many strengths, weaknesses, and risks of using social networks for marketing. One of the strengths of the use of social networks is since so many people are active on social media, it’s easy to promote their products in a wide and open audience. However, one weakness that can be spotted easily is that we are ruining users privacies due to the ads that are popping up based on the activity they are interested in. Risks also come in play when using social media for marketing especially because it’s easy now to exit or scroll past the ad whenever. There is no guarantee that users will actually take time to look at the product in-depth and with interest.
Overall, the article seems to tell me that when advertising in general, try to be broad and less specific when it comes to reaching out to customers.
With P&G’s rough journey with digital advertising, I think that other companies will learn from their mistakes and try to improve their marketing strategies as well.
claire kim. 