Can’t Buy Me Love: Exposing Marketing Scams to Grow Brands

Nowadays, brands are investing huge amount of money to get 👍 or ❤️ for their ads. While analytics on digital media metrics don’t lie, ways to achieve those KPIs can be manipulated. More and more agencies have figured out how to get around to making their clients believe they actually achieved those KPIs.

Here’s how:

Bots

This is not new. It seems to be common now for brands to buy followers or engagement. Whether brand owners know it directly or not, agencies running their social media can make it look like a brand is increasing awareness or gaining share of voice with bot followers.

• Upside: more number of followers versus competition will give the impression to consumers that they are the industry leader.

• Downside: unfortunately, there’s no bot yet which can actually convert likes into sales.

"Paid" engagement

No, this is not the budget brands allocate for media buying but this is money to pay people directly to "like" certain pages and posts. Instead of investing their client’s money on legit advertising, some agencies cut corners and just contract people to “like” an ad or "follow" a page and pay them a small fee which in their terms they call for each “task done”. Of course the fee they pay these likers is peanuts compared to what clients actually pay for media buying. It is quite clever because if anyone checks the legitimacy of these engagement metrics, it will show they came from real people’s accounts and not bots.

• Upside: brands do reach real people and get them to engage positively.

• Downside: these people consider these “likes” as mere tasks. They don’t actually bother with the content or the brand. They just move on from one task to another to get paid more. Hence, zero relevance, zero recall, zero sales.

Conclusion

Brand owners need to take time to investigate the credibility of agencies they wish to hire and do due diligence to double check metrics. Moreover, marketing heads shouldn’t take this bait to make it look like they are “growing their brands” because in the end, actual sales will be the only way to gain market share and therefore should be the ultimate end goal of any marketing activity.

As marketers, we cannot simply say we met our “awareness” or “engagement” KPIs and the ball is now with the sales team to convert those likes into sales. It is our responsibility to make sure we grow our brands the AUTHENTIC way to bring actual value to sales.

Want to grow your brand authentically?