26 Feb, 2008
Does “Free” Entrecard Marketing Help or Hinder? Should Businesses be Interested?
Posted by: Singapore Entrepreneur In: Up for Discussion
We all like FREE stuff but at the end of the day (especially as businesses) we need to look at the bottom line and properly analyze if all the supposedly FREE stuff actually costs much more than we thought.
TIME COST
Ultimately, the most important cost consideration when it comes to “free” marketing with EC pertains to our most limited resource: time. More and more Entrecarders are finding the time spent on the EC network to maintain brand identity to be quite prohibitive. Some spend 3 to 4 hours each day just dropping cards, making rounds in the forums, commenting, and helping other EC members out. Thus, many have become willing to pay someone for their EC credits instead of racking up their own because their time is worth much more than the going rate of .01/EC
More importantly, the time spent on FREE stuff is also time lost on seriously thinking, planning or working out marketing strategies that can bring in more sales. However, for a lot of EC members, their efforts have actually resulted in sales, so this means spending time on the FREE stuff, in their case, was worth it.
BRANDING COST
Another cost is branding cost. Does advertising on obviously FREE spots diminish your brand value? For example, would seeing NEIMAN MARCUS, SONY, or GUCCI advertising on either the EC or Spottt network make you think less of them?
For me, it definitely would- IF you’re already an established brand name. Pro-bloggers who think they are too big a name for EC are misguided if they think they are famous and have permanent mind-share as 160,000 blogs are entering the webspace each day, and I would hazard to guess that half of them are simply duplicating the most visited content on the web.
RESIDUAL EFFECTS
For many EC members, their experience has been that once you stop participating in the network, the traffic stops almost immediately. In other words, there is very little residual effect, hardly any peripheral benefits. Having said that, running ads through the google ad network would probably yield very similar results. Many EC members who have since left the system or stopped actively participating insist however that the paid ads are many times better in bringing in interested parties who are more likely to stay and continue to be readers or customers.
I have to say that my own experience is that the traffic drop can be significant once you stop actively recriprocating drops. But at the same time, the initial traffic spike because of EC was also significant and roughly sustained over 2 months, so perhaps it is still premature to talk about residual effects when EC has only been around for a few months.
SHOULD BUSINESSES LOOK AT EC SERIOUSLY?
All said, is EC something that businesses should look at as an effective marketing tool at the end of the day? I think the answer would be “NO” based on the analysis stated above. It is too time consuming (thus costly) and can diminish brand values (by association to smaller, sometimes freakish / bordering on porn blogs). As the residual effects based on the current system of drive-by-dropping to earn credits is still in question, I will leave that off the table for now. But I have to conclude that EC is a personal bloggers marketing & networking tool more than anything else.
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