Online Marketing Strategy in the Face of Google and Facebook’s Growing Rivalry

This week, I will take a break from my series of posts on Product Strategy and Product Management Process to revisit another favorite topic: marketing strategy.

The reason for this slight detour is the recent news on two new developments at Google and Facebook. Google and Facebook has become each other’s greatest rival, and they accelerated their product development, bringing out new features and offerings that might give one an edge over the other. The new features discussed here resulted from that rivalry and will make many online marketers and website managers rethink their website design and marketing approaches.

Firstly, Google has been quietly rolling out a new feature on their search engine which allows searchers to see an instant preview of their results (see screenshot below). While this is not entirely complete, Google is executing it very well – the snapshots show up really quickly (they are pre-fetched after you preview the first link), and they show the whole website, not just the very top part that fits into the screen.

 

Due to the implementation of this new feature, web design and layout will now affect the click through rate once searchers get used to scrolling through the previews before clicking through them. Text-heavy sites with dark backgrounds or dark-toned graphics will probably suffer a drop in click throughs, especially when they compete with sites that have preview-friendly designs, light colors, larger fonts and eye pleasing layouts. Sites with large Flash or Ajax components will probably suffer as well, as the preview will not show any of the dynamic graphic elements. This also affects search engine optimization strategies, as a web page’s textual content now needs to be balanced against good design and clear layouts.

This is just the latest in a trend towards “preview before click through”, that started out with website plug-ins such as Snap, progressing to link shorteners, and now major content producers like Twitter and Google. We expect that all click throughs in the future will be preceded by a snap shot review, and possibly even more information. Hopefully, with the preview features, fewer people are clicking through bad attack sites, and as a result, better designed websites will benefit from more traffic. As it affects the best sources of traffic, namely organic search and direct traffic, it will have deep consequences on internet marketing strategies.

The second development is Facebook’s soon to be unveiled email tool. While details on this is scarce, we can safely say this will be a massive step forward for Facebook, especially as they compete with Google on one of Google’s own turfs – Gmail. What I am more interested in is how it will affect the marketing mix of the modern online marketing strategist.

Email marketing has been the mainstay of online marketing for years, and it has been growing and weathering the overall market slump remarkably well. Every day, billions of emails are sent using a number of software platforms…from self service, no frills MailChimp to enterprise class ExactTarget. These platforms add value because they allow companies to reach thousands or even millions of people at very low cost and very reliably. Even with low open rates or click through rates, the return on email marketing is almost always positive, and typically outweighs other marketing channels. That is, until social media marketing came on the scene and upset the traditional channels in ways no one has predicted.

However, social media still lacks scale because it is still hard to use social media to immediately reach a large number of people with an unadulterated message (with the exception of Twitter, which then lacks “depth”, as a function of its inherent limit on message length). Moreover, most social media platforms are still “walled garden” that are more or less distinct from the basic electronic communication tools used by everyone connected to the Internet – email.

Facebook email, code named Titan, might well change that. Allowing people to send emails to connections on Facebook, allowing emails to be forwarded by friends of friends, and allowing emails to go to and from corporate mailboxes powered by Outlook, will drastically improve the reach and the grip Facebook has on our digital lives. Moreover, while we don’t know if they will allow for commercial use of the email system, the fact that there is capability to send rich, customized emails to millions of people on Facebook can make current email marketing vendors obsolete in just a few years.

Google and Facebook are accelerating the development of social media and the way we use internet technologies. In the face of such momentous rivalry, it behooves online marketing managers to stay abreast of the latest developments, and be aware of how they can and will affect marketing strategy in many fundamental ways.