I realize I’m in the den of marketing and technology folks here and must say what I’ve been telling media and account types for years: trust the creative, will ya?

Good design sells. Bad design is pissing your money away. Simple as that. Learn to spot talent, be willing to pay designers who aren’t living at home with their parents. Learn the difference between good and bad design and writing. Learn to have an expert eye for the 1% of advertising out there that’s actually well done and emulate it. Small business doesn’t have to mean poor design, but looking at the state of the industry hiring any kid with a mouse to do work best left to seasoned pros will get you nowhere. You wouldn’t buy Salvation Army furniture or take your clients to lunch at McDonalds, but the quality of your advertising often gives one that impression.

Now I’m off to design my first Facebook flyer for Progresswear.

Thats a very good question. Some of the reasons I can imagine as to why Facebook decided to release the Flyers Pro product are:

1. It is an attempt to tap into the growing cost-per-click advertising market and increase the amount of advertising on Facebook; it leads to people like us more likely to experiment with it.

2. Having a transparent market-driven model (by bidding on CPCs) provides a wealth of useful information not just to advertisers but to Facebook as well. Facebook can now monitor exactly how much advertisers value advertising on Facebook instead of setting static CPMs that are rather inefficient and do not reveal much about the advertising market on Facebook.

That said, I would be interested in how many people still use the Flyers Basic product when you can get so much more accountability of your marketing dollars with the Flyers Pro product.

Nihaar

However, there is a difference between being ‘better’ and being ‘better at.’ Facebook is ‘better at’ social networking than Google. Del.ico.us is ‘better at’ social bookmarking than Google. Our focus is not search, but user-generated recommendations, more commonly known as ‘word of mouth.’ What Google is for search, our goal is to become that for word of mouth. This article does a great job explaining the difference as well.

You are right. We actually did consider that as a possibility; that the flyer designed was not very attractive - from a messaging stand point. We are planning to run new campaigns using more “targeted” flyers. As an example, we are designing a flyer for high school students that will send a message along the lines of “Need help with that Homework? Try Youlicit to instantly find your answers”. I am very interested to see how using better designed flyers will improve CTRs although I’m still skeptical about seeing drastically higher CTRs. We will post up our results as soon as we can.

Thanks,

Nihaar

Well, maybe.

You should also consider that A) your banner is really quite bland and that B) you offer nothing beyond that which they can get with Google.

Now, maybe your services are ‘better’ than Google’s, but your banner doesn’t reflect it.

Try the test again with a flyer that actually contains a snappy sales message and you’ll see a much higher CTR.

Thanks,
Bob