The End of Buy Button-Free Holidays? Maybe.
The holidays are over, and marketers are looking at which of their efforts helped put them in the black and which held them back. Social is, without a doubt, part of that analysis. This season, however, brought the initial stages of something we didn’t have before: The Buy Button.
Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google have all unveiled new offerings that allow marketers to more directly sell their wares within user feeds and ads. But these buttons aren’t ready for prime time. After all, one can’t effectively do holiday shopping using these buy buttons alone. And this is for a few reasons. Search isn’t as strong on Facebook as it should be, and brands haven’t fully embraced buy buttons to the point where one can rely on buyable options being available when he or she does decide to shop on one of these platforms. Purchases are serendipitous at best.
This Will Change
2016 will be the year the Buy Button starts to take hold or fails. Pinterest is pushing Buyable Pins in a big way by going after people’s desire for deals. Now, users will be alerted if something they’ve pinned drops in price. But Pinterest won’t be the only one. All the social networks have good reason to push their own Buy Buttons because if they work, that means more money from advertisers.
Advertisers have every reason in the world to hope these buttons work. They have the potential to greatly reduce friction between users and products brands are selling through social channels. See, tap, buy. Social networks’ ability to target users specifically with messages that allow them to buy is the real power these ads represent. Advertisers sell products and add another way to tie ROI directly to their social media marketing efforts, social networks garner additional advertising dollars and consumers are introduced to (hopefully) highly relevant products they can buy easily. That’s the idea at least.
Not Without Challenges
Do people visit social networks to make purchases? No, with Pinterest being the possible exception. People visit social networks to connect with friends, catch up on the news, kill time and see what’s going on in the world. They don’t go there to buy, and that’s really the question that will be answered over the next several months.
Do people not buy on social networks because there isn’t yet an easy way to do so? Or do they not buy because they simply don’t want to? Introducing the buy button will give users a choice—a choice advertisers will be very interested in understanding.
Making It Work
The buy button makes so much sense on paper, but to be successful it will need to be easy and useful for brands and people. Brands won’t bother if people aren’t participating or if it cuts into profits. For example, there’s no easy way to do bulk purchases just yet. A fashion brand may sell a shirt to a user who sees an ad for it in his News Feed, but that user may have bought three if he had gone to the website.
Marketers and social networks will work together to make sure the desired actions are emphasized, but there is hope. And it operates on the adage of fish where the fish are. People spend countless hours on social networks when they go online. The buy button offers the opportunity to connect those users with products, and 2016 will be the year to see if it does just that. The holidays may never be the same.