Where Have All the Seniors Gone?

Facebook! According to research firm Nielsen nearly half of all online seniors visited Facebook or Youtube last month. Facebook has become the third most visited site on the net by seniors, of which there are 17.5 million active US seniors online. For more stats check out this article on Mashable.

While it is great to see this demographic growing online, it doesn’t necessarily mean opportunity does it? Well according to the seniors themselves, it does. When reading the above article, I happened to take a look at the comments posted after the article and a few of them caught my attention. The first being Deanna Carlisle who stated:

“I’m a senior….don’t play Farmville….don’t have time… still working and have 15 grandkids, I use Facebook to stay in touch with family. I also don’t like to shop so I order. My husband keeps up with local high school sports on webcasts. I’m not surprised that so many seniors are using the internet it has almost replaced television for us.”

And right underneath Deanna’s comments were ralphcarlson:

“I’m a senior (actually hate that term) that’s not even a boomer. I’m busy building a web profile with the intent of increasing my income. Web shopping is much better than actually going to the stores.”

What an opportunity for affiliate marketers. The growth of social media has been a boom for our industry, creating an additional and highly targetable distribution and income avenue for affiliates.

The senior market has long been ignored by many in our industry but with the stats put out by Nielsen and with seniors themselves stating they prefer to purchase online instead of going to a store, it creates an enormous opportunity for those of us in the performance marketing world to look to cater to this growing demographic.

We’ve seen success targeting senior related campaigns on Facebook since targeting by demographics is relatively easy to do on Facebook. I would also venture to guess not many publishers see dollar signs when they think of targeting seniors as part of their overall affiliate marketing strategy. I would suggest you reconsider and find campaigns that would work well with the seniors market. It is not as competitive, the cost would be relatively low compared to the coveted 18-45 demographic that most advertisers and publishers target and the place to find them is easy. Like the rest of us, you can find them on Facebook.

On a previoius post titled “Oh Canada”, I talked about the benefits of promoting your performance campaigns in Canada and how lucrative this market is for many affiliates. I wrote about how I would post a list of media buying companies located in, or that service, Canadian sites. Well here it is.

Some of these companies are Canadian, some are US with a Canadian presence but they all have a Canadian network of sites you can execute media buying on.

If you know them then great, you have a leg up on your competition. If there are any you have an interest in, contact your Publisher Manager and we can send you over a contact there so you can get things going at the soonest.

In the meantime, look for another post from me within the next week on promoting performance based campaigns in the international markets, such as Europe, South America, Australia, etc. The performance based world is getting much smaller and it’s time to start taking your business globally!!

How often do you think of Canada when thinking about promoting your performance based campaigns? Does it even register on your radar when you’re planning your Adsense, media buying or social media buying strategies? Well here is some information that will hopefully entice you to think of the Great White North as a lucrative market when planning your next promotional strategy.

According to our advertisers in the diet and nutracutical (colon, acai, etc.) verticals, 25% – 30% of their overall North American sales come from Canada. That is a HUGE number when you think about it. If you’r generating 100 sales per day on that Colon offer you’re pushing in the U.S., you could potentially generate an additional 20 – 30 leads if you also targeted Canadian consumers.

Teeth Whitening and Biz Opp, same thing. Any other reasons needed? Here are a few more: You’re most likely going to get a 20% – 25% discount since you’ll be paying in Canadian dollars, a lot less competition, a whole bunch of new media buying companies to work with. In fact, in the next few days, keep an eye on the MediaTrust Blog and you will see a list of Canadian companies to potentially work with when it comes to media buying.

But, you do not need to wait to find a Canadian company to work with, you can get started right away. Adsense, Platform A, etc. they all allow you to target Canadian target on their US based partner sites. As long as the advertiser can take the traffic, I’d suggest you look at implementing it right away. I believe you’ll be presently surprised at the uptick in your numbers.

If you have questions or want more guidance, give us a call and we will be more than happy to help you wherever we can.

Do you ever wonder where the innovation is in the performance marketing industry?  What new technologies have emerged directly  developed by a performance marketing company that would enhance the CPA, CPL and Revshare industry?  I have a hard time thinking of any technologies or companies that have done this.  Which begs the question: Why not?  Are we not in the middle of the Web 2.0 revolution on our way to Web 3.0 and the deliverance of the much talked about and anticipated semantic web?  Should our industry not be on the leading edge of better targeting advertisements to consumers?  We are after all a performance based industry.  If our campaigns and advertisements do not perform then we do not make any money.  So why not innovate?

With the emergence of social networks, behavioural ad networks and mass web collaboration through wikis, the performance industry is still relying on cookie tracking, off the shelf tracking technologies and the insistence of pushing the legal envelope to generate revenues.  Why not simplify, take a longer term approach to building a sustainable, cutting edge industry leading business.  Think differently and innovate.  These will be performance companies advertisers and affiliates will seek out and establish long term relationships with.

We’re working on some exciting things here at Advaliant. We’re excited to share them with you in the coming months!