Use digital and social media in marketing campaigns
What are the best social media marketing campaigns of all time?
What are the best social media marketing campaigns of all time?
…to this…
Old Spice man
In July 2010, Old Spice made custom videos where Isaiah Mustapha would address individual Twitter users, one-to-one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Cs95FmimP0&feature=player_embedded
This social campaign followed the hugely successful Super Bowl TV commercial of February 2010 and further follow-up ads, which were also very popular on YouTube.
187 videos were created for the Twitter campaign and brought in 11m views, and over 22,000 comments in three days.
In a debate that was raging back in 2010, many questioned whether such sharing would result in sales uplift.
However, despite an initial decline in sales of body wash, once the momentum from the advertising hit sales, numbers did increase significantly with numbers somewhere around 8% for year-on-year increase.
The campaign cost $11.4m in total and generated 1bn media impressions.
Taking such a popular TV ad on to social media and personalising it for some users was pretty new back in 2010. Although YouTube was well established in 2010, Twitter was still climbing, from 100m users at the start of the year to 190m in June 2010.
This campaign makes the list because it shows the reality of success on social is about engaging and, often, funny content that users are happy to consume. The campaign marked a departure for the brand and one that was ultimately successful.
Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns
In 2008, Obama’s team deserved credit for simply earmarking social media as a place that politicians, especially campaigning politicians, need to be.
By the time the 2012 election rolled around, of course, Obama would always be starting with an advantage across social networks, when compared with Mitt Romney.
It’s unsurprising that come 2012, a lot of sentiment, even for Obama, was negative on social media. A re-election campaign doesn’t have the same lustre, and by this time the bad side of politics had made it to social media, too.
Dan Weingrod looked at some of the parts of the 2012 social media election campaign to be admired.
Bringing the technology in-house
The campaign technology team was in-house instead of outsourced. A custom technology platform was developed that could iterate and meet the needs of the campaign.
Effective use of data
Integrating disparate data sets mirrors the joining of ecommerce multichannel data. This data helped OFA determine which social media platforms to use to target demographics perhaps previously ignored.
Most importantly a culture of A/B testing discovered the best media platforms, headlines, images and even the best minimum contribution level ($14) for emails.
Creating a social media infrastructure
On the infrastructure side OFA rolled out Dashboard, a tool which changed the way the team interacted with its volunteers.
Dashboard “socialized” the volunteer experience by using data to help volunteers focus on likely voters rather than lost causes.
Dashboard created more positive experiences for volunteers by driving more positive results. The result was a get-out-the-vote effort that surpassed all expectations.
In 2012 Obama had a 57% share of voice over Romney and took part in a successful AMA (ask me anything) session on Reddit. Throughout 2011 and 2012, Obama had also engaged in occasional town hall meetings on Twitter, answering user questions.
For anyone thinking these two election campaigns weren’t extraordinary in terms of social media usage, see Minter Dial’s teardown of social media use (or non-use) in the French presidential election of 2012.
GoPro's video of the day
GoPro obviously has a particularly engaged customer base when it comes to content creation, as luckily enough that's what the GoPro products are designed to do.
However, GoPro shares video extraordinarily well, with the following example perhaps the most famous. Good content gets shared and GoPro's video of the day on Facebook has helped the page rack up over 7m likes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjB_oVeq8Lo&feature=player_embedded
Oreo’s agility
Oreo features here for its entire activity rather than one campaign, though its agile marketing during Super Bowl 2013 is certainly the pick of the bunch.
Oreo’s activity shows how simple yet effective that reactive or agile marketing can be when combined with social media. The sharing of Oreo’s content is impressive for a cookie that hasn’t changed for many years.
In a sector like FMCG, this level of sharing and earned media effectively saves Oreo some ATL budget and generates brand awareness with effective scale.
For the PS4 launch:
For its Daily Twist campaign on the 100th anniversary of Oreo:
For the Super Bowl powercut:
Cancer Research UK: #nomakeupselfie
In March 2014 Facebook users, but also Instagram and Twitter users, were taking selfies with no makeup on then nominating other people to do the same. This was intended to raise awareness of and money to fight cancer.
Whilst this didn’t start as a campaign for Cancer Research UK, its team was agile enough to react in real-time and jump on to the trend. The charity answered questions asked by many of the public and encouraged engagement through its own channels. However, in the main, this was an example of great reactive and common sense marketing.See this post for more detail on how the social media team made the most of the phenomenal activity around the hashtag.
This campaign makes the list because it demonstrates (and made the most of) mobile and social media as newly integral to fundraising efforts.
The majority of the donations were given via mobile, by text message, and the content and imagery was mainly consumed on smartphones.
Cancer Research UK received donations of £8m in just a couple of weeks.View image on Twitter
Ikea's Facebook showroom
I’ve included this campaign precisely because it broke Facebook’s rules.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TYy_3786bo&feature=player_embedded
Ikea in the spirit of guerrilla marketing used picture tagging to run a competition designed to promote its new store in Malmo in Autumn 2009.
The campaign didn’t cost much, and technically contravened Facebook’s rule that businesses must use only apps within Facebook to run competitions and not organic posts.
12 pictures of the store’s showrooms were uploaded over a fortnight and users could win the products on show by being the first person to tag their name on it.
To me this campaign shows how if marketers understand the nature of social media, they can ‘jack’ it on lower budgets than traditional media. All it takes is a little creativity.
Innocent Drinks' Tweet And Eat Cheap
The ‘Tweet & Eat Cheap’ campaign was designed to promote Innocent veg pots.
The discount on offer increased with the number of people who tweeted the hashtag #tweetandeat.
The competition also ran on Facebook.
This campaign might be fairly modest but I’ve included it because of its simplicity. Mass action will result in mass gain. Audiences will unite on social media if it’s for the good of the group, even if it’s only a free pot of vegetables.
The results of the campaign show that simply being prepared to give away something for free can be the only bold step a brand needs take.
18,000 tweets reached over 5m people. Awareness increased by a considerable 11% amongst the target audience.
Customer base effectively doubled, with 31% of Innocents audience having bought a veg pot, compared to 16% prior to the campaign.
Kern and Sohn Precision Scales
Kern is included for demonstrating what an effect social signals and content sharing can have on search marketing.
Kern wanted to grow their reputation and revenue in the education and laboratory sectors.
The idea is explained in the following video. Earth’s gravity actually varies, so we weigh slightly more or less wherever you go. Kern wanted to send a gnome around the globe in a flight case with a set of its scale to test this hypothesis.
The hosts of the gnome in each city would add data to gnomeexperiment.com.
The gnome was photographed with many landmarks and even made it to the South Pole.
Within two days the story had reached an audience of over 355m in 152 countries.
16,386 websites linked to GnomeExperiment.com
Kern was pushed to page one on Google for ‘precision scales’ in all five key markets (up from an average of page 12), resulting in a 21% sales uplift and a 1042% ROI.
Describe the importance of the objectives and budget for digital and social media marketing aligning with the marketing plan
Six key questions to answer in your social media strategy
Assuming that you're clear on what you need from social media in terms of goals and objectives, there is often a key missing ingredient from a social media initiative - a fully considered strategy. It sounds a little glib, and yet it remains important to be clear on the how and why of implementing and integrating social media marketing into the business.
There are multiple benefits to getting this right:
Get buy in from budget holder, project sponsors and senior management
Clarity on vision, purpose and direction with business context
Ability to scale both the size and scope of the social media programme
Budgeting and resource management against objectives and goals, to understand the return against any other marketing activity
I find that strategy is generally misunderstood, and it appears that this is even more the case in social media where focus is so often about the goals (I want 10,000 Facebook Likes) or the tools and tactics (we need a Facebook Fan page).
Strategy is neither goal based, tactical, about timings or the plan itself. A strategy is what's needed to achieve the goals, the road-map, not the destination.
“All men can see the tactics whereby I conquer, what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved.” – Sun Tzu, The Art of War.
This issue is a marketing wide problem, probably business wide. We certainly have seen the same issues within siloed tactics like search engine marketing, PR, email and display advertising all running individually from any communications strategy. I appreciate that this maybe getting a little marketing textbook, yet a social media strategy desperately needs a wider operational context, it must be aligned with the business strategy and the subsequent communications strategy. Identifying and tying the social media strategy right back to the business strategy is therefore fundamental those 4 bullet points above too, of course. Strategic alignment immediately informs the perspective of the person creating the social media strategy saving a lot of pain further down the line.
Ensuring strategic alignment?
If you want your social media marketing processes and campaigns to deliver something of value back to the business then you need to align with the business. Forgetting the tactical, ad-hoc approach to social media ("We need a Facebook fan page") which is where most businesses currently are, there are two common strategic approaches that we see:
Social media marketing. Whereby you're most often reacting to the need to be using social media but nonetheless are integrating into a wider communications strategy. Reasonably advanced companies are in this space and it's where companies investing in the future are very quickly headed. Typically this is where there's a focus still on "campaigns" focus and how social media marketing can be integrated as a part of that, the listening and conversation is there with the consumers though the purpose remains promotional or at least very marketing orientated. The social tools and techniques have a purpose within the campaign context. Old Spice guy typifies this for me, it's great, hugely successful and yet it still remains campaign orientated. Tools like Buddy Media for Facebook, and Hootsuite for Twitter in particular have made social campaigns easier to execute for smaller brands, teams and organisations.
Integrated social CRM. several big brands seem to be getting really serious in this area, the focus is way beyond marketing and about the consumer and wider market interactions pre, during and post purchase. The case studies that we read about around Dell and Gatorade and their command centres, for example. Stuff of social media marketing dreams! Where the business is so customer oriented and leveraging social media to engage and interact with the consumer, marketing is but one component in meeting the consumer needs. It's right-side-up marketing done via social media tools, what does the consumer need over what do we want to say.
Key questions to be answered in your social media marketing strategy
Focussing on the marketing strategy, the reality for 99% of businesses, is that there are a handful of questions that are needed to tighten the strategy, and for the sake of this post I'm borrowing a lot from Jay Baer here who I think does a great job on explaining it so succinctly, he pushes us to ask the questions around people first, not abstract concepts, tactics or tools:
Is your strategy about brand awareness, customer engagement or sales? It can only be one of them in reality, otherwise it's two strategies, two strategies is fine so long as you realise and resource for that - most of us are not in that space.
What is your relationship with your intended audience? Jay suggests picking 2 adjacent audience types on this scale: Nothing > Aware of you, but never acted > Acted once > Repeat actions/enthusiasts > Advocates. The value in this question is significant in its simplicity I feel in how it informs your approach to marketing, especially when combined with the next point...
How does your audience typically engage in social media? Using the Forrester Social Technographics Ladder, understand how your target audience (as defined by gender, age, and geography) uses social media. Some audience types are not creative and simply want to consume and share content.
What's your purpose? Jay Baer calls this your "one thing", Joe Pullizzi (from a content marketing perspective) talks about the intersection between you and your audience.
How will you be human? Easier for smaller businesses, harder for larger businesses.
How will you manage social media? Think not only return on investment and KPI's, but governance and roles and responsibilities, easier again in smaller businesses where there's far less hierarchy and politics.
Describe how to identify the nature and location of target customers
Why identifying your target audience matters
If you know…
who the people are, you know how to get to them (the blogs they read, the sites they visit, the stuff they search in Google etc)
how they describe the type of services they offer, you can word the copy on your site to match the conversation in their head (very important!)
how they choose and compare products in your category, you know how to structure and prioritize content on your site
what they want, your value proposition can state exactly that and the whole site can be 98% relevant to them
what they don’t care about, you can dismiss and cut it from the site
how their life is better thanks to your service, you know which end-benefits to communicate
How to Identify a Target Market and Prepare a Customer Profile
Get your message to the people who need and want what you have to offer! This guide takes you through a step-by-step process that helps you identify specific target markets within your industry and provides you with the know-how to create customer profiles to better channel your marketing efforts
Get your message to the people who need and want what you have to offer! This guide takes you through a step-by-step process that helps you identify specific target markets within your industry and provides you with the know-how to create customer profiles to better channel your marketing efforts
WHAT TO EXPECT
This Business Builder will take you through a step-by-step process that will help you identify specific target markets within your industry and provide you with the know-how to create a customer profile.WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW BEFORE GETTING STARTED
In order to market your product or service, it is imperative that you tailor your marketing and sales efforts to specifically reach the segment of population that will most likely buy your product or service. It is critical that you first determine or clearly identify your primary market. Your energies and funds then can be spent more efficiently.
If you don’t know who your customers are, how will you be able to assess whether you are meeting their needs? Since success depends on your being able to meet customers’ needs and desires, you must know who your customers are, what they want, where they live and what they can afford.
We’ve all heard a business owner say, "My product is terrific! It appeals to everyone." Many of us have also seen small businesses that try to be all things to all people. This is a difficult, if not impossible, bridge to cross.
Targeting your market is simply defining who your primary customer will be. The market should be measurable, sufficiently large and reachable.
Once your target market is defined through your knowledge of product appeals and market analysis, and can be measured, you should determine whether that target market is large enough to sustain your business on an ongoing basis. In addition, your target market needs to be reachable. There must be ways of talking to your target audience.
Types of Markets
A market is simply any group of actual or potential buyers of a product. There are three major types of markets.
The consumer market. Individuals and households who buy goods for their own use or benefit are part of the consumer market. Drug and grocery items are the most common types of consumer products.
The industrial market. Individuals, groups or organizations that purchase your product or service for direct use in producing other products or for use in their day-to-day operations.
The reseller market. Middlemen or intermediaries, such as wholesalers and retailers, who buy finished goods and resell them for a profit.
IDENTIFYING YOUR MARKET
Here are three steps to follow when identifying your market:
Identify Why A Customer Would Want To Buy Your Product/Service
Segment Your Overall Market
Research Your Market
Step One — Identify Why A Customer Would Want To Buy Your Product/Service
The first step in identifying your target market is understanding what your products/services have to offer to a group of people or businesses. To do this, identify your product or service’s features and benefits. A feature is a characteristic of a product/service that automatically comes with it.
For example, if a toothpaste has a stain-removing formula, that’s a feature. The benefit to the customer, however, is whiter teeth.
While features are valuable and can certainly enhance your product, benefits motivate people to buy.
An example is anti-lock brakes; they are features on a car, but the benefit to the consumer is safety.
By knowing what your product/service has to offer and what will make customers buy, you can begin to identify common characteristics of your potential market.
For example, there are many different consumers who desire safety as a benefit when purchasing a car. Rather than targeting everyone in their promotional strategy, a car manufacturer may opt to target a specific group of consumers with similar characteristics, such as families with young children. This is an example of market segmentation.
In one column, list the features of your product/service. In the other, list the benefits each feature yields to the buyer.
Step Two: Segment Your Overall Market
It is a natural instinct to want to target as many people and groups as possible. However, by doing this your promotional strategy will never talk specifically to any one group, and you will most likely turn many potential customers off. Your promotional budget will be much more cost effective if you promote to one type of customer and speak directly to them. This allows you to create a highly focused campaign that will directly meet the needs and desires of a specific group. Again, this is called market segmentation.
Case Study…A president of a management training firm had been marketing to Fortune 500 companies more than a year. She received some business, but the competition was fierce. One day, she received a call from the owner of a manufacturing plant who needed to have managers trained. The president agreed to take the job, and found out there was virtually no competition for plant manufacturing training services, because it was less glamorous to train in a manufacturing plant than in executive offices of theFortune 500 companies. The president decided to change her marketing strategy and target only manufacturing plants. Their promotional material reflected this change. Within six months the company increased its revenues by 80 percent and created a competitive edge by segmenting its market.
Market segmentation is the process of breaking down a larger target market into smaller segments with specific characteristics. Each group requires different promotional strategies and marketing mixes because each group has different wants and needs. Segmentation will help you customize a product/service or other parts of a marketing mix, such as advertising, to reach and meet the specific needs of a narrowly defined customer group.
Case Study… Career Options, a job placement firm, has a target market of the unemployed. While it’s true that anyone looking for a job is a potential customer, developing a focused marketing strategy to reach such a broad market would be difficult, if not impossible.
Instead, Career Options should target the following segments within the broad group of people seeking employment: recent college graduates and professionals in transition. Both groups share one important characteristic — they need a job — but the two groups have different characteristics, different needs and wants. New college graduates, for example, are young and often unsure of career paths. They have little experience in resume writing and interviewing. Professionals in transition may be dealing with the trauma of being fired or laid-off. They usually have a defined set of skills and a career path.
Another example of market segmentation is the athletic shoe industry. Major manufactures of athletic shoes have several segmented markets. One segment is based on gender and the other segment is based on the type of sport or activity. They have different promotional campaigns for each market segment.
Larger markets are most typically divided into smaller target market segments on the basis of geographic, demographic, psychographic and behaviouristic characteristics:
Geographic. Potential customers are in a local, state, regional or national marketplace segment. If you are selling a product such as farm equipment, geographic location will remain a major factor in segmenting your target markets since your customers are located in particular rural areas. Or, if you own a retail store, geographic location of the store is one of the most important considerations.
Climate is a commonly used geographic segmentation variable that affects industries such as heating and air conditioning, sporting equipment, lawn equipment and building materials.
Decide if your business is going to do business on a local, regional, national or international level. Identify the geographic region where your market is located. Identify specific boundaries within which you will do business.
Demographic. Potential customers are identified by criteria such as age, race, religion, gender, income level, family size, occupation, education level and marital status. Choose those characteristics of your demographic target market that relates to the interest, need and ability of the customer to purchase your product or service.
For example, a target market for a real estate developer selling luxury vacation homes near Walt Disney World would include professional married couples approximately 30 to 45 years old with young children, and with incomes of more than $100,000.
Another example of targeting through demographics is Liz Claiborne Apparel Company. They have named their target market, her name is Liz Lady. They know Liz Lady’s age, income range, professional status, family status, hobbies and interests. Every decision from marketing to design is based on Liz Lady’s profile.
A demographic profile for a business would include such factors as customer size, number of employees, type of products, and annual revenue. If you are a business-to-business marketer for example, you may want to consider segmenting according to your target customer’s size. A printing company may decide to target only magazine publishers that publish more than one magazine because they need high volume accounts to make a profit.
Identify the following demographic characteristics of your market.
Consumer Market
Age
Income
Gender
Profession
Education
Family Size
Homeowner
Marital Status
Business Market
Geographic location
Size of Company
Annual revenue
Number of Branches
Number of Employees
Industry
Age of Company
Psychographic. Many businesses offer products based on the attitudes, beliefs and emotions of their target market. The desire for status, enhanced appearance and more money are examples of psychographic variables. They are the factors that influence your customers’ purchasing decision. A seller of luxury items would appeal to an individual’s desire for status symbols.
Business customers, as well as consumers, can be described in psychographic terms. Some companies view themselves as cutting edge or high tech, while others consider themselves socially responsible, stable and strong. Still others see themselves as innovative and creative. These distinctions help in determining how your company is positioned and how you can use the company’s position as a marketing tactic.
For example: Southwest Airlines has positioned itself as an innovative and fun airline that takes passengers on short, inexpensive excursions, whereas Delta chooses to promote reliability and safety.
The following are psychographic variables. Identify the characteristics of your target market.
Consumer Market
Lifestyle
Fun-Seeking
Family Stage
Trendy
Hobbies
Status Seeking
Sports Enthusiasts
Conservative
Forms of Entertainment
Socially Responsible
Publication
Environmentally Conscious
Influencer
Subscriptions
Family Oriented
Technical
Workforce Type
Management Style
Other
Business Market
Business Style
Industry Leader
Business Stage
Innovative
Employee Relations
Conservative
Trade Associations
Socially Responsible
Business Products/Stable
Services Used
Employee Friendly
Publication Subscriptions
Workforce Type
Management Style
Behavioristic. Products and services are purchased for a variety of reasons.
Business owners must determine what those reasons are, such as: brand, loyalty, cost, how frequently and at what time of year customers in a segment use and consume products. It’s important to understand the buying habits and patterns of your customers. Consumers do not rush and buy the first car they see, or the first sofa they sit on. A Fortune 500 company doesn't typically make quick purchasing decisions.
Most businesses use a combination of the above to segment their markets. Demographic and geographic criteria will usually qualify your target markets so you can establish if segment members have enough money to purchase your offering or if they’re in a location that’s accessible to the product. Most businesses then use the psychographic and behaviouristic factors to construct a promotional campaign that will appeal to the target market.
For example, Career Options is limited to the geographic region where their office is situated because their target customers want to work in that area. In their advertising they will appeal to psychographic factors such as the desire for stability and income.
Take a moment to decide which segmentation criteria will be most helpful to you in segmenting your target market:
geographic _____Yes _____No
demographic _____Yes _____No
psychographic _____Yes _____No
behavioristic _____Yes _____No
Next, identify what is important to your customers and rank these on a scale of high, medium, low or not at all. Are they price sensitive? Are they looking for the highest quality? Is great customer service important? Or, is location a deciding factor?
High Medium Low Not at all
Price
Quality
Brand Name
Variety of services
Salespeople
Customer Service
Special Offers
Promotional Campaign
Packaging
Convenience of Use
Convenience of Purchase
Location
Guarantees
Store/Office Decor
Payment Terms
Other
Step Three: Research Your Market
Some or all these reference tools can be found in the reference collection of any public library or college library that supports local business or a business school:
Psycho-graphic Summary: This segment closely associates work with self-esteem. They feel pressure because most have families and comfortable lifestyles to maintain. They are not interested in forging new careers but want stability.
CHOOSE THE SEGMENTED TARGET MARKET(S) YOU WILL SELL TO
After identifying and defining the possible segments within your target market, you must face the critical question of whether it would be profitable and feasible for you to pursue each identified segment, or choose one or two. To make this decision, you must answer the following questions:
What is the financial condition of my firm? If you have limited resources at this time, you may want to direct your marketing efforts to only one segment. A concentrated advertising campaign to reach one market segment is likely to be more effective than a diffuse campaign attempting to reach two.
What segments are my competitors covering? Are they ignoring smaller segments that I can possibly exploit? The printing company previously mentioned may decide to pursue small magazine publishers because there are many competitors currently serving the needs of larger publishers. Or, Career Options may discover that since in their geographic location there are several firms that specialize in helping professionals in transition, they should specialize in the recent college graduate market.
Is the market new to your firm? If so, it may be better for you to concentrate on one segment for now, and expand to others when your initial segment has been successfully penetrated. Developing new markets takes a greater commitment of time, money and energy.
Important Considerations:
Now think about all the characteristics you have identified and start formulating the promotional campaign that will best address this specific target market. Start to formulate a picture or description of your ideal customer. Make sure everything you do, from design, price to marketing, addresses your market.
Identifying Your Market
___ Determine why a customer would want to buy your product/service.
___ Identify your products’/services’ benefits and features.
___ Decide which segmentation criteria will best segment your target market: geographic, demographic, psychographic or behavioural.
___ Segment your market.
___ Divide larger target market segments into smaller segments.
___ Decide if it would be profitable and feasible for you to pursue each segment.
Explain the implications of retention and acquisition programmes as they affect the choice of digital/social media
Measuring the effects of social media in 10 steps
1. TrafficThis is one of the more obvious ways of measuring social media. Remember that quality often beats quantity, though not always (as many CPM-focused publishers will surely testify).
2. InteractionParticipation is a valuable indicator for many publishers (and brands). It says something about the kind of traffic you are attracting. Remember that an engaged customer is a highly valuable one. Interaction can be anything from leaving comments, to participating in support forums, to leaving customer reviews and ratings. It can happen on your website and on other websites. Keep your eyes and ears open!
3. SalesWe at Econsultancy are tracking sales from organic Google referrals and also paid search. It didn’t seem like much of a leap to track other channels, such as Twitter. Try it. Dell did, and discovered that it made $1m from Twitter in 18 months. Blendtec’s ‘Will It Blend?’ campaign on YouTube helped to drive “a five-fold increase in sales”.
4. LeadsSome companies simply cannot process sales online, because their products or services do not allow for it. For example, the automotive industry, which tends to measure the effects of its online ad campaigns by the amount of brochures requests, or test drives booked in (as opposed to car sales, which is, in marketing terms, an altogether more macro effort). B2B operators are in a similar position. If you are a consultant and spend time interacting on LinkedIn Answers then there’s a way of tracking that activity to enquiries about your services. The same applies across the spectrum of social media sites. Choose your weapon, thought leaders.
5. Search marketing The SEO factor cannot be understated. Social media can be far more powerful in this regard than you might initially imagine. For example, a well-placed story / video / image on a site like Digg will generate a lot of traffic and a nice link from Digg itself, but the real win here is that it will generate a lot more interest beyond Digg. Bloggers and major publishers are following Digg’s Upcoming channel to unearth new and interesting stories (Sky News now has a Twitter correspondent). One link and 20,000 referrals from Digg might lead on to 40,000 referrals and 100 links from other sites. The long tail, in action. 100 links means that your page might well wind up being placed highly on Google, resulting in lots of ongoing traffic. Remember too that you can use sites like Twitter and YouTube to claim valuable search rankings on your brand search terms (‘social search optimisation’).
6. Brand metrics
Word of mouth and the viral factor (inherent in sites like Twitter, Facebook and Digg) can help shift the key brand metrics, both negatively and positively. These include brand favourability, brand awareness, brand recall, propensity to buy, etc. Expensive TV ads are measured in this way, so if these metrics are good enough for TV then they’re surely good enough for the internet? Positive brand associations via social media campaigns can help drive clicks on paid search ads, and responses to other forms of advertising. We know that TV ads boost activity on search engines, resulting in paid search success stories, so I'd bet that social media can do the same.
7. PR
The nature of public relations has changed, forever. The last five years have been largely about the traditional PR folks not really being able to figure out the blogosphere. But if PRs cannot control the bloggers, then how on earth will they handle consumers? The distinct worlds of PR, customer service, and marketing are fusing. Twitter means everybody has a blog these days, and somewhere to shout about things to their friends (and beyond). Social media sites are the biggest echo chambers in the world! In any event, if you can measure PR (beyond adding up column inches and applying a random multiple to the equivalent size on the rate card!), then you can measure social media.
8. Customer engagement
Given the prevalence of choice, and the ease with which consumers can switch from one brand to another, customer engagement is one of the most important of all metrics in today’s business environment. Engagement can take place offline and online, both on your website and on other sites, particularly social media sites.
Customer engagement is key to improving satisfaction and loyalty rates, and revenue.
By listening to customers, and letting them know that you are listening, you can improve your business, your products, and your levels of service. The alternative is to ignore customers, which sends out a terrible message. Our research found that an engaged customer will recommend your brand, convert more readily and purchase more often.
9. Retention
A positive side effect of increased customer engagement - assuming certain other factors in play work in your favour - is an increase in customer retention. This is going to be a crucial factor in the success of your business in the years to come. Make no bones about it: we are moving into an age of optimisation and retention. Watch your retention rates as you start participating in social media. Over time, all things remaining equal, they should rise. Zappos, which is a case study in how-to-do-Twitter (and active on MySpace, Facebook and Youtube), is closing in on $1bn of sales this year, and “75% of its orders are from repeat customers”
. Go figure, as they say.
10. Profits
If you can reduce customer churn, and engage customers more often, the result will surely be that you’ll generate more business from your existing customer base (who in turn will recommend your business to their network of friends, family, and social media contacts). This reduces your reliance on vast customer acquisition budgets to maintain or grow profits. It makes for a far more profitable and more efficient organisation. I really hope that more businesses will find a better balance between acquisition and retention, sooner rather than later, from a resourcing standpoint. Too many acquisition strategies appear to be ill-conceived, are not joined up (both in terms of marketing and also operations), and as such are ripe for optimisation. Plug the leaky bucket and you won’t need to turn the tap so hard to top it up. And remember that old adage about it being cheaper to keep existing customers than to seek out new ones.
Explain how to reach target customers in accordance with the plan
Here are five powerful ways to reach your target market online.
Connect with their social circles
You’ve probably heard the (overplayed) expression that ‘birds of a feather flock together.’ When it comes to online marketing, nothing could hold more true. Social influence is powerful — and social media is social influence amplified. As a marketer, it’s in your best interest to align with the social channels that your customers and prospects are already using.
If they’re on LinkedIn, make sure that you set up an account on that platform — even if you’re not ready to actively participate, you should at least watch and see how your customer community is interacting. Did you find that your target audience has zero presence on Twitter? If so, don’t waste your time — your best strategy is to join discussion channels and conversations where your target market is already active.
Target behaviours through paid channel advertising
Think that Google AdWords is awesome? You may be surprised to know that there are many additional ad networks out there with powerful audience targeting features. These platforms build comprehensive profiles of users on the internet. Through data, ad networks can identify who you want to reach.
If you’re a Houston-based doctor who is recruiting new patients, for instance, you can work with advertising solutions providers to reach prospective patients who have searched for conditions that align with your area of focus. The ability to connect with prospects that are already searching for your product, or service can give you a leg up against the competition.
Blog about your customers’ interests
Content marketing is a powerful inbound marketing tool. By maintaining a blog, you’ll position your company as a thought leader and expert in your industry. If you want to attract visitors, what’s key is that you build editorial calendars, topic ideas, and keyword lists that are in complete alignment with your prospects’ areas of interest.
By selecting the right topics, you’ll give your brand the potential to achieve high rankings in organic search. For that reason, it’s in your best interest to learn the exact questions and search queries that your prospects are bringing to the table. Position your brand as a provider of compelling answers to your customers’ core needs.
Partner with like-minded brands
Multi-headed beasts are inevitably smarter than single-headed beasts. There are similar companies trying to reach audiences like yours. Find out who these companies are, and instead of trying to beat them — join them in a consolidated, team effort.
Once you find a few complimentary partners, guest post on each other's blogs every few weeks, share each other's social media posts, or co-host a webinar. Find ways that your online efforts can work together to not only extend your reach, but also to bring more value to your collective target market.
Provide relevant customer testimonials that speak to your target market
Your customer testimonials should connect with prospects on both a rational and emotional level. When visitors see your product for the first time, they are typically zeroing in on one key question — “what’s in it for me?”
You can simplify this mental process by providing a direct answer to this question. Show them examples of customers like themselves — social proof that underscores why your brand really is exceptional.
Ask individuals that you have worked with to provide a testimonial on your LinkedIn page, or to provide one that you can put on your website. If you really want to convey the value you provide, create customer testimonial videos.
1.6 CRM software tools are used for Data collection and reporting system that is capable of capturing the information required by the plan.
In CRM (customer relationship management), CRM software is a category of software that covers a broad set of applications and software designed to help businesses manage customer data and customer interaction, access business information, automate sales, marketing and customer support and also manage employee, vendor ...
eg: sage,
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.