Social media for customer engagement: How to successfully propose to your customers

Social media. The digital technique that provides bigger potential marketing rewards than ever before. Unfortunately this must be weighed against the possibly disastrous results. Today’s post looks at how to increase customer engagement on social media, alongside posing some of the key risks so you can use this initiative safely. Customer engagement can be viewed as a connection you make with your customers to produce a desired effect or reaction (Wenzl, 2016). It has been seen as a process that companies undergo that can be boosted by individual events but that should overall be a continuous thing. This theory can be found in this link to the Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice. It is especially interesting as social media can be continually updated and used for constant communication with customers. Social media has long been known for its ability to improve various aspects of customer relationships, but determining the outcomes you want to achieve is vital, as with all marketing it must be relevant to be effective. For an overview of three top metrics for measuring engagement click here.

Social media has pervaded everywhere in the developed world, with three quarters of the entire US population using it (Statista, 2018). On top of this, the developing world is catching up and this makes it possible to engage customers across borders and even cultures. Engagement has long been considered something that is on or off, but new thinking has afforded the thought that engagement is on a spectrum and therefore can be measured. With the difficulty in measuring social media ROI being one of the consistently mentioned issues in acquiring funding, or why social media is not used for marketing, assessing engagement levels can go some way to aiding this. For an insight into this, I would suggest this Harvard Business Review article on calculating the ROI of customer engagement.

 

How to succeed

As mentioned earlier, the first step to any successful social media attempt is determining what you want out of it. If, like me, you struggle with the initial thinking in these situations, consider viewing this article outlining nine general goals and handy insights into how to track them.

 

 Competitions

       

Image credit: The PR authority

 

One definite method of increasing engagement is to generate a buzz around something your company is doing. Buzz marketing aims to create publicity and excitement whilst conveying information to a customer (Karr, 2015).  Running competitions on social media is great for engagement because it gets customers actively involved with your brand and can create a buzz if the prize is considered worthwhile. Again, deciding on your desired outcomes is crucial. Well run competitions can increase your customer base, but if the prize or decided action is not relevant to the type of customer you want to acquire it may only lead to short term engagement increases. If looking to engage with a wide range of potential new customers consider a more general prize and aim to go viral. To help you with this check out this blog showing 7 essentials for making contests go viral.

Another reason to properly assess your decision is that competitions can be expensive to run and even more so if you decide to offer a prize, but also as with any social media marketing there are the general risks of the internet. Mountain Dew ran a contest to name a new flavour ,which was un-moderated and led to forum-site members hijacking the competition, creating and voting for names too rude to be published here….

 

 

Video credit: Neil Patel

Content

 

Image credit:  The Social M’s

 

The benefits of engaging customers are well known, however if you need a reminder read this article divulging the key advantages of investing in it. Considering this, using informative content is a great way to engage your current and also potential customers, but it must be relevant to do so (Runyon, 2015). It is important to do some research into what your target market and customers would like to see and would spend time viewing or reading, as otherwise they will not engage with it. Another point to consider is that video tends to be the most engaging type of content, as the average viewer remembers 95% of a message when it is watched, but only 10% when read (Carvalho, 2017). The benefit of pre-planning and having a set content strategy cannot be stressed enough. Not only does it help decide what sort of content will and will not be included, but by doing so you will have key engagement metrics that you can assess each post using, thus allowing yourself to determine which posts have the most success based on your criteria. Future success will depend on you monitoring this and then posting more of the same type to keep engaging those customers.

Unfortunately, despite the vast benefits available, there is an inherent danger to content marketing on social media due to the permanence of internet posts. Yes, you can delete posts that go wrong, but if it has gone severely wrong it is highly unlikely that you won’t be able to stop it being captured and shared by others. For example, Nivea posted a photo on Facebook, which has over 2 billion monthly users (Constine, 2017) with the controversial tagline ‘white is purity’. The racial connotations surrounding the tagline led to huge backlash on social media and the company withdrawing the image.

 

References:

Carvalho, M. (2017). This is Why Video is The Most Engaging Type of Content. [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@zipstrr/this-is-why-video-is-the-most-engaging-type-of-content-e5ca46d5cef1 [Accessed 8 Apr. 2018].

Constine, J. (2017). Facebook now has 2 billion monthly users… and responsibility. [online] TechCrunch. Available at: https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/facebook-2-billion-users/ [Accessed 7 Apr. 2018].

Karr, D. (2015). Buzz, Viral or Word of Mouth Marketing: What’s the difference? | MarTech. [online] MarTech. Available at: https://martech.zone/whats-the-difference-buzz-viral-word-of-mouth-marketing/ [Accessed 8 Apr. 2018].

Runyon, M. (2015). How To Engage Your Customers With Effective Content Marketing Strategies. [online] Search Engine People Blog. Available at: https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/150550925-engaging-content-marketing.html [Accessed 8 Apr. 2018].

Statista. (2018). Number of U.S. social network users 2022. [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/278409/number-of-social-network-users-in-the-united-states/ [Accessed 7 Apr. 2018].

Wenzl, M. (2016). The 21st Century Definition of Customer Engagement. [online] ReviewTrackers. Available at: https://www.reviewtrackers.com/definition-customer-engagement/ [Accessed 7 Apr. 2018].

The campaign for customers: A how to for social media campaigns

Admit it. Social media has become an integral part of your life in one form or another. However, you must also be aware that you are not alone, with Statista finding that as of January 2017, 42 million people in the UK were active social media users (2017). That is 64% of the whole population, elderly and new born babies included. For a really useful breakdown of social media usage by demographics follow this link.

It is no wonder then that 78% of companies have a dedicated social media team (Solis and Li, 2013). One of the most impactful ways social media can be used is to run an integrated campaign across different mediums, with the aim being maximum reach, engagement and an increase in revenue as a direct result. With 83% of customers saying that they have had bad experiences with social media marketing (Ray, 2014), this post aims to outline how to avoid putting your customers through that and how to create an engaging and successful campaign.

It should be common knowledge that social media profiles must be constantly monitored, whilst a campaign is for a purpose, over a specific period of time. The first step to doing it well is identifying what YOU want to accomplish. At the end of the day, the only relevant success metrics of a campaign are the ones YOU decide. If you are already struggling to measure the return on investment of your efforts, consider reading the MIT Sloan Management Review article on why common current techniques are not effective.

 

Image credit: Moirae

 

This post uses common measures of campaign success such as target audience impressions, shares and engagement as objectives when discussing risks and rewards. For a list of five easy steps towards measuring social media campaigns please click here.

Key factors of creating a well performing campaign can be drawn from previous success stories. Engaging content is of paramount importance, if your target market does not want to comment, share or re-view your material then it will not fulfil the potential reach. An example of a very engaging campaign comes from a peculiar source. Chiquita, who sell banana’s, managed to reach over 1.7 million views on a video claiming that the solar eclipse was actually caused by two of their banana’s. They achieved this using an integrated strategy, by posting on Facebook, running a chatbot which answered people with the time they would see the eclipse, live-streaming the event and creating a landing page.

View their dedicated ‘banana eclipse’ web-page on this link.

Image credit: Brenda Wicker

 

Another pre-cursor to a well performed campaign includes considering what details you aim to acquire from your target market for future use, but beware, as each extra required field tends to reduce opt in rates by 10% (Belosic, 2014). On top of this, audience participation is a key facilitator of engagement because the target market then does not feel as if they are being marketed at.

However, it is worth noting that despite high levels of audience participation and the ability of a campaign to ‘go viral’ being of high priority, these targets should not be blindly sought after. A prime example of why this is the case was an advert Mountain Dew released on their Youtube channel. The video did go viral, receiving over 44 million views and 15,000 comments, however the majority of these, along with the social media reaction, were negative. Content marketing, which plays the biggest role in cultivating engaged audiences (Trappe, 2017), requires you to make your audience WANT to consume more of your content. With comments like ‘why does this exist?’ it is unlikely that this video helped Mountain Dew to achieve this. See the image below for some of the comments on the video.

 

The other risk is that of internet permanence. Although a company can delete things that they post, if it is captured by a third party they can’t govern where it is then posted and whether or not it can be deleted. A very famous example was when a tweet was sent from the singer Susan Boyle’s Twitter account including ‘#Susanalbumparty’. Users of Twitter very quickly pointed out that this did not sound too appropriate. See below for a tweet the company Zoo put out to mock the event.

 

Conversely, there are still those that firmly believe the old saying that ‘all publicity is good publicity’. In a way this does make sense, the hashtag would have massively increased the reach and impressions of the social media surrounding the album release. However, to believe this saying was true in terms of social media would be to say that tweets like the sexist one seen below will attract more customers than those lost.

To sum up, well run social media campaigns can significantly boost awareness of your brand, improve brand engagement and even drive revenue. On top of this there are enough guides on what to and not to do that you should seriously consider if running one could help your business.

 

References:

 

Belosic, J. (2014). 5 Tips for Running Successful Social Media Campaigns. [online] Socialmediaexaminer. Available at: https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/successful-social-media-campaigns/ [Accessed 24 Feb. 2018].

Ray, A. (2014). What if Everything You Know About Social Media Marketing is Wrong?. [Blog] Experience: the blog. Available at: http://www.experiencetheblog.com/2014/04/what-if-everything-you-know-about.html [Accessed 23 Feb. 2018].

Solis, B. and Li, C. (2013). Altimeter Group’s State Of Social Business 2013 Report. Altimeter.

Statista. (2018). UK: social media penetration 2017. [online] Available at: https://www.statista.com/statistics/507405/uk-active-social-media-and-mobile-social-media-users/ [Accessed 23 Feb. 2018].

 

Way to Co! How co-branding can open the door to new customers

It is common knowledge that gaining a new customer is tougher than retaining one, lesser known that it can cost anywhere between five and twenty-five times as much to do so (Gallo, 2014). In this blog I shall outline how co-branding can be the key to customer acquisition, alongside a few other benefits this strategy can unlock.

 

Co-branding is an arrangement whereby two different brands work together to create a product or service representative of both brands, in order to reduce new product costs and expose both companies to new markets (Stec, 2013). These sound like realistic benefits, however it is worth noting the article suggests no limitations, drawbacks or occasions where these benefits will not be realised. On the other hand, Monrabal suggests that you should consider not participating in this strategy if there is any perceived risk to your brands reputation (2016). See here for more risk-reducing factors to consider before using this strategy.

 

Co-branding was a general marketing strategy long before digital marketing, with noted success in 1975 when Bonne Belle and Dr. Pepper created a flavored lip balm that is still sold today. Using an academic perspective to back up a fairly basic reason why this strategy can work entails information integration theory. This theory suggests that people integrate information from a number of sources in order to make an overall judgment (Foster, 2014). Applying this to the previous example, Bonne Belle released the first successful flavored lip-balm two years prior to the co-branded product, whilst Dr. Pepper was a well-known soft drink brand – the brand loyalty and brand equity held were more than likely to convince customers of either to purchase the new product. Follow this link to see more successful co-branding examples.

Image credit: Sophie Bernazzini

You can employ a co-branding strategy for many purposes, the most notable including being to expand your customer base, reduce product development and investment costs and as a more basic benefit to simply increase revenue. It has had major success for franchised businesses in reducing investment costs, consider Subway and petrol stations fulfilling the needs of a long drive in one stop! Click on Kerry Pipes’ name for an article highlighting the benefits of co-branding for or with franchises.

 

In terms of expanding your customer base – the aim of this blog, co-branding of a complimentary nature is vital. It is likely customers of a similar product will have heard of yours and on top of this you can still benefit from the reputation and brand loyalty of the other brands product. One of the most successful examples of this is Nike+, the collaboration product between Nike and Apple based on a shared group of customers. Apple designed a chip to fit Nike+ shoes and monitor data that was linked to the users iPhone app, meeting the needs of runners who wanted to track their efforts. The app has over 18 million users and exemplifies the need for both parties to provide benefits to the other by engaging in this strategy.

 

The reasoning behind a need to continue to offer or provide mutual benefit is proven in the case of Shell and Lego. They had a partnership dating back from the 1960’s that split in 2014 after GreenPeace created a viral video, shaming Lego for selling Shell themed products at petrol stations whilst Shell planned to drill in the Arctic (Vaughan, 2014). The deal was thought to be worth £68m to Lego but the bad publicity from the video, which to date has over 8 million views, led to the split of the partnership and damaged brand equity for both companies. Click the picture below to see the video.

 

 

Other potential pitfalls to be wary of include: Diverging company values or missions, dilution of the brand, operational distractions and communication issues. All of these issues tend to develop over the long term, however any ventures should be properly evaluated before and during to ensure these outcomes do not occur, as any of these issues would be extremely detrimental to both brands. The other thing to mention is that despite perceived reduced costs as you are splitting them, there is no accounting for the time invested into the planning and the ongoing assessment of the partnerships value.

 

 

 

Image credit: Persona design

 

The image above illustrates just a few of the ways co-branding has successfully been undertaken. To ensure your customer acquisition strategy is successful, you must clarify the types of new customer you are after and partner with a company that gives you access either because they currently operate in that market, or because they can aid you in creating something to satisfy that market. The digital age has meant that any partnership can also benefit from social media and viral video hype, further spreading the reach as both partner’s followers will be able to view and share the content. With a recent study finding that content marketing generates 3x more leads than paid search – which has been touted as the best digital marketing strategy (Mccoy, 2017), the benefits are real.

To sum up, with the right mix of pre-planning, patience and sensible partner brand selection, co-branding can be a great customer acquisition strategy,  just promise yourself that you will invest the time necessary for its success!

 

References:

Foster, C. (2014). The Application of Information Integration Theory to Standard Setting: Setting Cut Scores Using Cognitive Theory. Ph.D. University of Massachusetts.

Gallo, A. (2014). The Value of Keeping the Right Customers. [online] Harvard Business Review. Available at: https://hbr.org/2014/10/the-value-of-keeping-the-right-customers [Accessed 7 Jan. 2018].

McCoy, J. (2017). 9 Stats That Will Make You Want to Invest in Content Marketing. [online] Content Marketing Institute. Available at: http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2017/10/stats-invest-content-marketing/ [Accessed 7 Jan. 2018].

Monrabal, J. (2016). When Should You Co-Brand?. [online] Adage.com. Available at: http://adage.com/article/guest-columnists/brand/304810/ [Accessed 7 Jan. 2018].

Stec, C. (2013). Co-Marketing Vs. Co-Branding: What’s the Difference?. [online] Impactbnd.com. Available at: https://www.impactbnd.com/co-marketing-vs-co-branding-whats-the-difference [Accessed 7 Jan. 2018].

The only way is viral: How to tell if your social media campaign was a success

Any business investment is made to benefit the company in question in one sense or another. However, measuring the direct financial gains from a social media campaign is next to impossible as you do not exactly get paid for every “like” on Facebook or “retweet” on Twitter. With 41% of companies in a survey of 1000 admitting they had absolutely no idea of social media’s financial impact (Baer, 2012), why is it that 88% of companies are using it for marketing purposes? (Bennett, 2014).

 

Image credit: http://www.newmediaandmarketing.com

Quite simply, the prominence of social media in modern life means that companies not creating social media campaigns are putting themselves at a major marketing disadvantage. Knowing this, alongside the fact that sharing content and creating eWOM (electronic word of mouth) is free, and therefore the cheapest form of marketing, it is no wonder companies are attempting to measure the return on investment (ROI). So, if this is the case, how do we place a financial value on the effectiveness of a social media campaign?

In her report “Can You Measure the ROI of Your Social Media Marketing?”, Donna Hoffman, scholar and principal of marketing at The George Washington University states that by trying to financially measure ROI marketers are incorrectly trying to quantify the return from a social media campaign (2010). Hoffman believes companies should instead be looking at what marketing objectives can be met by these efforts.

KPI’s

These objectives should be quantifiable and linked to a specific campaign, meaning that the objectives can be amended depending on what the business wants to achieve from the campaign. These objectives are also known as KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators). It is not possible to give a list of the best social media KPI’s due to the individual nature of business aims, however developing an understanding of general key social metrics will allow you to look at your campaign and assess whether it has been successful.

Once you have defined your goals, it then becomes possible to measure the success of the campaign based on metrics decided by the person who wants the best outcome for the company and knows what constitutes its success – you.

 

Click here to view the top 13 KPI’s for social media managers

 

 

Image credit: Klipfolio

 

As already established, setting KPI’s is the beginning step to measuring the success of a social media campaign and therefore these should be set at the first stage of the campaigns development.

However, there are different ways these KPI’s can be assessed for success. Using the two main metrics of social media marketing; “Reach” – the measure of the range of the influence of any content and “Engagement” – the actions taken by users on the posts (Ramachandran, 2015), allows for two different assessment approaches. The first is to measure what we would call the superficial gains of a post, likes, followers gained, shares to name a few. This can be audited by you or your company very easily and is a good measure of the reach of the post and how well it did against your KPI’s for that campaign (bear in mind the only way to audit the success of your social media is against what YOU set out to achieve).

Google Analytics

Another option available is Google Analytics, using this you can audit what happened because of your campaign. This is possible because the software allows you to see where visitors to your website came from and to understand their behaviour on your site. This is the engagement side of the metric and can show you the number of conversions and the value of said conversions as a result of any social media post. Using Google Analytics to see the impact of a post also allows comparison to your own previous campaigns, although they will have had different KPI’s as each campaign is different, it is always useful to see if a different style led to a large increase in range or engagement!

More reasons you need to be using Google Analytics

There’s always a way

As a final note, although Falls said that the issue in determining social media’s ROI is in trying to put numeric quantities around unquantifiable human interactions (2008), the two methods outlined in this post should give you the tools to work around this. Setting your own KPI’s allows for a new kind of ROI calculation without needing to place a numeric quantity ($) on interactions, with Google analytics doing the opposite and placing a conversion value on interactions.

Thanks for reading! For more on how to measure the success of your social media campaign why not visit our friends Klipfolio here.

 

References:

Baer, J. (2012). Not Tracking Social Media ROI is Your Fault. [online] Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting. Available at: http://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-measurement/not-tracking-social-media-roi-is-your-fault/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Bennett, S. (2014). 88% of Companies are Using Social Media for Marketing. [online] Adweek.com. Available at: http://www.adweek.com/digital/social-media-companies/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Falls, J. (2008). What Is The ROI For Social Media?. [online] Social Media Explorer. Available at: http://socialmediaexplorer.com/content-sections/tools-and-tips/what-is-the-roi-for-social-media/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

Hoffman, D. (2010). Can You Measure the ROI of Your Social Media Marketing?. MIT Sloan Management Review, 52(1), pp.41-49.

Ramachandran, S. (2015). Reach and Engagement: Making the Most of Social Media Marketing – TFM Insights. [online] TFM Insights. Available at: https://insights.technologyformarketing.co.uk/reach-engagement-making-social-media-marketing/ [Accessed 1 Dec. 2017].

 

Ikea: When flat packing just isn’t quick enough.

Image result for ikea

View the original case study: Ikea and the socializers here – https://studentcentral.brighton.ac.uk/bbcswebdav/pid-3029519-dt-content-rid-5621925_1/courses/IT382_2017/Ikea%20Case%20Study.pdf

Ikea is all about speed, but these days data analytics has overtaken the speed of even Ikea’s furniture to formulate.

Ikea are known for their easy assemble furniture, home-styled stores and glorious meatballs. Although all of this is known, and the experience tends to be very similar wherever you go in the country, there were still reports of varying perceptions of the brands customer service across regions.

One interesting statistic is that in the US in 2014 36.5% of the total conversation about negative experiences was on Facebook, compared to just 5% in the UK.