After looking at why Social Media is important to business’s in my previous blogs, I’m now going to critique if Facebook competitions can increase awareness to ultimately drive sales (doesn’t every company want to drive sales!?) Take a look at the below table from Mangold & Faulds, (2009) to see where Facebook is situated within social media as whole.
(Mangold & Faulds, 2009)
It is interesting to recognise that Facebook originally started out as a niche private network for Harvard University Students (Kietzmann et al, 2011) and now has become an integral part of everyday lives not only for consumers but also for businesses. This presents an enormous challenge for firms where management methods are ill-suited to deal with the change in how customers want to be listened to, engaged and responded with (Kietzmann et al, 2011). It is apparent that companies are using sites such as Facebook to support the creation of brand communities (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001) showing academic theory behind the aim of this blog. Examples of this are Warner Brothers and Adidas allowing visitors to associate themselves with an identity and ensuring activity alignment (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010).
Worldwide, there are over 1.39 billion monthly active Facebook users (13% increase yea-on-year) statistically meaning Facebook is just too big to ignore, offering a massive platform to showcase your brand and products.
In the increasingly saturated market place of home furnishings, it is essential to promote your brand to stay ahead of your competitors. As Hall & Bensoussan, (2007) state, “the level of need to remain competitive has increased by statistically a significant amount since 1996”. With 16 million local business pages created since May 2013, a whopping 100% increase from 8 million in June 2012, shows just how popular this channel must be.
The Facebook competitions that succeed are ones, which appeal to the lifestyle and interests of the brand’s target market, creating the best Return on Investment. Ultimately this keeps the motivation to enter, related to your brand and your products. The Facebook competitions that don’t succeed are ones that give away other incentives that are unrelated to the brand, an example of this could be iPads being given away by home furnishing companies.
Very.co.uk is a national UK shopping website that has used Facebook to increase its traffic by starting a Facebook competition with the caption #TheFreeze.
How to enter?
To enter and win the weeks #PartyInStyle (the weeks featured outfits) entrants need to firstly watch the Very Video. Great advertising of its stylish products, agreed? The entrant then takes a selfie mimicking the pose from the advert and posts it onto the competition page. Simple!
Why it works?
This competition is aimed at woman, the brands core demographic and target market and has been creatively executed. Very are capitalising on the populariry of the selfie and more importantly enticing its core customer.
Crate & Barrel are a home furnishing and houseware supplier that started off in Chicago. Now it is owned by the Otto Group of Hamburg, Germany – the 2nd largest online retailer worldwide! The competition objective was to encourage engaged couples to create gift registry with the store.
How to enter?
The competition used the Strutta platform, where entrants had to create a gift registry, and then submit 3 images and answer 3 questions. There was a round of voting then a judging panel picked the final winners – to win a $100,000 dream wedding! With Strutta, Crate & Barrel were able to:
Validate each couples gift registry for entry
Build a customised site
Manage and moderate all content
Why it works?
The competition was promoted across all channels (website/press releases/online advertising/email and blogger outreach/in store displays)
Results:
$35 million in gift registry created over 2 campaigns
16,000 couples shared their love story!
3 million pages views over a year
1/2 million votes each year
As soon as couples upload their photo’s they can share and tell friends to get as many votes as possible, having customers promote the competition themselves can be the most cost effective way of promotion!
However, Facebook competitions can go wrong (creating bad brand reputation and not brand awareness):
Lori Greiner (from QVC)
Where did it go wrong?
First impressions, this would look easy and simple to enter. However, critically analysing this competition, people have to comment on the image to enter which is against the Facebook terms and conditions.
It is also against the rules to administer a competition through a photo and instead should be done through a 3rd party application.
To summarise, as the competition is done through an image, Lori has no way of contacting the winner apart from posting it on her page and asking them to message the page. Again against the guidelines! This shows a level of unprofessionalism which can affect consumer confidence in a brand, what if the post gets missed?!
Skillens Jewellers in Castlewellan
Where did it go wrong?
Planning to give away a tanzanite and diamond ring sounds too good to be true? It was. All you had to do was like the photo, share the photo and comment saying ‘liked’ or ‘shared’. Again, critically analysing this example, this goes againt Facebook page.
Something that can damage brand reputation rather than enhance awareness is coming across as lying to entrants. Lynda answered from the Skillens account, which portrayed a confusing message that she was an employee, attracting outrage. It later emerged she was not an employee, however having devastating effects on the company as the Facebook page was deleted – potentially having consequences on sales.
Brand Awareness
Let’s be honest, everyone likes to win freebies, don’t they? Competitions, if done correctly can be super effective, as we can see, with little outgoing expenditure for the brand. This can be a key tactic when wanting to boost online traffic and over time, can lead to higher sustained levels of traffic.
To increase brand awareness and ultimately sales, these are things not to forget:
Include competition information on your website
Ensure entrants must visit the website to enter
Link back to the site whenever promoting the competition!
And avoid the following:
Using a Facebook feature as a contest
Click like to win
Share this photo and win
Comment to win
Not using an application
Popular competition applications are: Binkd, Strutta & Wildfire
Announcing winners on wall
Giving away unrelated prizes
Not promoting enough
How to run a successful Facebook Competition:
It is important that you understand how to run a Facebook competition, as it can be confusing. Checkout this great 5 minute video below that will guide you through how and how not to create a successful Facebook competition for your brand!
Did you get all that? If not take a look at this helpful blog, giving you a detailed 5-step guide, from Wishpond! However, Facebook reserves the right to remove any business page without warning, for not adhering to the terms and conditions. So be careful!
Finally to summarise this blog, I think the scope of Facebook has dramatically changed over the years allowing business to become more personal and interactive with consumers through things such as competitions. There have been some great examples above showing how traffic has increased to the websites having a knock on effect of increased sales. However through critical analysis, there are also some poor examples that have in turn created a poor brand reputation even leading to a business Facebook page being shut down – definitely creating poor brand awareness and no ROI.
There is the famous saying of.. “Any publicity is good publicity” which can be seen as a subjective statement. But do you agree?
References:
Hall, C., & Bensoussan, B. (2007). Staying ahead of the competition.
Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business horizons, 53(1), 59-68
Kietzmann, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business horizons, 54(3), 241-251
Mangold, W. G., & Faulds, D. J. (2009). Social media: The new hybrid element of the promotion mix. Business horizons, 52(4), 357-365
Muniz, A. M., & O’Guinn, T. C. (2001). Brand community. Journal of Consumer Research, 27(4), 412—432
Following on from my previous blog post, where I discussed the HOT benefits of social media, I’m now going to directly relate it to the home furnishings market.
The UK home furnishings market is positioned as part of the home furniture industry. This contributes a whopping £9.4bn to annual GDP, a figure that took me by surprise due to its sheer size. Industry revenue is projected to grow by 4.9%, which didn’t take me so much by surprise considering that the Government’s Help to Buy scheme is estimated to help 120,000 households, increasing the number of first time buyers, having a positive trend on the UK home furnishings market. Surely you’re now thinking how can social media increase this statistic even more? So now lets look at the social media industry and see how the two combined, can benefit from one another..
Since the millennium, user generated content has turned the world upside down, becoming increasingly popular on the web. An important thing to remember is more and more users are participating in content creation, instead of just consumption (Agichtein et al, 2008). Without overwhelming you with numerous statistics, here are just a few to get your head around; Twitter has become the most popular micro blogging site (Zarrella, D. 2010) with an expanse of over 230 million active users (an opportunity not to be missed by home furnishing retailers), Facebook has become the foremost site, allowing companies to track and engage with potential customers (Zarrella, D. 2010) with over 1.2billion users. Its apparent to see that social media is an effective way of communicating for retailers (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2012) – surely?!
Put both these industries together and you cant deny the ever-growing importance of social media as consumers go-to tool for inspiration, reviews, communication and shopping.
I’ve found this great case study on Fab Furnish as a great example of a success story.
In order to utilise and leverage social media, it is important to set some business objectives, for Fab Furnish they wanted to:
Increase website traffic
Increase sales by 20% every month using their Facebook Ads
So how did they go about it? If you want to read in more detail then check out this blog on Digital Vidya!
Strategies implemented to attain their objectives:
Photo Ads
Fab Furnish posted relevant and attractive photographs showcasing the best of their 60,000 products. These were shown on desktop and mobiles on the right side of the page, in the form of news feed, encouraging people to click on them.
Link Ads
This increased traffic to the website providing quick and easy further details of the products.
Quality Images
In-house top quality images were selected to be in the Ads alongside embedded call to action tab enabling visitors to take immediate action.
Targeted Right People
Fab Furnish decided to target the upwardly mobile bracket with superior spending capabilities and those expressing an interest.
Custom Audiences
The first line of target should be a customer that is loyal as they prove to be a valuable part of a business. Identifying requirements of those existing helps to market appropriately and effectively.
Increased Online Sales
Don’t forget that it’s essential for potential customers who click through, are forced to visit again and again!
How to change your online presence:
Setting up a page
This should include all the information about the business, its diverse range of products, not forgetting attractive images and links to interesting blogs and the website
At least one page category should be mentioned to appear in search results making it easily accessible.
Identifying the target audience
For a home furnishings company, this needs to be people who are willing to spend on these products and those who have shown interest in products whilst visiting the website. This helps to target the right products to the right customer.
Compelling Content
This has more of an impact than blocks of text, encouraging increased click through. Queries need to be responded promptly to help develop a bond to the brand. Links provided increase user friendliness and enables interaction for the customer.
What were the resultsfor Fab Furnish?
Revenues increased by 10 times
Traffic to the website increased 5 times
The number of orders increased by 12 times
The ROI over advertisements increased by 2 times
WOW.. it’s now clear to see that home furnishing companies can leverage their online sales by implementing social media marketing strategy to attain objectives. These channels should be embraced and not ignored! I’ve definitely learnt more through this success story and I hope you have to!
However I’ve also found an example of a failed success story, looking at Habitat UK.
This trendy furniture store decided to use trending topics on Twitter to get their brand and products noticed. Habitat UK used hashtags that had nothing to do with furniture or shopping, using popular ones at the time such as #Apple, #iPhone, even using a hashtag for an Iranian election, trying to get people to sign up to a database… totally inappropriate I’m sure you’re all thinking!
As you would expect people were annoyed which led to Habitat deleting its offensive tweets replacing them many product and sales related tweets.
What could Habitat have done instead?
Individually reply to everyone who complained and apologise for the spammy behaviour
Apologise in public
Given Twitter followers a special discount to be redeemed online
Ask Twitter followers what information/offers they would like to see to build value and interest
It’s ok to fail, but do it quickly and apologise publicly! If you want to read more on this, take a look to Social Media Today’s blog!
So what’s the main message?
Tone down the hard selling
Respond quickly to customers
Use lots of enticing videos and photos
Be creative
And perhaps.. unexpected!
So finally, I’d like to leave you with some academic DO’s & DON’Ts from Ramsay, (2010) to get you thinking from all perspectives…
DO put a communication strategy in place
DO develop a style
DO strike the right balance between conversation and sales
DO set limits for what is and is not to be tolerated in any channel
DON’T use social media for corporate communications
DON’T be afraid to vary strategy per channel
DON’T forget to update content
If you have the time I’d recommend looking at the social media etiquette specific to each channel here.
References:
Agichtein, E., Castillo, C., Donato, D., Gionis, A., & Mishne, G. (2008, February). Finding high-quality content in social media. In Proceedings of the 2008 International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (pp. 183-194). ACM
Chaffey, D. and Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2012) Digital Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice. Harlow: Financial Times Prentice Hall
Ramsay, M. (2010). Social media etiquette: A guide and checklist to the benefits and perils of social marketing. Journal of Database Marketing & Customer Strategy Management, 17(3), 257-261
Zarella, D. (2010). The Social Media Marketing Book. Canada: O’Reilly
The average person is reputedly exposed to 2,000 or more marketing messages every day, a figure that might take you by surprise! As Weber, (2009) states, marketers should participate, organise and encourage social networks in which people want to belong. This encourages vital engagement; instead of talking at customers, marketers can talk with them. The social web has become the most effective way in the history of the world to do this, on a large scale (Weber, 2009). Therefore as a start-up company, social media can be invaluable, so take a look at these HOT tips!
10 HOT benefits for start-ups:
Easy to learn about your audience
The key to success is knowing your target market, for any business across all industries. Now social media has such a huge impact on consumers, businesses are acknowledging the impact on brand reputation (Kaplan, & Haenlein 2010). Facebook Insights in Hootsuite is a tool offering valuable information such as, age, gender and dominant languages spoken, helping to aid offers and campaigns ultimately increasing profits.
Helps to target audiences effectively
An effective way to send marketing messages to a specific demographic or specific audience based on locations can be achieved through geo-targeting. For example, Google News site automatically identifies local content based on IP addresses and other geo-targeting technologies (George & Hogendorn, 2013). Platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have tools allowing organisations to communicate appropriate content to the appropriate audience. Hootsuite can target by; education, language, age, location and many other aspects. If you want to send out a post to people who live in London, geo-targeting is an successful tool to utilise.
Helps to develop audience and entice new customers
An essential part of success for a start-up organisation is to expand their potential customer base and to locate current customers. Using geo-search in tools such as Hootsuite on Twitter, can allow small home furnishing start-up retailers to locate anyone tweeting about home furnishings within a selected area. After locating those twitter users, it’s possible to invite them to purchase goods using a unique promotional offer from your organisation, ultimately encouraging loyalty and potentially online and offline word of mouth marketing. Marketers are aware of the importance of this channel, which now affects the majority of all purchase decisions (Dichter, 1966).
(Kozinets, 2010)
It is important for start-ups to understand the academic theory behind word of mouth evolution, as shown in the image above, before interacting in any social media presence as poor word of moth marketing can ultimately damage brand reputation.
Instant feedback from customers
As an organisation, being active on social media gives immediate access to strong or weak feedback. This access is incremental in providing valuable insights into customer perspective with the ability to interact, increasing brand reputation and rectifying any damaging feedback with the aim of providing excellent customer after care. If you launch a new range of home furnishing products, organisations can learn from social media which features they like or learn how they style their homes and which products they would like to be sourced. This can lead to brands bringing out new products based on what their customers desire.
Staying ahead of your competitors
Want to access important information on your competitors? Another useful tool is social media monitoring which can improve organisations market intelligence, therefore staying abreast of all movements that can affect your own sales and profitability. This can guide strategic business decisions such as developing your organisations product range to offer diversity that competitors might be lacking.
Increase traffic and SEO
Social media will direct people straight to your website (although only ensuring increased sales if the usability is great!). The more shares that your oganisation receives; the higher up the search engines you will be placed, showing organic growth.
(Takes, 2011)
The above diagram shows the importance and significance of each social media platform in correlation to search engines and website traffic.
Easier & faster to share content
A vital part of ensuring engagement is making sure you organisations social media content aligns to the brand values and targeted audience. This can encourage customers to share your content and a faster rate! Businesses can use social media specifically to build awareness of new products/ranges, simply by sharing it on the organisations social network platforms that it’s active on! Easy Peasy you might that.. however it is important to emphasise the importance of relevant content. For example, as stated in my previous blog reasons that customers Unlike brands on Facebook can be for the following reasons; post too frequently, repetitive posts, stopped liking the brand in ‘real life’ and boring content. So it is important to steer clear of these.
Meaningful customer relationships created
Social media platforms can be an excellent tool to create two-way relationships with customers and potential customers. For example, Urbanara customers can show feedback through Trust Pilot. Two-way dialogues are essential in creating customer loyalty as it is fast and very personal, something that traditional marketing campaigns will never achieve in comparison.
Still not convinced? Take a look at this blog from Clickz, on how you can build customer loyalty through social media!
Increase brand awareness with minimal budget
Traditional advertising methods are known to have much higher costs in relation to the costs associated with social media strategies. It’s now becoming popular for companies marketing departments to start hiring community managers to adopt relations with online audiences across many regions and markets.
Enrich the customer experience
The core function of social media is a communication channel, in the same way you would pick up a telephone to make a call or send an email. Each individual interaction poses itself as an opportunity to visibly validate your customer service skills.
The above hot tips are a great guide for start-up companies if considering social media as a means to expand their brand. However, it is important to recognise that this is just a guide!
It is advised that some critical analysis should be done of the external environment, as this is likely to affect consumers and possibly the way they use social media.
For example, the following can heavily impact on a consumer and therefore your organisation:
Economic changes – this can include inflation / tax rates which can impact consumer confidence. Ultimately you as an organisation may be active on social media but if consumer confidence is low this may not result in an increase in sales through these channels.
Laws – consumer protection / environmental and environmental legislations are always changing. This can impact on costs and therefore may take away from the cost of having social media resourced the majority of the time.
Changes in technology – this has become significant since the millennium. Communication technologies are evolving constantly, so it is important to be aware of latest developments as falling behind with social media channels can devalue your brand!
References:
Dichter, E. (1966), “How Word-of-Mouth Advertising Works,” Harvard Business Review, 16 (November–December), 147–66.
George, L. M., & Hogendorn, C. (2013). Local News Online: Aggregators, Geo-Targeting and the Market for Local News. Geo-Targeting and the Market for Local News
Kaplan, A. M., & Haenlein, M. (2010). Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media. Business horizons, 53(1), 59-68
Kozinets, R., Wojnicki, A. C., Wilner, S. J., & De Valck, K. (2010). Networked narratives: Understanding word-of-mouth marketing in online communities. Journal of Marketing, March
Takes, F. (2011) Search Engine Optimization. Leiden University
Weber, L. (2009). Marketing to the social web: how digital customer communities build your business. John Wiley & Sons
