How apps can increase brand awareness and effectively widen the scope of your digital marketing channels

Apps enable users to do a variety of things whether it is finding a restaurant, ordering clothes or reading news.  They enable many international brands such as Chanel, Pepsi, Ford and many more to provide users with branded content, like Yuill (2010) suggested it provides access to consumers anywhere, and at any time to suit the users. Many apps also require customers to provide information, meaning they can monitor consumer behaviour on their app to improve their ability to create relationship marketing initiatives.

Goddard (2010) suggests apps can be categorised into four types: these are campaign based, popular gimmick, straight utilities and branded utilities. The apps that can raise awareness, promote brand to consumer and be highly utilised most effectively are branded utilities. Goddard explains that branded utilities apps are both useful and develop the brand promise. He suggests they are the most powerful types of apps, simply because engagement occurs through the functionality which is tied to the essential value of the brand.

These are apps which are useful and can be used in a consumers every-day life, promoting brand messages and also collecting information on consumers, enabling a leaner approach to their marketing strategies.

An example of this would be the Starbucks ‘early bird’ app which became popular in 2012. Starbucks along with Berghs School of Communication in Sweden developed an ‘alarm clock like’ app to reward ‘early birds’ to encourage people to get to work on time. The app would reward customers who pressed ‘wake up’ instead of ‘snooze’ by offering them a discount on their Starbucks coffee if they got to Starbucks within an hour. This app was able to be highly usable as it operates as an alarm clock and was constantly in a consumers every-day life, it was able to push Starbucks products by opening up a channel of communication which is downloaded into a consumers’ device and incentivise the consumer to purchase a Starbucks by offering a discount on a peak time for coffee sales as people go to work. https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/starbucks-early-bird

Starbuck’s mobile app has had such high usability due to the rapid customer adoption rate of the app with 19 million active users. (www.statista.com) However, the success of the app has caused the coffee giant problems in other areas of the business. Due to the high volumes of sales being placed via the app it has led to congestion in store and has led to walk in customers not purchasing products leading to a negative impact on their comparable sales. (www.forbes.com) This was identified as one of the drivers for poor company growth in Q1 of 2017. In Q1 this congestion was identified in 1200 stores which was a 100% growth from the previous quarter highlighting the success an app can have in terms of improving performance.

Whilst this is a positive in certain aspects for Starbucks it also highlights something that company’s must be aware of before launching an app. Which is to understand what needs to be put in place to handle the increase in traffic an app can cause. This is a problem that can be applied wider in the business world as Tesla Motors struggle with matching production rate with the demand. You must have the foundations to expand your business upon.

Apps create a new digital channel and despite being expensive can be a valuable tool in assisting advert effectiveness in a crowded and multi-channel environment. (Xu et al 2014). Xu also found that an app can sustain awareness in a such a competitive marketplace. Recent consumer trends also emphasise further the need to sustain brand awareness on mobile as reports from Mobile Metrix show the total browse time on mobile is 156% greater than browse time on desktop in the US & 177% in the UK.

Xu et al (2014) also found that apps and mobile sites need to have different digital media strategies to have any significant benefits in a multi-channel marketplace meaning an app or a website is best suited to having a specific goal whether it is decreasing congestion in store, increasing brand awareness or increasing e-commerce. It is important to know what platform is best suited to what purpose though as a recent report from Monetate Ecommerce Quartely showed conversion rates on desktop were 232% greater than conversion rates on mobile.

https://www.smartinsights.com/

However, if we look at brand awareness and customer retention increase a report from Adobe showed browsing sessions on apps are three to four times longer than those of desktops. This extra time spent on app browsing provides a great opportunity for brands to consolidate customer relationships taking advantage of the high levels of engagement.

When looking at one of the main drivers of creating an app it is to create a platform to increase engagement which is imperative to creating loyalty to a brand. Reports from Bain show repeat customers spend on average 67% more than first time and a report from Five Stars showed brand loyal customers drive approximately 80% of a company’s total revenue showing a very obvious advantage to launching an app for your business.

References:

Fill, C & Turnbull, S (2016) – Hello, Marketing Communications, Seventh Addition

Goddard, M (2010) Sizing up a proposed app, ABA Bank Marketing 42(4), 20-23

http://www.bain.com/Images/Value_online_customer_loyalty_you_capture.pdf

http://www.marketingprofs.com/chirp/2013/11338/surprising-facts-about-customer-loyalty-marketing-infographic

https://liquid-state.com/mobile-apps-build-brand-loyalty/

https://theblog.adobe.com/are-mobile-app-users-more-loyal/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2017/02/02/starbucks-success-with-mobile-order-and-pay-is-too-much-of-a-good-thing/#cfa250d43dab

https://www.smartinsights.com/ecommerce/ecommerce-analytics/ecommerce-conversion-rates/

https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/starbucks-early-bird

Xu, J (2014) News media channels: complements or substitutes? Evidence from mobile phone usage. Journal of Marketing, 78 (July) 97-112

Yuill, M (2009) Smartphones and app stores driving mobile media, Admap, 503 (March), retrieved 2 June 2010 from www.warc.com/atriclecenter/

Market Research

Market research is the most important part of launching an app, you must understand the market you are to compete in. You need to know who your competitors are, what features of their app engage users the most and which features users don’t like or would like to see, as well as gauging if your product is needed in the market. App stores and forums are good places to conduct secondary market research. If you fail to research your market your product can ultimately fail such as Hailo. In March 2017 the brand was dropped and became MyTaxi following a merger with Daimler in 2016. (Business Indsider, 2017)

Hailo – ‘Nearly Uber’

Hailo offered a similar service to Uber and had great success in London. When they hit New York in early 2013 with $100 million backing the product failed.  Their premise was to help NYC cabs find fares, however NYC cabs were fine without Hailo. They withdrew from North America in 2014 and Uber started a price war with them which Hailo couldn’t compete in. (PlaceItBlog, 2015)

Accounting & Marketing

Once you have conducted your market research and raised capital you can start creating the app. However, whilst in this stage you must be very careful on managing your finances and maintaining interest in the product. Everpix was a photo organisation tool and had great success early on, boasting 55,000 users merely a year after its launch, however a year later in 2013 they were broke. (PlaceItBlog, 2015)

This was attributed to two main issues. Firstly, they took too long to develop the app meaning by the time it hit the market they were out of money and time to raise capital. They didn’t have enough users to sustain growth. Secondly was not marketing the product, as they were a team of developers who hoped the high quality performance of the app would be enough. It is vital to market your product, especially today as the market is dominated by major players who see how lucrative this industry is currently and how it is forecasted to grow, as shown below.

Worldwide global app revenues for 2015,2016, 2020

Source: Statista

Beta Testing

Beta testing is vital for any app. This allows major flaws to be identified before launching to the mass market. It ensures the app is of good enough quality and can launch without bugs avoiding potentially expensive re-designing costs. Not having a feedback loop can be damaging to the app. You must decide between a public beta test, giving you a wider range of feedback but could backfire if the beta test is poor and lead disappointed customers to not download the final release. The feedback can often be far more generalised and not accomplish the test goals.  Another problem can be companies using beta testing as a marketing tool, this effectively markets your problems to your customers so be sure you are beta testing for the right reasons. Companies can opt for focused beta testing, opting for a smaller feedback pool. This provides higher quality feedback and doesn’t damage your app’s reputation before it is released. The downside is it requires more time than public as you need to recruit the correct testers and often offer them incentives to do the test. (InformationWeek, 2012)

Defining success and goal management

Once launched you must understand what success looks like for your app. You must set measurable goals, looking at active install rates, retention rates, rating in the app marketplace and revenue generated if the app has to be purchased. You must understand the market when setting these goals to make sure they are SMART goals. Such as:

• free mobile apps have a higher active install rate during the first month as they start at 50% and tend to level off at 30% and (HubSpot, 2017)
• to maintain a healthy active install rate you need to have a higher rating than the average in the marketplace. (HubSpot, 2017)

Even companies such as Google must manage expectations and define success as they found out with Google Wave. People were calling it ‘the new g-mail’ among other things without knowing what it offered, when it launched following much hype the result was underwhelming. This among other reasons is why it was pulled six months after launch. (PlaceItBlog, 2015)

Monitoring and understanding relevant metrics

When your app is launched you must be constantly monitoring it. The goal is to know exactly how users interact with your app then react accordingly to enhance their experience. Monitoring performance early allows immediate recognition and resolution of any problems that may occur. Localytics ran a survey in 2015 showing 23% of users abandoned an app after one use, which led the industry focus more to retention rates than acquisition rates. Despite this, downloads are a very important metric during launch as you want as much exposure as possible, downloads are a good indicator of interest and usage.

Security

One final risk to be aware of prior to launching your app is data breaches with the threat of cyber-attacks. If you’re app requires users to enter personal information such as name or email, then make sure that information is well protected. Application security firm tCell revealed 90% of applications had unused code leaving them open to data breaches and cyber-attacks. Nothing will damage your app more than users not trusting it. (eWeek, 2017)

References:

http://www.informationweek.com/pdf_whitepapers/approved/1376402531_uTest_Whitepaper_Beyond_Beta_Testing.pdf

http://uk.businessinsider.com/hailo-brand-killed-off-users-redirected-mytaxi-daimler-merger-2017-3

https://smallbiztrends.com/2016/08/benefits-of-having-an-app.html

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/11-mobile-app-pitfalls/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/allbusiness/2014/11/17/heres-why-your-business-needs-its-own-mobile-app/#34c16ef8327f

https://www.allbusiness.com/12-step-guide-to-building-your-first-mobile-app-11193-1.html

https://www.allbusiness.com/build-first-mobile-app-12-steps-part-2-11896-1.html

https://www.newgenapps.com/blog/10-biggest-risks-to-mobile-apps-security

https://www.upwork.com/hiring/for-clients/biggest-risks-for-app-and-software-developers/

https://www.devsaran.com/blog/11-important-tips-know-developing-mobile-app

http://info.localytics.com/blog/9-things-to-consider-before-during-and-after-launching-your-app

https://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/31277/a-marketer-s-complete-guide-to-launching-mobile-apps.aspx

https://blog.placeit.net/apps-fail-teach-us-app-marketing/

Digital Marketing Strategy Proposal – Matchroom Boxing

This strategy proposal is for Matchroom Boxing, a UK based boxing promotion company who are currently in the process of expanding into the US market.  This proposal will look at certain digital marketing initiatives that can help with penetrating the US boxing market.

Strategy

Matchroom’s decision to move into the US at this time is due to the fact they have one of the most exciting talents in Boxing today, Anthony Joshua. Joshua holds three of the five heavyweight belts and the goal of himself and his promoters have been to unify the division. Joshua fights for one of the belts in March and providing he wins, it will set up a fight with unbeaten American champion Deontay Wilder. Eddie Hearn, Joshua’s promoter, in an interview with IFL TV said he wanted to build the profile of both Joshua and indeed Wilder in America to maximise returns from the fight. Therefore, the goal now is to build these profiles to a point where there is a very high public interest both in the UK, US & worldwide. Matchroom have made one major step in signing broadcasting deals with two major US boxing broadcasters HBO & Showtime. With the recent set up of Matchroom USA as well, a successful show with these two fighters and a strong undercard could leave Americans with a very positive impression of Matchroom and would be a great foundation to increase brand awareness in the US. Due to the PPV model of Matchroom, these big PPV nights in boxing can create a terrific fan base and platform for a promotion to build from.

As of 26/01/18 off Official IG pages

Influencer Marketing

One digital marketing initiative on the rise is influencer marketing. eMarketer in 2016 revealed brands spent somewhere upwards of $570 million alone on influencer marketing on Instagram. Matchroom can use this to their advantage to help them build Joshua’s brand in the US. Joshua and Hearn have built Joshua’s brand very well in the UK attracting big brands such as Beats by Dre, Jaguar, Under Armour and many more. The way influencer marketing works is brands choose a public figure of influence to represent their brand and influence the public to become a customer of that brand. However, Joshua and Matchroom could greatly benefit from reversing the role and encouraging those brands that are popular in America to increase their content on Joshua. The fact of the matter for Matchroom is the bigger Joshua’s brand in the US becomes the bigger Matchroom’s become. This is in part due to the public figure promoter Eddie Hearn has become and whenever Joshua is in the public discussing boxing, Hearn is with him. One brand in particular that comes to mind is Beats by Dre as the demographic is in line with a sports demographic and is a huge presence in America. This is very obvious from their IG page. All their content is athletes wearing Beats.

Taken from BeatbyDre Instagram Account

 As you can see, their page is full of athlete’s such as LeBron James, Tom Brady and the Williams sisters wearing their products, and Joshua has featured on there before also:

Taken from Beats IG Account

There would be great benefit for Beats as well. Joshua wears Beats to many public appearances and it would be great brand exposure for Beats to be associated with Joshua in the build-up to what is one of the most highly anticipated match-ups in boxing today and it is in the hugely appealing heavyweight division. This match up will attract a lot of media attention globally equalling high brand exposure for Beats. Personal appearances at Beats events, advertising campaigns and exclusive interviews  with Joshua would be great at increasing his awareness in the US and would lead to more brand exposure and advertising for Beats.

Matchroom Boxing App 

The second digital marketing initiative I would suggest is an app. Apps are becoming increasingly popular and for Matchroom it could be a huge asset. An app can provide a hub for boxing news, fighters and upcoming events. It is easy to update and people can access it with one click and get all the news they need providing they have internet. It also gives your organisation a presence and pushes branding out to a wider audience due to the global availability of app stores. Matchroom also have the perfect platform to promote an app as they have some big events with broadcast partners on the horizon and they will be able to advertise it on the boards behind fighters during the press conferences, in ring sponsorship and be able to discuss it in the media. Furthermore, no other boxing organisation has an app, and there isn’t a successful app for boxing news either therefore this would give them a competitive advantage and differentiate themselves from other promotions.

Apps cut out waiting times, they are quicker than a web page as a lot of the info is stored in the app already, it increases visibility as it is constantly on a customer’s phone, it increases consumer engagement, making it easier for customers to interact with the brand and find out information on the brand, such as fights, champions, and general news. Lastly it reduces marketing costs as you can post information on the app, and with alerts people can receive notifications to their phone whenever there is news. This would be the best way for Matchroom to improve communications with their audience.

BENEFIT

• Potential Reach

Social media offers a cost efficient and effective way of reaching a very large audience, a good reason why so many organisations have dedicated social media marketing teams now.

A report by Salesforce in 2015 revealed that 66% of marketers had appointed such a team in response to the size of the available audience’s constant growth. We are Social/Hootsuite’s carried out a study showing results as of January 2017, as shown below. The figures I would like to highlight are the active social media users and the active mobile social users. The active mobile social users had grown by 30% compared to the previous year, confirming easier and more frequent access to a huge database.

• Higher Conversion Rates

Increased visibility on social media means there are growing opportunities for conversion. One benefit of social media is it enables companies to personify their brand through constant interaction with their customers and followers. This increases both transparency and consumer trust in an organisation. A study by HubSpot revealed that social media has a 100% higher lead to close rate than outbound marketing. Another report by Social Media Examiner showed 66% of marketers saw lead generation benefits by using social media platforms 6 hours per week.

• Improved Brand Loyalty

Elite Daily & Crowd Twist produced figures showing that millennials (people born between the mid-1980s and the early-2000s) are the most brand loyal generation with 50.5% saying they are extremely or quite loyal to their favourite brands. Elite Daily also found that customers are 62% more loyal to brands that directly engage with them on social media. Brand Loyalty is vital for an organisation on two counts. Firstly, it is cheaper to retain customers than market to new ones. Secondly, these loyal customers are more likely to share content on a product or service and post their experiences with a brand so generating positive eWOM.

• Gain Marketplace Insights

Because social media is so immediate, it enables people to see the views of others within seconds of sharing. This provides a unique opportunity for brands to monitor their marketplace and keep across the latest consumer trends. Companies can use social media as a complementary research tool to better understand the marketplace. Sites such as Sprout Social allow marketers to measure engagement, performance and monitor ongoing campaigns enabling brands to maximise and update the effectiveness of their platforms constantly.

RISKS  

• Negative Feedback

While one of the benefits of social media marketing is that a successful campaign achieves instant impact in the market spreading positive eWOM like wildfire, this is a dangerous two-way street. Users are more inclined to share negative feedback and bad news has a habit of travelling faster than good. An example of this reaction came when food company epicurious made an ill-considered reference to the Boston Marathon tragedy to promote a product in honour of the victims:

Unsurprisingly, their crass tweet provoked a strong response from users that felt it disrespectful in the extreme and jumped on social media to voice their anger and publicly shame the company:

A mistake of this proportion gives a new product a branding and reputation that it is difficult to shake off or fully apologise for. Due to the nature of social media a tweet is public and permanent in the ‘webiverse’ and can never be fully erased.

• Potential for embarrassment

Embarrassment for a company is another risk if their social media account is poorly managed or maintained. Disgruntled customers or, in some cases, employees have a platform on which to share their grievances with millions of people that might not otherwise been aware of the failings of a product or service. The greater the reach that a company achieves in search of positive marketing, the greater the risk of negative publicity going viral. HMV found this out the hard way. The company made 60 workers redundant at a time when an unhappy employee was manning the twitter account:

These tweets portrayed the brand in an extremely negative light because they provided an insider’s view of HMV. What made this particularly damaging was that it was tweeted to followers of the company who, because of their active interest in the organisation, were more likely to share the tweets and therefore the ill feeling.

• Time Intensive

Due to the fast and constant pace of the internet, social media marketing can be extremely time-consuming and labour intensive. Companies with small social media teams may not be able to devote the resources necessary to maintaining a regular presence on platforms or to monitoring potential problems and dealing with them. A strong team will continually check and update all networks, responding to questions and feedback as well as recycling valuable positive reviews. If an organisation is unable to maintain a favourable round-the-clock profile it can often be more damaging than not having an online presence at all.

Conclusion

Social media marketing is still a relatively new idea and so constantly evolving as companies become better at understanding the different platforms and new trends emerge to engage in a more focussed way with their audience. Hootusite has produced a list of the top themes on social media for 2017.

An Audit of Co–Branding in the television industry Stranger Things Edition

Introduction:

 One of Chaffey’s six digital channels is online partnerships, the specific area I will be looking at in this piece is Co-Branding.

Co-Branding in internet commerce is when two firms work together to market a good or service.

http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/co-branding.html

Advantages of Co-Branding:

 In Co-Branding – The science of alliance – Blackett ,T & Boad ,R (1999) it says Co-Branding ‘offers the opportunity to create an entirely new income stream or to boost sales of existing products’ in addition stating that it ‘may reduce the need for costly investment in targeting new markets’ as well as ‘gaining additional brand exposure’ and ‘provide a novel way of communicating with the market’.

In this blog I will look at these advantages of Co-Branding in relation to the television industry, specifically looking at Netflix’s original show ‘Stranger Things 2’.

Stranger Things X Tophop/Topman

 In the build-up to the release of the new season, Stranger Things worked with retailer giant Topshop to create a marketing campaign that featured a limited edition range of clothing, a re-design of Topshop’s flagship store in London, a re-design of the Topshop website featuring a ‘Strangeify’ button, a link to the new trailer on the website as well as exclusive content on Topshop’s blog with Stranger Things star Natalia Dyer.

Some of the advantages of this partnership were to create a new income streams through *‘Royalty income’ by selling ‘Stranger Things’ branded clothing due to Netflix owning the rights for the shows imagery, gain additional brand exposure by collaborating with a well-known brand such as Topshop and to create a new way of communicating with the market by encouraging fans of the show to come to the Topshop flagship store and pay tribute to fan favourite – ‘Barb’.

According to the Daily Mail three ranges of the Topshop/Stranger Things collection sold out for £20, later items were found on EBay going for £50.

Topshop in the last 6 months has had 7.67m total views on their page with people staying on the page for an average of just under 5 minutes. This partnership created another ‘touch point’ for fans to interact with the brand thus increasing awareness of both brands. The Topshop line sold very well as indicated by products selling out and 15.8 million people tuned into the first episode of the new season according to engadget.com – that is almost triple the viewers of Season 5 of House of Cards.

They launched this collaboration via a social media campaign in which they posted this exclusive content with a hashtag #TopshopTopmanxStrangerThings. This hashtag enabled fans to share their experience with other fans, spreading organic EWOM about the brand. This is a useful channel to advertise in as it encourages fans to share their experiences with the brand and consumers trust consumers more than brands, so are therefore more likely to buy into the experience.

 Stranger Things X Spotify

 Another way in which Co-Branding has been effective in increasing brand awareness and creating more touch points is through Netflix’s collaboration with digital music streaming giant Spotify. Spotify is the 4^th most visited site for people to listen to music according to similarweb.com. In the last six months there have been over 820k of total visits to the Stranger Things x Spotify section. 2.14% of Spotify’s traffic over this period has been Stranger Things related and 100% of this search has been organic, meaning they haven’t paid money to boost the SEO. Furthermore 11.12% of Spotify’s traffic comes from referrals, of this 8.93% has come from the Stranger Things partnership.

Spotify created playlists paired with characters of the show such as ‘Eleven’s breakfast jams’ & ‘Lucas’ bike around tracks’. This digital partnership has another benefit as it provides a different way to communicate with the market. The way this Co-Branding campaign was advertised is ‘it gives the users a chance to find out which character they have the most in common with’ – giving the listener another way to interact with the show and create an attachment through music with one of the characters. The campaign also encourages people to post their playlist on their social media, in doing so the post is turned upside down and fans are taken into *‘The Upside Down’. This makes the post stand out on a social media timeline thus increasing the chance of people taking interest in the post.

Example of playlist on Spotify

References and Appendix

• ‘Royalty Income’ – For manufacturers of products which are used as components or ingredients in the wares produced by their industrial customers, a co-branding deal offers a possibility of a new secondary source of income. Instead of playing an anonymous minor role in the product offer, the manufacturer of the component ingredient may be able to negotiate to receive additional payments.
• https://partner.netflix.com/en_us/licence/
• The Netflix Materials are owned by Netflix, its affiliated companies or licensors, and are rights protectable as intellectual property or otherwise. The Netflix Materials, and all uses thereof, shall at all times be and remain the exclusive property of Netflix or its designee. You shall not use the Netflix Materials in any manner that is objectionable to Netflix, at Netflix’s sole discretion. Netflix reserves the right in its sole discretion to terminate or modify Your permission to use the Netflix Materials, and take action against any use that does not conform to the terms of this Agreement, infringes any Netflix intellectual property or other right, or violates applicable law.
• The Upside Down – Is an alternate dimension existing in parallel dimension to the human world
• Co-Branding – The Science of Alliance – Blackett, T & Boad, R (1999)
• http://www.nme.com/blogs/tv-blogs/stranger-things-playlist-music-spotify-2154905
• http://mashable.com/2017/10/26/stranger-things-2-netflix-spotify/#gznFTOG5qgqF
• https://www.engadget.com/2017/11/06/stranger-things-2-viewers-netflix-nielsen/
• https://www.similarweb.com/website/spotify.com#overview
• https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=pmkHt_lXAREC&pg=PA38&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false
• https://www.spotify-strangerthings.com/result/steve
• http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-5054115/Stranger-Things-t-shirts-Topshop-sell-out.html
• http://www.topshop.com/en/tsuk/category/topshop-x-stranger-things-7095002/home?geoip=noredirect