1. Use Dave Chaffey’s SOSTAC Marketing diagram as a guide.

2. Where are we now? (Situation Analysis)

What aspect of digital marketing is your company best at? Are you more email marketing based or social media? Where are we compared to our competitors?

3. Where do you want to be? (Objectives)

Identify what you need to make the competition a success. Are you looking for new Twitter or Facebook followers? Or more addresses for your email list. Identifying what you are looking to get out the campaign should be the first goal.

Talking of goals, set an achievable and measurable goal that you can use to assess the effectiveness of the campaign.

4. How do we get there? (Strategy)

Pick a relevant and motivating prize – Make the end prize worthwhile, in the example of a football club is that free tickets? A stadium tour? What sort of prize is going to make users apply, connect and share? Don’t make the prize too good though, or you’ll have something similar to the Hoovers free flight promotion disaster of 1993.

For competition campaigns not through social media. Use contact information forms to quickly and easily get information like email address, name and place of birth etc.

Make sure that (if your competition giveaway is through Facebook) you are aware of their contest rules https://www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.php

5. How exactly do we get there? (Tactics

Get users to share content. If it’s a social media competition, don’t rely on users to share your content. Make it a requirement.

6. The details of tactics (Actions)

Time frame. Make sure you leave enough time to enable consumers to apply, connect and share. Don’t make it too long a time frame, though. 1 week is more than appropriate.

Promote across all social medias. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, Snapchat. The more the better. If users are sick to death of seeing the promotion, you’re doing it right

Kotler discusses the importance of other social medias like twitter in starting conversations, addressing customer service issues, researching customer reaction and driving traffic to relevant articles, web sites and (competition) contests (Kotler, 2007)

7. How do we monitor performance (Control)

If you’ve never done a competition campaign or giveaway before, then it may be hard to monitor how it is going. A good campaign will result in a small number of new followers at the very least.

Preventing voting fraud. If you give people the option to vote over and over again then some will. ShortStack.com provide a list of methods in decreasing the chances of being subject to voting fraud.

References

Chaffey (2014) SmartInsights, http://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/customer-acquisition-strategy/new-media-options/

481. Kotler and G. Armstrong, “Principles of Marketing”12th ed. (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall,2007): 481.

ShortStack. (2017). Weekly Campaign Idea: Voting Competition – ShortStack. [online] Available at: https://www.shortstack.com/build-brand-momentum-with-a-voting-competition/ [Accessed Apr. 2017].

John Wanamaker, considered to be a ‘pioneer of marketing’ developed the well known phrase “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half” (Korolak, 2017)

It’s an interesting concept which is constantly used in communications between finance and marketing departments in organisations. Finance departments are constantly putting pressure on marketing for results and some evidence of how and if the money spent for advertising and marketing costs was effective.

We all know the common methods used to measure the effectiveness of a social media campaign; Conversion rate, Website traffic, Social Media Keywords etc. Snapchat, now in its 6th year, is an entirely different platform to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter and it offers a host of different metrics that enable you to measure its effectiveness for marketing without the need for 3rd party platforms like SEMrush.

Whilst you can see the amount of people who have viewed a video on Facebook (or viewed a post or advert) there is no way of seeing whether that view has A) been viewed in its entirety by the consumer and B) at which point (if at all) the consumer has stopped watching the video.

When producing a ‘snapchat story’ (a collection of short 10 second long videos put together to form a coherent ‘story’) you can see clearly exactly how many people have interacted with each video individually or the video as a whole.

This enables you to see how many people started watching the story and how many watched it to its completion, and the percentage of people who viewed the story at all compared to the amount of consumers you are connected with in the app in total.

This also enables you to see which marketing ideas work through the organisations’ snapchats completion rate and which cause the consumer to click out of the story and/or app. If there is a significant drop in people watching one section of the story compared to the next one, then actions can be taken and questions can be asked about this particular segment. Why did people stop watching and would it have worked better on a different platform (Twitter, for example)

With this comes the benefit of knowing when exactly a social media campaign is most effective, too. Because Snapchat stories are only available for 24 hours, you have a relatively limited time frame to work with, however by trialling different content on different days and times you can see when is the most effective time to post new content. For example, posting videos and pictures at either rush hour or an hour or 2 after rush hour would likely see a better completion rate than videos being posted at midday or early afternoon.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, Snapchat does not have a ‘like’ feature, however this does not limit the apps potential to engage with its consumers. Screenshot competitions are used by companies where if you screenshot a particular picture or video in a companies story you have the chance to win exclusive prizes etc.

Slightly linking to my previous blog https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/rb441/wp-admin/post.php?post=41&action=edit other marketing tools like cross-promotional marketing can be easily measured too using Snapchat, especially if the organisation utilises the screenshot feature.

As discussed by NYU professor of Marketing Scott Galloway, though, there are some aspects of Snapchat that will lead to a decline in their value in the coming years. Snapchat aren’t using their algorithms to their advantage like Amazon and Instagram do and are increasingly more unable to use their algorithms to push content or personalise the experience. Despite this, I would argue that the real problem with Snapchat in pushing on and hitting that next level is the amount of users that connect with companies on the app. Their daily video views actually exceed that of Instagram and Facebook video views, however, as briefly shown in the video, a company as successful as Nike get over 10 times as many views from Instagram as it does from Snapchat. (Frier, M. 2017) The application has brilliant and innovative methods at measuring consumer engagement for companies however if it can’t utilise it’s algorithms and become attractive for its consumers to approach their favourite companies on, then Galloways predictions at it losing ground on the other social media platforms may unfortunately come true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CztRvr7_5W8&feature=youtu.be

References
Frier, M. (2017). Snapchat User `Stories’ Fuel 10 Billion Daily Video Views. [online] Bloomberg.com. Available at: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-28/snapchat-user-content-fuels-jump-to-10-billion-daily-video-views [Accessed Apr. 2017].
Korolak, R. (2017). How to Know Which Half of Your Advertising Budget is Wasted – ImagineeringNowImagineeringNow. [online] Imagineeringnow.com. Available at: http://imagineeringnow.com/how-to-know-which-half-of-your-advertising-budget-is-wasted/ [Accessed Apr. 2017].

It’s the old lesson you learn about in business from an early age. Synergy. Two heads are better than one, and whilst that may apply mainly to mergers and takeovers there is another area of business where this is definitely applicable. Marketing. More specifically, Cross-Promotional Marketing.

Cross-Promotional Marketing or CPM as I’m going to refer to it as for the rest of this blog, is the joint partnership between two companies where you utilise another company’s distribution and marketing channels. (Entrepreneur.com, 2016)

When deciding on who you are going to approach about a potential CPM partnership, two things are usually considered: Is this company good at reaching the audience you aren’t good at reaching and/or is this company going to adequately increase your marketing potential?
Traditionally, CPM is used with companies that targets the buyers of a related product with another company (like informing the customer that bought a pair of jeans of a shirt that would match it) (study.com, 2016) But recently we are seeing CPM with products from different companies competing in a different industry all together, think of the huge stadium deals that go on, like for example between a giant airline company like Fly Emirates and Arsenal Football Club. These partnerships don’t make much sense to the naked eye but they are hugely affective.

So if the two companies have products or services that are unrelated, why implement CPM?
Reach out to new but already established channels

This is undoubtedly the most important benefit that CPM has for some businesses. When a company isn’t performing too well with a certain demographic, i.e. students, It might be because they are unable to reach them, therefore using CPM enables them to go and communicate with this segment, without spending tons of money on things such as Facebook and other social media advertising routes. This is commonly done through social media posts, content marketing and email marketing to name only a few. (Entrepreneur.com, 2016)
Regarding the use of social media posts with cross-promotion, Entrepreneur.com state that it is a powerful online marketing tool that has been proven to influence consumer decision-making. Statistics have shown that 46 percent of consumers’ decision to patronise or purchase a product or service was influenced by a social media post.
Powerful but inexpensive
One of CPM’s main benefits is its cost-effectiveness. “Promotional activities can be more cost effective by using cross promotion, where a coupon or other incentive for one product is distributed or promoted by another product or service” (Soares, 1992) Some companies, however, are not interested in exposure on the other side and are happy to cross promote another company for a price.
According to the Aida Model, People become aware of products by seeing them pop up on blogs or social media, which may stimulate an interest that leads to them searching for the product themselves. Cross-Promotional Marketing is the most affective way at reaching that audience quickly and seemingly unforced.

If the Aida Model is anything to go by, cross promotion through blogs or social media may result in more traffic to a company’s website. This is where the job of CPM is basically done. It’s now up to the website to turn that traffic into purchases (depending on the businesses industry)

Whilst Cross-Promotion is an effective marketing tool, especially for small businesses. There are a number of potential issues that can caused unwanted.
Negative connotations associated with your brand
One minor problem with CPM is any negative connotations associated with your brand if the brand you are marketing with are embroiled in a scandal or social or political issue. However, potential issues regarding a company’s association with someone else can be sorted quite promptly. In 2010, Proctor & Gamble dropped Tiger Woods from promoting their Gillette razor and shaving products because of revelations of the golfer’s extramarital affairs (Guardian, 2010)
Customer ‘source’
Another issue with CPM is the potential problem surrounding how a consumer is found. With CPM that is just based around mentioning another companies product or service you may not know what the source of their custom was and so the future allocation of marketing costs may go to areas that don’t need it and vice versa. (Knowledge.hubspot.com, 2017)
Of course, cross-promotion could go one step further, and become cross marketing. But this relies a lot on the industry of the companies, if only one or neither of the companies produce a physical product or service then it is hard to cross-market it.
In closing, the effectiveness of CPM depends partly on the size and industry of a business. Whilst larger companies do not need to dilute their brand with cross-marketing they are more than willing a lot of the time to cross-promote another business in return for capital. Smaller businesses, however, get a great deal out of CPM. The increased economies of scale that synergy in marketing brings and introducing new markets and marketing channels offers smaller companies an inexpensive but incredibly powerful opportunity.

References
Knowledge.hubspot.com. (2017). How to use Sources report to measure your marketing campaigns. [online] Available at: https://knowledge.hubspot.com/sources-user-guide-v2/how-to-use-sources-report-to-measure-your-marketing-campaigns [Accessed Feb. 2017].
Robinson, J. (2017). Tiger Woods dropped by Gillette. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2010/dec/24/tiger-woods-dropped-by-gillette [Accessed Feb, 2017].

Smart Insights. (2017). The AIDA Model – Smart Insights Digital Marketing Advice. [online] Available at: http://www.smartinsights.com/traffic-building-strategy/offer-and-message-development/aida-model/ [Accessed Feb. 2017].
Soares, E. (1992). Promotional feats: the role of planned events in the marketing communications mix. Choice Reviews Online, 29(08), pp.29-4600-29-4600.
Tarcomnicu, F. and more, R. (2017). 5 Smart Ways to Integrate Cross-Promotion With Online Marketing. [online] Entrepreneur. Available at: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/280211 [Accessed Feb, 2017].

According to their website, Trainline is the ‘UK’s No.1 rail ticket retailer’ so, like probably every student in the country, I have bought tickets from them in the past and opted in to their emails, giving them permission to contact me regularly with e-newsletters, event triggered emails and conversion emails.

I have to be honest, it took a while to find an email that was good enough and in the end i may have looked for too long, there is not a lot wrong with this e-newsletter from Trainline, but i will do my best to appropriately scrutinise each aspect of it. Positive and negative.

The amount of literature on the subject of email marketing is scarce to say the least, however the Journal Article ‘Web advertising: the role of email marketing’ written by Ellis-Chadwick, Fiona and Doherty (2012) has provided me with a good working knowledge of the area. Their study analysed the email marketing tactics of over 1,000 emails and the full eport on this can be found here.

As explained by Ellis-Chadwick ‘the subject line in the e-mail is the first point of contact and acts as a trigger to encourage the message recipient to open the e-mail’. The table used in Ellis-Chadwick’s research recommends that the content in a subject line is critical for grabbing the user’s attention, therefore the use of CTA’s like Trainline have done with their use of personalisation and quoting a specific price could be quite effective

Upon deciding the email I would choose to analyse, the first thing I did was look at it on my mobile phone, why would I waste time looking at the same email from my laptop, computer, iPad and iPhone you may ask. Findings from Buffer show that mobile devices account for 47% of all email opens, which actually seem pretty low in reflection. Regardless, it is important that an email looks the same on all different platforms it may be viewed on. This involves, for example, following the iOS guidelines on pixel width and length etc.

Outlined again in the study by Buffer, the research they looked at conducted by Experian marketing services suggests that the best time for a company to send out a promotional email is between 8:00 p.m. and midnight. Their table (which for the record dates back to late 2012) shows that 4:00 a.m. To 7:59 a.m. is used by companies the most apart the 8:00 a.m. to midday slot, however the unique opens and clicks were second worst.

Arguably you might wonder why a company like Trainline would want to bother its customers at 4 in the morning, however due to the nature of the business it may be the best time to send out this email. Hoping to catch out people before their daily commute, for example.

The prices for the 8 previous journeys travelled, however, are out of peak time, and someone waking up and seeing this email at 6 in the morning, for example, may click on one of the deals only to find it is not the price the email suggests.

After the subject line, the first thing i noticed when i opened this email was Trainlines new, recently changed logo. Their website says ‘Any new logo needs a new colour so we’ve gone mint. It’s new, fresh and clean. Just like the experience we want you to have with us’. 

The new logo looks more professional, sleeker, and is positioned in the top left corner of the email. According to Table 1 in Ellis-Chadwick (2012) ‘99% of marketing emails have a brand logo prominent in top left hand corner’. Ellis-Chadwick explains that the further an item is from the top left the more it is likely to require scrolling, which requires the recipient to already have engaged.

Although not apparant in the subject line of this email, it is triggered by an event. The short paragraph about Autumn and the picture that heavily connotates the season is an attempt to make the email sound more human, trying to connect with the user without sounding like they are trying to sell you something.

There is a good use of CTA’s in the second screen grab of the email. It is important that these phrases like ‘book now’ are not used too frequently, as an e-newsletter which this email effectively is can easily be considered spam if it is too pushy. The integration with apple pay signifies a moving company who are moving forward technologically, something which users strive for.

Providing links to the companies social media platforms is also done well too, however as explained in Buffer (2016), the best content is free content. A marketing technique used very often by companies is to offer something for free, in return of the user following their social media sites and ‘sharing’ it on social media

In conclusion, the use of personalisation which to begin with looked to be of good quality, could definitly be done better, but all in all this email is very effective at doing what the research from Ellis-Chadwick suggests, grabbing my attention and maybe, perhaps clicking through to their website and purchasing something.

References.

Ellis-Chadwick, Fiona and Doherty, Neil F. (2012). Web advertising: the role of email marketing. Journal of Business Research, 65(6) pp. 843–848

Social. (2016). 8 Effective Email Marketing Strategies, Backed by Science. [online] Available at: https://blog.bufferapp.com/8-effective-email-strategies-backed-by-research [Accessed 4 Nov. 2016].

Argos is considered one of the UK’s foremost retail pioneers in digital

Having been around for over 40 years it has created a brand that has developed over the years to adapt to changes in business. You might think that the process of sitting on an uncomfortable chair and waiting for 20 odd minutes for an item that you had use all your arm strength to find through a ginormous heavy book is outdated, but Argos has developed intuitively to cater to the needs of the technologically minded consumer and now is one of the best digital brands around, offering customers the ability to have products delivered, browse the vast catalogue online or even purchase an item and have it waiting at your nearest store 20 minutes later, eliminating the need to sit on those terrible chairs again.

The addition of 53 new digital stores across the UK gave Argos the opportunity to venture into a different area again, however with the familiarised and successful brand name that Argos possesses, they wanted to find out exactly how consumers felt about them, and the best way to do this would be through social media, with over 123 million customers every year there is a large amount of customer insights about Argos.

Brandwatch Analytics is the process of analysing social media platforms using intelligent sentiment analysis. Based on a catalogue of rules created using natural language processing it helps a company understand the basic sentiments customers felt about a product or company, or in this case Argos’ new concept stores. This Brandwatch Analysis also enabled Argos to better understand the demographics of the people writing the comments, were they male of female? which areas did these comments take place? etc.

Using Categories and rules Argos were able to manage this data more effectively. Allowing them to filter the data to give a more precise and accurate insight. They made categories for each of its 53 new stores to find out which store specifically had been visited and mentioned.

Takeaways from the case study.

Brandwatch Analytics is an incredibly effective way to analyse and find out