Does the Internet suck as a branding medium? That was the question I saw on a post at Millward Brown, and I would have to question this for a few reasons. It’s level of interactivity is second to none, providing a vast amount of options. Video, display ads, search, and most communications options seem readily available. Additionally, its far more easy to measure the effectiveness of any marketing efforts, as well as the ability to evaluate and make quick changes.
In many ways, the Internet is almsot a hybrid of most other marketing channels (print, broadcast, DM) with outdoor possibly being the exception. But the segments that really stand out would be social media and search. Engagement and influence has never been known to such a degree before.
Social media is both a persuasive and influential part of online branding, and clearly the norm these days. It’s estimated that many Internet users are spending up to 25% of their time on social networks, with as many as 53% of them following or interacting with brands.
To understand what’s driving the growth, its important to look at both demographics and psychographics of social media users in order to put things in perspective. Females make up the largest segment of social media users, and 18-34 year olds being the most active among all age groups.
Even today targeting is overlooked. Many are lost in a world of different metrics like followers, likes, retweets and more. Even social media marketing should cater to a customer segment through some kind of targeting.
All this is interesting, but what’s important to note here is how fast mobile is gaining on popularity.
Almost 40% of people now access social networks from their mobile phone, and Web users over the age of 55 are driving the growth of mobile social networking. That’s twice as many accessing social sites from their smart phones as last year.
SEO, Social Media, and PPC were recently compared for effectiveness at generating leads and sales in digital marketing between B2B and B2C in the 2011 State of Digital Marketing Report amongst 500 U.S. online marketers, with about two-thirds of all respondents identified themselves as B2B marketers.
The results? While the clear winner is SEO, about 60 percent of respondents said they will increase their budget for social media marketing; with 53 percent planning to increase their budget towards SEO and 40 about percent will be increasing their PPC budget.
While social media is clearly the trend as of late, it’s often difficult to measure. But despite this, social media is not hype. What needs to be understood is that it takes time, and it can have significant influence towards online branding efforts.
SEO might take a while before seeing signs of progress, but it’s the clear winner. With the highest conversion rates, SEO outperforms all other means of online marketing. It’s worth mentioning that while PPC can bring traffic almost instantly, it will cost more over time than SEO, and is most suitable for starting a campaign to acquire traffic until an SEO campaign kicks into high gear. Additionally, PPC only earns about 10% of the potential search traffic, and if you’re not in the top spots (which are more expensive bids) then you won’t see a lot of visits.
One of my favorite examples of an effective social media marketing campaign would have to be the one for Best Job in the World. Countless media mentions, lots of buzz, and thousands of blog entries. Not to mention the 35,000 people that applied for the job.
Created by the Queensland Tourism Board in Australia, they asked prospective employees to post one-minute application videos to YouTube so they could create a short list, and choose someone (eventually) to be the caretaker for Hamilton Island for six months. The only real task as caretaker would be to blog about how much fun he or she is having doing their “job”.
As promised, here’s a few social media case studies worth looking at…
Do you want to smell the success of a social media campaign that will engage your audience to no end? Swan dive, into the best social media strategy of your life.
But first, let’s have a look behind the scenes with the most recent social media success story.
Old Spice and advertising agency Wieden + Kennedy, along with actor Isaiah Mustafa, partnered to create a campaign that took the web by storm. After introducing the Old Spice Man character (played by Mustafa) the team proceeded to seed various social networks with an invitation to ask the dashing shirtless man any questions they may have.
Using reddit and twitter, the responses were tracked carefully and those that contributed interesting questions or were submitted by high profile individuals on social networks received a video reply that was posted on Youtube.
A team of creative’s, marketers, and writers made about 87 short video replies in the first 11 hours. That works out to about 7 minutes per reply, including writing and filming. And an astonishing 180 videos in total were made during the entire campaign. The entire campaign was tweeted, retweeted, emailed, and shared on Facebook multiple times. Mashable provides a look at the Old Spice campaign by the numbers.
So what was it about the campaign that made it the success it was? One interesting point to note is once the original ad (above) was released, there was no brand mentions with the 100+ video responses. It was simply entertaining to watch and most already knew it was the Old Spice man.
The big take away to this success story is how the integration of several social media options were used together. It allowed the marketers to seed, engage, respond, and viewers to submit, view, and share.
While this was one helluva marketing and production feat, its easy to see how combining the social media options helped. But like many viral or social campaigns, the big idea and the seeding will likely determine the results.
Social media is much more than creating a Facebook fan page or Twitter account. You have to think about how to engage with your network. If you simply broadcast, you want to do so with value, such as promotional offers or news of new products or sales. But for most that don’t have legions of fans like Apple or similar, you want to share and engage. Offer info of value.
Social media contributes to online branding, reputation management, awareness, word of mouth, and more. It creates a huge opportunity, but as Seth Godin says; it’s a process, not an event.
Pepsi created the Refresh Everything and skipped advertising during superbowl (some saying it was a mistake) to give millions of dollars to fund ideas that will refresh the world to non-profits in six categories. Health, Arts & Culture, Food & Shelter, The Planet, Neighborhoods, and Education.
IKEA‘s Facebook campaign was a stroke of genius. Using the photo tagging feature, a bunch of showroom images were uploaded to the account of a store manager at their Malmo store. The first person to tag an object got to take it home.
Ford bet on social media to generate buzz to promote the new Fiesta ( story ) and head of social media Scott Monty has been hard at work and winning.
Dell stands out as one of social media’s best examples and have created success through a network of blogs, sale alerts on twitter, and listening to their customers via their community IdeaStorm.
Intuit created a community for it’s Quickbooks software users while being active on Twitter and Facebook.
Starbucks used crowdsourcing to create MyStarbucksIdea so customers share suggestions which others vote on, with the best being implemented.
Blendtec used video for its series Will It Blend and purees everything from the iphone and more for millions of views.
Zappos has an unparalleled commitment to customer service, and social media has allowed them to form more personal connections with customers.
Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, had the following to say…
“Brand building today is so different than what it was 50 years ago. 50 years ago you could get a few marketing people in a small room and decide, ‘this is what our brand will be’, and then spend a lot of money on TV advertising — and that was your brand. If you as a consumer only had your neighbors to talk to, you had to believe what the TV was telling you. Today anyone, whether it is an employee or a customer, if they have a good or bad experience with your company they can blog about it or Twitter about it and it can be seen by millions of people. It’s what they say now that is your brand.”
Or you could say that your relationships are your brand.
With recent social media events and speakers in town, more companies are starting to develop an interest in what social media can do for them. Winnipeg social media is on marketers lips and after discussing with a few businesses, they often understand the value and how it can help with online branding, but many feel its not the time to implement.
Here are a few considerations when thinking about adding social media to your marketing mix;
It’s not a question of whether you do, its a matter of when. And putting it off just means that much more catching up you’ll have to do.
There’s a very good chance your competition is doing so already
It’s strongly recommended to have someone devoted to this role as opposed to adding it to someone’s duties. The majority that try their hand at social media fail as it is time consuming.
I’ve spoken with a few local companies (and a couple south of the border) lately and have found many to be anxious to begin but unsure where to start. What I’ve done is created two options to provide direction. One being provide an analysis and report to clients as a primer, the other being available (retainer) for strategy and direction.
With advertising slowly dying, social media is really a great way to communicate with customers.
Whether its social networking or social bookmarking, social media is creating a paradigm shift in the way we consume media. This is not a mere blip on the radar, but a tsunami of sorts. But don’t mistake social media as another advertising channel. Marketer’s need to realize its more about talking to, and not talking at.
By knowing your audience you can leverage this medium. Note that its not a trend and your marketing efforts should include social media for your online marketing or branding strategy. Consider watching the following video to get a better understanding of social media’s influence.
A prime example of social media acceptance is a site you may know of called Facebook (a social media favorite) with over 250 million uers. It sees more than 1.5 million pieces of content (Web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photos, etc.) are shared on its site daily. In fact, the way we interact and socialize has undergone surprising changes, with one out of eight couples married in the U.S. last year having met via social media. Although you might be surprised to learn that the fastest growing segment of Facebook are 55- to 65-year-old females.
About 25% of search results for the world’s top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content. With about 78% of consumers trusting peer recommendations, and only 14% trusting advertisements. Furthermore, 34% of bloggers post opinions about products and brands. Another interesting fact – 25% of Americans in the past month said they watched a short video… on their phone .
Social media, bookmarking, and citizen journalism may jeopardize the future of print media. Its estimated that 98% of the largest newspapers are experiencing record declines in circulation because we no longer search for the news – the news finds us.
If you’re serious about online branding and engaging with customers, you need to include social media in your strategy.
