In today’s day and age, it should come as no surprise that effective digital marketing initiatives deliver excellent value back to businesses. A strong online presence is an investment that can impact an organization in a variety of ways.

As a branding tool, few other mediums offer the flexibility and responsiveness of the web, which can be refreshed instantaneously to reflect new promotions and embrace user-generated contributions. The phrase “your brand consists of your customers” has never been truer.

Beyond brand equity, effective digital marketing translates to tangible business impacts in the form of sales growth. Social media and email integration allow companies to penetrate a customer’s online repertoire, and a well built website facilitates and encourages online purchases.

The web has also allowed companies to improve the customer service experience. The public nature of company updates and responses on social networks allows companies to show a responsive and caring attitude toward customer questions and qualms. This results in more resolved complaints and a cut in support costs, as online help desks free up bandwidth and expenses previously dedicated to telephone customer service.

A strong digital strategy also permits businesses to reallocate their marketing budgets to more efficient channels, resulting in more effective media buys. The metrics available to tie business performance back to specific digital initiatives result in a more transparent and true assessment of marketing impact.

Lastly, a web presence that inspires and gives people a place to express themselves can result in a breadth of consumer insights. This amounts to a truer form of market research, as opposed to traditional survey research, as analysis is based on organic user contributions.

See the chart above for stats collected by the Boston Consulting group, which recently surveyed marketing executives at over 30 corporations across Europe, Asia, Latin America and the US, researching the benefits of effective digital marketing across the areas of (1) Brand Equity (2) Sales (3) Customer Service (4) Media Buys and (5) Consumer insights.

Sources: Forrester Research, BCG Interviews, BCG Case Work, BCG Analysis

To keep people coming back for more, there is nothing more powerful than saying “thank you”. Here are 4 new ways to reward your loyal customers for visiting your stores, purchasing your products, engaging with your content or creating content for you.

Reward User-Generated Content

What could be more genuine than the marketing your fans create for you?

More than 8 in 10 people say user-generated content from people they don’t know serves as an indicator of brand quality and influences their purchase decision. Surprisingly, 51% say opinions from strangers are more important than opinions from friends and family.

Surely, there is a lot to be gained from loosening the reigns around your brand and creating a space for the people to speak for you.

Ratings and Reviews

Including a ratings and reviews section on your website or Facebook page conveys a willingness to be transparent that assures your audience of the quality of your offering. Set up ways to respond publicly to ratings and reviews to further indicate your responsiveness and caring.

Photos and Videos

Who doesn’t want to be e-famous? Set up a section on your website, promotional microsite, or Facebook page to highlight photo and video submissions from customers. Compose tweets or status updates to call out new entries to your social media audiences. Take inspiration from Oreo’s Facebook profile picture, that the company uses to feature a different Oreo fan every week.

Tweets and Comments

Why not reward your fans for clever tweets and comments around your branded properties? Create lists like “10 Best Responses to #twitterheist Campaign” to highlight text-based fan contributions and compile them into blog posts or company newsletters.

Most of all, keep it genuine. Show people you want to listen, you want to respond, you want to put them in the spotlight to thank them for being a part of your brand.

To keep people coming back for more, there is nothing more powerful than saying “thank you”. Here are four new ways to reward your loyal customers for visiting your stores, purchasing your products, engaging with your content or creating content for you.

2. Reward Gaming

As “gamification” becomes the hottest marketing buzzword, companies are increasingly gravitating toward games as the format of choice for branded experiences. The benefit of a game versus a static marketing piece is plain to see – a more engaging experience that necessitates repeat visits, creating a strong community of regulars around your marketing.

“[Traditional marketing] is failing because people today are seeking more reward and more engagement from experiences than ever before,” argues Gabe Zichermann, author of Game-Based Marketing. To this end, developing gaming mechanics that stimulate initial plays and repeat visits is key.

Points:

The most commonly used form of game mechanics, points allow you to measure achievements in a linear and limitless way. This creates an environment of competitiveness in the form of scoreboards, or, to use the gaming term…

Leaderboards:

Leaderboards encourage users to become power players to the end of seeing their name reach top rankings. To maximize competitiveness, create a universal leaderboard and one that compares a user’s points with those of their friends.

Levels:

Levels make a game more “sticky” by giving users an accomplishment to work toward, similar to…

Badges:

Like levels, badges provide an incentive to keep users playing in order to unlock symbols of virtual accomplishments. Badges also become part of the user’s identity, as they can be featured on a gamer’s page within a type of “digital trophy case”.

Prizing:

Of course, none of these mechanics should exist in a vacuum. Gaming initiatives work most effectively when players can exchange their digital achievements for real world prizes. This can range from company merchandise, to company products, to larger prizes that do not necessarily utilize your product but speak to your brand – like an exotic vacation for a company that makes travel backpacks.

Social:

The final step to ensuring your game creates maximized impact is to integrate a social layer in the rewarding dynamic. Compensate users for sharing interactions with your game to their audiences on Facebook and Twitter. There are mechanisms for prompting users to post such updates, even going so far as suggesting the content of the update to enhance fluidity between playing and posting. At the very least, posts that get rewarded with points should include @-mentions (or tags, in the case of Facebook) of your company. This maximizes exposure of your company to your user’s audiences, who can click-through on their friends post to your company’s page, and gives you a way to tabulate company mentions resulting from game play. For increased impact, ask users to recognize the promotion name in the form of a hashtag (Twitter) or event link (Facebook).

Other Posts in This Series
Reward In-Store Interactions
Reward Social Participation
Reward User Generated Content

Promotion advertisers now have the ability to reach consumers based on their requested choice of page. Promotions and advertisements can now be served and targeted either by the profile of a consumer or the content requested from a site.

For example a company that manufacturer’s high quality golf balls can now target promotions to an individual searching for golf related products or tee times. These types of tactics are the polar opposite of traditional promotions which depended on mass media reach to connect with potential customers. Instead they focus on relevance and timing to consumers who are considering a purchase of a specific product.

The next few years will see a wave of digital natives and other tech-savvy folk leaving their office and home PCs and stepping out into a world swarming with internet-connected devices and context-specific information services LeSourd (2011). LeSourd coined this trend SoLoMo (Social, Location, Mobile) meaning the convergence of people, information, services, things, and places on modern mobile platforms. Futhermore he suggested that the effects of these changes would impact retailers on the high street, because high touch points rule brand loyalty

Shapiro (2011) defines the marketing world as two camps: the “one-to-many” camp representing the marketing model of the last 25 years (e.g. one brand markets to many people), and the “many-to-many” camp, where we reframe social media as a lead performer (but not the solo performer) in a bigger, newly emerging community-centered marketing system. Her construct gives an excellent contrast of traditional mass media versus social media.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term Lurkers, think of Lurkers as spectators who consume content but do not contribute. The skeptic may go as far as calling them digital parasites, while the visionary sees a new untapped market.

In Internet culture, a lurker is a person who reads discussions on a message board, newsgroup, chatroom, file sharing or other interactive system, but rarely or never participates actively. Research indicates that “lurkers make up over 90% of online groups”

In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.

While traditional marketing continues to emphasize branding and creative as the most important features of a campaign, digital promotions are evaluated almost entirely on performance results which are captured and measured digitally. Justifiably marketing budgets are rapidly migrating to new media channels, because traditional perceived success factors, such as emotional stimuli created by the warm and fuzzy feeling of a traditional campaign can no longer compete with actual facts and figures.

Edelman (2011) contends that up to 90% of spend goes to advertising and retail promotions. Yet the single most powerful impetus to buy is often someone else’s advocacy. For this reason numerous new models and performance measures have emerged in the sales promotion industry. A recent UGC video contest we built had 132 entrants and 636,774 video views, meaning 98% of the participants were viewers.

Reach is a vital element of any promotion, however traditional methods continue to produce diminishing returns. Therefore promotions need original engaging content, mainly produced from its own customers.

The digitization and networking of information has forever changed the way marketers and consumers connect. So be prepared to change or risk extinction

Facebook has decided to shut down Facebook Deals after only a four month trial.

“After testing Deals for four months, we’ve decided to end our Deals product in the coming weeks,” Facebook told Reuters.
The product, which launched in late April, was an attempt to bring the popular daily deals phenomenon to Facebook’s 750+ million users. It launched in San Francisco, Austin, Dallas, Atlanta and San Diego, but quickly rolled out to other cities.

The idea was for Deals to serve as an incentive for Facebook users to integrate the also now defunct Facebook Places (a poor copy of Foursquare) in their daily lives — and they were also an incentive for marketers and major brands to put more money into the Facebook platform.

However, the Facebook Deals were less like a Foursquare coupon awarded to the user after a checkin and more like a Groupon voucher, meaning the user had to buy a certificate for a certain good or service at a steep discount, typically half off its retail price, then redeem it later.

Examples of the new breed of Facebook Deals from brands include “unlimited bowling with six friends for an evening for $60 (75% off)” and “luxury winery tour and 25% off all wine purchases for $50.”

The market for daily deals has become more competitive in recent months, however, and many are questioning the entire business model in light of Groupon’s questionable financials.

It’s no secret that a brand’s success on Facebook is largely contingent on Facebook-only discounts and content, but Facebook’s Deals had been – in the words of Vinvius Vacanti, co-founder of Yipit.com – “an underwhelming product and experience”.

This does not necessarily mean that daily deals are ineffectual. Vacanti said it best: “I don’t believe this means daily deals are not a viable business. It more suggests that large media and tech companies can’t just ‘turn on’ daily deals and expect them to work. It has to be more thoughtfully integrated into their existing product”.

In other words, customization is still king. And, consumer engagement needs to be customized to the space, the way people interact within that space and the content and brands they care about. AdAge conducted a study about the deals space revealing that 52% of people feeling overwhelmed by the amount of emails they receive and 60% feel the deals market is just too crowded.

With this much competition, the quality of the deals can dwindle to the point of becoming SPAM instead of exclusive content customized to the consumer’s interest.

As Christopher Au tweeted, “Nobody needs more laser hair removal daily deals in their inbox anyway.”

Augmented Reality (AR) as a technology has existed for more than 15 years, with tailored applications in industrial automation, theme parks, sports television, military displays, and online marketing (AIB, 2009). Forrester research defined AR as; The concept of AR simply put is the overlay of virtual or artificial information either in the form of visuals, graphics, or text onto a medium, which is then projected over an actual image stream. This additional information can then be augmented to the user either by using a wearable display setup or through a fixed location setup.

The next stage of internet engagement is going to be its connection with physical space. AR will be an important tool in this evolution. Based on a Total Immersions definition, there are 3 types of AR; Web-based AR, Kiosk-based AR and mobile AR. Web-based AR uses PC and webcam with a marker, image or through motion capture. It is the most common type of AR since it runs on Flash and does not require a plug-in or any kind of download. It is also the most economical option and can be easily integrated with social platforms. However, users need to have a webcam in order to use it.

Kiosk based AR is capable of running more powerful AR applications using 3D or facial tracking. It can leverage multiple platforms and can reach broader users through out-of-home or point-of-purchase marketing. Also, the user does not need a marker or a webcam for using it. However, it is relatively more expensive. Mobile AR uses the viewfinder to show the digital information in user’s surroundings. Mobile AR can leverage location and, with smartphone adoption rising, its potential reach is increasing. However, mobile is a fragmented environment, since some smartphones run on different platforms, such as iOS and Android, and the battery life of a smartphone can be an obstacle. Additionally, hype around this type of AR is hard to control. (Adage, 2011)

According to Gartner Inc, AR is one of the top 10 strategic IT technologies and is expected to be a $1.5 Bn industry by 2015 . However, viability of reaching this number is much debated. According to some experts this number will be reachable since AR can be applicable to many industries and has various use cases. On the other hand, some experts argue that this number is not realistic since AR will take time to reach mainstream adaption.

In short it’s how people consume and process media in both time and priority.
Usually monochronic people process one thing at a time and then move on to the next task, preferably in an orderly and sequential. Whereas polychronic people deal with multiple tasks simultaneously or conduct many tasks at once.

So why is this relevant to marketing communications?

Because two generations have been taught to process information contrarily to their parents or other family members. This produces a unique dilemma to many marketers. The question is how should I allocate promotional media budgets? To understand this dynamic we first of all need to identify who is a Monochronic or Polychronic consumer. Secondly what type of device they prefer or use the most often.

Most people over the age of 40 were instructed to read sequentially, one word and then page after another. This was perfect for the mass media marketers of the 40’s to 90’s. In the late 90’s people started to defy conventional messaging by disrupting the control channel and attention span. While most monochromic consumers accepted and embraced broadcast media, younger generations did not.

Conversely the digital consumer (whose main demographic is under 40 and mostly grew up with computers, internet, cell phones etc) rejected or changed media distribution and consumption based on their personal preferences and also processed multi-media at the same time.

So consider these differences during your next planning meetings.

The explosion in social media is changing the way Millenials engage traditional retail channels.  With over half a billion users on Facebook alone, it has never been easier for retailers to reach mass scale without sacrificing the relevance of their message or product offer to targeted audiences.      Welcome to f-commerce, the next wave in social media.   The National Retail Federation shares some thoughts on how social media is changing the game for the retail future in the following article:

http://blog.nrf.com/2011/01/12/not-on-facebook-heres-why-you-should-be/

 
One of the most significant but often disregarded aspects in the vast online spectrum is social media monitoring. It is imperative to measure the social media presence of your company and industry to produce content, create strategy and fix any disreputable PR catastrophes before they’ve had a chance to develop (think Coca Cola, Nestle and BP). Below are some steps to take when devising your social monitoring strategy:

What are my objectives?

The initial step in ensuring your monitoring will be worthwhile is to define your current business objectives. Examples of objectives could be identifying or measuring brand recognition, customer loyalty, new markets or social media buzz. For instance, do you want to measure the success of a social media campaign, or even your competitors? Or maybe you’ve recently launched a new product or advertising slogan and would like to observe the public’s response. Whether it’s marketing, public relations, social media, customer service or any other aspect you’d like to measure, it’s achievable.

What to measure?

Once objectives are acknowledged, the next step will be to identify various keywords to measure. The first and most obvious is the company brand name, to determine whether you’re being talked about and to identify any dissatisfied customers or common misspellings/nicknames associated with your brand. Other measurable keywords include competitors, common SEO keywords, slogans, Directors, business partners, events, industry topics, news and products.

What tools to use?

- Google Alerts, Analytics & Trends: Simple mix of updates of keywords, insights into web traffic and monitoring of topic trends.

- Social Networking Sites: Twitter, Facebook, TweetDeck and HootSuite allow you to search, filter and interact with large volumes of real-time conversation.

- Social Networking Tools: Ice Rocket, It’s Trending, Ellerdale and Twitterfall for tracking and searching specified content on social networking sites,

- Blog tools: Blog Pulse and Technorati to monitor daily activity
- Free Social Media Monitoring: Social Media Mention and HowSociable?
- Premium Social Media Monitoring: Radian 6, Alterian, Scout Labs or Visible Technologies for more bespoke and expert monitoring.

How to Analyse?

When examining results on various monitoring platforms, human monitoring is essential to structure and define data and to filter out any unnecessary, irrelevant or inaccurate results. It is essential to identify recurring trends and phases, identify new markets, compare volume of conversations and the main online sources, monitor brand sentiment or feedback and identify domains with the most conversations.

Recommendations

To gain a realistic overview of your brand it is advisable to use a mixture of paid and free monitoring tools for full variety and understanding. Once you’ve reported what’s effective and what isn’t, it’s crucial to alter your strategy or approach accordingly i.e. customer service and products. For this to be achieved a brand needs to use monitoring to learn rather than merely listen to opinions or criticism. Rather than using technology to impose on discussions, customer trust can be maintained by using social media portals to invite feedback whether negative or positive. As a result, measuring and initiating online conversation is priceless and the key to continuous improvement.

If you’d like to discuss this in more depth, please drop a tweet to @brandmovers_US