Leader’s Blog

Digital advertising continues to grow as more and more customers shift to online shopping. And it’s not experimental anymore. Due to the evolution of real-time personalization and deeper customer care programs, digital media is able to transform marketing programs around a single individual.

• Paid Search is enabling advertising to get local.
• Banner Advertising is making the experience more interactive. Used as complimentary content on article pages, customers are able to become aware and knowledgeable about their products on third-party websites. The result is more completed purchases, profitability.
• Email has transformed from advertising to loyalty. Companies are able to learn from their customers and use that information to provide promotions and rewards they will most appreciate, ultimately encouraging repeat business.

It’s more then the rise of a new advertising age, it’s the rise of a target audience of one.

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Rice University set out to verify whether Facebook fan pages could have actual impact on businesses.  The case study followed a Houston bakery and café as they established a Facebook fan page and tracked the impact.  The café only saw about 5% of their regular customers become Facebook fans, but those who did become fans came more frequently and spent more than non-fans. The fan page also seemed to cultivate brand affection and loyalty.

I think this study sheds light on what all businesses can accomplish using Facebook.  The results suggest that although the café didn’t reach all customers using fan pages, there was significant impact on those they did reach.  This is a great example of “meeting your customers where they are”.  It is likely that those who did become fans where already Facebook users.  The café – rather than simply building a fan page and hoping “if we build it they will come” – used the fan page to meaningfully engage with their fans by offering giveaways and discounts.  And the campaign was effective for the target group because the café approached the tactic holistically. 

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Adequately titled “Social Commerce 101”, the article provides a great overview of how multi-channel integrated marketing can be applied to create customer experiences, specifically in the business to consumer operating environment.

What you may be left wondering after reading the article is what exactly bridges the gap between the “buzz” and the “buy”.

At face value, the article may appear to suggest that simply creating and implementing a social commerce framework will result in sales and bottom-line sales growth. But as many already know, a “build it and they will come” strategy is not a strategy at all. So then what specifically encourages user generated content, transitions it to delivering on customer’s wants, and truly results in social commerce – or in other words, sales that are driven as a result of the “buzz”?

It is the emotional drivers you create – your market positioning, your messaging and delivery. Those aspects are what typically resonates with customers and what typically motivates people to take action. For that reason, content strategy becomes a core investment to ensure your social media truly results in and drives social commerce.

Additionally, if you want to get the most return on your investment, it is wise to measure and optimize your positioning and messaging efforts to identify and focus on the exact trigger points that result in sales. For example, you may say the same thing, in the exact same way, in multiple delivery vehicles, across multiple social platforms. But it is the individual source – segmented as far down as the specific digital media asset that was served to the customer, in a specific environment – that generated the actual sale. That is your strongest bridge and where you focus on and optimize around.

Leverage your social commerce 101 lesson to begin creating customer experiences, add in compelling messaging in an engaging delivery vehicle, and in a short amount of time you will be on your way to social commerce success.

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The Sears brand has been around for over 124 years.  Reading this Chief Marketer interview with Sears’ Senior Vice President Online I was surprised to learn that they’ve been vigorously pursuing a multi-channel strategy including online merchandising, mobile commerce, and communities.  They’ve even gone as far as to open up an online marketplace, similar to Amazon.com, that allows consumers to shop directly from vendor sites.

Sears developed much of this approach based on feedback from their customers.  If you visit the MySears community site – you’ll notice that it includes everything from customer reviews and questions about products to compliments and complaints about service in the store.  I think the biggest fear companies face when embarking on an online community is the possibility of negative things being posted.  Sears has really faced this fear head on and their community includes the good, the bad, and the ugly.  What you might be surprised to read is that Sears’s customer satisfaction scores weren’t negatively impacted by the approach – they actually went up! 

Companies are beginning to realize that customers are taking to online communities to discuss products and services whether you want them to or not.  The question is will your company ignore them – or join in and be part of the conversation?

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