Leader’s Blog

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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Interactive components and digital media continue to morph and adapt as new technologies and technology platforms continue to flood the market. Penguin’s approach to publishing interactive books provides continued validation to the hundreds of other innovations that surface daily.

Additionally, approach, implementation, and new channel integration challenges continue to expand and as a result, many new specialty agencies have been created and existing agencies are quickly moving to expand their product and services offerings to take advantage of these new opportunities.  Each is going to market on a promise that they are different from their competitors which leaves marketers scratching their heads about what resources are required to solve each unique business challenge they embark on.

Although it seems complex to identify and choose an appropriate partner, it is actually quite simple if viewed from a big picture perspective.

Because at the core this is about more than the Internet, more  than interactive media, and more than emerging technology platforms. At the core of successful marketing is the holistic customer experience. Marketers can feel confident that along with all of the quickly developing technologies, trends, and platforms, the customer experience remains core to the overarching Internet, interactive, digital and traditional marketing strategy.

The actual challenge for marketers remains the same. Marketers must first plan for how these new opportunities fit into the existing customer experience then  identify resources that are best fit to holistically integrate and manage the solutions that provide the greatest benefit to the business – not from a technical standpoint, but from an experience standpoint. The technical challenges will then be a result of the strategic integration work, or one thread of the larger experience project. This of course is a best case scenario for marketers, because it puts the critical aspects of delivering success in the hands of the experience planners, which is of course where it should be.

By strategically planning and weighing the benefits and feasibility of embarking on uncharted ground and new technologies and working with best of breed experience experts, marketers will continue to position themselves and their businesses for the greatest levels of success and growth opportunities.

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Target now accepts gift card payments via mobile device at its 1,740 U.S. stores.  Card holders can enter the login and pin for the gift card online or on the mobile version of the site, and a 2D barcode appears for cashier to scan.  Target is the first national chain to incorporate mobile enabled scanning across all locations but there are several other retailers - including Starbucks and 7-Eleven – piloting similar programs in their stores.

As the ability to scan barcodes from mobile devices becomes widely available, I envision uses expanding greatly to include other functions.  This would be a powerful way for retailers or even consumer goods companies to offer coupons to customers.  Giving consumers another (and I’d argue more convenient) way to save at the register could do wonders for brand loyalty.  I would love to see this take off as a way to handle store membership cards too.  It seems as if every retail store I go into now offers me a membership card for discounts or rewards, and I have to be honest I have started to turn most of them down because I can’t fathom adding another card to my wallet or key chain.  If they could offer me a version of their membership that could be scanned from my phone when I come in, I’d probably accept every membership I was offered.

The key to this for me is that I go everywhere with my phone in hand.  A retailer or consumer goods company that allows me to more easily spend or save with a few clicks of my phone would definitely be higher on my list than one that didn’t.

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Online display advertising began as one of those memorable marketing channels that often grabbed my attention.  As the market got more crowded though, I seemed to find myself ignoring many online ads – regardless of how visually interesting I perceived them to be – typically, because they just didn’t apply to me.

Google is hoping to change that experience as a result of their acquisition of startup Teracent, developer of a series of “machine-learning algorithms that can create and customize an ad in real-time, based on user preferences and other characteristics”.

What this really means is that Google would have the ability to serve up more relevant display ads based on location, time of day, language, placement of the ad, or even which ads have performed better in a given time period.   Teracent offers an additional expanded ability that could make the ads more dynamic on the page – serving up different creative or size of ads based on the users visiting the site.

This acquisition could mean a lot for a medium that hasn’t seen a lot of innovation lately, so I – for one – am excited to see online display ads get more targeted.

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Apple’s commercial featuring their suite of small business apps peaked curiosity for many business owners and operators. A grand development many businesses face at the local sales level – a streamlined ability to process credit card transactions while out in the field. It would provide the opportunity to replace archaic processing systems with a real-time solution. And it would result in cost saving for the business. What perhaps is not as obvious, is what impact would it have on the customer experience.

That’s right, credit card processing streamlines more then business processes, it streamlines customer experiences. Real-time processing allows end-to-end transactions to be completed in a few minutes, enabling purchasers to receive their goods and services faster, and as a result receive feelings of satisfaction sooner.

And faster turn-around at the point-of-purchase leads to shortened repeat purchase cycles, meaning the customer comes back for more, more frequently – another win for the business.

So as we continue to monitor the integration and transition to in-store, on the sales floor credit card processing systems, and remote credit card processing systems, we will also continue to monitor how these transactions evolve companies’ customer engagement strategies, After all, real-time processing opens the door to whole new worlds of opportunities to engage and profit, such as real-time second chance offers, and “you may also like” opportunities – delivered through the internet, in-store, in-person.

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The thing that makes online marketing such a powerful force is its ability to be agile.  eBags used an agile approach to take what could have been a challenging holiday season into “Cyber Monday” sales that were up by 32%.

So what worked?

The marketing team kicked off their paid search campaign with the words they thought would generate the most sales, but they didn’t stop there.  They defined a firm target on how a word should be generating sales and reduced spending on those words that didn’t make the mark.  It has been my experience that people treat paid search as a “set it and forget it” marketing technique so I am always glad to hear about companies that follow my preferred “deploy, analyze and adjust” model for paid search.

I should also mention they deployed a targeted email campaign that was based on users’ previous purchase that led to a 25% in their email marketing.  This is a one-quarter increase in opportunities to sell to a current customer based on the understanding of what they like.  This is a great combination of the analytics gathered at purchase with a straightforward execution method.

With a nimble marketing strategy in place at one of the peak times of the buying season you can understand how eBags earned its spot as 93 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

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I have always loved the CES – every since I was a kid, growing up during the rise of Nintendo and the DVD. And this year’s CES is an extra special one, as it confirmed the next channel of digital marketing is upon us – the Internet integrated into your television.

For the consumer, a whole new world is opening up – television supported by new interactive experiences, new ways to share with others, new ways to access and digest information, and new ways to navigate.

And for companies, a new way to engage, interact, and satisfy customers. And it enables new ways to extend existing campaigns and assets across a brand new channel.

Throw in a few of the other emerging technologies such as Internet integrated into your vehicle or Skype’s extension into wherever the Internet lives and it is easy to see that the Internet is quickly become the primary tool for people to manage everything they have going on in their lives. But more then intriguing to ponder the possibilities is the fact that those companies that embrace these channels as part of the holistic customer experience will be those that benefit and profit the most from this evolution.

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As we are all now well into our marketing efforts for 2010, it is hard to miss the reports stating that “this is the year for mobile marketing”.  So how to you determine how much is fact and how much is hype?

The article doesn’t talk about predicted mobile ad spending as the main reason you should stand up and take notice, but rather looks at how people are using their smart phones for things other than calls.  The study indicates that users have essentially doubled their non-voice communications.  It also indicates that 18.5% of mobile users have searched for local products or services from smartphones. (For more thoughts on how mobile can be effective locally, check out Getting the Most From Mobile Ad Spend.)

As marketers start to shape their mobile approach, it will be critical to understand how users interact in the mobile environment.  Once you have a clearer picture of the landscape, you can make better decisions about how mobile can best impact your business.

Only time will tell if companies are able to successfully harness the mobile landscape – whether or not it is 2010 – it appears that is more for mobile users to decide.

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