Phones are not anymore used only to call, nowadays the cellphones have many uses, and the call has become old fashion.

Companies are getting used to all this new technologies and trends, that why every time more we are able to see different kind of marketing campaigns in all different of media, while TV commercials are becoming less effective, as they don’t impact as much as before.

Moreover, all the media is interconnected, phones, social media, commercials, shops… For example, you can go to a shop and in this shop the seller gives you a pamphlet where you can find the Facebook address and also you can find the QR code and enter to the website with your phone. Therefore, companies can reach you everywhere and can send you all the information they want at any point

A  good campaign that shows this interconnection is the one that Diesel did. The customer entered to the store to try on jeans and there was a little cartel with the QR code in every model of jeans, so the customer could scan with his/her phone the QR code and “tell his/her friend” that they like those jeans through Facebook (as the QR code was linked to facebook). In this case, if you “liked” a product, you got a discount on it, which seems like a fair exchange for basically advertising the item to all your Facebook friends.

The customer servicethrough social media is a fact nowadays and the consumers expect the brands to respond through this media. Therefore is important to have some steps clear to have a great customer attention through the social media:

Clear objectives

First of all it is prominent to define what is your objective or goals that you want to reach with you customer attention, if you don’t have this issue established you will give an unprofessional image.

Develop a strategy

It is important to deign the guidelines of actuation, which start in the moment that you receive the question until after the moment that you provide the solution. In this strategy you should include everything: The type of conversation that you want to give, the time you want to wait before responding, which channels to use if the conversation with one person goes far away, etc…

Provide the economic resources needed

It is necessary to make an investment to have the enough personal and tools.

Have people to work on it

Nowadays there is people specialized in social media, people who have done some study about that as this new trend is getting bigger and more important.

Use useful tools

With the tools you will be able no analyze how is it going your Brand profile in the social networks, to notice if it has a high performance or not.

It is very useful to have tactics to work in the social media, customers are getting used to this new media very quickly and your company has to reach their expectations.

The end of the year is getting closer, it is a period of time when everyone starts to think about the goals for next year and what we have to change. It is also the period of the year that companies start to think about how much they have sell, the projections for next year, what to improve, but also what are the threats and opportunities for the following year. For this reason I am writing about what trends should companies consider for 2013.

Tablets

Appel has just launched the Mini Tablet, which probably will be the best seller this Christmas. There are also other companies, such as Samsung, Google and Microsoft that are promoting the same kind of items (Galaxy, Nexus 7 and surface). These new devices are becoming more popular and are gaining territory to the computers. So, what should companies do with this new trend? Consumers are changing the way of purchasing a product, the way of looking for it and the way of searching through the Internet. Therefore, companies have to be able to adapt.

Cloud computing

The e-mail is starting to get “old-fashioned”, nowadays users and companies are using every time more dropbox or google drive to work wherever you are. It is starting to be more popular to share and keep the information on-line, likewise you don’t have to worry about not carrying your pen-drive, breaking your HDD,…

Big Data

Nowadays it is very easy to know better your consumers and your target due to internet and social networks, so it is easier for the companies to get closer to their costumers. These social networks will continue to develop in the follower years, having costumers every time more les privacy and sharing more information with the brands.

Mobile Marketing

It is a big opportunity to companies to reach their target through customers phone, as this item has become a device that has multiple uses, and the most important: Internet.

Content Marketing

The marketing of content is the new publicity. The social networks are basically conversation.  “The brands need to act like editors”.

Social Company

The companies have found out that social networks are not only affecting the marketing of a company, they affect the business in general. It is a new way of making business.

Not everything is online

It is true that people are becoming online fans and that is the new big trend, but we shouldn’t forget the customers’ attention offline, as it is also very important. The challenge now is to know how to combine the Internet with the traditional ways of doing business and marketing.

The arrival of the new technologies have been a relief for the customers, thus this Christmas they will use more tan ever, as in this period of the year the lines in the shops are bigger and people go crazy for the Christmas shopping (Black friday in US). Therefore buying  and looking for promotions at home will be more comfortable.

Companies have to take to account this new trend and try to incentive the consumers through internet and social networks to buy their products, by launching deals, discounts and coupons in this new media. Every time more, clients rely more on blogs and social media profiles tan other media (like TV commercials or magazines). Moreover, these days are a good opportunity to engage more people to your social network profiles by doing good Christmas campaigns, as in this period of time people feel more relaxed and want to share their Christmas with others. For example, a good campaign that Sephora did through twitter was: “Dear @Sephora, all I want for the Holidays this year is….”, every day Sephora awarded a follower for twitting that.

Apart from using social media and internet, consumers will use their smartphones and tablets to purchase the presents for the holidays. The big advantage of these items is that the consumers don’t have to go to the shop; the only thing that they have to do is turn on the devise and  “click” to buy the product. According to Deloitte, the customers that own a Smartphone or a tablet will purchase a 72% more than the regular customers.

Is your company going to turn back to this huge opportunity?

Nowadays it is very easy to find successful social media strategies in big companies. If we think about some of them, it will quickly come to our minds big brands like Starbucks, Coca Cola and Heineken.

However it is more difficult to think about successful strategies with small business. Maybe we haven’t thought about them, but they are using social media too. Plenty of customers are using social media so that gives small business owners a lot of incentives to join in.

It is not easy thought for small companies to generate traffic to their network pages and create traffic and engagement, as they don’t have the Brand awareness that big international business have.

Connecting with customers is the most important reason for small companies to use social media. It is also a tool to give them visibility and self-promotion. Although small companies think that social media is very important, they don’t spend a lot of money on it, they think that it is very easy to use it and that you don’t need too put so much effort, but that’s wrong. For this reason some times small companies aren’t as successful in social media as the big companies.

However I have found a Spanish company that made a good social media strategy and it was successful. It is a Spanish shoe company called Victoria that now has a very large fan community and with a very high brand awareness outside of Spain. They did the following things:

1. They went slowly to build a good strategy:

They spent a few years exploring and learning the social media world and how it works. In the beginning they had only a corporative blog where they published the new products and give an image.

Its current priority is to move from the networks as a tool to raise awareness to get social media becomes a two-way communication channel.

2. They use each platform for different approaches

They have their corporative blog in two languages to communicate the different products and even. They also have a facebook page in two languages too (they can reach a major audience). The aim of the facebook page is to create a relationship with the customers. Furthermore, victoria also has a twitter account to be more attached with fashion prescribers and tendencies. It is important to have different channels do reach your audience, but it is also important to know the communication that you want to give in each media as the audience can be different.

3. They take care of the content and they adapt it

The content that they publish is about their products, fashion tendencies and promotions. As they have two different facebook pages they publish different promotions and campaigns, as the promotions aren’t the same in Spain as in the other countries, which depends on the season and the culture. Now between the two facebook pages, they have almost 80,000 fans, that is pretty much as they are a small company.

4. They have created a plan for the crisis

When they started with social media they were improvising if they had any critic or any complain. Now they have elaborated a plan depending on what the customer says. If it is someone complaining about a product that he has bought, the community manager responds to him saying what should he do in a respectful way.

Having social networks it is not everything; you have to know how to manage them, how to communicate to your audience and which social network fits better with your brand.

Consumers have a bunch of information due to the Internet; they have so many data to analyze before purchasing a product or service. Nowadays there are so many brands to compare that they offer the same with different prices and different add values, so consumers have the opportunity to study deeply each product. There are also now different Internet engines that make this job easier for the buyers. There are so many pages that help you to make the best decision at the time of buying a product. One of the most known page is Amazon.com, which is a web site were you can find all kind of products classify by their category. You can enter in each category and find all the different products with all its prices, descriptions and stars (the value of the product). Like amazon it exists other web pages where you can compare different items before making the purchase, and every time more the volume of these new pages is bigger as consumers are using these sites more often.

I have found a very interesting comparison engine that mixes the comparison engine with the social activity. This web page is called SocialCompare, it is an innovative sharing community where you can make your own comparisons and you can share them with other people that are registered in the web page.  These other people can add items in your comparison or modify them (with your permission).

How does it work?

You as a user want to make a comparison between different brands of the same category. First of all you create a table with the different brands and in this same table you add in another column the qualities that you want for your product, thus you compare the different brands with the different qualities. Moreover, in the table you will add the pricing and other relevant information. Below you can see an example of how the table would look like:

With these comparisons other users that are looking for the same product as you can use the comparison to make a good decision in order to purchase the product. Other users can also add information, vote for the table that you have made and make comments.

In my opinion this comparison engine is different from the others and in some point more especial, as you can connect with different people and they can give their opinions. Furthermore, this site is proactive and customized as you make your own table and you set up the features that you like for the product that you finally will buy. Moreover, this webpage is also a tool for companies, they can see what people look for when they buy a product, what are their priorities and if they are price sensitive or not.