Category Archives: Digital Marketing

Marketers are continuously trying to challenge the norm and rise above the crowd with their creative edge, and Sony succeeded. They embedded a secret message in their brand new ad for the Xperia Z5 phone. The phone’s selling point is that the camera has an auto focus of 0.03 seconds, and a Scandinavian agency chose to highlight this by embedding a secret message in their ad, but what’s the catch? This message was only shown for 0.03 seconds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1cwrCIKct8&feature=youtu.be

This message urged the users who were able to catch it to email the address posted, and in return, they would have the chance to win a brand new phone.

Nordic brand and communications manager, Martina Johansson, spoke about the ad and stated: “I think we have confirmed what we already knew, that consumers have to be given fun and interesting reasons to watch branded communication”. Nowadays, brands are always aiming to find new ways to get consumers to interact with the brand, and Sony developed an outstanding ad to capitalize on this opportunity.

The ad surpassed expectations of success, having consumers send emails to the address within minutes of the ad being posted. They stepped outside the box and presented the main features of their new product in an interesting way, and caught consumers’ attention.

In today’s busy advertising world it’s extremely difficult to be the ad which people notice, however, by embedding fun games into the ads as Sony did, brands have a higher chance of gaining impressions. This ad promoted high engagement by urging consumers to act, but its most successful attribute is arguably that it achieved what marketers are find to be very difficult nowadays; to disrupt and be noticed.  

Sources:

http://digiday.com/brands/sony-embedded-secret-message-new-digital-video-ad/

Marketers are consistently faced with the same problem: how do you measure the success of certain content? Although marketers have developed metrics to define immediate success of a native advertisement campaign, such as reach and impressions, measuring financial effects on the bottom line continues to be an obstacle.

According to a HubSpot survey, 30% of marketers stated that providing financial returns on their marketing efforts was a constant problem. Although metrics do exist, marketers always ask themselves if there are more accurate ways to measure success. How can you precisely quantify what brand awareness and engagement will do for your brand?

Marketers are now suggesting to ditch the traditional concept of ROI and adopt ROAS – return on advertising spend. They suggest that ROAS is much more accurate in predicting the success of a native advertisement campaign, as the goal of such a campaign is to increase awareness rather than directly change a company’s bottom line. ROAS calculates revenue generated from every advertising dollar spent and relates it to a specific channel.

Although marketers developed this ROAS formula, they were still faced with a challenge: how can we optimize our spend on customer acquisition? To answer this question, they’ve developed the formulas displayed below:

*LTV represents a customers’ numeric lifetime value

Although there will probably never be a hard formula that is completely accurate for measuring native advertisement efforts, the development of the ROAS is still a giant leap forward. Now marketers can become even more precise, and potentially redefine the entire industry.

Sources:

http://digiday.com/sponsored/stackadapttt-005-628-638-solving-the-native-advertising-conundrum-how-to-measure-success/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKO2nN28X4Q

“3 KIDS. 1 DOG. AND AN EPIC QUEST TO LIGHT A RIDICULOUSLY GIANT TREE.”

The holidays have always been a magical time for children and parents alike, but they’ve also resembled massive sales for retailers around the world – beginning on Black Friday. Last year’s Black Friday sales represented $50.9 billion in sales revenue, a massive number which retailers cannot afford to miss out on. In today’s cluttered advertising world, retailers are consistently competing for customers’ attention.  So how are retailers innovating their holiday campaigns to wow their customers?

Target has switched its focus to target the most influential customers for the holidays: children. For the 2015 holiday season Target renounced traditional advertisement practices and created “the Holiday Odyssey” to transport kids through a unique holiday adventure. The story is narrated by Neil Patrick Harris and amplifies the holiday magic through great storytelling – 3 kids on a quest to light a giant Christmas tree, alongside Lego characters, Barbies, and more.

Target CMO, Jeff Jones, commented on the campaign saying: ” we’ll aim to excite the kid in all of us, create powerful cultural and family moments during the season, and deliver extraordinary value and easy shopping experiences”; and that is exactly what they’ve achieved.

This campaign embodies everything Christmas and allows kids to have an interactive experience – digitally. To amplify this campaign, Target has also launched the kid’s “wishlist” app, where kids can write letters to Santa, build a wish list, and play exciting games. This campaign includes 12 commercials airing on TV and social media, with a physical Wonderland store opening in New York.

Once again we see storytelling being used strategically. This campaign is not only successful because of its magical storyline but also because of the ability to engage. Kids and their parents are able to have 2-way conversations with Target, and even bring this story to life in the New York Wonderland store.

Sources:

http://digiday.com/brands/three-brands-thinking-outside-box-holiday-season/

http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/target-takes-consumers-a-toy-filled-odyssey-holidays/301143/

http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/targets-holiday-campaign-brings-magical-story-life-across-tv-digital-and-its-stores-168113

The digital landscape is ever-changing, but Google is at the forefront. Google will be embedding apps right in search results. The links will look the same as the currently do, but once clicked, they will open to apps rather than websites.

Mobile has been a growing trend in recent years and consumers are being more demanding for companies to produce mobile-friendly sites. A Google survey showed that 72% of mobile users want mobile-friendly sites, with 67% saying they’re more likely to buy if a site is mobile-friendly, and 61% saying they will leave a mobile site if they don’t see what they want immediately. So what are the top features consumers are looking for?

• site speed – loading time of less that 5 seconds
• BIG mobile-friendly buttons
• limited scrolling and pitching
• quick access to contact information and click-to-call
• link to company’s social media accounts

What delivers all these requests seamlessly? An app.

Google wants to remain relevant, and this is the reason it chose to embed apps in its search results and deliver the most mobile-friendly results. However, this new technique would completely change the traditional concept of search engine optimization (SEO), and developers will be forced to create new ways to place their apps within top results. There are currently 9 companies who have agreed to participate in this new trend, however, these apps will display limited options to start. In the future, these apps will provide the full range of in-app experiences, and that is when they’ll become a huge threat for traditional SEO methods.

Sources:

http://digiday.com/platforms/search-engine-app-timization-google-puts-apps-right-mobile-results/

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2208496/72-of-consumers-want-mobilefriendly-sites-google-research

The e-marketing retail space is becoming more and more crowded, so how did Revolve – a Los Angeles online retailer – take its brand global? The answer is simple: speed and automation. It has a unique inventory replenishment system which “looks at what people are buying, clicking on, putting in their baskets and revisiting, by category, and then automatically restocks new products, with the approval of a human buyer”. By also including items of interest that were placed in carts but abandoned, allows the company to make very fast decisions, vital in such a competitive space.

This data-driven approach is also the reason for Revolve’s success in its international growth, specifically its infiltration in the China market. China is a very difficult market for outside companies to infiltrate, mainly “due to the struggle to translate the brand for the country’s crowded, mobile-driven market”; however, Revolve has succeeded. Its China revenues have been growing at around 80% year after year, making it its biggest international market.

Not only is Revolve using videos to be relevant to the Chinese market – seeing as how “they consume 6 billion hours of video a month” – but the company has also embedded the ability to purchase in the video. This ability to purchase instantly drives the sale by allowing consumers to purchase right then and there – without wait or hassle. Video commerce seems to be the new emerging trend and Revolve has already capitalized on the opportunity with its innovative video-ads.

Not only has the company revolutionized video marketing, but it also incorporates the same instant ability to purchase in its user-generated content. The #RevolveMe program asks user to tag their Revolve outfits for a chance to be featured on the website’s home page. As solely being an online retailer, real-life consumer pictures will inspire confidence in the product fit, as well as build a tight-knit community. So what’s the twist? Revolve embeds the instant buying option into the featured consumer posts, as well as offers suggestions on what you may also want to pair with the featured piece.

Revolve has taken its brand global through continuously asking themselves how consumers are going to shop next, and they’ve revolutionized the online retail space in the process. Nevertheless, the e-commerce space is fierce and competitors will be aiming to create new innovative trends. What will be next?

Sources:

http://digiday.com/brands/revolve-clothing-took-l-brand-global/

Honda’s recent social media strategy alteration really put things into perspective. Simple, in their case, is better. Like many other companies, their social media goals were: to personalize the brand on a different level and engage consumers in all aspects of the brand. However, we live in a maximalist market where the norm is to be more innovative and creative each day; and that is exactly what Honda’s Instagram reflected.

Despite this maximalist norm, the pictures that had the highest engagement – receiving on average 300% more likes per photo – were the simple posts of just Honda cars. The brand then began incorporating cars in every post, “hiring different influential photographers to add some diversity to the style of sheet metal shots” and transitioned their platform into “just sheet metal”.

So why is simplicity the better choice for certain brands and not for others? 

Many factors come into play such as the brand identity and nature of the product or service it sells. In terms of Honda, I speculate that the reason why consumers crave simplicity if because of the nature of the product. Cars are both a necessity to many consumers, yet there are still aspirations involved. People dream of having a better, faster car, and they receive utility from viewing aspirational posts. On the other hand, when people are looking to purchase a car, they also view these pictures and use them as a tool to evaluate their options. Buying a car also tends to involve a more of a cognitive decision process, which again reinforces the need for consumers to see the actual product in a post rather than an abstract post. Therefore because of the fundamental nature of the product, simplicity is better because the consumers are interested in the product itself.

At the end of the day, success on social media is very subjective to the brand, but the one important point to remember is: excessive creativity is not always the answer. Simplicity sometimes overrules. 

Sources:

https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/449467842_640.jpg

http://digiday.com/brands/hondas-instagram-strategy-just-sheet-metal/

http://motrist.com/images/posts/1/5/248/15248_m.jpg

Influencer marketing has been on the rise for quite some time now, but a recent article by Social Times named this trend, the “new content king”.

With the growing number and popularity of blogs and YouTube vloggers, consumers are now turning to influencers on these platforms to give them product recommendations. Why? This is simple: consumers trust independent influencers more than brands.

This is not to say that consumers don’t consult the actual brand or retail sites before making a product purchase. Retail and brand sites still remain the #1 most influential platforms to guide consumer decisions; however, blogs have risen to #2. This is because consumers can visit the brand site and absorb the information that the company is putting out there, which depicts the company or product in the best possible light, and then they consult blogs as a reassurance mechanism. The blogger or YouTube star is an independent entity apart from the company, and they are not afraid to give bad product reviews.

Even though consumers know certain influencers are paid by the companies to give those reviews, according to The Shelf infographics, “92% of consumers trust recommendations from other people – even someone they don’t know – over brand content”.

The growing importance of influencer marketing is also reflected in companies’ ever-changing marketing budgets. The Shelf infographic also shows the vast amounts of money that go into these budgets, with 5% of companies having an influencer marketing budget of over $5 million per annum, and 25% of companies having a budget of $500k per year.

When put into perspective, these are huge amounts of money that are only going towards sponsorship of influencers. So are these bog-scale budgets worth it?

The simple answer is yes!

Not only are companies allowing consumers to build trust to the brand at a faster rate by using these influencers, but they’re also increasing the number of conversations of their brand, in turn building awareness and attracting new customers. Influencer marketing can increase the amounts of conversations by 3-10 times, meaning vast awareness, and a huge potential to retaining existing consumers and acquiring new ones.

This is proof that the trend of influencer marketing is here to stay, but it will be interesting to see how it evolves. Will bloggers become more involved in the brand advertisements? Will consumers turn to different platforms for reviews? Only time will tell.

Sources:

http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/TheShelfInfluencerMarketingInfographic.jpg

http://www.brafton.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Screen-Shot-2015-01-16-at-1.41.55-PM-350×237.png

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-P7ruUdsZrjw/U4Wl4JOygGI/AAAAAAAAEKg/dwjxMcJayqg/s1600/maxfactor-stefypuglisevich-stefy-puglisevich-blogger-youtube-british-primer-new-liglosses-nude-promade-ccsticks-review.png

The fact that many of the commercials aired nowadays are busy and enforce information overload is no secret; which is why companies like Guinness are shifting their strategies back to the basics of storytelling.

This new strategy is refreshing, trading in clichéd beer commercials for an impactful story: “a game of wheelchair basketball followed by a pint of Guinness, where only one of the men in the group is an actual wheelchair user – the rest, are his friends who are playing wheelchair basketball so that they can all play together”.

This message not only breeds its own, reinvented beer model, but it also signals and impactful message to the audience:

“the choices we make reveal the true nature of our character”.

https://youtu.be/Au8Y98Rgxbk

So apart from the play on emotions, what makes the new strategy of storytelling so successful?

According to Digital Spark Marketing, there are 7 areas to consider when building an impactful storytelling strategy:

1. be relevant to your target market
2. define your positioning – differentiate your brand from your competitors
3. grab and hold viewers’ attention – message must be interesting to your audience, which is much easier to do through storytelling
4. define a value proposition – give your audience a reason to choose you over your competitors (here Guinness establishes itself as a brand that cares)
5. make your messages simple – pictures and videos speak louder than words (the goal here is to evoke emotion)
6. consider the end state values to your customers
7. influence and persuasion – focus on emotional engagement

Overall advertising is taking a turn and going back to basics, and we’ve seen many companies like Guinness adopting the new storytelling strategy and executing it very well. Traditional, aggressive advertising is slowly becoming extinct, with simple, refreshing, and raw stories taking its place.

Sources:

http://www.digitalsparkmarketing.com/creative-marketing/marketing-strategy-creative-marketing/guinness-marketing-strategy/

http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Au8Y98Rgxbk/maxresdefault.jpg

http://img0.gtsstatic.com/wallpapers/cb160f114d5c4794896ca9bc0ed8aea6_large.png

Over the last 18 months Reebok achieved a staggering 8,000% growth on its social media channels, but how exactly did they manage that? The simple answer is: they adopted a “quality over quantity” approach. Reebok revamped its social media strategy to shift focus towards relationship building, and that meant focusing on fewer channels but producing higher quality content. Reebok now focuses heavily on Instagram, along with maintaining its presence on Twitter and Pinterest; and it no longer uses Facebook to produce organic marketing content. This change alone accounted for a 163% increase in Instagram followers for Reebok, placing the brand ahead of its competitors by over 9%.

While shifting its focus heavily onto Instagram, Reebok chose to split the brand into three different accounts –”classic”, “women’s”, and “brand community”, in order to target consumers more specifically. The “classic” and “women’s” channels are very targeted to specific segments – Reebok shoe lovers and women, respectively – while the main “brand community” channel publishes a variety of content that appeals to all, and showcases the brand values.  This approach is interesting because by splitting the Instagram channel into three accounts, consumers have the ability to follow one specific account that only publishes certain content – for example shoe lovers will follow the “classic” account and only see shoe images – or all accounts for the full brand experience.

To support Reebok’s narrow focus on engagement and relationship building, the brand has invested in new and creative social media campaigns, and example of which is the #MoreThanTape campaign. Fans were asked to tweet inspiring words they had for Ronda Rousey – mixed martial arts fighter – for a chance to have their words printed on her training hand wraps. This campaign received millions of impressions and was Reebok’s top Instagram post in the last quarter, receiving almost 14,000 likes.

There has been a shift in the way we use social media, from receiving one-way content, to consumers now wanting to engage with brands. Reebok capitalized on this change, and took a big risk by moving away from channels like Facebook and Snapchat, but it paid off. They completely reinvented Reebok’s brand presence on social media in just 18 months by using this narrow approach, and their follower base continues to grow. Now it’ll be interesting to see which of their competitors will adopt this approach next.

Sources:

http://digiday.com/brands/reebok-got-8000-percent-growth-social-media-18-months/

http://pbs.twimg.com/media/CPHJYptWEAAKHhn.png

http://www.self.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Reebok-BMH.jpg

Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg recently confirmed that the rumoured “dislike” button is being worked on and approaching the testing phase. Although he feared that the button would promote negativity, Zuckerberg says that there is need for a button that shows empathy for sad posts, for which a “like” button wouldn’t suffice.

Now what does this mean for Facebook? Will this “dislike” button, which is meant to show empathy keep its function, or will it be used spitefully?

This topic is very controversial among users and its implementation has the potential to either make or break the company. Supporters have been requesting this button for years, arguing that the site needs such a button to show support in negative situations, and to provide more choices to the user. On the other hand, the opposition argues that this button would promote conflict and increase cyber bullying. We know the cyber space can be dangerous, especially among youth, so why add gas to the fire?

Zuckerberg hasn’t yet confirmed that this addition will specifically be a “dislike” button, but in the testing stage they will experiment with different designs. There has been talk that a solidarity button or a simple range of emoticons would be better suited for the purpose, and I believe that to be true. If this button is meant to give users the ability to show more emotions than just “like”, why not give them that through emoticons? Not only would emoticons allow the user to display an array of emotions, but it would also mitigate the negativity aspect that a dislike button would have.

References:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/facebook-dislike-empathy-1.3229681

http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-facebooks-dislike-button-is-such-a-smart-marketing-move/

http://qz.com/503361/facebooks-dislike-button-is-going-to-be-a-disaster/

http://cdn.images.express.co.uk/img/dynamic/59/590x/Facebook-Dislike-Button-Real-Confirm-Release-Date-UK-605510.jpg

http://www.thatericalper.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/facebook-dislike-button.png

https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2015/09/facebook-emoji1.png?w=738