Digital CPG Blog

For consumers, Facebook’s Like button is a pathway to getting discounts, promotions and special offers. Marketers have a more narcissistic view, according to a new study.

Citing the “Variance in the Social Brand Experience” study from the CMO Council and social CRM firm Lithium, apost from digital intelligence firm eMarketer stated that:

• 57 percent of marketers thought a ‘like’ meant the content on the site was agreeable;
• 41% thought it meant customers wanted to be heard;
• 33% of marketers said they thought customers were looking for incentives or rewards for their ‘like.’

From the consumers’ perspective, the study says they engage with brands through social channels primarily to:

• Be eligible for exclusive offers (67 percent);
• Interact with other consumers and compare experiences (60 percent);
• Find games, contests, and other unique experiences (57 percent);
• Find service and support from their social networking site (50 percent);
• Share ideas for new products and features (41 percent).

There was also a difference between the two groups in terms of perception of customer loyalty. Of the 132 marketers surveyed in the study, only 24 percent thought a ‘like’ meant the consumer was also a loyal customer. Conversely, 49 percent of the 1300 consumers surveyed said they liked a brand because they were already loyal customers.

Most damning was the revelation that, though brands are seeing benefit to the use of social media, less than one-fifth (17 percent) have yet to fully align social channels into the marketing mix.

Ouch.

Bottom Line? Give your customers and fans whatever is valuable to them!  Don’t assume they just want to talk to you. Engage is a huge buzzword, but value is what marketers should really be thinking about.

• Adult mobile users who have downloaded an app to their phone nearly doubled in the past two years – rising from 22% in September 2009 to 38% in August 2011. (source)
• The average iOS device owner will download 83 apps in 2011 vs. 51 in 2010, a 61% increase year over year. (source)
• The average smartphone user in the adds just 2.5 new apps per month. (source)
• In May 2010, only about two-thirds (68%) of adults who had apps on their phones reported actually using them. (source)
• In March 2011, 26% of all apps downloaded were opened only once and then never used again. 26% were used 11 times or more. Of the remaining 48% of apps: 13% are opened only twice, 9% are opened only three times, all the way to 2% that are opened 10 times and never again. (source)
• 38% ?iOS & Android users stick with an app after one month. 14% ?iOS & Android users stick with an app after six months. After 12 months, only 4% are left. (source)
• Roughly half (51%) of mobile owners use a handful of apps at least once a week, while 17% report using no apps on a regular basis. Almost a third (31%) could be called app “power users” in that they use 6 or more. (source)
• The top 10 Android apps account for 43% of all the time spent by Android consumers on mobile apps. The top 50 apps account for 61% of all time spent. With 250,000+ Android apps available at the time of this writing, that means the remaining 249,950+ apps have to compete for the remaining 39 percent of the pie. (source)

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Facebook has begun introducing a new feature which allows business pages to receive private messages from their fans on the social network.

The new communications option, which has appeared for Asia-based admins only so far —is a significant introduction that will allow businesses to interact more closely with customers on the service than ever before.

Consumer facing businesses will find the feature particularly useful as it enables more personal communication with individual customers, opening the possible of a greater level of customer service on Facebook. The move is also likely to cut down on the pain of off-topic comments on company pages and reduce communication lost when Facebook fans fail to take their comments to customer service channels outside of the social network.

The move isn’t an all out opportunity for business to contact customers, however, as communication must be initiated by the customer. However, once that has been done, the conversation is open to both parties.

I think this is a great move for Facebook, and sorely needed! So many customers reach out on Facebook and you’d love to be able to discuss account details, but to do so you, you must move the conversation to email or phone. Hopefully customer service teams will become familiar with these new features when they are rolled out to all business pages, and perhaps we will even see some apps that allow for increased customer service! One can dream… 

Spice company McCormick introduced two social media applications on Facebook in December in order to inject itself into as many online conversations as possible. The Merry Merry Menu Planner lets users post menus that friends and family can comment and vote on; the Big Cookie Share provides tools for creating custom digital cookies, which can be sent to Facebook friends with messages.

“At a time when laptops and tablets rival spatulas as the most-used kitchen tool,” the company says in its release, “we are offering our fans new ways to share the holiday spirit and create memorable taste experiences — whether they’re putting the holiday menu up for a vote or frosting Facebook cookies for faraway family members.”

I like both of these applications, and would love to see what the results of their campaign. It looks like in December they had 9100 fans (see screenshot above), but if you visit their Facebook page now, they have nearly 280,000! Quite the increase if most of it came from their new initiatives.

Really? Are you sure? Because most brands ignore 50% of consumers’ Facebook posts!

Despite glowing percentages about social media users – 65% of users recommendations led to a purchase, and recommendations by social media users were twice as likely to lead to holiday gift purchases – brands apparently are not responding to consumers on social media sites.

More stats:

A slim 36% of social media users trust brands that have a social media presence more than brands that don’t.

Only 55% of brands respond to consumers via Facebook.

Brands respond to consumers via Twitter 61% of the time.

Here at Alice, we respond to every mention on Facebook or Twitter (even if it’s just a “like” or RT), but I imagine it becomes increasingly difficult the more fans and followers you get. Does your company respond to every customer on social media? Is it any different from responding to every customer who emails or contacts your Support team? I don’t think so.

We all understand that in order to effectively market products to consumers you need to have a good understanding of the attitude and behaviour patterns of your target audience. Psychologists have defined six universal traits that have been seen in shoppers and are now being seen in social commerce.

• Social Proof: 81% of customers reach out to friends and family members on social networking sites for advice before purchasing products
• Authority: 77% of online shoppers use reviews to make purchase decisions
• Scarcity: 77% of people like getting exclusive offers that they can redeem via Facebook. We assign more value to products that are less available
• Like: 50% of shoppers have made a purchase based on the recommendation of the people they follow(and like) on social networks. We follow those we like and do the things they do
• Consistency: Purchases made from the brands we trust reinforce our future shopping patterns
• Reciprocity: We have an innate desire to repay favors in order to maintain social fairness, whether those favors are invited or not

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Research shows that getting consumers to like a fan page has some positive effect on conversion rates. In fact, where commerce is concerned, Facebook could replace the thumbs up icon with a foot – as in “foot in the door” – because that’s what brands are getting with the like. It’s a social gesture that potentially manifests in the consistency rule kicking in (yes, pun intended).

Social commerce platform provider 8thBridge wondered just what effect the “like” had on purchase behavior, so the company conducted a survey to find out.

The above graphs are what they found.

Do you encourage “small steps, big steps ” approach in your strategy?

Talent.

Finding staff with suitable digital skills topped the list in a recent survey by E-Consultancy.

We asked participants in the survey about the specific skill areas that they perceived to be the most difficult to recruit for.

Web analytics and data topped the list, followed by social media, and content marketing, indicating that there is already a potential skills shortage in these areas.

When respondents were asked which digital marketing disciplines they anticipated would be the key areas of growth in the coming year, the top answers were social media, content marketing, and web analytics and data.

The fact that those areas of predicted growth in resourcing were the same as those that are already listed as being the most difficult to recruit for means one thing: a looming talent time bomb.

In May this year McKinsey released a report (Big Data: The Next Frontier for Innovation, Competition, and Productivity) that brought sharp focus to this talent crisis in one key area: data.

The exponential growth in data it said,  driven by a growth in data-rich and real-time environments such as social and mobile, embedded internet (the so-called ‘internet of things’) and the increasing focus on analytics and owned media, will mean that the capability of analysing large data sets will become “a key basis of competition, underpinning new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus”.

…

Not far further down the list of areas that are challenging for companies to recruit for came web design and build. This was also notable in being identified as the most challenging area in which to retain staff.

And this doesn’t look like a problem that is going away anytime soon. A campaign to boost the teaching of computer skills and coding is gathering momentum, supported by large technology companies including Google and Microsoft.

What is your company doing to retain top talent in the digital space?

General Mills has creates a portal, called G-WIN Digital, for the public’s ideas on its digital initiatives, including applications and games. Consumers with digital-product ideas can use G-WIN to send their concepts directly to the company’s marketing team.

So, consumers with digital-product ideas can use G-WIN to send their concepts directly to the company’s marketing team. Here’s how it works:

Those just bursting with ideas for a game involving Cheerios or a mobile app for Betty Crocker–or any of the multitude of General Mills brands, including Green Giant, Pillsbury, and Häagen-Dazs–are directed to the innovation portal to share their non-confidential idea, product, company, or technology. Once submitted, GM’s digital marketing group vets the ideas, and status updates are promised within three weeks. From there, a dedicated review team is at the ready to quickly hand intriguing ideas right over to the digital marketing operations. Specific ideas they choose to engage in will likely start out small and experimental with lessons and experiences applied on a broader scale.

Being first in the digital marketing space is important to General Mills:

This past April, it was the first consumer packaged goods company to use a daily deals service, offering consumers in Minneapolis and San Francisco a sampler pack of GM goodies for $20 on Groupon, a 50% discount. Also, in October the company announced an ambitious initiative called Trail View that creates a first-person, street-view style experience of national parks such as the Great Smoky Mountains, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon.

And General Mills is trying to act more like a lean start-up than a massive CPG corporation:

Addicks offers the mantra “create, iterate, learn, and scale,” which, he says, means becoming an agile, learning organization. “I don’t think that’s a small thing; I think that’s a big thing for organizations like ours. There’s a big cultural change that has to happen–you have to be very agile, ready to move super fast and you have to be in the moment. You have to learn. We call it ‘market while we research, research while we market.’ Those used to be discreet functions. Today, it’s finding partners, trying something on the brand and really watching and learning as we go and continuing to iterate.”

Here are the top new rules of engagement to effectively reach Gen Y moms across digital platforms:

The 24-hour rule: 46% of Gen Y moms expect brands to update their profile pages on Facebook daily, compared to 37% of female consumers. Sixty-four percent of Gen Y moms also expect to hear back from brands within a 24-hour window. Marketers need to make sure that their social networking strategies reflect this sense of immediacy, as well as meet age-old expectations for great, reliable service.

Get your game on: Women, and moms in particular, increasingly lead social and casual gaming. Today, 75% of women (and 77% of moms) have at least one gaming app, compared to 67% of men. Companies like Groupon, Living Social and DailyCandy Deals have effectively tapped into this game mentality, using flash sales and daily deals to build anticipation. Whether you develop a game to build your brand, or reward patrons with virtual currency, this is an opportunity to win big with female consumers.

Rethink loyalty: Loyalty programs are losing significance among consumers as a faster pace online and offline puts a premium on living in the now. With 66% of Gen Y moms claiming that brand loyalty constitutes usage of only six months to a year, brands need to rethink what it means to have “loyal” customers and consider developing a relevancy program instead. Marketers must ask themselves whether their brands are in the right place at the right time with the right information.

Curated serendipity: Offering filtered content is an effective and necessary way to cut through the clutter. But to fully engage moms, there must be room for serendipitous discovery. 87% of women and moms agree that they would rather participate in a one-day flash sale than a weeklong sale. Brands should create the possibility for surprise. E-commerce companies, for example, should take into account the element of spontaneity that happens in offline shopping — the moment of delight when someone discovers or stumbles across a perfect item they weren’t expecting.