Digital CPG Blog

Pampers tested livestreaming an online TV show to its UK & Ireland Facebook page earlier this year:

The session featured baby sleep expert Wendy Dean, who shared her advice with those watching.

P&G UK marketing innovation manager Ben Tatlow said that this is the first livestream the company has run within a social media platform in the UK.

It is exciting to be able to test and learn this new approach of providing streamed content not only to our core brand fan bases, but also to our wider target audiences through live streaming through Facebook ads. We look forward to piloting similarly innovative projects in the future.”

Streaming live into an event tab adds a new level of engagement to Facebook-based activity, since it allows a brand to invite its community to join the event – while providing a permanent reminder that it’s happening.

He added that an additional benefit of hosting a webchat via Facebook is that you get an instant idea of how popular ait will be, bearing in mind that the vast majority of views always come afterwards, on-demand.

Already we can see in Pampers’ case that 876 people have said that they’ll be attending, which is great.”

P&G will be running a video ad campaign within Facebook to drive more views over the two-hour period that the show airs.

Clicking one of the ‘watch now’ style messages in the right-hand column on Facebook will open a lightbox, with the player embedded, which will also feature its own mini wall. This means that P&G will be able to compare engagement according to viewers watching and commenting from within its page, to those clicking on an ad.

This is a proof of concept project for P&G, but Goldsmith says that he already believes it will be successful based on engagement levels from other client projects.

He also quotes stats from Facebook that suggest a brand only reaches 17% of its community with a simple wall post, since posts that friends’ have commented on or liked are more likely to be given top billing. It’s harder than ever to ‘be seen’ without paying for it.

Therefore the solution is to create content that your community wants to engage with, be that click on, share, like, comment or whatever’s appropriate. Although I’m naturally biased, video is far more engaging, and it’s what people love to share and talk about within social environments.”

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P&G’s optimization approach for digital is not unlike the continuous improvement processes long used on factory floors, and some of its brands, including Pantene, are using continuous data on consumers’ response to digital ads to tweak media buys and inform creative elements.

For about a year, Pantene has been using such a system, Smart Media, developed withResource Interactive, Cincinnati. Smart Media analyzes click-through rates and flash surveys on purchase intent across numerous permutations of ads and placements.

The billion-dollar hair-product brand has improved performance on those target metrics by 28% to 90% vs. the previous system of creative pretesting alone, according to Marketing Director Kevin Crociata.

The program evaluates three creative elements (the headline, hair visual and background color), and Pantene makes changes based on how different combinations of each element perform in various media placements.

The brand makes discoveries that inform future creative. Those have included that white backgrounds don’t work well on Yahoo, orange is effective on Facebook and blondes get a better response than brunettes on some sites.

“Background color is big,” Mr. Crociata said. “It sounds pretty simple, but it can have a dramatic impact on purchase intent.”

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Many social-media “experts” insist that a “two-way conversation” between marketers and consumers is the whole point of social, and anything less than that is a reflection of outdated, broadcast-style thinking. But the reality is that many people follow and “friend” brands simply because they want to hear from those brands, not necessarily talk back.

If you look at the behavior of the Twitter audience of one particular specialized business publication (@adage, with more than 350,000 followers) and one well-known art-rock band (@okgo, with more than 650,000 followers), you’ll see that most folks are only listening. Though Mark Naples could have reached out to OK Go or Ad Age on Twitter, he chose good old-fashioned email — wisely, I’d say.

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Agreed! Do you have all your eggs in the social media basket? How do you approach social media “conversations”?

Here are three ways brands can leverage Pinterest now:

1. Add Pinterest Content to Your Existing Facebook Presence.

Images are more effective than text at encouraging engagement, and an effective technology platform will allow you to surface visually appealing content on one or more Facebook Tabs. This content can be presented as a simple pinboard, as part of a game, or even in the News Feed.

2. Optimize Your Web Properties to Draw People to Your Pinterest Content.

You can always put a “Follow Me on Pinterest” button on your website. But remember, a user’s choice to “Follow” may not be brand-specific, but rather board-specific. This gives you an opportunity to segment your followers in ways relevant to your business. Lowe’s does a nice job of this and has seasonal boards (the Big Game, Valentine’s Day), themed boards (Craft Ideas, Unique Pet Projects), and boards that tie to specific merchandise areas (Lighting, Bedrooms, Bathrooms).

3. Make Your Pins Work Harder For You.

This means using a URL shortening and redirection strategy, preferably one that aggregates your Pinterest analytics (views, Repins, etc.) in a central location. This will allow the metrics to be combined with, and compared to, those from your othersocial properties. You also need to combat the link rot that can occur when the source image feeding your Pin is removed from its website.

Lastly, the pinned images themselves can be set to click through to a variety of sites. Imagine a Pin of a product that, once clicked, takes you to a flash sale where the product is sold at a discount after a minimum purchase threshold is met. All of this is possible now!

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Pinterest – which technically is still in closed, invitation-only beta — drives more sales to retailers than YouTube, Google + and LinkedIn combined and is nearly equal to Twitter’s referral traffic.

How moms are using Pinterest:

Women currently dominate Pinterest making up nearly 70% of their active users. Moms are using Pinterest in a variety of ways to organize and learn more about their interests. They follow experts to be in the know about trends on a variety of topics from parenting, to fashion and design, to cooking. They’re also following friends and finding Pinners with similar interests to share and be inspired by.

They’re also following brands. Retailers like Nordstrom and West Elm have significant followings on Pinterest – similar to on Facebook, moms want to connect and interact with their favorite brands.

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Here are five reasons your brand should consider marketing on Pinterest.

1. Shift in consumer behavior from search to discovery – Search is great for finding answers. Discovery is great for finding inspiration. Pinterest taps into that phenomenon. As Samil Shah explained on TechCrunch back in November, Pinterest is bringing some of that discovery online…which could lead to a revolution in how we purchase items. Right now we are trained to go to Amazon or Google to find what we want. Pinterest starts before that search, before we even thinking we want to buy a particular product. For example, if I wanted a sound system for my laptop, I might hop on to Pinterest, browse a category devoted to sound systems and then land on a product. Within that discovery phase, however, I may never end up at Amazon since Pinterest drives traffic back to a retailer’s site.
2. Little interaction needed for brands – A legitimate concern for any brand considering jumping into a new social media platform is the resource question: do you have it in the budget to staff? The nice thing about Pinterest is there isn’t a lot of overhead. Outside of pinning, categorizing and tagging images, you don’t have to worry about managing comments or playing the follower game. You can push content at your own pace.
3. Connect with the visual segment of your audience - Pinterest is visual. So it attracts an entirely different crowd…those who may have an appeal for an image over written words. Why is this important? Consider how content marketers typically engage their audiences…through words, videos or audio podcasts. You can open the doors to a new segment of buyers who may be interested in your product…but not know about it…by building a community around the images you pin. That can draw others in who are inspired by your account and lead to referrals.
4. Repinning is the new “retweet” –It’s quite possible that you can build a community from simply sharing other people’s pins…the same way some Twitter power users have built a following off of retweeting or Tumblr users who’ve reblogged.
5. It’s beating out Facebook referrals – Finally, perhaps one of the best reasons for using Pinterest in your social media marketing plans is that it is outperforming Facebook. The general manager of digital for the print magazine Real Life said that Pinterest was a huge source of traffic in October 2011…more than Facebook. Time to re-tool our marketing strategies, don’t you think?

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Anarchy is the first Axe fragrance to be available in a women’s version, after many years of popularizing the “Axe effect” with young men. The Unilever brand has created many hilarious, often award-winning, commercials around the world to convince young men that the product makes them irresistible. The company, apparently testing Axe’s potential among women, says this is a limited-edition product.

BBH has also developed two Facebook applications as part of the campaign. The “Anarchy Matchmaker” invites people to select Facebook friends they fancy and then notifies them — although it makes the exchange public only if the attraction proves mutual. “Kissing Chaos” invites people to post photos of themselves in smooching poses, and then randomly matches them up with other participants.

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Dominos has a successful social media strategy that gets results. Here’s what they do:

1. Promotions work. More people follow brands via social media to receive promotions and deals than for any other reason. Domino’s understands this and successfully runs promotions to increase trial and sales of its products.
2. Be unfiltered. Domino’s has benefited from a number of campaigns where it amplified both good and bad feedback from users about its brands. In the end, the effect was that it increased transparency and made the brand seem more trustworthy.
3. Spread the load. Domino’s social media efforts are a cross-functional effort between its digital marketing and PR teams, but it also pulls in help from agency partners, and some content is even user-generated.

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For a few years now, brands have been touting frothy Facebook “like” numbers as evidence of their social-media acumen. But how many of those fans are actually bothering to take part in conversation with brands?

Not too many, as it turns out.

Slightly more than 1% of fans of the biggest brands on Facebook are actually engaging with the brands, according to a study from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, an Australia-based marketing think tank that counts Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and other major advertisers as its supporters.

“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” said Karen Nelson-Field, senior research associate for Ehrenberg-Bass Institute who describes herself as a “Facebook advocate.” “People need to understand what it can do for a brand and what it can’t do. Facebook doesn’t really differ from mass media. It’s great to get decent reach, but to change the way people interact with a brand overnight is just unrealistic.”

In the background here is the thinking of Andrew Ehrenberg, the late mathematician who was highly skeptical of conventional marketing wisdom. In dense statistically-oriented papers, he cast doubt on concepts such as brand loyalty and was never sold on the persuasive power of advertising. Now his disciples advocate achieving broad reach through mass media. Brand growth, they maintain, is attained not by reaching a few loyal fans but a larger number of light and medium buyers. In this understanding of the marketing and media worlds, social is just another media channel useful for its reach rather than any notion of engagement.

This research jibes with that thinking, as does a separate study from Ms. Nelson-Field looking at the distribution of buying behavior among Facebook fan bases. In that study, she used web-based consumer panels to examine the behavior of Facebook fans of two unnamed repeat-purchased brands, in the chocolate and soft-drink categories. The key finding was a much greater occurrence of heavy buyers in the Facebook population than in a more general population of customers. The study also found that purchase frequency didn’t increase after someone became a fan.

In other words, Facebook fan bases skew toward heavy buyers rather than the more casual shoppers that a brands needs to reach in order to grow. Again, unless you’re someone who believes marketing on Facebook alone constitutes a full strategy or you’re lining up for the inevitable Facebook IPO, this isn’t all bad news. Facebook does provide good reach and its audience of loyal fans is good for market research and word-of-mouth advocacy.

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Social media agency Ignite has taken a closer look at Pinterest’s demographic data and compiled a profile of ‘those who pin’.

comScore says that the blossoming social curation site has over 4m registered users and is growing rapidly, while Google Ad Planner shows that nearly 1.5m people visit Pinterest every day – spending 14 minutes on the site on average.

Google Ad planner shows that users are:

• Largely women (a 80% to 20% ratio). So there’s some truth to Matt Buchanan’s post on Gizmodo yesterday that proclaims Pinterest as “a Tumblr for ladies”.
• Aged mainly between 25 and 44 (accounting for 55% of the group, 30% are 25-34, 25% are 35 – 44)
• Just 25% of users have a bachelors degree or higher
• The majority live off a household income of $25-75k

Experian Hitwise stats from December 2011 show that in the US at least, alongside the demographics, Pinterest users fall into three of its Mosaic lifestyle segments.

• Boomers and Boomerangs – the baby boomer adults and the teenagers/young adults who live with them. This accounts for more than 10% of Pinterest visits, in which they might pin travel plans and imagery related to their online habits. They also live in older houses so might be tempted by DIY and home improvement content.
• Babies and Bliss – the parents of large families (with five or more in their houses), and in their 30s and 40s. Mothers in this group tend to work full time and pride themselves on being computer literate. This group are ‘power shoppers with upscale tastes’ and value deals on high-quality products. They tend to pin things related to convenience, and so relate to brands that provide good online experiences, discounts and make lives easier.
• Families Matter Most – this group includes young middle-class families with active lifestyles who are interested in things that allow them to juggle work and parenting effectively. This group is not interested in window-shopping however, like the Babies & Bliss group, it’s more likely to pin useful, practical things like easy recipes, child friendly activities and healthy living.

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