Chapter 4

Starting to use social media and PR

This section is for companies interested in exploring digital marketing as a channel to attract new customers. It will focus on the core areas of Google AdWords, social media (paid for and organic), online public relations and a very top-line view of using search engine optimisation (SEO).

I met up with the team at 10 Yetis Digital, which are behind marketing campaigns for clients such as Superdry, Made.com, Confused.com, etc. Together, we discussed some of the best examples of how to get digital marketing to deliver for you quickly.

Key takeaway

  • ‘News-jacking’ is the most cost-effective way of raising awareness of a company or brand after an initial launch.
  • Social media, specifically an influencer-led campaign, can be one of the most cost-effective ways to grow a new brand, attract new customers and build a newsletter database.1
  • The likes of Google AdWords and social advertising are good for drilling down and targeting a specific demographic, but can be more expensive when going through the learning stages of understanding what keywords and profiles will work best for your company.

The advice

Pay per click (PPC)

The most popular type of PPC is Google AdWords, but you can also buy PPC from a raft of other providers. PPC is a way in which a company advertisement can be triggered and presented to a potential customer when that customer types a certain phrase or keyword into the search engine.

There are entire textbooks available on just the technical aspect of how to set up Google AdWords and, as such, it would be difficult to explain in just one chapter.2 The following should act as a good overview of the opportunities that Google AdWords presents for start-up companies that are trying to attract new customers.

This is an example of how (in very simple terms) Google AdWords works:

  1. A brand that sells a range of shoes has a Google advert prepared that showcases its range of ‘shiny red shoes’ when the phrase is typed into the search engine.
  2. The brand sets out how much it is willing to pay for someone to click on its advert in the advert settings.
  3. The consumer types ‘shiny red shoes’ into Google.
  4. The brand advert is displayed.
  5. The consumer clicks on the advert.
  6. The brand is charged for this click.

The price that a brand pays when the consumer clicks on its advertisement is dependent largely on the competitive nature of the industry in which it operates. The more competitive the sector, the higher the cost of the click.

Brands have a choice of how their ads are triggered and these are based on the kinds of keywords that they select. These are:

Exact match: the advert is displayed only when the consumer types in an exact phrase, e.g. ‘shiny red shoes’.

Broad match: this is the default setting in Google AdWords. If the brand selected broad match on ‘shiny red shoes’, then it would display the advert when the user typed in variations on this search term that Google felt were relevant.

Modified broad match: when a + symbol is added at the start of the chosen keywords, e.g ‘+shoes’, then Google knows that the advertisement should be displayed only when the consumer types a phrase that contains that term.

Phrase match: the advertisements are triggered when a search query contains the words for which the brand wants to appear, in the order that they have selected, but can include words before or after the required search terms. For example, if ‘red shoes’ are the keywords that a brand wants to use to trigger an advert, phrase match would show advertisements triggered by searches including phrases like ‘cheap red shoes’ or ‘red shoes size 11’.

Brands can also choose if they want their advertisements to appear in both Google’s Display and Search Networks. The Display Network is where site owners, big and small, sell space to Google to place adverts. Even the likes of The Guardian and some of the biggest news websites and portals in the world offer display advertising.

The Search Network is Google’s own search engine website. Brands can choose to advertise on just one of these networks. Our experience tells us that a start-up brand trying to attract new customers is better served by using the Search Network, as consumers on here are more likely to be in a buying mode, rather than those on the display network who will be, at best, in research mode.

Now that the most confusing area is out of the way, it is time to look at some Advertising101 best practice for getting the most from adverts. The number one rule of an advert is to have a clear ‘call-to-action’. Examples of calls-to-action are; ‘call today’, ‘buy now’, ‘sign up here’, etc.

If the number one rule is to include a call-to-action, the number two rule is ‘solve a problem’. Advertisements that give a solution to an issue that a consumer faces are going to get more clicks than a more general advertisement.

Google AdWords also gives the advertiser the opportunity to use a display URL. A display URL is the web address that Google shows to customers for the advertisement. It can be different to the actual URL that is associated with the advertisement and, essentially, makes the advertisement more attractive.

Going back to the red shoes example, the URL that consumers will be taken to may be ShoeCompany.com/red-shoes/1011.html. This is not a visually attractive URL. The display URL could be ShoeCompany.com/RedShoes and this is far easier on the consumer’s eye. The user still would be directed to the unattractive URL, they just would not see it as part of their journey to the site.

The final point to address is ensuring that the ‘landing pages’ of where the traffic is being pointed to by the advertisements are optimised. It is important that the landing pages are relevant to the advertisements that consumers are clicking on. Some brands create dedicated landing pages for their advertisements with multiple calls-to-action including buying and sales messaging and also encouraging visitors to sign up for company newsletters and information.

Whilst creating dedicated landing pages is not essential, it is best practice and is also another way in which you can measure the success of a Google AdWords campaign.

Social media

This section will give an overview of how a brand can use social media to attract new customers. The social platforms that this section will focus on are Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. These three are in the top six most popular social networks globally.3

The three social networks not included from the top six are Google+, YouTube and Pinterest. These are all clearly successful and influential platforms but not ones that, in our experience, deliver as successful results as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram for start-up brands trying to attract new, long-term, customers.

It is also worth mentioning Snapchat, an image-based mobile messaging application. This platform launched in 2013 but has yet to go mainstream with consumers. It is a hugely popular platform with Millennials and, typically, a younger demographic. At the time of writing, there is no way for brands to advertise on the platform and it is virtually impossible to track interactions that lead to sales. Once this functionality becomes available to brands, it is our agency’s belief that this platform will overtake Instagram in terms of popularity and mainstream take-up.

As a starting point for a business, it is very important that social media accounts are set up on as many channels as possible. Even if the brand decides to go on and concentrate on only a few core channels, it is best practice to have secured the brand name on every platform, where applicable, in order to prevent others (competitors, for example) from doing so in the future.

When the reader has reached the end of this chapter, it should become clear that one of the common traits of what works well on social media is the creation of high-quality content, such as professional imagery and well-thought-out and shot video snippets to support a status update, tweet, or Instagram post, be that of a sales or non-sales variety.

One of the key ways to attract new customers in a cost-effective manner is to piggyback on hashtags or national awareness days. Hashtags will be explained later in this chapter, but national awareness days are events like British Chip Week, National Ice Cream Day and more specific ones like National Small Business Day.

Brands can piggyback on these national awareness days by creating bespoke, branded content that fits that particular day. This content can then be deployed on all of the social media platforms outlined in this chapter, along with using the supporting hashtag.

Another common theme across all social media platforms is the emergence of ‘influencer’ campaigns. The true definition of what an ‘influencer campaign’ really means is still being debated by the wider social media industry. As we see it, an influencer is someone who says something that creates an action by those who follow them.

In days gone by, our parents were the original influencers because, if they gave advice or instruction, their followers (i.e. us, their children) would listen and act. In today’s social media terms, influencers are seen as individuals or organisations with experience and credibility in their industry and, more often than not, a large following.

Influencer campaigns can result in big returns; however, they do not happen overnight. Brands need to take their time and build up relationships with key influencers and can, in fact, become influencers in their own right over time.

The first stage in these campaigns is to identify exactly who are the influencers in the target industry.

There are many platforms out there that assign a score for an individual’s Twitter, Facebook or Instagram account in order to allow brands to see who has supposed influence, but, more often than not, these results are flawed and it is easy to see who is trying to ‘game’ their influence score. For example, someone may have bought Twitter followers to make them look more influential, but a quick review of their accounts can often point out if this is the case because of a lack of engagement with the content that they share. This is just one, very basic, way to investigate influencers.

The best way to identify influencers is via the brand’s own industry knowledge of who is who and who are the leaders in its sector. Similar to real-life, on social media it is important to build trust and form one’s own opinions on who should be listened to and who commands respect. Direct engagement and the building of a relationship is the most effective way of getting to know influencers and, eventually, having them share a brand’s content or speak positively about that company.

Whilst brands cannot buy influence, they can buy mentions from influencers. Often, this is in the form of a blog post from an influencer talking about a brand, through to a tweet, Facebook status update or Instagram post. In accordance with Advertising Standards Authority guidelines in the UK, influencers should declare when they have been paid to post something on behalf of a brand.

The following is a breakdown of our experience on how to use the three social media platforms that will be focused on in this chapter.

Facebook

As well as having the ability to set up company ‘pages’ on Facebook, brands can also use it as an advertising platform. Similar to Google AdWords, describing the technical details of how to set up adverts on Facebook would take longer than one chapter and the following is a comprehensive overview.4

Facebook advertisements to promote a business take the form of three core areas. The first is to promote the company page. The second is to promote a call-to-action from the company page, such as ‘buy now’, ‘click here’ or ‘sign up’. The third is to promote or boost an individual post on a company page.

Facebook advertising has become hugely popular with brands because of its ease of use and also because of the level of targeting that can be achieved. For instance, if a brand wanted to target its advertisements around a set demographic, or a common interest (or even both), it can. This targeting can be set up for all three forms of Facebook advertising.

The brand goal for using Facebook is to attract ‘likes’, with those likes being from an engaged audience, interested in the brand, product or service, that will then lead to sales. Creating great content that attracts people to take the time to like the page is the key. Many brands have made the mistake of trying to fast-forward the number of likes on their Facebook page by running competitions or even buying likes from third-party providers.

The issue with this is that the brand is left with an unengaged, un-interested follower base. Facebook has its own algorithm that can detect when a brand page is not getting good engagement from its audience and penalises the brand by not giving content from that page a good organic ‘reach’. Reach is a Facebook term that shows how many people have viewed or interacted with a piece of content or status update.

This is another reason why it is very important that brands constantly strive to post engaging and thought-provoking content. At the time of writing, Facebook has said it is giving extra focus on content that is placed on the platform using its ‘Facebook live’ video streaming.

This is where a brand can stream video footage live to its Facebook page via a smartphone or a tablet device. For example, a brand could film the launch of a new product or service, have a senior member of its management team talk through an aspect of the business or maybe something fun, like a company sports event or challenge.

Brands can also take advantage of trending hashtags on Facebook, although it is worth noting that this should be done with care and it is best practice never to jump on the back of a trending hashtag that surrounds something sensitive or would cause upset.

A hashtag is the # symbol and is something that Facebook users, brands and individuals, use to share their thoughts on a common event or theme. For example, when the Budget is being announced by The Chancellor of the Exchequer in Parliament, many people comment on this story and they would use the hashtag #budget. If a user was to click on the word #budget, they would see all of the updates that contain that term.

An opportunity for a brand to piggyback on this term could be a company that maybe offers a mobile app that helps track or log personal finances. The company could push out branded content related to the budget and use the hashtag #budget to make sure it gets in front of people who may be interested.

Although this is the section on Facebook, it is worth noting that hashtags first appeared on Twitter and can be used in exactly the same way over on that platform.

Here are some top tips for brands on getting the most from using Facebook to attract customers:

  • Use attractive imagery, preferably professionally shot, to support brand status updates.
  • Try and use more engaging and immersive content when posting a status update, such as video.
  • Facebook is a ‘pay to play’ platform for businesses. This means you will need to pay to boost posts in order to get higher levels of interaction. This is a great way to kick off the launch of a great piece of content that a brand may have on its website, that it wants potential customers to see.
  • Plan what the brand will be saying on Facebook in advance and create the supporting content in advance. Our own agency plans its content three months in advance, but one month is also sufficient time to plan social campaigns.
  • Make sure that the brand page on Facebook is optimised for driving traffic to the company website, getting newsletter sign-ups or even selling. There are multiple shopping platforms that a brand can place on its Facebook page using a tab, with one of the most popular being Shopify.5
  • Monitor emerging trending hashtags and engage with them, where possible.
  • Facebook is good for testing out new product ideas or for running mini focus groups for research purposes. A brand could set up a secret Facebook group, invite its most devoted customers and then post information about new product ideas and received feedback straight away.
  • Do not just continually run competitions to grow page ‘like’ numbers. The people who enter these competitions often are not truly interested in the brand and just want a chance to win a prize. A competition every now and again is fine.
Twitter

Twitter is a social networking platform that allows people to communicate using 140 character tweets. Similar to Facebook and Instagram, Twitter has its own advertising platform. Also similar to Facebook, Instagram and Google, explaining the technical aspects of its advertising would take longer than one chapter. Here is a good guide that has been created by Twitter: https://business.twitter.com/.

Twitter facilitates two main ways to advertise on its platform. The first is to promote a tweet that the brand has written and issued or a dedicated tweet for use in an advert. The second is to promote an account on Twitter. As with Facebook advertising, a brand can deploy advertisements that are targeted around a very specific audience, interests, age/demographic or all of these combined.

It is important for brands to realise that Twitter is not just a proactive marketing tool, but it is also a great discovery and listening platform. Consumers increasingly are turning to Twitter for customer service and product/service information issues. Consumer-facing brands often set up a secondary Twitter account that deals exclusively with customer service issues.

Hashtags are a core part of the Twitter experience. The previous Facebook section outlines how hashtags work. In addition to piggybacking on trending topics, brands can use Twitter to try and engage with journalists who are looking for information around a story or products. The fastest way to find a journalist in need of help on Twitter is to monitor the hashtag #journorequest. A brand can do this simply by typing #journorequest into the search box on Twitter.

Here are some top tips on brands getting the most from using Twitter to attract customers:

  • Use professionally shot images to support messages being deployed on the platform.
  • Do not just pump information out. Listen to and engage with the audience that is being spoken to.
  • Do not just run competitions to try and swell follower numbers. The audience attracted to these competitions will not be engaged with the brand. It is ok to run competitions every now and again.
  • Put together a campaign plan in advance and begin creating content in advance.
  • As well as having a core brand account, consider having accounts for the more charismatic senior people within the organisation. People buy from people and are more likely to engage with a person than a brand account.
  • Make sure that a company Twitter account has a strong visual presence and makes the most of its header and profile images.
  • Tools like Buffer enable brands to schedule content in advance. This is a handy tool to have when planning content campaigns.6
  • When following lots of people, it can become difficult to keep an eye out for tweets from key people. Brands can set up lists, publicly or privately, on Twitter. Add the people that are important to keep track of, competitors or industry peers to these lists.
  • Do not be afraid to ask for retweets of important content.
  • Get to know and engage with influential people within your industry so that they are more likely to share your content.
  • Look for opportunities to carry out branded, random acts of kindness. If a company spots an influential potential new customer or industry influencer requesting something that the brand can help with, the brand could help them in the hope that they get a positive mention on social media in return.
Instagram

Instagram is a smartphone-based image-sharing app that allows its users to take a picture, shoot a short video or use a previously shot video or picture and then add a filter to slightly change its appearance and share on its platform. The key area for brands to remember with Instagram is that they need to use visually stunning images in order to build their audience and get engagement.

Understanding the use of hashtags on Instagram is key to a brand growing its follower numbers. There is no limit on the number of characters that a person or brand can use when typing text to support an image they are posting. This means that multiple hashtags can and should be used. Using the example of a red shoe shop posting an image of a pair of new red shoes they are selling, they may want to support the image with some of the following descriptive, funny and helpful hashtags to make the post more attractive to those searching for shoe-buying inspiration:

#RedShoes #WomensShoes #ShoePorn #CheapShoes #Affordableshoes #ShinyRedShoes

Brands should also try to attract and win new customers by carrying out hashtag searches for topics that relate to their industry. It will then be easier for them to identify the hashtags that they should be using. Doing so is also an opportunity for the brand to go and ‘like’ or ‘comment’ on images that they feel fit with their own brand in order to try and grow its follower numbers.

Although Instagram does offer the opportunity for brands to use advertisements, it is one of the last social media platforms where branded content does not necessarily have a ‘pay to play’ requirement. A brand can freely use and grow its audience on Instagram without having to buy advertisements, although advertising can speed up that growth, if done correctly.

Instagram is owned by Facebook and, as such, its advertising is powered and controlled by Facebook’s own advertising platform. A guide to the technical specifications of setting up Instagram advertisements can be found here: https://business.instagram.com/advertising/.

It is worth noting that, at the time of writing, Instagram allows users to post only one clickable weblink and that is on the user profile page. Users cannot post clickable links in the text that they use to support an image or video.

Here are some top tips on brands getting the most from using Instagram to attract customers:

  • Use professionally shot images where possible.
  • Plan content campaigns in advance and create the required content in advance.
  • Get to grips with industry hashtags, as these are key to growing an engaged audience.
  • Give ‘likes’ and leave comments on relevant content. This is the fastest way to grow an engaged audience.
  • Consider unique ways for the brand to use Instagram. For instance, can a senior member of the team take over the account at an event or to showcase a launch or similar?

Search engine optimisation (SEO)

Search engine optimisation is a longer-term way to find and attract new customers. SEO campaigns do not show immediate results, but over time, SEO, deployed correctly, can transform a business.

SEO is the way in which a brand tries to get its website to appear as high as possible on search engines for terms that it knows its potential customers may use when looking to buy or research a product. For example, a car insurance company would want its site to appear as high as possible on a search engine for the term ‘cheap car insurance’. There are a number of factors that can affect where the insurance website may appear.7

Google is the most used search engine in the world and, as such, the information in this chapter relates to this platform only. It is also worth noting that SEO has a number of key elements that are too complex to cover in one chapter. The website Moz.com is the platform that our agency recommends for clients wanting to get a more in-depth understanding of modern SEO tactics, explained in a really simple way.8

Top SEO tactics that a brand can use to attract and win new customers include the following:

  • Attract links that go from popular websites back to the company website. This is explained from a media and news perspective in the next chapter.
  • Ensure that the company website loads in the web browser as quickly as possible. A key way to ensure this is to make sure that all images shown on the site are as small in file size as possible.
  • Ensure the content that is written for the company website is unique (not copied from elsewhere), well written and explains the necessities in a strong way.
  • Make sure the titles of the pages are relevant to the content on the page and user terms that potential customers may input when using Google.
  • Make sure that the onsite content contains the words that customers may search for when using Google. For example, if a brand wants to appear high in the search engine for the term ‘cheap car insurance’, this must appear multiple times on the website pages and in the website page titles. Do not overdo it, though!
  • Make sure that the website displays correctly in every browser and on mobile phones and tablet. This is called ‘responsive design’.
  • Make it easy for Google to be able to ‘index’ the website. Index is where Google goes through a site to make sure it sees every page. Think of Google as running water; make it easy for it to flow throughout the site. The best practice is a site-map that is a page that shows every page on a site. Typically a site-map is designed in a way that is similar to an actual map.
  • Make sure pages are optimised to keep people on the site and interested. Google knows if someone lands on a page and then leaves immediately because they could not find what they needed, and penalises a website for people not staying on a page for a time that it deems suitable.

Online public relations (PR)

The team at 10 Yetis believe that online PR can deliver the best return on investment in terms of the time spent by a brand managing and deploying campaigns, compared to the wider marketing efforts of that brand.

Online PR is the way in which brands can engage with highly influential journalists and encourage stories to be written about their services or products that are then shown to a mass-market audience. A story in a national newspaper or on an international website can get a company in front of millions of readers.

Not only is the story visible to millions but, if a clickable web link is included in the story, then this also delivers potential customers to the company website and gives a great boost to the brand’s SEO campaign (see Chapter 1 for more information on the benefits of this). In addition, being able to showcase the mention that a brand has had in the media is another marketing opportunity, helps with credibility and can be shared on social media platforms.

The typical way in which brands secure online media coverage is to issue a press release about a pre-agreed company story to journalists. Brands should have a regular proactive campaign plan of stories that they wish to share and that can be written in advance. Press release topics could include: new product launches, new senior level appointments, reaching business milestones, product innovation or commentary on industry goings-on.

The latter (commentary on industry goings-on) is, in our opinion, the fastest way to grow a brand’s industry credibility, demonstrate thought leadership and get links from authority websites back to the company website. This is commonly known as ‘news-jacking’. The brand is, essentially, piggybacking on an ongoing, existing, news story in order to raise its own profile and put its own point across.

As with a press release, news-jacking needs the company to have built up a list of key journalists to whom it can send its news. Using a media database to find the right journalists to target can help with this. Our preferred media database supplier is ResponseSource.9 If that is a budget stretch too far, the brand could read the titles and websites that it is interested in contacting and then use Google to find the journalists’ names.

Quite often, a journalist’s email address is freely available on the website for which they write or the news outlet’s email string is made clear, e.g. [email protected]. In addition, most modern-day journalists and freelance writers have a Twitter account that you can follow and engage with.

With regards to news-jacking, time is of the essence. The fast-paced nature of the modern media is such that journalists have very little time to work on a story and need input very quickly. Brands need to react to breaking news immediately in order to stand a chance of getting their comment used.

Monitoring emerging hashtags on Twitter is a great way to spot opportunities, as is simply having one of the TV news channels on in the background of day-to-day office life. Being fast is not the only factor, though.

It is vital that a brand makes what it wants to say as interesting and colourful as possible. In the same way that a person never wants to get stuck next to a dull person at a party, a journalist does not want a dull quote. Journalists look for controversy and a brand can give this via a more engaging and fun comment, where appropriate.

Top online public relations tactics that a brand can use to attract and win new customers are:

  • React to everything your organisation can give comment on that is breaking in the news.
  • Be fast to react.
  • Make statements and comments interesting.
  • Use a media database to speed up the process of finding key journalist contact information or use Google or Twitter, if budget is an issue.
  • If a brand gets a write-up or a comment in a news outlet, do not be afraid to ask for a link back to the company website.
  • Build relationships over time and try to get to know the key industry journalists – get out and meet them.
  • Make sure, when pitching a story or press release, that the journalist being spoken to actually writes similar stories.
  • Following up a press release with a phone call to a journalist increases the chance of the story being used, but never ask if they got the release (journalists’ number-one pet hate) and keep in mind that journalists have very limited time.
  • Think bigger than just a press release. Create videos for the media, concept images of futuristic products or similar, web-widgets or common interest quizzes that the media may want to share with its audience.
  • Many news outlets encourage brands to share on social media the write-ups that they have given. Brands that can demonstrate a large following could be viewed more favourably by a journalist.

Lessons for you

  • Monitor and react to the hashtag #journorequest on Twitter to find media opportunities direct from journalists, freelance writers and influential people on social media. This is the fastest brand growth-hack there is.
  • Where appropriate, piggyback on national days on social media (for example, National Pie Day, National Chip Day) and create relevant branded content that can be shared, and use the relevant hashtag.
  • Remember to include calls-to-action in all of your campaigns, such as ‘buy now’, ‘click to read more’, ‘sign up to our newsletter’ or something as simple as ‘please share this’.

Recommended actions

  • Short term/quick win
    If you are not already doing PPC yourself, start with that. That will give you a benchmark of relative success, then hire a PPC agency, hold them accountable for their ROI so you can justify their fees. Make sure you have them teach you what they are doing, how they are doing it – so you can take over later.
  • Medium
    What social channels are your customers using? Sign up to their advertising service and start testing it.
  • Long term
    Map all journalists/writers that cover topics linked to your business, start following them on social media, reach out to them individually with your best angle for a story. Remember, they are not interested in writing an advertisement about your company, so think, instead, of a trending topic or theme that you have expert knowledge about and offer your help/commentary.

4.1 Deep dive: from social listening to predicting

Can we move from simply observing past customer actions to a world where we can predict them? That is possible, according to Startcount, a social intelligence agency founded and backed by Edwina Dunn and Clive Humby, which previously created Dunnhumby (for more information, visit: www.starcount.com).

For most companies, transactional data will never be able to show retailers the personalities, passions or motivations of their customers. This level of insight can be found, however, using connections on social media. The complex networks around customers provide a rich understanding that brands can use to take audience understanding into the next generation.

Social media can be used in one of two ways. It can be used as a customer service channel and social listening tool and, historically, has been limited to this. Or it can be used as the world’s richest and furthest-reaching research tool. The many connections surrounding each individual form networks that can unlock the passions, motivations and habits that drive customers. Retailers now have the opportunity to understand the people behind transactions, and this level of audience understanding should be used to inform strategy and customer engagement across the business.

Until now, audience understanding for most retailers has comprised either demographics or trying to replicate the Tesco Clubcard model with analysis transactional data. However, few retailers enjoy similar transactional patterns or volumes to supermarkets and, as a result, using the same method to understand customers will not yield the same level of audience understanding. By understanding the connective networks around audiences on social media, brands are now able to surpass this level of understanding. They are able to understand a person’s interest in their own industry, but also their interests in all aspects of their lives.

  • Despite the many claims by the media, browsing behaviour and transactional data will not be able to build the detailed customer profiles that brands desire to know of their audience. For retailers with additional challenges, such as cash transactions or low loyalty scheme engagement, this problem is amplified.
  • To understand a person, we must look to their ‘social persona’. Most customers regularly use some sort of social platform and form complex networks around them by connecting with the profiles that represent their varying passions. Analysing these gives us a 360-degree view of audiences.
  • Content produced by the 13 per cent of users who actually post often is deceptive or selective and an inaccurate or incomplete image of the individual. To understand 100 per cent of users, without bias, we must look to what they consume, not what they talk about – who they follow.
  • Understanding from social media is not restricted just to selected audiences, but to the entire market. This wider view provides the opportunity to understand the competition and a brand’s position in the community.
  • The combination of rich market understanding and detailed customer profiling allows brands to segment their audience with precision and create customer-centric strategy.
  • The real-time nature of social media means that strategy can be adapted and improved continuously.
  • Understanding social data gives a global opportunity to even the smallest businesses, who now have access to a worldwide research and communications tool.
  • Companies who are able to recognise the potential of social media will be able to have unparalleled audience understanding. Accurate understanding will inspire exciting and creative strategies.

Twenty years ago, a revolution took place in retailing. Tesco launched Clubcard and leapfrogged Sainsbury’s to become the UK’s biggest grocer in the space of 18 months. Much of the credit for this huge transformation is attributed to the detailed understanding of customer behaviours that Tesco obtained by analysing data collected by Clubcard for every customer.

Historically, audience understanding has been formed using demographics and retrospective purchasing patterns. In a time where demographics can no longer be indicative of life stage – a 25-year-old could be married with children and a 35-year-old working or studying – audience understanding is a more complicated task. The rise of the ever-present internet that enables customers to analyse a huge range of products (and prices) in their hand wherever they are, has resulted in the decline of brand loyalty and, as such, the decline in loyalty schemes traditionally used to harvest customer data.

Today, this detailed analysis of customer transactions and web browsing behaviour is promoted as a panacea to all retailers. Deep insights into customer behaviours theoretically offers retailers the ability to step change their relationships with customers. However, for most retailers, the ability to benefit from insightful transactional customer data will forever be out of reach.

Grocery is a very distinctive type of retailing; where customers return every week and buy the same or similar products and, even amongst infrequent shoppers, the retailer will see the customer 8 to 12 times a year. Nearly all other retailing is so very different from this. Most retailers will have large numbers of customers who make fewer than four purchasing visits a year, do not engage in loyalty schemes or simply choose to shop with cash. For these customers, building up an accurate image simply is not possible using only a retailer’s own data.

Even for the small group of regular customers, the story is much the same. Understanding the role that the retailer plays in its customers’ lifestyle is much too difficult from the 15 to 25 items they happen to buy. The truth is that, even if companies have huge amounts of transactional data, this rarely tells you anything about the person making the transactions, why they did so or what they may be likely to do next week.

The answer to this lies in their ‘social persona’. The vast majority of customers use some sort of social media platform and leave a detailed fingerprint of their interests and passions open for analysis. This social fingerprint can unlock more than how a customer has spent their money historically; it can give insight about the passions that motivated the people to behave this way, it can bring personality to the data. Social data can show the media consumed, influencers followed and brands engaged with. If this cultural understanding of motivations and aspirations is gained, retailers will be able to see themselves through their customers’ eyes. Until now, social media mainly has been used to provide another form of customer service or for social listening to understand the mood of a select few customers. The much bigger opportunity to understand not just vocal customers, but the whole market, has been overlooked.

This is coupled with the rising expectation of customers for a bespoke and personalised service to provide retailers with a new challenge around audience understanding. Most customers now consider themselves to take part in some form of data exchange; cookies and shopping online are just some of the examples that most people come into contact with on a regular basis. The exchange is accepted. However, in return, people have come to expect to be understood by the brands to which they give data. There is mild outrage now at receiving an email about unrelated or inappropriate products. This expectation means that even large and traditionally data-rich retailers must use other resources to further their understanding of their audiences. The largest, most comprehensive and under-used of these resources is social media.

The way people use social media can be described in two ways: projective and consumptive. Projective social media involves posting content that is usually a carefully curated gallery of the best parts of a person’s social life. It is the highlights and usually is deceptive, showing only a tiny portion of a person. However, this is the shiny version that the person wishes to portray themselves as, not how they really behave. If they are interacting with a brand, usually it is to give (negative) feedback or get something free, and cannot give much indication as to how the person really sees the brand or any of their other interests. To see how customers behave in ‘real life’, brands must look to what they choose to consume instead.

On consumptive platforms such as Twitter, the majority of people tend to be silent. Analysis by Starcount shows that only 13 per cent of users on Twitter regularly tweet. The rest of the audience are characterised by following a high number of influencers and brands related to their passions from which they can consume content. These connections tend to be one-way relationships and result in profiles with huge followings, for example Katy Perry who has 84 million followers globally. The audience use these platforms to create a portfolio of profiles that keep them immersed in their varied passions.

You could be a financier getting market updates, following top chefs for restaurant ideas, getting the lowdown on the newest cycling gear, following your football team and indulging in that guilty pleasure of Daily Mail gossip. Each ‘follow’ enriches the picture built of a person and shows the technicolour image of the individual. No person can be defined by one label, and is interesting to different brands for different reasons. The complex network of connections sheds light on these reasons and it is these connections that are essential to understanding the silent majority, the 87 per cent who do not regularly tweet or post content.

For each individual, the complex network they create by connecting with the profiles in their portfolio is the key to understanding what makes them tick. Starcount has identified 750,000 popular accounts (‘stars’) in social media that account for over 85 per cent of content consumed and codified the genre, themes and topics these accounts represent. The combination of these popular accounts a person follows can show us the different passions and motivations of the individual. These combinations show us who a person really is, not what they project. For many people, if they are asked whether they are interested in celebrity gossip, they may answer with something along the lines of, ‘No, well maybe sometimes for a joke.’ To answer this question accurately you just have to look at the huge volumes of people following celebrity gossip stars; it may not be something a person is particularly proud of, but it does tell a lot about the way they may respond to certain media campaigns or celebrity endorsements.

The connected networks can be expanded and brands can use the social universe to view the entire market, not just the part they inhabit. For retailers, the UK Twitter base of 13.5 million active users can be tapped to create profiles with a level of understanding that takes demographics and purchasing habits to the next level. Similar methods can be applied on other social networks.

Using social media as a research resource allows retailers to understand the wider market place. Traditionally, companies have been restricted by the limitations of their own transactions; it is one thing to understand why a customer shops with you, but why they do (or do not) compared to someone else, brings the understanding to the next level. The connections joining each user and star build up highly intricate networks. By having a view on the entire network, retailers are able to see where in the market they fit. This shows brands how they are seen by their audience in relation to the wider community.

The view on the wider community gives retailers the ability to analyse the size of the market place and the opportunity for growth. The knowledge of the size of the prize, who the prize is and what they are driven by has, heretofore, been unknown. Exploiting this can inform the best use of resources when creating a strategy. In particular, for brands with more limited resources, this can inform the difficult decisions when deciding budgets and strategy.

The social universe allows retailers to understand who the competition is and what their audience looks like. Brands will be able to find out why certain brands are their competition and what their attraction is to the audience. They will even be able to analyse the size of their audience and how they differ to their own. The desire to understand competition is nothing new. However, until now, it has been a dark art, with very little hard data to support it. This has left the understanding open to being highly subjective and difficult to prove. The scale of social data can help to validate and evolve the perception of the competition.

Once the market is understood, this context can be used by brands to enrich the understanding of their audience. Stars on social media include media titles, brands, celebrities, influencers and many more. The variety of stars from every industry imaginable creates a complete picture of the individuals who make up audiences. We are no longer just left with the idea that a Nando’s customer likes chicken, chips and a diet coke. Now we are able to see that this Nando’s customer loves music, their favourite musician is Professor Green and another favourite restaurant is Pizza Express. They do not follow fast-food outlets such as KFC and do not view Nando’s as fast food. The differentiating passions of audiences and the brands/influencers that they consume show us the person behind the purchase.

These profiles can then be combined with market data and used to shape strategy. Once a customer segment has been defined, retailers can understand their appeal to the segment and the benefits they offer. They can also understand the tone of the audience, if they are deal-driven or excited by the new thing. To be noticed by these people, do you need to be cool, reliable or can you attract people with deals and offers? The research and resulting actions should not be restricted to social media strategies. Instead, it should be used at the highest levels when decisions are made on customer engagement strategy.

Using the profiles built by the segments to form strategy allows retailers to begin a cycle of understanding. This can be developed to create sustainable and scalable growth. The feedback from the strategies can be used on each segment to further enrich the understanding. In turn, this can drive ever more precise and innovative strategies. Precision strategy allows brands both to appeal strongly to the relevant audience and to target people, not just modelled types. It also enables brands to avoid overwhelming and annoying the inappropriate audience, those who will never be customers and may resent you for bombarding them. The knowledge of who not to target saves money and effort and allows brands to spend more on rewarding campaigns. The real-time nature of social media means that this evolution of strategy can be continuous and instant.

In an ever globalised market place, being able to trade internationally is a fantastic opportunity for retailers. To do this has, traditionally, been risky and required huge amounts of capital investment. As such, it has been possible only for larger companies. Social media has opened the door for smaller businesses who are now able to create awareness abroad and to get an idea of where and how they should begin trading internationally. The global nature of social media means that retailers are now able attract customers from far and wide and understand markets across the world. Social media offers large potential audiences globally; which people in Asia are Anglophiles and like to follow English heritage brands, key UK celebrities and the like?

These huge volumes of users allow retailers to compare their existing and potential audiences in different regions and tailor their strategies accordingly. Furthermore, it can help retailers to gain an understanding of foreign market places before the launch of a new product. An understanding of local culture and the nuances of a new community prevents brands from entering the market with little research.

Social data is open to everyone, and brands of all size finally have the ability to reach and read the whole market. Gone are the days when only large multinationals could afford volumes of focus groups or scale up IT/CRM systems. In the present day, even the smallest businesses are able to analyse the market, understand their customers and create precision strategies to gain new ones. This poses a challenge and opportunity in equal measure; it is the companies who take advantage of the insight and use this very personal understanding of audiences to make innovative strategic decisions that will come out on top.

Companies have long known that social media is a reserve of data they should be tapping. However, using it just to listen to and occasionally speak with noisy customers has distracted from the full potential of this incredible resource. Using social media as an understanding tool opens up the realms of possibility for the next generation of customer insight and customer-centric strategy. We can now understand who a person is, not just what they have bought or said. Real-time analysis of audiences combined simultaneously with transactional and market data will enable brands to create increasingly creative and detailed strategies and will, ultimately, result in improved customer experiences.

The brands that can take advantage of this understanding and provide the best value to customers will reap the rewards. Big data and precision customer understanding will not be the end of creativity; it will be the fuel to fire a new generation of thinkers and inspire innovative and exciting strategy.

In summary

  • Using only transactional or demographic data to understand customers builds an incomplete picture of a brand’s audience.
  • In the UK alone, there are over 8 million active users on Twitter, each user following an average of 363 profiles. This vast, connected network can be used to map out the passions of each individual, giving an unprecedented level of customer understanding.
  • Precision audience understanding should be used to drive customer-centric strategy at the highest level.

4.2 Case study: Björn Borg

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to reach the target audience, according to the Direct Marketing Association. They found that ROI from email rose from £24.93 in 2014 to £38 in 2015. But, this ROI becomes relevant only if the emails are relevant to the audience and consistently make their way to the recipient’s inbox.

With Björn Borg sending out such a high volume of messages to subscribers, Noelia Guinón, ecommerce manager, recognised the need to make the email messages relevant, if they were going to be effective at capturing the attention of the customer in a short space of time. Poor email deliverability was causing the email channel decline, both in growth and revenue. She knew that the only way to achieve this would require a better use of their customer data.

Key findings

  • Within the first six months, Björn Borg saw positive results. Newsletter deliverability rate increased by 75 per cent, click rates increased by 83 per cent and there was a 66 per cent increase in email-generated revenue, as a result of a more personalised and relevant approach.

Interviewee

Noelia Guinón has been ecommerce manager at fashion label Björn Borg for over two years. Previous roles have included marketing manager for fashion brand Halens and online marketing manager at Consortio Fashion Group. She has over 15 years’ experience in online marketing.

About Björn Borg

Founded by the international tennis star of the same name, Björn Borg is a fashion underwear and sports apparel brand based in Stockholm, Sweden. Initially established in the Swedish fashion market in the first half of the 1990s, it was relaunched as a premium sports fashion brand in 2015. It also sells footwear, bags, fragrances and eyewear through licensees.

Björn Borg products are sold in around 30 markets, of which Sweden and the Netherlands are the largest. The Björn Borg Group has operations at every level from branding to consumer sales in its own Björn Borg stores.

Its online retail strategy

Björn Borg’s business spans multiple channels and uses a variety of messaging strategies. A large proportion of these messages were based on discounting. The brand was founded in Stockholm, Sweden and expanded to become a leading fashion underwear business in the Nordics and Benelux in the early 1990s. In 2015, the brand successfully relaunched as a premium sports fashion brand and is distributed in around 30 markets worldwide.

Part of Björn Borg’s online retail strategy is currently to send out nearly 20 million marketing messages a year to 200,000 email subscribers across 12 markets.

The key projects for the next 12 months are to expand its email marketing campaigns to encompass basket abandonment, post-purchase outreach and product recommendations within its improved brand unified email messaging framework. A major part of this is its ongoing effort to move its messaging away from its focus on discounting.

The Case

The problem

The company wanted to unify the brand under one umbrella to improve sell through and become the number-one sports fashion brand. The business recognised that the way to achieve this was to engage customers with more personalised communications that were more focused on being a part of the Björn Borg tribe.

The solution

Björn Borg decided, ultimately, to go with the email platform provided by Bronto Software. The brand already used Magento’s Enterprise ecommerce platform and the solution needed to integrate easily with the existing ecosystem. The project first launched in May 2015 and, in the first six months, Björn Borg saw good results in the execution of its email marketing.

Creating a consistent brand experience

With a variety of messaging strategies spanning multiple channels, Björn Borg knew that improving brand affinity and recognition were key to unify the brand’s position. This was especially important as the brand worked to take its messaging beyond being based largely on discounting. Guinón explains: ‘We believe that the way to reach our goal is to engage our customers with more personalised communications that are more focused on being a part of the Björn Borg tribe.’

A key part of this, in addition to updating its marketing emails, was to reinvent the brand’s transactional emails. ‘We know these emails are the most opened ones, so why not use them to establish a better brand experience?’ The project has enabled Björn Borg to deliver messages with a ‘spot-on’ brand feeling. ‘Our customers instantly recognise our order confirmations, building our brand awareness even further.’

More engagement – better personalisation

The improvements also enabled Björn Borg to import three types of data into their email marketing platform to enhance their emails, basic address and customer information, product data and images and order history details. ‘We only get a person’s attention for a very short time, so we need to deliver a message they feel is directed at them personally.’ The new functionality allowed the brand to create more relevant and personalised emails.

In addition to this, the brand was looking to ramp up the reliability of their email marketing deliverability. ‘The primary objective was to invest in a platform with rock-solid deliverability. Previously, we encountered a variety of issues, including a high bounce rate that hurt our delivery rate.’

Results

Within the first six months, Björn Borg saw impressive results. Newsletter deliverability rate increased by 75 per cent, click rates increased by 83 per cent and there was a 66 per cent increase in email-generated revenue, as a result of a more personalised and relevant approach.

To encourage new customers, Björn Borg also introduced an email welcome series, which is also delivering sizable results. In fact, the performance of the welcome series has exceeded the standard marketing emails. The click rate is 232 per cent higher, conversion is up by 21 per cent and the revenue from the welcome series is up by 217 per cent.

Three more campaigns, focusing on basket abandonment, post-purchase outreach and product recommendations are already in the pipeline.

Lessons learned

If you want to move away from mass marketing and get more personal, email marketing is an incredibly powerful channel. The results of Björn Borg show just how powerful it can be, if it is approached in the right way. Gaining brand alignment across all types of emails is extremely important to keep customers engaged and grow sales. Whether you are building a premium brand or not, having a smart email strategy in place will prove an important investment. As brands, we get a person’s attention for only a very short time, so the message needs to be relevant so consumers feel it is directed at them personally and will encourage them to respond accordingly.

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1 Tomoson, (2015) ‘Influencer Marketing Study’, http://blog.tomoson.com/influencer-marketing-study/.

2 Our company recommends the following book: Google AdWords for Dummies, Howie Jacobson, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Google-AdWords-Dummies-Howie-Jacobson/dp/1118115619 (Note: our company has no commercial or vested interest in recommending this book).

3 Moreau, E. (2015) ‘The Top 25 Social Networking Sites that People are Using’, http://webtrends.about.com/od/socialnetworkingreviews/tp/Social-Networking-Sites.htm.

4 Facebook guide for brands advertising on its platform, www.facebook.com/business/ads-guide.

5 Shopify is not a client of 10 Yetis Digital.

6 Not a client of 10 Yetis Digital: Advance scheduling tool for social media: https://buffer.com/.

7 Not a client of 10 Yetis Digital: https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors.

8 https://moz.com/.

9 Not a client of 10 Yetis Digital: http://www.responsesource.com/.

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