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The Numbers Are In

Social marketing is no longer a novelty. It’s a significant part of any retailer’s marketing strategy, and top executives will demand the kind of documented results that they expect from other marketing efforts. One important aspect of social marketing to measure is how well a company does in creating consumer advocates who will share their enthusiasm about a brand with friends across social networks, e-mails and other online channels.

Social referrals can turn into significant revenue because consumers are sharing so much online these days. That includes updates, conversations, recommendations, photos, tweets, posts, shares, or +1s. Consumers share something 4 billion times each day on Facebook, 200 million times on Twitter, and 1 billion times on Google+. Research shows social networks reach 82% of the world’s online population and represent 1.2 billion users worldwide. What’s more, one in five minutes spent online is spent social networking. READ MORE

Social Search And The Rise Of Consumer-Generated Content

With more than 1 billion searches a day on Google, it is no wonder marketers spend the majority of their search dollars there. In fact, in 2010, 97 percent of Google’s revenue came from search. Marketers know their consumers are using Google to search and are investing accordingly — however, the rules of the game are changing.

Consumers are sharing more online every day. Currently consumers share 4 billion things on Facebook, 200 million things on Twitter and 1 billion things on Google+ every day, and Mark Zuckerberg predicts that each year, consumers will share twice as much as the year before. In addition, consumers now turn to their peers, and even strangers, for recommendations and information on brands and the products or services they sell. As stated by Nielsen, 92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from their friends and 70 percent of consumers trust opinions posted online. This massive shift in consumer behavior has been reflected in the new search engine algorithms rolled out by Google and Bing, and those algorithms now include consumer-generated content as one of the key factors in determining brands’ search engine result placement (SERP). READ MORE

Video in a Web 2.0 World: Building a Social Strategy

Consumer-generated video is another innovation that corporations are using to spread and support brands as a sort of word-of-mouth on steroids approach to what has long been a very influential factor in marketing-simply getting consumers to spread the word about your products and services.  

Angela Bandlow is with Extole, Inc., a social media marketing company based in San Francisco. “The basis of what we do we call social referrals,” says Bandlow. Extole has had success with this concept through leveraging advocates and generating word-of-mouth marketing to drive measurable social results through referral plans, promotions, and testimonials; it is now moving into the use of video as another online tool. “Video is our newest offering,” says Bandlow. “Getting real people to say real things about your brand-it’s a much more engaging medium.” READ MORE

Extole Selected as Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD)

 
San Francisco, CA, April 20, 2012 – Extole (www.extole.com), the leading Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) Social Marketing Platform, today announced that it has been named a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD). To be selected, Extole went through a rigorous application process and was selected based on it proven ability to build integrated Facebook apps for its C2C Social Marketing Platform.

“Consumer sharing on Facebook is more than doubling annually, making it all the more important for brands to harness the power of their consumers to help influence advocacy. At Extole, we are dedicated to ensuring our platfrom seamlessly integrates with Facebook, while offering the best solutions to power C2C Social Marketing,” said Brad Klaus, CEO of Extole. “We’re thrilled to be a part of Facebook PMD program and look forward to giving brands and agencies new and exciting ways to engage and interact with their consumers.” READ MORE

Turn Customers Into Brand Advocates

J. Hilburn provides men’s luxury clothing via direct sales. Not only is J. Hilburn the reseller, but it is the manufacturer as well, and 1,400 sales representatives resell the merchandise. All sales are done direct through field reps, called style advisors, as well as through its e-commerce channel. The retailer conducted a survey among its 30,000 customers and nearly 50% of respondents reported that they were referred to J. Hilburn by current customers. Neal Patel, VP of technology at J. Hilburn, explains why the company’s homegrown referral program was not robust enough to grow the business.

 J. Hilburn’s homegrown referral program worked for field sales representatives, but didn’t provide value to the customers. “Our homegrown referral program was small with little room for growth,” says Patel. “The referral program was built into our ordering platform for our style advisors. For example, when the style advisor met with a customer, the style advisor knew that person was referred by someone else. At that point, the style advisor would log in to the system and place the order. The style advisor would then be able to link the new customer and the person who referred them. The process needed to shift from the style advisors’ hands to that of those customers.” READ MORE

PURL Jam: 6 ways personalized URLS can help increase the virality of your campaigns

Virality is that state of marketing nirvana where your campaigns are liberated from the earthly confines of your own media spends and marketing efforts, and take on a free-floating life of their own.

As I’ve said before in “Social Media Marketing: Going viral is so easy it’s hard,” I don’t believe there is any secret to going viral, but you can position yourself well for that opportunity. That blog post has a few of the factors that influence your chance of going viral, but in today’s post I want to focus on one very specific tool that can help your efforts — personalized URLs, also known as PURLs. READ MORE

Driving Measurable Results from Social Referral Programs

Social media and its impact on consumer behavior and marketing is top of mind for every marketer. Brands have made significant investments in building social marketing presences and amassing social followers, but the question remains – what is the real value of these social marketing initiatives? From fans and followers, “likes” and engagements – the metrics used to quantify success have yet to be standardized. As we enter this new phase of social media marketing, the focus has shifted to drive real, measurable results from social marketing investments

With the exponential increase in consumer online sharing and the reach of social networks, brands have a new opportunity to tap into the power of consumer-to-consumer (C2C) sharing across channels to drive quantifiable results via social referral programs. Social referral programs, by nature, tap into consumers’ desire to share information and content with their friends and peers, resulting in C2C dialogues.

By properly harnessing the power of these C2C dialogues, brands can identify their highly engaged, loyal customer advocates and turn them into social advocates who, in turn, refer the brands and the products or services they sell to their friends across their social communities. READ MORE

The Art of the Social Referral

Word of Mouth marketing has been around since the town crier stood on the street corner hawking the day’s news. But with the dawn of the internet and social media specifically, the concept has expanded. We’ve gone beyond what one housewife tells another during their weekly bridge game. Now, we have one person broadcasting their opinions to hundreds, even thousands with a single Tweet or Facebook post.

These social referrals are extremely valuable to a marketer. So much so, that it’s often worth rewarding customers for spreading the word among their friends. But managing and tracking such a program can be overwhelming so I asked Angela Bandlow, VP of Marketing for Extole to offer some tips for making the most out of social referrals. READ MORE

Climbing the Search Engine Rankings Ladder

The way people share and consume information online is changing rapidly. This creates both a challenge and an opportunity for marketers as they strive to keep their brands top of mind for consumers. The challenge is that consumers now not only influence brand awareness and perception, but they also affect brand search engine rankings.

The increasing amount of online sharing gives marketers a way to harness the power of consumers. They can encourage them to create and share content that can improve brand awareness and perception, as well as search engine result placement (SERP). Keeping this in mind, marketers must build strategies that drive the creation and sharing of consumer-generated content about their brands and the products and services they sell. READ MORE

Referral Program: 18,000 Customer Participants Create More than 60,000 Shares, $100,000 in Sales

With a highly engaged customer base, a referral program is a winning way to get those customers to become brand advocates and even help drive sales. This case study looks at a provider of extended warranties for consumer electronics that knew it had some very engaged customers based on tracking online mentions of its products. To tap into that energy, the marketing team created a multi-channel referral program and sweepstakes incentive that included direct mail, email and social media to get about 18,000 referral program participants over three months.

CHALLENGE
SquareTrade, a provider of extended warranties for consumer electronic products, knew within its extensive database it had some devoted customers. Some of these customers purchased multiple warranties for a number of different products. Will Spencer, Marketing Manager, SquareTrade, said the company noticed the positive word-of-mouth SquareTrade would receive from a subset of its customer base. It also noticed a lot of this “brand evangelizing” was coming from owners of extended warranties for Apple products such as iPhones and iPads. He stated, “The opportunity for us was to capitalize on the enormous amount of positive word-of-mouth that SquareTrade has.” READ MORE