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While you slept through the social media learning curb, your competitors learned to monetize online conversations. How can you tip the scales in your favor and win points for your brand? Find out more…
1. Who’s Driving This Thing?
If you’ve deluded yourself into thinking you’re driving your consumers instead of the other way around—here’s a reality check—as marketers, we’re in the backseat! If we use this fact as a point of departure, we understand the importance of listening. Marketers need to keep their eyes and ears plugged into the dialogue both on and offline.
2. Ride the Tech Wave.
Your consumers are interacting on emerging platforms, are you out there too? Brands must constantly innovate in order to hold their competitive advantage. Kraft, for example, is staying ahead of the curve by coming up with the iFood Assistant, an application that works with the iPhone, providing recipes and shopping lists for Kraft singles, Jell-O gelatine, and Minute Rice. Consumers pay a one-time 99-cent fee to download the application and—here’s the clincher—sit through advertising. Not only is Kraft getting them to pay for an application, but they’re also feeding advertising and gathering relevant data about consumers in order to better target them in the future. The reason why it’s working well is because consumers see value in the application. The secret ingredient for success is leveraging technology to add value for consumers.
3. Cheaper, Faster Insights.
Back in the day, qualitative research meant big dollars for focus groups and lots of patience while you twiddled your thumbs anxiously waiting to find out what they really thought about your brand. Today, all you have to do is monitor the blogosphere and scan social networking sites for commentary. Brace yourself, you’ll have no control over it, but you’ll know what the problems are, and sometimes, they’ll even tell you how to fix them. Take advantage of these ‘free’ insights consumers offer up online to fine-tune your product or service. There are tools, like text analytics technology, that can make this job a lot easier.
4. Team Up!
Maybe your product or service lacks capabilities that could significantly strengthen it. Consider seeking out a symbiotic partnership, like the one between CNN and Facebook, who recently teamed up to cover President Obama’s inauguration. In one corner, we have CNN, a credible news brand; in the opposite corner, we have Facebook, the virtual water-cooler brimming with up-to-the-minute chatter. These contenders proved their power together: CNN.com Live with Facebook reportedly generated over 21.3 million live video streams worldwide. Moreover, it helped CNN target a younger demographic. Remember to ensure the two brands make sense together. Finding the right partner can help your brand strengthen its current position or reposition itself, if that’s the end goal. |
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