A large online retailer who many of us buy from on a regular basis sells thousands of products online in dozens of categories. They noticed a big drop in conversion rates and revenue per client and didn’t know why.
They went to McKinsey & Company for help, who did a 20,000 person study on consumer behavior and how selling and marketing to consumers has changed. They identified where efforts should be directed to yield the highest return on marketing efforts. Click here to read a great brief about the study – “The Consumer Decision Journey.”
Key Findings
They dug deep into existing online analytics to study the correlation between purchases and quantity of product per category
They used segmentation to calculate likelihood that customers in each category would “cross the aisle” and buy something in another category
After digging into the data, they found the lifetime value of a toy buyer increased greatly when they bought in other categories
Conversely, consumers who bought a lot of pet products did not buy frequently in other categories
After studying their consumer decision journeys they developed cross-selling and category penetration techniques to grow the lifetime value per customer
6 months into this project yielded a jump of 25% in email conversions, 60% increase in on-site conversions, increase in overall sales of 20% and and overall ROI of 30%.
Yahoo! Movies, a division of Yahoo! wanted to get a bigger piece of the multi-billion dollar movie going pie by the summer of 2012 through their Facebook page. Their goal is to become the source for movie goers who love to research, be in the “know,” get VIP passes to early showings, and communicate with other movie aficionados.
They get 24 million visitors on their main website but lack that kind of traffic on Facebook where they see untapped potential to grow their brand.
Joint Venture
Their campaign strategy was a joint effort with their offline partner, Regal Cinemas, who put up banners in theaters promoting the Yahoo! brand along with a QR code pointing to an offer most movie goers couldn’t refuse – free popcorn. People who did a social check-in via their Smart phones and liked the page got the popcorn. Offer applied online also. They would just redeem the popcorn when they arrived at the theater.
The Results From Campaign
1.2 million new Likes on their Facebook page
200,000 Check-ins
1.4 Million minutes spent on Yahoo! Movies Website
$1,000,000 of popcorn given away
Let’s Test Their Million Dollar Spend
They say their long-term goal is not about the “liking” it’s about building an audience of repeat visitors who will engage and make Yahoo! Movies their online source.
The great part about case studies like this is that you and I can take a peek behind the curtain and see if this is hype or really working. Below are the objectives/goals they hope to achieve now since the campaign began a few months ago. I encourage you to go to their Facebook page and see if the goals below are being lived out.
How Yahoo! Measured Success
Target a Season – focus on summer movie season
Hit Fans From All Angles – Reach fans online and offline
Relevant – Reward movie goers and capture “Likes” in return for continued activity on their Facebook page
Connect More – Interact with more movie fans via their website and Facebook page
Become The Movie Source – provide great content to keep fans coming back to their page regularly
My Take
I would question their last two goals – connecting and becoming the source. Out of the 2.15 million fans, they are not averaging the comments and interaction I would expect to consider this successful. It’s about amazing content and some of their biggest days of activity are based on movie blockbuster debuts or contests/giveaways they may be doing in a certain month. Their ratio of commenting back to people is very low and not that of a Sage archetype or the “in the know” type of a person I would expect running the page.
To view the full case study on SlideShare - go here. What do your think? Was it successful?
Recently, Coke was so bold, they shared their marketing plan with the world on how they will own a disproportionate share of the conversations of popular culture by the year 2020. The mastermind behind this new direction is Jonathan Mildenhall, VP Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence at Coca-Cola.
The videos below are a profound look into the future of digital marketing. It will not be about the creative twist or angle or brilliant call to action to move you to buy a product. Soon, to succeed companies must think like inventors willing to invest in the cost of generating great content (blog posts, white papers, eBooks, videos, marketing campaigns). It’s the willingness for your CEO to create an R&D department in your company just for content creation. See 70/20/10 below. Think about Shakespeare’s masterpieces. They are inventions that came about after a heavy intellectual investment in “R&D like” practices and systems to create those works. To become relevant in the ever increasing noise of sales pitches and reused copy online, companies who adopt Coke’s goal to produce compelling content will succeed.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Future In Coke’s Eyes – Become Dynamic Storytellers
Dynamic storytelling is the process of identifying incremental elements of the brand’s core story and then dispersing those elements systematically/consistently across multiple channels of conversation for purpose of creating a unified brand experience. Your core story is the essence of what made you, including the ups and downs, the ugly and pretty. It’s not a sales pitch. It’s something all your employees can tell easily and is not memorized. It’s a unifying cry to all and a story new hires want to be part of unless you are a losy brand/company run by a selfish boss who is out to take and not serve. In that case, don’t read any further. You are doomed.
5 Types Of Dynamic Storytelling
Serial storytelling
Multi-faceted storytelling
Spreadable storytelling
Immersion and discovery storytelling
Engagement through storytelling
Keys To Success To Win The Content Wars
Behave like a ruthless editor to stop noise from getting through. Don’t extend conversations on your Facebook page that leave your core brand story. Let your tribe carry it forward but be focused. Every day, there is more and more noise online. Put a “Brita” filter on your content faucet.
Build system wide capabilities as in new processes, people, compensation plans, and technology to allow for dynamic storytelling.
Evolution From Content To “Liquid Content”
What is content – Coke holds a higher standard when defining content. They see it as stories expressed through every possible connection and channel that (1) add value and (2) add significance to people’s lives. Content is the “matter” or “substance” of brand engagement and conversation.
What is liquid – elements of content that move freely amongst themselves but do not become separate stories.
The 70/20/10 Liquid Content Investment Principle
Pay special attention around 3:30 into the second video and pause and take notes for you to fully understand this principle. It is a primary key to their vision over the next 10 years.
70% of your content and investment of time and money – Low risk content
Should take less than 50% of our time to produce these blog posts, stories, testimonials, campaigns… This pays the bills and gets the word out.
20% of content – this is where we innovate from what worked from the 70%. What took hold there we carry forward to this area.
Engages more deeply with a specific audience
We should invest 25% of our time and resources here but with higher paid writers and creative types.
This content still has the ability for broad scale and appeal.
10% of content – brand new ideas. Becomes next year’s 70% and 20%. This is high risk – this goes viral over night or fails as quickly. This is where you spend your R&D budget in content. The invention of great content is just that, an invention of something new to the world that you develop. You need to be investing in your future stories. This is where that is done. This is where a lot of A/B testing can happen.
This should take up 25% of our time and resources.
Paradigm Shifts To Consider
Going from design excellence to CONTENT excellence.
Move from one-way storytelling to dynamic story telling.
You need to produce sharable ideas/stories/concepts that earn a disproportionate share of popular culture (Own a Topic).
Constant iterations of your content, not replication of your production content.
Stop thinking in 30 second commercial bites and elevator pitches and website home pages. Think in story and evolving conversations.
Don’t stop campaigns too early. Keep the conversation fueled and going.
Pre-testing and approving content before campaigns begin can kill the campaign in this new world of evolving stories on and offline of a brand.
Plan your budgets (pad them a bit to be ready) that initiatives will evolve as they are being rolled out and allow for real-time testing during campaign so you can adapt as needed
Think in forms of tent poles (quickly setup shop like the Circus city to city) and tent pegs (hold the tent “core story” in place).
Now that you’ve got your YouTube video uploaded and live, it’s time to learn more about who’s watching your video, where they’re coming from, and what parts of your video they’re most interested in.
Today’s viral campaigns may seem like jackpots in a one-in-a-million lottery, but it turns out they are well within the reach of any marketing team’s grasp. All it takes is knowing the secret ingredients behind some of the world’s most talked-about campaigns.
By reverse-engineering each element of a successful viral campaign in your industry, Tod Maffin will demonstrate the key markers that can launch a campaign into the viral stratosphere — markers that can be programmed into the smallest budgets. He will literally “deconstruct” a viral campaign, piece by piece, then show you how to re-assemble a campaign for your own organization.
And, using his ASSURED ROI™ methodology, he’ll detail each of the six action steps required for launching an impactful and measurable viral campaign.
You will never look at a viral campaign again the same.
Contact Tod directly if you’re interested in having him present this engaging, fun, and information-packed keynote to your organization or conference. Or visit http://www.DeconstructingViral.com for full information on the presentation.
“Quite simply, Tod blew our audience away. His Deconstructing Viral presentation gave our members a clear view inside the inner workings of successful viral campaigns. Both entertaining and packed with information, Tod’s presentation was a huge hit.” — Tracy Campbell, Vancouver Board of Trade
“Tod engaged and entertained our audience right from the start. His Deconstructing Viral talk was a seamless presentation — exciting, educational, and cholk-full of insight. Feedback from audience members included: ‘Great speaker with great content and vivid presentation!’ and ‘Tod is funny as well as smart. As he said: ‘Laughter is one of the keys to a successful viral campaign.’ It’s also key to a winning presentation!”
— Monica Hamberg, Third Tuesday
Jaremy Rich at Viralogy.com has posted a great article about social media ROI and makes the point that social media is, indeed, measurable — the problem, though, can lie in using that measurement model twice. For instance:
If one major influencer picks up your social media campaign and promotes it to their followers, you have a big outlier problem (not the worst problem to have, to be sure). Sure, you can measure and report on the results of that individual campaign, but moving forward, you’re going to have issues duplicating and predicting future success.
The problem is with data extrapolation. If one user with millions of followers retweets your post, it changes everything. It’s just like if a new post or viral video you’ve made lands on the Digg front page – an event that provides an exponential boost in traffic.
Though you can measure that one event, it will be extremely difficult to account for that when predicting future events. So if you’re running a contest that costs $5,000, it’s certainly something to keep in mind. If you consider each impression on Twitter to be worth one tenth of a cent ($0.001 – due the relatively small number of people that actually *read* each tweet), a retweet by @aplusk would put you immediately at break-even when your campaign might have otherwise lost thousands of dollars
Tod Maffin, President of engageQ digital, is a digital communications strategist, specializing in social media, mobile marketing, and viral marketing. [keynote speeches | bio]
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