A 3-Step Guide To Planning Social Advertising Campaigns

Editor's Note: The following is a guest Marketing Mulligans post written by Charles Lumpkin, vice president of product management and innovation at BLiNQ Media, the leading Social Engagement Advertising (SM) pure-play media and technology company for the Facebook platform. This commentary, which offers a three-step guide to designing and implementing social media advertising campaigns, originally appeared in MediaPost's Online Media Daily. You can follow Lumpkin and BLiNQ Media on Facebook at Facebook.com/BLiNQMedia or on Twitter at @blinqmedia.
__________________________________________________

The amount of first-party data available on Facebook and other social networks is enough to make an excited brand marketer foam at the mouth. But social media advertising isn’t as simple as just matching ads to consumers. Successful social branding campaigns require careful planning and testing. More often than not, they uncover unexpected correlations between brand and consumer.

When plotting a social media campaign, there are three criteria to keep in mind above all others: creative, targeting and optimization. Consider the following as you prepare a campaign:

Creative
Effective advertising gives users a reason to click. The creative needs to convey this reason, whether it’s a compelling offer or a call to action. Users flock to social media platforms to converse and share with friends, so your creative team should produce short, catchy ad copy with a conversational tone.
With a few creative ideas in hand, you can test dozens of combinations of text and images. Our internal studies have found that images are responsible for 70% of the response rate on social ads, so don’t be afraid to experiment. Test images that are visually jarring or out of the norm.

Every in-ad image should have a single subject, and that subject should take up a large portion of the graphical real estate. Space comes at a premium within social ad units, and group shots can make an image murky.

If you’re using Facebook, take advantage of Like-gates for fanning campaigns and try to match the creative to target sets. Social’s targeting capabilities enable advertisers to match different messages and creative to different audiences for maximum performance.

Targeting
One key step in running a successful campaign is planning. Consider the target demographic and how you might reach them, based on their interests. This can be done concurrently with creative design, as the two fit closely together. When advertising to moms, try daytime TV show targets to appeal to their interests. It is important to sift through many different targets and think about their inclusion in the campaign before it begins.

Marketers would be wise to use Facebook advertising products, like Friends of Connections Targeting, which leverages the social graph to grow their base, building scale off of a group of consumers who match their criteria by targeting their friends.

Facebook’s Sponsored Stories product is also a great tool for reaching new users on the network. This ad format is triggered when a consumer Likes a brand’s Facebook page, application or place. The activity is then promoted across the network to their friends, via a sponsored story ad, increasing the likelihood that friends will notice this activity in their News Feed.

Optimize
Once the creative has been tested against several different audiences, it’s time to optimize the combinations that achieve the best results. Don’t be afraid to kill all the losers, because you’re going to reward the winning campaigns. Once you build new fans, re-market to them to build engagement and drive branding goals.

Even if your campaigns hit your desired level of success, don’t stop experimenting. Constantly ask yourself, if you move more budget to social, will it replicate this success on a larger scale? Can you expand on the targets that are working?

Social advertising is opening a world of opportunity to brand marketers, but some of the biggest opportunities are initially hard to see. Keep experimenting with creative and targeting, because you never know which unlikely corollaries will drive brand results.

© Copyright 2012 MediaPost Communications. All Rights Reserved.

Competition You Can't Ignore

Editor's Note:  The following is a guest Marketing Mulligans post by Rajesh Setty, an entrepreneur, author, and speaker based in Silicon Valley, and a creator and seller of limited-edition prints at Sparktastic. This piece, which discusses the importance of identifying and monitoring indirect competitors, originally appeared in Amex OPEN Forum. Why is this critical? Because most companies only pay attention to direct competitors...the ones who pose the most obvious threats. However, competition can come from a variety of sources, and it's important to know exactly what those sources are so you can devise an appropriate marketing strategy that deals with them appropriately. You can follow Setty on Twitter at @rajsetty.

__________________________________________________

First, there is no product or service that doesn't have competition. And if you tell someone that your product has no competition, what they hear is that there isn't a big market for your product...which isn't good.

Having clarified that, let’s look at the two big categories of competition.

On one hand, you have direct competition for your business — this is mainly other companies that are making the same promises that you are making. Lot of factors about the competitor (such as size of the company, pricing of their offerings, brand and image, etc.) will influence how much they will affect your business.

On the other hand, you have indirect competition. As the name indicates, this kind of competition is easy to miss.

Here are five of them to consider:

1. There is no “real” need now.

This is a mindshare competition. This happens when you create products that are “solutions waiting for problems.” There is a big “lean startup” movement going on (at least in Silicon Valley) where products are co-developed with customers. Most often, that’s not the case—someone develops a product because they see a need for it and assume everyone has that same need. If you have a solution that is looking for a problem, you need to go back to the drawing board.

2. There are mediocre, but less expensive, alternatives.

Whether you like it or not, if there are less expensive alternatives to what you are offering, there will be a large majority of people who will opt for it. Quality and standards are relative and varies based on taste. What one thinks as mediocre may be perfectly acceptable to someone else.

3. There are “minimal” alternatives.

Your gizmo may do everything from video chat to bringing your newspaper in the morning. You may also be adding new features every other month. The point is that not everybody wants all your features. 37Signals built a huge business building products with no-frills. Eighty percent of the people out there can get by using a product with minimal features and 80 percent is a large enough market to focus on.

4. People generally maintain “status quo.”

This is the hardest one to recognize and digest. Before your product or service came into the market, life was going on and life can go on without people having to use your product. In general, status quo will be maintained only because the alternate option is “to change,” which is not easy to come by.

As you design products, think of incentives that you can provide for people to embrace your product. It is harder than you think.

5. New ways of serving “needs” emerge.

You may remember products like Sony Walkman, floppy disks and VHS tapes. During their times, those products were popular and served the needs of people. Things changed and new products that changed the game emerged. With these new products, the way the needs were served changed—be it more capacity, more convenience, speed or new capabilities. Once that happened, the old products became obsolete and entered the end of their product life cycles.

© 2011 American Express Company. All Rights Reserved.

7 Key Lessons Super Bowl Ads Can Teach Small Business Owners

Editor's Note: The following is a guest Marketing Mulligans post written by Barry Moltz, a well-respected business consultant to entrepreneurs, that first appeared on American Express OPEN Forum. With Super Bowl XLV just one week old, and with the Steelers-Packers contest having generated tremendous volumes of traditional media, blogosphere, and social networking coverage for the debut of dozens of new advertising campaigns, Moltz discusses some very important lessons that small business owners can learn from the successes and failures of the brands that ponied up to $3 million for each 30-second spot.
__________________________________________________

Running a small business is a lot of pressure. But, what if 110 million people were watching you everyday like at the Super Bowl? This is the type of stress that businesses face when they advertised last night by spending $2.5M for a 30- second commercial.

For some consumers, the commercials are a very popular part of the event. Super Bowl ads have produced many breakthrough moments in television and many more bombs. There are memorable commercials from the 2010 Super Bowl like Betty White for Snickers and the Old Spice Man. But there have been many more horrible ads like Pets.com sock puppet and this year’s Groupon debacle, displayed below.

So without spending millions of dollars, what can your business learn by watching Super Bowl commercials?

1. Don’t risk everything at once. In small business marketing, it is far safer and more effective to spread your bets by testing many different marketing methods. Homeaway.com took a big risk for a small company running their second Super Bowl ad this year. For your small business, it is far more effective to take patient interim steps. After your company has learned what works and doesn’t work in your marketing campaign, plot the next step. With limited capital, small businesses can’t afford the risk of a “one and done” strategy.

2. Track how the marketing tactic performed. Most companies have a variety of things they do to promote their business. Spending money on marketing is worthless unless your business knows what worked and what did not work. It is essential to get feedback on all aspects of your campaign. It is simple with today’s technology to ask the consumer in the targeted segment to go to your website or use a social media tool to judge results. The Ford Focus commercial encouraged the audience to cheer on their team online and “Watch, Compete, and Win."

3. Deliver on the promise. Denny’s offered a free meal in a 2010 Super Bowl ad. Not surprisingly, Denny’s was overwhelmed by 2 million people showing up the next day for a free breakfast. The goal of the ad was to get people to try Denny’s and then come back. But if the service was bad on their first visit, why would they return? (Notice there was no free Denny’s breakfast this year!)

4. Interact with the consumer. Getting attention for your ad and getting consumers to perform a specific action are very different. Most Super Bowl commercials are now interactive. For example, GoDaddy asked the viewer to go to the web site to watch the end of the commercial that could not be seen on TV. Chevy and Glee produced a car giveaway commercial that the consumer needs to watch at the conclusion of the next Glee episode. Remember, the majority of people watching anything these days will have smart phones with them and can react immediately.

5. Don’t let the humor or drama distract from the brand. Your commercial may have been entertaining, but did consumers remember the brand or what the company was promoting? Doritos had a commercial in which their product brought a dead relative back to life? What does that have to do with the snack? However, Volkswagen’s Passat commercial struck the perfect balance. It focused on the car, but had a little bit of brand help from Darth Vader. The Chevrolet Cruze Eco commercial merged seamlessly their new car and the OnStar feature of real-time updates from Facebook.

6. Be careful not to let a celebrity pitchman overshadow your brand. We all remember Ozzie Osbourne’s line, “What’s a Bieber?” But who was the commercial for? Could consumers look past Kim Kardashian and remember Skechers?

7. Don’t mix your product with politics. What was Groupon thinking with their commercial that played off the issues of Tibet and their company? If your business wants to give money to charity (like the Citibank Thank You ad), that works, but tackling a political issue in a Super Bowl ad is a big risk. Mini Cooper’s “Cram it in the Boot” ad didn’t translate well for American audiences. The Chrysler commercial with Eminem did a fantastic job of selling their company while focusing on bringing back Detroit.

© 2011 American Express Company. All rights reserved.

E-Mail and Social Media: Can't We All Just Get Along?

Editor's Note: The following is a useful and highly-educational blog post, which details how to effectively integrate of e-mail and social media communications, written by the outstanding editorial staff at MarketingVOX, an online publication which keeps marketers and media professionals abreast of industry news, trends, and culture.
________________________________________________

When Ben & Jerry’s announced this summer that it would exclusively market its products via social media – discontinuing its e-mail marketing initiatives – eyebrows were raised. While there has been much debate over the advantages of e-mail versus social media, few advocate entirely ditching one for the other. In fact, the best practice gaining traction is to integrate the best of these channels. Unfortunately few firms have done so, leading to siloed e-mail and social media marketing operations.

The benefits of this approach, though, are clear. A study by Emarketer, for example, called "Maximizing the E-Mail/Social Media Connection," found that joining the two approaches provide new avenues for sharing and engaging customers and prospects. "The two channels can help each other, offering the opportunity for marketers to create deeper connections."

12 Tips
To nudge firms along this path, CoTweet and ExactTarget, in their latest report, The Collaborative Future, offer 12 tips to integrate these channels.

1. Promote Facebook games, applications, and competitions in e-mail and on Twitter.
2. Feature winners of Facebook competitions in your e-mail newsletter.
3. Tweet about exclusive content that’s only available to e-mail subscribers.
4. Promote exclusive deals on Facebook and Twitter, but make it only available to e-mail subscribers.
5. Post links to Web versions of your best e-mails on Facebook and Twitter.
6. Include Like and Follow buttons in e-mail newsletters and promotions.
7. Include links to your Twitter and Facebook pages in e-mail newsletters.
8. Collect e-mail addresses at the point of conversion for consumers who link to your site from Facebook and Twitter.
9. Create an e-mail segment containing Twitter followers, and provide them with additional “insider information” through e-mail.
10. Include questions posted on Twitter and Facebook in your e-mails, and then answer them.
11. Encourage e-mail subscribers to post questions on Facebook and/or Twitter.
12. Host videos on your Facebook page. Include links in your e-mails and post links on Twitter.

© 2003-2010 Watershed Publishing. Reprinted courtesy of MarketingVOX, a Watershed Publishing property. All rights reserved.

A New Year...A New Marketing Plan Part II: How To Build A Marketing Plan For Small Business

I wanted to offer my readers a timely, relevant follow-up to my post the other day which emphasizes that the beginning of a new year is a perfect time to either refresh a business's existing marketing plan, or build an entirely new one from scratch. In either case, the plan must reflect changing market conditions and company dynamics.

Since that post went live, I have received numerous inquiries from small business owners, all with the same question: how do I actually build a marketing plan for my company?

It's not as hard as it might seem. For good, solid guidance on this exact topic, please check out my recently-posted contributed article entitled, "How To Build A Marketing Plan For Small Business," on UnderstandingMarketing.com. This piece provides step-by-step instructions on how to build a marketing plan from the ground up, and insight into the various issues which small business owners must explore when finalizing the scope and depth of their marketing efforts.

If you're not familiar yet with UnderstandingMarketing.com, you really need to be, as it is an excellent resource for small business marketing and communications strategies, tactics, and techniques. Founded and managed by John Sternal, UnderstandingMarketing.com offers readers a bounty of “do-it-yourself” marketing and PR information and advice so they can remain competitive and also maximize tight budgets. The Web site helps by providing how-to advice on everything from traditional marketing, such as direct mail and loyalty programs, to today’s more complex social marketing opportunities found on Facebook and Twitter. Make sure to check it out when you get a chance; you won't be sorry. And it looks like I will be working with John on a regular basis as a frequent contributor to the site.

And as always, please stay dialed in to the Marketing Mulligans blog for even more great content, counsel, insight, and perspectives on marketing and communications strategies for small and mid-sized businesses.

Best wishes for a great weekend...

A New Year...A New Marketing Plan

If you're anything like me, you're still recovering from a very business holiday season, and slowly but surely getting back into full-time work mode after taking time off to spend with your friends and family over the past few weeks. If this describes you, then welcome back to reality! It's really not so bad once you get back into the flow of your normal business routine. Or so I remind myself...

During the initial week of January, I always like to spend the first few days totally closing out the previous year (e.g., filing, completing year-end accounting, preparing financial statements, etc.), and then devoting significant time to finalizing all business plans (i.e., finance, operations, marketing, etc.) for the next 12-month period. As part of this process, I carefully review the plans I have already written, and then modify them accordingly based on specific goals and objectives I want to achieve, specific trends I have identified, and market conditions that I know will impact my company, positive or negatively. Most importantly, I evaluate what worked, and what didn't, in the previous year...across all business functions, including marketing.

And that brings me to the main point of this post. As I've mentioned before in this forum, many business owners simply ignore the strategic planning process altogether, and that's a HUGE mistake on many levels. An even larger error in judgment is to embark on a marketing effort, regardless of its size, without having a detailed marketing plan in place. I see it way too often in the SMB sector, and this approach (or lack thereof!) almost never works out to the company's advantage.

Now that it's 2010, do yourself two favors: 1.) Please don't ignore the strategic planning process; your business will thank you in the end!; and 2.) If you intend to market your products or services at all this year, then take some time to develop a comprehensive marketing plan so there is a concrete rationale and approach in place to guide your efforts as you move forward.

It's a new year, and that means you should have a new marketing plan in hand to assist you. Times change, people change, businesses change, and industry conditions change. All of your plans should reflect these shifts, but your marketing plan will BEST outline how you continue to reach and interact with your core customers as these dynamics remain fluid.