Statistics support using social in your marketing mix, but how?

Last week, I gave a presentation on “Driving In-Store Sales through Social Media” at the In-Store Marketing Expo in Chicago. After taking the crowd through our Sears Arrive Lounge and Mountain Dew DEWmocracy case studies, I was ready for questions.

I was surprised that the majority of the questions were about social media basics and how to integrate social not only into a company’s larger digital plans, but also into the greater marketing mix. So many marketers feel paralyzed by social media. They’re behind the eight ball and they don’t know how to get ahead. What’s worse, many marketers think that consumers are ahead. I argue that’s only because we as marketers and agencies are letting them get ahead.

Social media must be taken out of the context of traditional marketing campaigns and move into the context of customer relationship management. How will you keep your finger on the pulse of your consumers on an ongoing basis?

We’ve long known that digital communications allow people to immediately take action when they hear a message. The problem is most marketers are ignoring the consumer response. Now more than ever, we must pay attention to that action, and listen to the response. Yet we continue to be driven by the push mentality—pushing messages out to consumers.

For example, one of our clients saw an uptick in online sales, so they were ready to move all communications online and decrease their in-store presence. By doing Personas and truly understanding the customer’s online behavior, we found that people were actually using the store as an important information-gathering tool before making purchasing decisions. Three of the four Personas used both in-store and online tools to influence their purchase. You have to have both. If we wouldn’t have worked with our client to really get in there and understand how the consumer was using digital, we would have ignored a very important part of the purchasing decision. Marketers must appreciate that the true aspect of digital is multi-way communication. And they must learn how to capitalize on that.

For me, one of the most important benefits of social media for the marketer is knowledge gathering. Listen to what the consumer is saying, but then use that knowledge to speak to the consumer in a better, more informed way.

Immersing users in competitive game play increased brand interest

The DEWmocracy campaign we presented at the conference didn’t start as a social media campaign. Instead we were approached with a business problem—how does Mountain Dew come up with its next flavor? The process was taking too much time in R&D, and the client needed a different solution. So we looked at the Millennial target and their relationship with technology. We knew the target would want to be a part of the product development process. You couldn’t just shove a new flavor in front of them and expect them to embrace it, so we decided to build an online game and social network where consumers could actually create and then campaign for the next flavor of Mountain Dew. Users eventually aligned behind three top drink choices, formed teams and collectively worked to enhance each component of their drink candidates to make them stronger and more appealing to the public. When the game closed in January 2008, campaigning for the three finalized drink creations began. Campaigning ended in June, and Americans voted to ultimately determine the fate of the next Mountain Dew from July through August 2008. Based on our recommendation—knowing that the target audience would want to see, touch and feel the product—Mountain Dew actually sold the three contending flavors in stores. At the end of August, Voltage was declared the winner, and the new flavor hit stores that November.

The DEWmocrac voting site included assets to let users evangelize

DEWmocracy had an enormous participation rate of 1.5 million users, with numbers increasing 5-10% every few days. The average time spent per user on DEWmocracy was an astonishing 27 minutes. For reference, reaching just a mere five minutes on a brand website is an amazing feat. DEWmocracy has certainly brought forth an experience that users were interested in engaging with for extended periods of time, over the course of many weeks.

Why was it so successful? Because we listened to the target and engaged in a dialogue. We let them become part of the process. And organizationally, we didn’t pigeonhole social media in the marketing department. Instead we worked with

Top 3 user-generated flavors were sold and encouraged more social activity

R&D, marketing, packaging, merchandising and the in-store team. The entire organization embraced the campaign, and they were flexible enough to listen to what their consumers were telling them.

At the end of the day, my lesson to the conference attendees and any marketer entering or living in the social media space is that we as agencies and marketers need to use all of our resources and mediums (social included) to speak to, listen to and engage with our consumers in order to stay one step ahead of them.

I’m happy to discuss social media, in general, and also how it can drive in-store sales. I’d love to hear about the social media challenges you’re facing. Feel free to email me at: sbava@whittmanhart.com