In the spirit of Monday’s get stuck into a problem vibe, check out this Adliterate blog post about diagnosing the problem to understand where your efforts will be best spent.
A very useful exercise to use when interrogating a client brief, or helping them develop one. And a tool that you could adapt to break down into micro questions for comms to help you get to clarity on what’s really holding back sales.
A lot of brands’ social media strategies revolve around dialogue, CRM or monitoring of buzz and sentiment. But it’s also possible to use social platforms to drive short-term sales or other “hand” objectives. Obviously, DR advertising runs on social platforms, but there are other more creative ways of getting people to act.
For example, Marks And Spencer use their Facebook presence to alert fans to sales, both on and offline. And they create media pitstops, with timed messages suggesting tasty sandwich options just prior to lunch, or easy meal solutions at the end of the day.
Dell use their DellOutlet twitter account to tell followers about stock sales.
Skittles use their Facebook page to maintain a continuous dialogue with 600k+ fans – this is (at least in part) intended to prompt regular reminders about the brand to increase frequency of purchase and rate of sale.
And Orange use their Orange Film Club page to suggest films for people to see on Orange Wednesdays, pushing more people to redeem the offer, meaning more loyal Orange customers and more vocal advocates.
Anyone got any more examples?
We should be considering how we can get people to buy, go instore or act on a brand message when building social strategies for our clients. Perhaps time-limited sales to create a sense of urgency. Or deals exclusive to our social media fans / subscribers to reward them for signing up to our page. Or timed messages to prompt action close to purchase opportunities (eg the end of the day / Friday night / lunchtime / the weekend).
So your client says they’ve got a huge Facebook page populated by friends of the brand/product/campaign. In the hands of a normal planner, it’s just a quanititve measure – a big number – that doesn’t really tell you much.
Unless, of course, you use the new real-time insight tool from Tim Page in Investment. Simply tell Facebook you want a Pulse run done on your client’s page, drop the CSV file into Ivan’s new PulseInterpretationTool and, hey presto, you get a pen-portrait of the punters who’ve taken the time to be Friends with the page.
We’re already used it to recalibrate our targeting on a couple of Universal Music releases, proving that the fans of Delphic and Kate Nash aren’t quite the same profile as the product managers might have thought.
Speak to Tim or me for more details. It’s a small part in a big jigsaw, I know. But it’s real-time data, baby…
Dear All
Have a peek at Ben Malbon, planner at BBH’s view on the issue of Real Time Planning.
There are some really good conclusions / next steps.
Cheers,
Sean
On 13-16th October we attended the Media Business Course in Brighton; a highly prestigious and intensive media planning immersion course which we stole based our very own Real Wold Pitching and Graduate planning training days on.
3 days of some of the most inspirational speakers in the industry (this isn’t a sales pitch, it’s what happened!) are surrounded by the task of working together in a team to answer a tough client brief and then present back a plan to extremely important and scary people in a bid to make it through to the final, and be crowned the winning team!
As the task of answering the brief was rather familiar to us as a business, we’ve picked our joint 4 favourite things about the week which surprised and delighted us –
Julia’s Favourite
I think that the key experience to take away from the whole 4-day event was learning how to work alongside team mates from other areas of expertise and experience. Most teams only had one planner/media agency delegate with the rest being media owners. Therefore, it often fell to the planner to lead the process in terms of format and logical steps. I think I had forgotten that our planning process isn’t obvious to everyone, and can take a bit of explaining to people who aren’t exposed to it every day. It was a good wake-up call therefore to work through the process with people who had never seen it before. Having to explain the process and having people question elements helped me to see our Planning process through fresh-eyes.
All of the members of our group had great creative minds (although sometimes too creative – focusing on what the TV ad would look like – grrr!), and once on board with the process all collaborated to produce the final presentation and media plan. As a planner it was hard once we had agreed on the ‘Strat Plat’ (check the lingo!) and idea not to start drawing the media plan in my head, but having the input from other disciplines helped to slow us down – fully investigating all opportunities and leading to a fully rounded plan.
Team work was also really important because you spent every waking moment in your rooms with your team when there weren’t any presentations. And every waking moment literally meant til about 2 am, so getting on was pretty crucial!
Tracy’s Favourite
I have a fairly laid-back, overly verbose, hugh-grant-“in-the-words-of-the-Partridge-family”-a-like style of presenting. So when , in our 1st run through, my bit lasted for the full 20 minutes allocated for the total presentation, I knew I had to make a change.
In learning to distill the key and salient points, and make sure I stick to a loose-ish script, I managed to get it down to 5 minutes. Combining this, with slowing down my breathing to make sure I didn’t sound too nervous (or be sick), I sounded more confident and assured that I ever have before. This will be massively beneficial to me in the future, and was a personal highlight of mine.
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Because we were awesome, both of our teams made the final (a shout out to James Wigley, a former Mediacom-er (now media owner side) who was in the 3rd team in the final – spot the trend?!), which was wonderful and incredibly scary at the same time.
So, to sum up, if you get the chance to go, definitely do it. You’ll be exhausted, feel like you’re on another planet, but be surrounded by enthusiastic and knowledgeable people, just as ready to share their knowledge with you as you are with them. It will be one of the most rewarding and inspiring things you’ll ever do for your day job.
P.s – Tracy would like to say thanks to Andrea Williams for helping out from afar. And Julia would like to thank Sam for his Media Multiplier and Chris K for the most mammoth Touchpoints ever!