Modern Moms are a different breed from June Cleaver.  Our hair is less perfectly coiffed, we have traded in impeccably ironed party frocks for casual wear and jeans, our social engagements are limited to weekends because we’re usually working during the week, and we know better than to wear real pearls because our babies will just yank them off anyways. 

But the differences are not just cosmetic.  We have tuned into technology in ways that would utterly horrify poor June.  Nielson recently unveiled a report that indicated that Mom is embracing technology more rapidly than nearly any other segment.  Smartphone adoption among mothers has risen to 65%, and Mom is 58% more likely to shop on her smartphone than the rest of the population.  And according to a report released just this month by BabyCenter and comScore, Mom is 20% more likely to use social media than the general population.  She wants to network with other mothers, gain advice from people in her same situation, share her experiences, look for ways to help her kids and family, and voice her opinion across multiple social channels – all from her mobile device. 

An accompanying survey from BabyCenter and comScore has even more impressive stats:

• 59% of moms reported having bought something because a brand posted a special offer or incentive on a social network,
• 44% indicated they made a purchase because they saw a friend like or post about the brand. 

Brands, sit up and take notice!  We Moms check our Facebook and text messages first thing in the morning, not our email, and what we are reading from our Mom friends greatly influences our purchasing behaviors.  What we share in turn greatly influences our friends’ purchasing behaviors. 

Moms are also savvy and have a great recognition of perceived value.  We are eager to share that information with other moms across multiple social channels.  As a rule, we will quickly spread the word about negative or highly positive experiences with a brand.   We know when a ‘freebie’ is a waste of our time, we recognize when we are being offered premium value – and we will be loyal to brands that differentiate between the two and acknowledge our purchasing power.

What does all this mean for your brand, and are you truly achieving your potential with the largest buying segment in today’s marketplace?  Are you engaging with Mom (with ME) across these social channels?  Are you offering a quality incentive for me to be engaged with your brand, and in turn become a loyal brand ambassador for you? 

As the obvious influence of the social media space continues to flourish exponentially and my fellow Shopper Moms roar more loudly, brands that understand, adjust, and respond accordingly to Mom’s buying supremacy, will in turn be rewarded with more from Mom’s wallet. Not to mention the even more valuable prize – Mom’s loyalty voiced across her social media channels.

Cyndi Walker, VP Operations

We have all been customers ourselves and had frustrating experiences; not hearing back from an organization after multiple inquiries or being passed around a call center before being cut-off are common examples.  There are other consequences of not being in touch besides the affected venting to their friends though.  Not having the vital link with the card holders providing your revenue will have other long-term implications for your business.

Whatever you provide, whether it’s a product or service, your business exists because it fulfills a customer need, whether that be health, happiness, or peace of mind.  If customers do not see a need for your product or service, they will stop using it and stop paying for it.  Customer needs evolve over time as lifestyles and technologies change, so keeping up with customer demand is a continuous process.  Making assumptions about what customers want is a dangerous game.  Creating products you think consumers might like, then trying to persuade people why they want them can only work so well.  There is only so much you can do to reposition an offering; if your product is undesirable, you will have a hard time trying to persuade consumers they want it.  It would be much easier to build a product you know customers want, and then highlight the features you know they are already looking for.

The good news is that keeping in touch with today’s customers (and prospects) is easier than it’s ever been.  Communication avenues have multiplied since the onset of social media, removing any semblance of a divide between creators and consumers.  Customers are constantly publicizing their opinions on their experience with your brand, either regarding very specific instances or their wider impression.  Monitoring comments on channels like forums, blogs, Facebook and Twitter can give you real-time knowledge of what customers are saying, whether directly aimed at your brand or not.  As you respond to each comment, you can pick up trends that can be fed into product development; likes and dislikes about what you’re currently offering.

You don’t have to only gather feedback here and there though.  Why not directly ask your customers want they want?  They’ll appreciate your interest and have your brand in mind whilst they’re responding.  You can collect any information you’d like; what consumers think about a recently introduced line or modification, what they’d like to see more of, what they’re not so keen on, how they feel about your pricing, what they’d like to see in the future from your brand; ask them anything.

Now talking to all your customers one-on-one regularly just isn’t feasible.  That’s why surveying can be so valuable; you can capture opinions en masse that point to representative trends.  The process is much more rapid and cost effective than it used to be, and surveying through social media can allow access to demographic data for assessing the makeup of your respondents.  Combine that with the ability to incentivize responses by including rewards, and you have a powerful method of gaining rich results to inform your future product decisions.

In this day and age there is no barrier to being in touch; reach out to your consumers and they’ll reach back.  Connecting with your customers keeps your relationships strong, and should ensure they’re around for a long time to come.

Mark Jones, Product Manager

Sources:

• The Four Steps to the Epiphany:Successful Strategies for Products that Win – Steven Gary Blank
• The Art of Marketing Conference Vancouver -  Scott Stratten

Photo credit: Dell’s Official Flickr Page / Foter.com / CC BY

EdgeRank is a crafty system Facebook uses to monitor the importance of a post.  To put it in layman’s terms, it takes the amount of comments and likes a post receives as input, and outputs a number that ranks its importance. The higher the EdgeRank – the more light of day the update receives on the Facebook Newsfeed, which is where you want to be.  Higher EdgeRanks display a post to a wider net of fans and for a longer period of time. 

A brand’s focus should be less about garnering new fans, and more on increasing fan engagement with existing fans.  Is engagement the Alpha and the Omega? No. The all-encompassing performance measurement for brands is sales. However, treating your fans as fans, not Likes, assists in building an engaged community that will be more responsive and reactionary to the products/services your brand is trying to sell. An engaged Fan is also more likely to remember your brand when they make a purchase decision.  Considering this, more comments and more activity is the #1 goal when posting status updates. Here are 5 things to remember when trying to engage your fans and increase your EdgeRank.

1. Offer Compelling Content: It’s very hard to have a conversation with a boring person.   The same goes for your brand.  Ensure that you’re status updates/posts zero in on what matters most to your fans.  Engage your fans with valuable content, solutions to problems and questions that intrigue them to answer.

2. Promote Sharing: This is super important.  Facebook was built around the ability to share.  Your fans engage in the act of sharing content the second they log in Facebook.  Provide your fans with shareable content to amplify their sharing habits.  Your Facebook fan is far more engaging if they have the ability to include a friend in the process.

 3. Timing is Everything: When’s a good time to update status/post?  The majority feel fans engage more on weekends than weekdays.   You’ll also experience better engagement after 8PM as the greater population are wrapping up their day (work/dinner) and have more time to surf their social media.

4. Photos: Rapid success with the likes of Pintrest/Instagram has proven that people are infatuated with images/photos and love sharing them.  Pictures tell your brand’s story in an extremely quick and easy manner.  Encourage your fans to submit photos of their experiences with your products/services.

5. Incentivize All of the Above: Lastly, a small reward goes a long way and giving a little to get a little never hurts.  Offering an incentive for your fans’ efforts is the best way to amplify social engagement and sharing.  And it gives back. Facebook is too often a one way street for Brands to push out marketing messages. Brands need to be engaging their fans with content that resonates, engages, and provides the fan with something in return for their time and attention. Remember, more comments and more activity is the #1 goal when posting status updates and rewarding fans/consumers, is a great start to climbing the EdgeRank ladder!

Remember, treating your fans as fans, not Likes, assists in building an engaged community that will be more responsive and reactionary to the products/services your brand is trying to sell. An engaged Fan is also more likely to remember your brand when they make a purchase decision. 

Think Fans, Not Likes

Everton Lewis Jr, Partnerships Manager

Photo credit: infocux Technologies / Foter.com / CC BY-NC

This downward trend for the recording industry represents an entry into the decline phase of the standard product/business life cycle. But this could have been prevented, and all hope isn’t lost yet for music. The music industry is not unlike any other business or industry that reaches maturity and must react. In maturity, sales are leveling and sometimes declining, firms fight to get and maintain market share and keep out any new entrants, operations are consolidated for more operating efficiency and a focus shifts to branding and securing a competitive advantage in order to maintain and stay in operations. Often at this stage, the introduction of a replacement product can rejuvenate a market or company significantly and new sales of the replacement can replace the loss on older product lines. Even Coca Cola has had declining unit sales at times, responding by reinventing, re branding or re-marketing their products and thus maintaining sales within a reasonable bracket and keeping their brand in maturity for decades – think Coke zero, Coca Cola Vanilla, etc.

In the maturing music industry, that ‘new product’ or ‘replacement product’ was a new music format, the MP3 (as seen in past with the emergence of vinyl, cassette and then the CD). But no one (and by that I mean the music industry, and retail partners) saw it as that, perhaps because the music industry didn’t ‘create it’ like they had other formats of music. The uniqueness of the MP3 format lay in the fact that it was a not a replacement in its entirety either, rather a complimentary format that would emerge from a parallel universe – cyber world, the net, online. It was digital – something unknown to most industries and definitely new for the music industry at the time. The new format and new world would allow consumers choice and access to multiple channels for music consumption.

But the response of the industry at the time wasn’t to support digital MP3′s as the next ‘version’ of their product line…in fact quite the opposite. Instead of supporting it, building digital channels to monetize it and marketing the MP3 (or digital music) as the next format, what were labels doing? They were fighting it, spending time trying to enforce copyright, shutting down peer-to-peer sites, and arguing copyright laws, meanwhile losing space at retail for their product to other more profitable goods. I’m not saying that these are not important concepts or rights for the industry to hold – I have been employed in the music industry for most of my working career. However, if as an industry, when your new format emerges to replace your last product, and you do not adopt it, market it and offer consumers viable methods to purchase that new format, but that format is widely available on the internet via peer-to-peer file sharing sites, how do you expect people to not consume it for free? The MP3 went viral in 1994, yet no one in the record industry, nor the ‘music retailers’, responded. Finally, in 1999, Apple bought a small start-up and renamed it iTunes in 2000, six years AFTER the explosion of MP3’s on the net.

The ironic part is that music consumers in today’s economy of abundance are actually consuming more music than ever before and accessing music across a multitude of platforms, including live, physical recorded, digital recorded, peer-to-peer, streaming, music videos, music in games, and many more. Technology has increased our access to content. In the next few years, global spending on Entertainment and Media is expected to grow to $2.1 Trillion, 67% of which will be revenue from digital content (music, movies, eBooks, etc.)¹. For the first year in many, overall music sales are up 3.1% vs. last year²; largely driven by the access technology has afforded consumers in obtaining music content across their devices. Now imagine if that had been the case from the start and consumers had access to digital music from legal sources and viable alternatives to pay for that music from these legal sources. Would that have changed the decline of the music industry? Would it have changed this notion that many consumers still have that music is free?

Camille Kennedy, Sales Solutions

Sources:

1. http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/global-entertainment-media-outlook/data-insights.jhtml
2. http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/04/download-me-maybe-u-s-music-market-up-by-3-1-fuelled-by-1-3b-digital-track-sales/
3. Chart: http://www.tomspencer.com.au/2009/01/25/product-life-cycle-model/

One of the things that always amazes me is how far a promotional PIN Code can travel: from the point of where it was acquired, to the place that it was redeemed. Tracking the path of the promotional PIN Code is a science in and of itself and it requires analyzing data from several different sources. These sources include data from the company that distributed the PIN Code, Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, the Social Graph, and our own internal reporting systems.One of the most important places to start is to understand the ability of assigning a PIN code to a specific product, store location, or both.  PIN Codes can be generated in batches and can be applicable to a specific product and POS.  This allows for a deeper dive into the analytics of the consumer.

When the consumer takes the promotional offer, they go home with their product and their PIN Code.  They sit down at their PC or Tablet and enter in the web address of the promotion (sometimes they do it from their smart phone before they even leave the store).  The user logs into the promotional site with their Facebook account and applies the PIN.  They browse the site and find a product for which to redeem their PIN Code for.  They download their product and that is where the fun of analytics begins.

First, you know where they purchased the product and often what product was purchased.  Then, you know who they are based on the consumer using their Facebook login to access the promotional site.  Depending on the level of Facebook permissions that are requested (which is flexible) you can gain valuable insights into things such as what their Likes are, how many friends they have, where they have been via Facebook Places (e.g. a competitor’s store near your retail location) and many other data elements that are available via Facebook.  Now the Google Analytics data comes into play.  Google Analytics can show you the products that they looked at on the promotional site, seeing how long they were on the site for, what kind of platform they are on (Windows, Mac, Mobile, etc.) where they were physically located when they took the promotional offer and how long they were engaged on the site.

When all of this information is viewed in the aggregate it can give you an incredible insight into your customers’ profile.  Combine that with the ability to segment the consumers into user types and it becomes even more powerful.

Understanding consumers and more importantly your customers, starts with getting access to the data.  Once you have that data the ability to slice and dice it are endless. Access to all this consumer data starts with a PIN Code given to the consumer as their reward: A simple PIN Code that unlocks a world of data.

Chris Boyle, SVP Engineering

Facebook uses the data collected by our applications and helps our clients understand who is participating in their promotion.  This is all collected using the permission set requested from and granted by the end user when they open the application.  We are able to collect this data in two different ways.  First, our sites can include a Facebook login feature.  This removes the burden of manual account creation and gives the end user a simple way to access the promotion quickly and securely.  The second means is through our Facebook application, which places a store directly on our clients’ Facebook pages.

Facebook offers several levels of permission sets.  These permission sets must be directly requested from the end user and the end user has the ability to grant them and gain access to the promotion or to decline them and not gain access.  Facebook allows us to use the information obtained from users who grant these permission requests. This information allows us to measure participation rates, demographics (especially age and gender trends), traffic over time, growth and retention rates. We can combine this data with Google Analytics to develop a picture of the end user and track their behavior from purchase to promotion.

The most commonly used, and the minimum permission set, is called ‘basic info’. This permission set allows app makers to access the users name, profile picture, gender, networks, user ID, list of friends, and any other information made public.

In addition, developers are allowed to request additional extended permissions. This is a selection of my favorites:

• Email address
• Friends list
• Mailbox, granting the app the ability to read the users mailbox
• Read requests which allows the app to see a user’s friend requests
• Read stream, allowing the app to access the users news stream and to search the news stream
• Create event which allows the app to create events
• Publish check-ins, enabling the app to check in on behalf of the user
• Publish actions which allows the app to post on behalf of the user including content, comments, and likes

With all of these options, it may be tempting to request all possible permission sets from the end users. The drawback is that extended permission requests often lead to lower acceptance rates and thus lower participation in the promotion. We can measure this within Insights using the Total Impression vs. Total Accepts metric. In a recent promotion, dropping an extended permission request increased acceptance rates by 23%. This is why it is a good idea to monitor this acceptance measurement throughout your promotion to ensure your participation rates are consistent and as high as possible.

Overall, Facebook app permissions and Insights reporting are powerful tools.  They can provide valuable information on who is participating in the promotion and how effective the campaign is at reaching the desired demographic. I take great pleasure helping our clients collect and interpret this information.

These technology companies understand the ever evolving consumer trends, and the optimal ways to reach the most valuable shoppers in a way that traditional media does not.   Still today, 93% of all products in the US are sold at physical retail locations.[i] A brand can saturate retail locations with ingenious promotions, but today’s consumers are shopping with their digital shopping companions (mobile phones) instead of relying on a store employees or a friend. The digital world has met the physical world, and the two must be integrated to provide relevance to consumers when it comes to in store promotions. The marriage of the two is no longer an optional strategy for brands, it is a necessity.

For major brands, direct relationships with technology companies are becoming a competitive advantage.  Mondelez, Campbell, PepsiCo10 and Nestlé’s Brand Center of Excellence, are examples of the growing relationships between brands and tech companies.  CMO’s are looking to lead the way in marketing innovation, and having teams dedicated to finding new technologies has become a priority. Startup companies such as Hip Digital have developed promotional marketing technologies that integrate digital forms of rewards, such as premium digital content (music, movies, mobile apps and eBooks) into appealing in store promotions that can help brands not only engage consumers, but increase sales and provide far more advanced buyer insights.  Integrating in store promotions across mobile, social, web, allows the brand to engage the consumer across multiple channels and to learn more about their consumers while reaching them in an interactive way.   

As this post comes to an end, I ask you think about how your brand is using mobile and digital to drive sales.  Are you able to identify individual buyers?  Are you able to identify repeat purchases?  Are you able to differentiate your product at POS?  If you did not answer yes to all of these questions, it is time to adjust your strategy and think forward.  Mobile and digital are here to stay.  The need to merge online research and behavior to offline shopper marketing is a necessity.  The good thing is that you don’t have to do this yourself.  I suggest that you look around, better understand HOW people are interacting with modern technology, determine where technology is headed, then begin to test different solutions that will position you and your company to capitalize on these new behaviors.  Having the right tools to recognize your actual buyers and market to them more effectively, plays a huge role in prioritizing marketing initiatives.  Brands not embracing digital technology as part of their traditional marketing methods are soon to be left behind.

Peter Abualzolof, Partnerships Manager

Sources:

As part of an ongoing desire to measure digital marketing efforts, brands have really been eager to understand how their digital efforts are impacting specifically in-store traffic, and ultimately sales. While the market continuously moves toward more sophisticated technology, there still seems to be an unknown as to whether digital and social marketing initiatives actually moves the needle.

Over the last few years, several companies have fine-tuned sophisticated technologies which reveal insightful data about consumer actions online, including impacts on digital and e-commerce sales. For example, established industry powerhouse Adobe Systems is well-along in capturing invaluable data on consumers everywhere they interact with a brand, e.g., mobile phones, tablets, and the like. Another standout is a new start-up named Tapad Inc., who is doing amazing things with multi-device advertising, and providing a way for companies to engage with consumers in a consistent manner, with ads across platforms. Under all accounts, engaging with consumers and capturing data on them has become easier with technology. However, they are still missing clear data that shows a correlation between interactions with consumers online, and the hard metrics for in store sales that may follow.

Some brands and retailers are finding work around methods with social media tactics in-store: “checking-in” and using location based applications to learn more about the in-store social shopper. Others are using neighborhood-level advertising to stay relevant in this digital era. A great example of this is Walmart, who has a localized strategy on Facebook, customizing the marketing messages for each of its 3600+ stores in the US. They are creating personal connections with shoppers and fans by offering tailored communications about local deals, events, and distribution of products.

Advanced partnerships like such between Facebook and Datalogix, aim to tie retailer loyalty card data (email addresses) against fans on Facebook for a true social to sales metric. But how does this translate for an individual CPG brand who does not have a loyalty card? Is it scalable? How much does it cost, or rather, how much will Facebook charge you to obtain this data?

Are there true solutions to actually track social and digital marketing to in-store sales results in a scalable, concrete manner for brands? Solutions which connect that buyer to online/digital interactions? We have yet to see any beyond in-store promotions and coupons.

Ivan Zavaleta, Director of Sales

Well over 50% of Americans now have a smart phone. We have passed the tipping point. From a brand and retail standpoint, the pervasive growth of smartphone technology is impacting the way consumers shop. What’s more, the smartphone is now an important tool in the shopper journey. In fact, 80% of consumers with a smartphone use their device for shopping finding stores and price checking. Clearly, mobile is a channel that marketers need to give close attention.

Now, many of these mobile statistics might not come as a surprise. However, there is another trend that convergence is driving: Consumption of digital content. I find this next statistic most staggering. The percentage of people NOT consuming digital content, like Music, Movies, Games, and Magazines, is only 1% between the ages of 18 to 44. For those over 45, that number only rises to 5%. Smartphone and tablet technology is helping drive an insatiable demand for premium digital content. In fact, the most popular activities for smartphone users after texting, is listening to music and interacting with apps. Meanwhile, 46% of brands are undecided if mobile will be a key part of their marketing strategy.

An even more interesting statistic is that 67% of consumers like to share music and movies via social media. Not only is premium digital content in high demand but consumers love to share their digital content experiences like reviewing a movie they just watched. 

Technology convergence and digital content consumption deserves some close attention by brand marketers. It is clear that these trends will continue on a growth path and there are opportunities for brands to use digital content as a way to engage consumers. With the growth of mobile phone usage at retail, there is an even bigger opportunity to affect consumer decisions with digital content incentives that they can redeem immediately. 

Next time you see that shopper with ear buds, give some thought of how your brand can effectively connect with that consumer via digital content.

Brad Josling, VP Sales

Sources: POPAI, Pew Research, FTI Consulting

Photo credit: Johan Larsson / Foter.com / CC BY

Since our inception seven years ago, we’ve explained our business countless times to customers all over the world.  Yet, it is still exciting to write about it on this first post, perhaps because it feels like we are sharing our passion not just with customers and partners, but also with rest of the world, friends, and family.  Thank you for reading.

WHAT WE DO IS SIMPLE…

We create promotions & rewards programs where the reward is digital content, such as music, movies, mobile apps and more.  We work with brands to determine the parameters of the promotion, select the type and amount of rewards, the place to redeem the rewards (mobile, social media, web), and our technology, The Premium Rewards Platforms, takes care of the rest.  It is seamless, easy and we’ve done over 3,000 promotions to date.

…BUT EFFECTIVE

We found out that premium digital content makes great rewards.  Engaging consumers with coins, trophies or badges goes only so far.  After a while they want something of real value for their time and actions.  When a company like Kellogg’s (a Hip Digital customer) offers music as a reward for purchasing their cereal, they get a threefold benefit. First, they increase sales by advertising a reward at the right place and right time.  They advertise to shoppers while they are shopping with checkbook in hand.  As a result there is often a material increase in sales.  Our customers routinely see a 10-15% lift in sales when they do a promotion, sometimes as high as 30%.  Digital content is what today’s consumers want.

Is there any doubt to that?  Just walk down the aisle in an airplane.  Somebody is either, watching, listening, reading or playing something on their smartphones or tablets, all of which is premium digital content.

The second big benefit is engagement.  When Kellogg’s offers a PIN code on a box of cereal good for a song, the consumer goes to a Kellogg’s branded site to claim that reward.  On average, for the smallest reward, the brand gets an additional two minutes per visit on the rewards site.  For larger rewards, we’ve seen as much as 17 minutes/visit in order to claim the reward.  That is serious engagement.  Why is this?  Everybody loves content.  In the case of music, they sample songs, look at new releases and top hits, all under the experience of one brand.  For a short period of time, our brand customers become entertainment sites where their customers want to spend time on.

….AND DELIVERS PRICELESS ANALYTICS

The third benefit of a promotion with premium content is analytics.  A unique PIN code taken from a product box, and entered in by a consumer (who logged in, say, using FB Connect), lets our brand customers know who he or she is and most importantly that he or she purchased something.  Consumers who come to a Hip Digital powered rewards site are not just fans of a brand, they are buyers.  It is that unique PIN code that bridges the gap between offline purchase behavior and online analytics.

There are a lot of marketing companies out there who can bring a brand fans on Facebook.  Hip Digital not only brings fans but buyers.  There is a big difference between the two, and we not only identify buyers, but we know their content habits; what they listen to, what they play and download.  That data is also available to our customers.  You can learn a lot about somebody from the songs they download, games they play and books they read.  Until recently, such information was not available to brands, now it is.

WELCOME

At Hip Digital, we are singularly focused on helping our customers spend their online marketing funds effectively.  Promotions with premium content, is one certain way to do so.  There are others we are working on.  Stay tuned and over the next year we will reveal new products and new methods to help increase sales and create engagement for our customers worldwide. 

How can we help you?  Click Here to get in touch!

Baris Karadogan, Chief Executive Officer