Marketing Consulting/Omni-Channel Marketing: Offline and Online
A recent Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey shows that:
In case some wondered, FDA guidelines apply on social media as well and liking a post from one of your followers promoting unsubstantiated claims is an endorsement of those claims.
In December 2012, the FDA sent a warning letter to Amarc Enterprises regarding two websites. This letter has garnered attention because it references Facebook. The FDA details a variety of serious concerns over the way Amarc is marketing their vitamins, in particular their websites have numerous testimonials that are unsupported by clinical data.
For example, “PolyMVA helped save my life. I began a regimen of PolyMVA… After 3 months, the Stage 2 cancer was down to Stage 1.” These vitamins have not been approved by the FDA and are being improperly marketed as drugs. Similar claims were made for pets using the products and the FDA notes that this is also a violation.
Here is what the warning letter says about Facebook: “We also note claims made on your Facebook account accessible at: https://www.facebook.com/poly.mva, which includes a link to your website at www.polymva.com. The following are examples of the claims: In a March 10, 2011 post which was ‘liked’ by ‘Poly Mva’:
The product’s Facebook page has been taken down, but it appears that the claim was posted to the wall. Not only was the claim left on the wall, it was “liked” by the page administrator which would be a clear endorsement of the claim. The letter also mentions a blog post on the Amarc site that makes claims that are unsupported by scientific data.
Interestingly, their other Facebook page is still live and posting things like this: “THE BINDING OF PALLADIUM, A RARE TRACE MINERAL, WITH ALPHA LIPOIC ACID, A POWERFUL ANTIOXIDANT, DRAMATICALLY INCREASES NUTRIENT ABSORPTION AT THE CELLULAR LEVEL AND THROUGHOUT THE BODY – A BREAKTHROUGH THAT DISTINGUISHES POLY-MVA® FROM ANY OTHER SUPPLEMENT!”
I posted a link to the FDA warning letter on their wall and asked for a response. They replied, “Discussions with the FDA are ongoing and the issues raised are being addressed. AMARC is committed to our products and working with health agencies in complying with any applicable rules and regulations. This is somewhat of a normal review in the industry. Thank you for the inquiry and we will continue to support our clients and our products.”
Follow existing guidelines
It’s clear that these websites, the Facebook page and blog provided no clinical data to support any of their claims. This warning letter isn’t really about Facebook or blogs, but about following existing guidelines. The FDA is very clear on labeling and how companies can promote their products. Companies that continue to follow this guidance (on websites, Facebook and blogs) should be fine
The Art of Social Selling: Does Social Media Disrupt Your Sales Cycle?
How do you sell in a world where you no longer have an informational advantage over customers? In 2013, many of your customers are likely as knowledgeable about your products as you are. They know who your other customers are, who your competitors are, the product specs and how they compare to competitors, and they’re all talking.
Fortunately the same tools your customers use to learn about you and your competitors are just as open for you to learn about them. Social selling gives you the resources to find high value customers, learn what they’re looking for, and sell to them more effectively than ever before. Join as we explore:
According to the CMO Council and Balihoo, brands still struggle with local marketing. Between keeping control over the brand, compliance with corporate directives and the necessity to adapt their effort to local markets only 7% consider their local marketing effective.
Driving customers into store locations is an essential step in the path to purchase, and local advertising is one of the best ways to reach consumers “on the ground.” A February 2013 report by the CMO Council and Balihoofound that local marketing is increasingly happening at the digital level, with the greatest percentage of respondents (27%) reporting that increasing digital investment was the biggest change in their local marketing strategy in the past year. But the study also found that brands are at very different stages in terms of their integration and execution of local marketing.
Just over one-third of those surveyed thought their local capabilities were growing, while 15% of marketers reported struggling or underperforming in their local efforts. Only 7% considered themselves highly evolved in their local outreach.
As brands make a greater push into local marketing, one of the major difficulties they face is executing at the regional level while keeping a corporate focus and quality control on local efforts.
Half of US brand marketers surveyed managed local sales and engagement efforts at the corporate level. In addition, one-third reported a combination of corporate-level monitoring of local efforts, along with franchise and outside network management. To develop local marketing strategy, three out of five marketers said that the CMO or corporate marketing team set local priorities.
Communicating the message of the brand at all levels remains a top priority: 81% cited uniformity of the brands’ values and promises as a goal for the year, and 64% wanted to eliminate customer confusion that conflicting execution caused. This suggests that brand consistency will continue to be more important than incorporating local-level insights and ideas into marketing efforts.
Formatting your posts on Google Plus can be frustrating, here are a few tips that will make your post easier to read and increase their impact on Google plus
Bullets can also help break up text. To create bullet points you can press Alt + 7 on you keyboard to create a black dot, or Alt + 9 to create a white circle dot. In fact, any of the special ALT codes on this list can be used when you create your Google pLUS updates.
Life Technologies’ global senior e-marketing manager for search and social, Robin Smith, explains how the deep relationships the company makes with its fans help influence the products the company makes and how it does business. Their approach is a sustainable way to actively make business better with social media.
Some of her key points:
Advertisers’ appetites for paid advertising on social media sites shows no sign of abating in 2013. According to a study conducted for digital brand measurement provider Vizu by Digiday, 64% of US advertisers planned to increase their paid social media ad budgets this year, with just 2% saying they intended to spend less money in 2013 than they did in 2012 on paid social ads.
Most of those increasing their spending on ads on social sites planned to do so by 10% or less. But a significant number were making even larger investments: 26% of respondents reported planning to increase their social media ad spending by 11% or more.
Seven in 10 respondents said they would spend between 1% and 10% of their online budget on social ads, suggesting that for most it is a present, but not a dominant part of the marketing mix. For 13% of respondents, however, it plays a larger role: This group spends 21% or more of their online budgets on paid social media advertising.
Overall, eMarketer estimates that US advertisers will spend $4.1 billion on paid social media ads this year, rising to $5 billion in 2014.
If brands want to improve their customer perception, having a well-rounded social communications practice that serves both as a marketing outlet and as a place for consumers to solve service issues will help.
In a new study, J.D. Power and Associates measured consumer experience working with companies through their social platform for both marketing (such as receiving a coupon or some other offer through a social channel) and service (such as answering questions about a product or service or solving specific problems) needs.
The study was based on the responses of more than 23,000 consumers and covered 100 brands in six industries: airlines, auto, banking, credit card, telecom and utility. The bottom line: very few companies doing both marketing and service particularly well.
“Hardly any companies are doing equally well on social marketing and social servicing,” Jacqueline Anderson, director of social media and text analytics at J.D. Power, tells Marketing Daily. The discrepancy, she says, has a negative impact on brand perception.
The study found a correlation between a company’s overall social communications and a consumer’s likelihood to purchase and overall perception of the company. Among highly satisfied consumers (those with satisfaction scores of 951 or higher on a 1,000-point scale), 87% said their online interaction with the company “positively impacted” their likelihood of purchase from that company. Meanwhile, 10% of consumers with low satisfaction scores (less than 500) said their experiences with a company’s social communications “negatively impacted” their likelihood of purchase.
According to the study, nearly a third of consumers ages 30-49 and 38% of those over 50 interact with companies via social marketing (compared with only 23% of consumers 18-29). However, 43% of the younger demographic use the channels for social media interactions, while only 18% of those over 50 do.
Understanding exactly which consumers are using social media channels to what end will go a long way in helping companies improve their overall communications, Anderson says. Companies will have to evaluate how consumers are using their social media channels and then develop a strategy to address those patterns. This may require some of them to reorganize.
“It’s kind of a failure to understand why consumers are reaching out,” Anderson says. “Many companies are still organized around servicing on one side and marketing on the other.”
Among the industries evaluated, the auto industry is the only one that performs particularly well when it comes to marketing and servicing via social media. The wireless industry scores well when it comes to social servicing interactions, while utilities perform well in social marketing.
Until natural language processing improves, only humans can tell what’s important. So Facebook today starts rolling out the option to pay to promote a friend’s posts and get them seen by more people. This will help critical posts bubble to the top of the feed, and let Facebook earn some money, too. The feature respects privacy controls, but could still make you look like a self-important prick.
Facebook began testing the ability to promote your own posts in May 2012 and rolled the feature out to the U.S. in October. See, your average Facebook post only gets seen by about 16 percent of your friends because they aren’t online soon after you post, or you never interact with them on Facebook. Promoted Posts artificially boost your posts so they appear in the news feed to people Facebook wouldn’t have shown them to.
The option has enraged some people, making them feel like they’re being extorted to communicate with their friends. When it first came out, I said Facebook was recklessly endangering the meritocracy of the news feed, which until then only rewarded posts that got the most Likes, comments, shares, and clicks.
But there are real uses for Promoted Posts. If you’re raising money for a good cause, looking for an apartment, or have a big announcement for your company, paying to force it into more people’s news feeds can actually be really valuable, and worth the $7 or so. The price varies by geographic area and how many people it could reach.
Now you can do the same for friends’ posts, or at least you’ll be able to soon. A gradual global roll-out for the feature is starting now, and it’s only available to people with fewer than 5,000 total friends and subscribers.
When you see one you think deserves more attention, you can click the drop-down arrow next to a post to sponsor it, and it will reach a larger percentage of the original audience of the post. That means promoting a friend’s post won’t violate their privacy settings. If the post was set to only show up for their friends, your payment will just make it show up to more of their friends. If their post is publicly visible, your promotion could appear to your friends, too.
Facebook explains “If your friend is running a marathon for charity and has posted that information publicly, you can help that friend by promoting their post to all of your friends. Or if your friend is renting their apartment out and she tells her friends on Facebook, you can share the post with the people you and your friend have in common so that it shows up higher in the news feed and more people notice it.”
One issue, though, is that you don’t need a friend’s permission to promote their posts. And depending on what they said, the extra eyeballs might not always be appreciated.
A friend could jokingly promote an embarrassing photo of me, or my status about something bad happening to me. If I post that I wrote an article or am selling something, a friend might innocently think they’re helping by promoting the update. But when people see the “promoted” tag on my self-serving post and realize money was traded for their attention, they might think I’m tooting my own horn a little too loudly.
Facebook will have to keep an eye on this one. If people use it for evil, or people unwittingly end up looking like a loudmouth used car salesmen in cheap plaid polyester suits that reek of even cheaper cologne, then it may want to give authors the option to prevent promotions.
Many small businesses are already using some form of content marketing to promote themselves—74% as of a January survey of US small businesses by BusinessBolts.com. It’s a tactic that must be paying off, because three-quarters of small businesses also said they planned to do more content marketing this year than last—and just 4% said they had no plans to do any content marketing at all.
Articles and blog posts were the type of content most favored by small businesses—74% have promoted their business using articles, and 64% through blog posts. Slightly under half were publishing social media content and about two out of five used email newsletters.
Small businesses spent an average of 6.9% of their annual marketing budgets on content marketing last year, according to a November study conducted by Ad-ology Research.
Ad-ology found that US small businesses were spending a greater share of their budgets on content marketing than on social media advertising. This suggests that small businesses may be more focused on using social sites to publish owned content rather than paying for advertising on the networks—a trend at some larger businesses as well.
But small businesses in particular seem to rely on content marketing because it can be extremely cost effective. A majority of the small businesses surveyed by BusinessBolts.com estimated they spent less than $100 on content marketing per month; just 11% spent more than $500.