brand Archives - Spinnaker Marketing

July 31, 2012July 31, 2012

Reviews Are Key To Build Consumer Trust

Gaining consumer trust is an important issue for marketers seeking to ensure that they’re not scaring prospective customers away. In fact, a March to June survey of US adults conducted by About.com found that 84% of respondents felt that brands needed to prove themselves trustworthy before they would interact with them or other information sources. Moreover, the study found that there were 10 primary trust “elements,” or cues, that brands must establish in order to engender trust, including accuracy, expertise and transparency.

In a social media context, customers wanted to see that brands had a significant number of positive reviews, and that they didn’t go out of their way to hide the negative ones. The survey found that 41% of respondents said the ability to see reviews on social networks added to their feeling of trust in a brand. Reviews played a bigger role in cultivating trust than seeing that friends had “liked” or recommended a brand, or that the brand had accumulated a large tally of “likes.”

Video was found to improve trust the most when it served as a complement to other types of content. This ties back in to consumers’ hunger for useful information. Brands can build trust with potential customers by demonstrating expertise through quality owned content that is also devoid of a hard sales message.

April 30, 2012

Demystifying social media

As the marketing power of social media grows, it no longer makes sense to treat it as an experiment. Here’s how senior leaders can harness social media to shape consumer decision making in predictable ways.

Executives certainly know what social media is. After all, if Facebook users constituted a country, it would be the world’s third largest, behind China and India. Executives can even claim to know what makes social media so potent: its ability to amplify word-of-mouth effects. Yet the vast majority of executives have no idea how to harness social media’s power. Companies diligently establish Twitter feeds and branded Facebook pages, but few have a deep understanding of exactly how social media interacts with consumers to expand product and brand recognition, drive sales and profitability, and engender loyalty.

We believe there are two interrelated reasons why social media remains an enigma wrapped in a riddle for many executives, particularly nonmarketers. The first is its seemingly nebulous nature. It’s no secret that consumers increasingly go online to discuss products and brands, seek advice, and offer guidance. Yet it’s often difficult to see where and how to influence these conversations, which take place across an ever-growing variety of platforms, among diverse and dispersed communities, and may occur either with lightning speed or over the course of months. Second, there’s no single measure of social media’s financial impact, and many companies find that it’s difficult to justify devoting significant resources—financial or human—to an activity whose precise effect remains unclear.

What we hope to do here is to demystify social media. We have identified its four primary functions—to monitor, respond, amplify, and lead consumer behavior—and linked them to the journey consumers undertake when making purchasing decisions. Being able to identify exactly how, when, and where social media influences consumers helps executives to craft marketing strategies that take advantage of social media’s unique ability to engage with customers. It should also help leaders develop, launch, and demonstrate the financial impact of social-media campaigns

January 17, 2012

4 Common LinkedIn Profile Mistakes

With the new year comes the time to clean up our desks, desktops, files… and start the year on the right foot.

In the digital era and the social media era, we need to add a few tasks to start the year on the right foot. It’s time to take another look at our social media profiles, clean them up, bring them up to date, optimize them and get them ready to work harder for us.

Let’s start with LinkedIn. With an exponential user growth, I see the same mistakes over and over again, let’s start with some basic mistakes I see over and over again:

1-Professional headline:

Your professional headline is your brand, it appears next or under your name everywhere your name appears, in searches, groups… With your name, it’s the first thing users read when they come across your name, make it count. Your professional headline will determine if someone will merely glance at your name or want to click on it and read your profile. It’s who you are, what you want to be.

By default, LinkedIn will put in your last job title, is that who you are, what you want to be? Will that entice potential business partners or employers to take a closer look at your profile?

Take as much time as you need, craft a headline people will remember and entice them to want to know more about you, tell them how you can help them

2-Profile picture:

Social media is a very public space. Chances are, if you are on LinkedIn, you want to be seen and found, you want to network.

Would you go to a networking event with a mask on your face? Probably not, then why are you doing it on LinkedIn?

Posting a professional photograph has a number of advantages.

Potential contacts do not like incomplete profiles, incomplete profiles send a message that you have something to hide
A photo helps potential contact remember you
A photo helps identify you are who you say you are
A photo builds trust

3-Public profile

Your “Public profile” is actually a misnomer, it’s your public URL. Think of LinkedIn as a personal website. Each website comes with a URL (Unique resource Locator), a unique address that identify them and allows users to find them on the web.

Your “Public profile” as LinkedIn calls it is your personal URL, the address to your personal profile, a link you can add to your resume, marketing material, business card.

Just as any website address, your URL should be short and memorable.

Why short? The shorter and the easier to remember, the less contacts and potential contacts will make mistakes (typos) when they search for you and the more likely they are to find your profile. A short URL is easy to remember, it’s easy to add to your marketing material

By default, a LinkedIn public profile link looks like this: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/first-lastname/24/9a5/766 Try to remember that one, spell it to a potential contact and have that contact type it without mistake.

LinkedIn allows you to chose a custom (also called vanity) URL, the URL looks like this: http://www.LinkedIn.com/in/yourname*.

Which one would you rather spell, print or type?

4-Websites

By default, LinkedIn adds “My website”, “My Blog” “Other” as the links to your websites or internet properties. LinkedIn also offers ways to customize the links. Use that opportunity to rename them, use your website name, your blog name. LinkedIn profiles are extremely well optimized for search engines, if you search your name, chances are, your LinkedIn profile will come at the top of the search.

As a bonus, renaming the links with the name of your website or blog will give them a lift in searches (SEO effect)