Article

The ROI of social engagement

Current social media trends put the focus on context.

February 26, 2015 by Scott Slucher — Account Executive, Networld Alliance

The retail landscape in 2015 is one of paradoxes, where the point-of-purchase isn’t always an actual physical location, local is global, small is big and shoppers welcome intimate relationships with corporate behemoths.

The plight of the shopping mall has become a tangible symbol of the shift from retail to e-tail, where Black Friday is losing ground to Cyber Monday. For better or worse, the digital revolution has turned our lives inside out, and retailers have been forced onto the unpredictable frontier of social media, a virtual wild west where anything goes.

Perhaps the biggest paradox for retailers is that social media, a bottomless well of selfies, cat videos and narcissism, has become the Holy Grail of retail success.

When done right, social media drives sales, and as maddening as it can be to take steady aim on one trend, when they seem to shift so suddenly, there’s a bedrock principle of retail as trustworthy today as it ever was – it’s about the relationship.

Social media sells

A recent Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) report surveyed over 19,000 shoppers on six continents to understand the relationship between the brick-and-mortar store and the digital experience, and the proliferation of social media networks was identified as one of four disrupting forces in the coming year, with 62 percent of respondents saying that their interaction with a brand on social media influenced a decision to purchase.

The good news for retailers is that the number one reason respondents liked a brand’s social media page was “attractive deals/promotions/sales” (45 percent). Number two was “interested in new product offerings” (33 percent).

Social media gives retailers a powerful one-to-one link for direct selling in a way and on a scale that is unprecedented, but what the PwC report didn’t tell retailers was which social platforms to use and how.

Social media execution is tricky

There’s no shortage of advice about social media. The advent of content marketing has spawned a new generation of internet celebrities carving out turf for themselves on topics like SEO/SEM, content marketing, inbound marketing, blogging and a host of related subjects that all rely on social media for success.

Commentators agree that marketers tend to fall into a trap of thinking of social media purely as a distribution channel for their goods and services rather than approaching it in terms of relationship.

Even though social media is indeed a distribution channel, experts tell us, it’s one predicated on relationships. To ignore this distinction is to be ignored by consumers.

Gary Vaynerchuk is a rock star in the content marketing world, as famous for his foul-mouthed keynote addresses as he is for his early adoption of platforms like YouTube, Twitter and Facebook, where he’s built huge followings that are more like sports fans than your typical business followers.

Vaynerchuk, a tireless communicator, shares content nearly every day via social media outlets, podcasts, video blogs and various writings that explore his obsession with every social platform imaginable, analyzing which ones are best for selling product.

Recently, he published a post on his website where he referred to Facebook as the best direct selling platform of the moment. “If you only have the budget for one platform, please make it Facebook,” he wrote, citing the platform’s dark posts as “the number one tool you have at your disposal right now.”

In a world where mistakes are to be avoided at all cost, Vaynerchuk adopts more of a ready-fire-aim approach to social platforms, encouraging marketers to play around and experiment with a given platform, trying out its tools and analytics to see what works and what doesn’t.

Guiding all this experimentation is a guiding question, “Are you marketing like the year you actually live in?” It’s a reminder to be present in the here and now, focused on people, not the tools you employ.

Heidi Cohen, another commentator with a large following, recently blogged about the dangers of clutter in what can be described as a more-is-more mindset prevalent in content marketing circles. She cited a recent study by TrackMaven that used Pottery Barn’s 2014 Pinterest strategy as a case study.

Understanding that repetition creates a tipping point, Pottery Barn steadily increased the number of pins posted as the year went on until they realized a diminishing return on their efforts. Somewhere along the way, they passed a point where more became less, and as they reigned in their output, they noticed that engagement began to grow again.

It’s a lesson for all retailers to take to heart, regardless of the platform chosen. There’s an old saying — familiarity breeds contempt. It seems to apply to brand relationships as well as human relationships, and the traditional media approach of generating as many impressions as possible is a recipe for disaster in the emerging social landscape.

Social media winners

When we read about social media success stories, the connecting theme between them all boils down to contextualization. The social media winners are the brands that understand their customers and manage to engage them in a way that feels natural and adds value. When this happens, products are sold.

HelloWorld is a marketing solutions company that specializes in helping retail brands engage with customers through interactive campaigns, loyalty programs and live events.

Jessica Kessler, HelloWorld’s Senior Product Marketing Manager for Social, keeps close watch on the relationship between brands and consumers on social media. When asked about the current trends, she said that engagement is the gold ring retailers are chasing.

User-generated content is one way brands are driving engagement. “What brands are doing now is using great content from their consumers,” Kessler said. “They don’t want it to be too touched-up. They want it to feel natural.” So, instead of more traditional bursts of promotional content, brands will appeal to consumers to post hashtagged photos of their own and perhaps connect them to a contest to add value.

“Brands are finally finding a way to embrace social,” Kessler said. “Previously, they had a hard time monetizing and quantifying the ROI of social. But agencies like HelloWorld have helped them directly link consumers to their e-commerce pages.”

What Kessler is referring to is an innovation in social commerce called Like-to-Buy, where users are taken directly to an e-commerce site when they like a photograph on a retailer’s social media platform, like Instagram, where they can make a direct purchase and then return to their social surfing.

The Like-to-Buy model can be applied to both brand-generated and user-generated content. The key is for the content to have the right cadence and not be too “touched-up,” as Kessler would say.

Something like this is also happening where retailers connect their brand to social causes through social media.

Last October, Chico’s paired up with Living Beyond Breast Cancer (LBBC) to raise money to help women impacted by breast cancer. The promotion was simple. Anyone interested could upload their Facebook profile photo to a special site to make it pink, label it with a dedicated hashtag and then upload it back to their page. For every person who did this, Chico’s donated one dollar to LBBC. The promotion raised $25,000 for LBBC, and in the process, users got to feel good for playing a role and probably felt good about Chico’s for writing the check.

One other trend that is similar to Like-to-Buy has to do with so-called style bloggers. As the name implies, style bloggers write about fashion and usually cultivate a specialty. For example, one blogger may only write about accessories, while another will spend each post putting together a chic outfit from head to toe.

Brands partner with style bloggers by applying Like-to-Buy connectivity to their posts, enabling readers to click-through to an e-commerce site and purchase the exact clothing or accessories pictured. The blogger earns an affiliate commission for driving the traffic and brands enjoy a seamless flow of organic traffic to their e-commerce sites.

The style blogger model is a perfect example of contextualizing with consumers because all the brand really does is make certain items available, along with links to their e-commerce pages. Bloggers are left to do whatever they would normally do, which means being authentically themselves. There’s no phony promotion and no annoying interruptions. The product is seamlessly woven into every day content.

Social media ROI

“Retailers have finally cracked the nut on driving the purchase from their social interactions with their customers,” Kessler said. “When you can quantify that for a retailer, it helps them prove to their senior leadership that this is a powerful space and it opens them up to more risk where they’ll be more apt to embrace the space and allow the reigns to be loosened up a little bit and allow for that interaction to happen with their consumers because that’s where they are.”

In other words, Kessler says that retailers have finally figured out how to prove in financial terms that it’s all about the relationship.