Social Media & user generated content

Social media has been a phenomenal success in terms of adoption and usage levels. This new user generated content has caused a shift on how people connect with each others, on how they express and share ideas, and more importantly how they interact with products.

As the world of social media continues to evolve, the way consumers interact with brands online has also been affected. For instance, let’s take the following example, when the time comes to make a purchasing decision, who are you more likely to follow - a brand, or another consumer who already uses the product?

Naturally, as a consumer we tend to take recommendations more willingly from friends, family members or other users than brands who we always suspected to trick us in their advantage, when making a buying decisions.

What is User Generated Content (UGC) and how does it work?

User-generated content, represents any form of content that is created by users and consumers about a brand or a product. This type of content has total recognition due to its authenticity (not paid) which transforms the user into a brand advocate as well.

UGC is particularly important and used on Instagram, where brands can easily repost from users' accounts. And it's worthwhile for brands to do this -- 76% of individuals surveyed said they trusted content shared by "average" people more than by brands, and nearly 100% of consumers trust recommendations from others.

Source : http://www.den.nl/art/uploads/images/kennisdossiers/user_generated_content.jpg

How User-Generated Content Helps Brand’s expand their reach

While it is a good idea to share one person’s content on your social media to gain his or her trust, you can’t share everyone’s content. Fortunately, there are other good UGC advantages mentioned in the article from “ Sprout social” written by Alex York ( cf sources) that you can leverage as well to help your brand :

• It pushes more engagement: ComScore found brand engagement increases 28% when user-generated content is used in product videos. Consumers also tend to twice as likely to share user-generated content with friends or family.
• Builds Trust With Consumers and humanizes the brand. And with 51% of consumers trusting user-generated content over information on your brand’s website, you can build better relationships with this content stream.
• Helps the brand's visibility thanks to SEO Valuation: Kiss Metrics found of the world’s top 20 largest brands, 25% of their search results are linked to user-generated content. This means more backlinks, higher organic traffic and higher ranking.
• Push and re engage people’s purchase decisions: According to an L2 Inc report, when consumers witness user-generated content while shopping, the conversion rate increases by 4.6%.
• Increases your follower count by giving your customers a better channel for conversation: Nearly 35% of people use social media for customer care. With user-generated content, you’re going to get more people following you to discuss with you or other followers.

To conclude we can say that social media is having a huge impact for brands to help them acquire knowledge on their customers through new channels but it is also a better way for companies to connect with their customers and create a new type of loyalty bond differentiating themselves from the competition.

Thalia Lafond & Sarah Lundqvist

How Netflix habits helps entrepreneurs to understand their target audiences

This is the era of digital disruptions where markets, industries, and lifestyles are transformed by key actors or new entrants. One of the main challenges for companies in this era is to gather precise and relevant information about their customers or potential customers. With more than 100 million of users, the disruptive innovator Netflix collect numbers of personal data that a lot of firms could profit and take advantage of in order to reach their target audiences.

As indicating in the article of Deren Baker in the Entrepreneur, “What Netflix Habits Reveal About Your Target Audience” (October 2017), understanding the demographics of a show’s audience is capital to capture customers insights and motivations. Doing so is a way for businesses to adapt their marketing and advertising strategies, like defining the type of advertising they want to display, when and where.

The article presents three ways in which Netflix helps entrepreneurs to understand their target audiences:

1."Build out richer demographic profiles”

Netflix can collect specific information about its customer habits and preferences, and therefore the company can create a personal selection of movies and series for each of them. With this kind of information, firms can now intervene in the customer journey, instore a relationship with their target audiences, and gather up-to-date data. The article says that “companies that meet their goals are 7.4 times more likely to have recently updated their profiles”.

2."Check out competitors’ content”

Companies can track where and what other content Netflix users consume, and then take actions. This gives a step ahead to companies compared to their competitors because they can anticipate and adapt their advertising strategy. Also, it is important to underlie that not every firm can successfully collect data, only 10 percent of marketers are able to do so according to the article.

3."Personalize […] messaging”

Personalization strategy not only help creating an emotional link between businesses and customers, which is vital in digital marketing, but also helps addressing the right issue and therefore becoming a brand reference in the mind of customers. The article relates that “79 percent of companies surveyed that had beaten their goals for annual revenue had personalization strategies”.

The ability of Netflix to understand the typology of its customers is a superior competitive advantage. It can help entrepreneurs in different ways as we saw above, mostly the American service helps businesses to have a better understanding of their target audiences. The whole idea with the use of Netflix information, is to discover the needs of the customers even before they realize they have ones. However, Netflix is keen on keeping private its viewership statistics, entrepreneurs shouldn’t except too much about the company in terms of data providing.

Sophia Abdelkafi

Source:

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/302873

Why Your Sales Team Should Invest More Time on Content Marketing

“Content is king.” (Bill Gates, 1996)

Ten years from now, marketing was mainly driven on advertisements and on how to push a brand and/or a product in a consumer’s mind. Nowadays, marketing strategies are evolving to content marketing. This new strategy will focus more on the consumer’s expectation than on forcing him to purchase. It goes through catching the attention of the consumer.

In his article Why Your Sales Team Should Invest More Time on Content Marketing published in February 2016, AJ Gergich emphasizes the importance of content marketing. Indeed, he states that on average, consumers are considering more than ten pieces of content before choosing whether or not they will purchase a product. He adds that in general, people prefer to select a product by examining its content rather than learning about an offer from an online advertisement. A lot of marketers has noticed this phenomenon and nowadays, 88% of B2B companies turned to content marketing to drive their business.

The author also point out that content marketing should not be only the priority of marketer, but should also matter to salespeople in order increase its effectiveness. Indeed, a sales team should be engaged in content marketing as it directly drives to lead generation. By taking a role in the elaboration of the content, a salesperson will be able to personalize his approach to potential customers and meet them in the right stage of the buying process. Furthermore, 78% of salespeople using social media are surpassing their peers who are not.

Gergich finally explains why it is important that both sales and marketing teams works together on content marketing for a better success, as salespeople are direct brand ambassadors for consumers. It will create a beneficial situation for the company’s culture as well as for creating a sustainable bottom line performance.

The sentence from Bill Gates takes all its sense with content marketing. Indeed, with the recent democratization of medias, people have created a need to be more proactive than they use to be. It means that they now prefer looking for content themselves than the content coming to them through advertisements. This is why it is becoming more profitable for a company to invest itself on a content of quality rather than pushing advertisements.

Pierre Spinelli

Source:

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/why-your-sales-team-should-invest-more-time-content-marketing-infographic

Social Media: the tips to convert your followers into paying customers

How many of you have ever clicked on a Facebook ad, ended up on a web page that is not related to its content, and eventually closed the page without further navigation? This is what we want to avoid for your business. What we want however, is to attract your Social Media followers, seduce them with content, engage them, and finally convert them into loyal paying customers.

The article of Aaron Agius in Social Media Today, “How to Convert Your Social Media Followers into Paying Customers” (November 2017), provides some tips to avoid followers abandon, but to generate financial return with Social Media:

1.“Use designated landing pages”

Because we want to keep followers on track, it is capital to send them to the right landing page when clicking on your ad. However, the mail goal is not to lead them at the right place but to collect any kind of personal information that could be useful for following-up.

2."Special deals”

Good deals have made their proof through the years. As same as the discounts in physical stores, special deals in digital marketing and Social Media represent a benefit and help capturing the attention of the followers, encouraging them to engage themselves.

3."Host a contest”

As Social Media users, we can imagine that your followers like novelty and challenges. What best strategy could be possible to connect with them than through a contest, like a photo contest? A special reward for the winner or winners will make them feel concerned about your business.

4."Add more value”

There are different ways to add value to your Social Media channels. It is important to keep in mind to be up-to-date, to provide your followers with content regularly, and encourage them to comment and give their opinion.

Now that you know how to convert your followers into paying customers, you might ask yourself whether it worth the effort to change your strategy or not. In terms of numbers, the article relates that “2.8 billion people were using social media by the end of 2016, an increase of 21% since 2015”, and that “71% of consumers who have a good experience with a brand on social media are likely to recommend it to a friend”. These numbers show that the potential targets for your business are promising. As you saw in this article, the process to attract your followers is capital, yet it is crucial to provide relevant content, and to think deeply about your global Social Media strategy.

Sophia Abdelkafi

Source:

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/how-to-convert-your-social-media-followers-into-paying-customers/511582/

Why YouTube Is a More Important Platform Than Snapchat for Luxury Brands

In her article Why YouTube Is a More Important Platform Than Snapchat for Luxury Brands published by Adweek in March 2016, Lauren Johnson describes how high end brand such as Burberry, Channel or Louis Vuitton are investing a lot of their marketing budget in videos and posts on Snapchat. She explains that even if those “investments” are relevant since they reach a new market niche that are the millennials, those brands should not go all-in on this app.

Johnson emphasizes that most of these luxury brands’ marketing team have taken longer than other “more common brands” to adapt themselves to digital. But they still differentiate themselves with other brands by still using digital basics such as YouTube and search marketing.

She explains that this phenomenon with a quote from Gregory Pouy, a famous marketer in New York that works with luxury brands (TAG Heuer, Guerlain). Pouy states that while many people or even brands think that Snapchat is the coolest for millennials, "The coolest tool for millennials is [actually] YouTube." He then affirms that there is no way to see luxury brands on Facebook, Snapchat and other social networks when they do not have a proper YouTube page; “I think YouTube is way more important because of SEO and how people search for information."

The author is also taking into consideration the thoughts of Thomas Serrano, founder and president of Havas Luxe, who said that most of the luxury brands were not able to advertise on a platform such as Snapchat. Indeed, when we know how Snapchat is working – Snapchat allows a user to make pictures and/or videos of maximum 10 seconds–, it is pretty hard to imagine how a brand created about 100 years ago could express its history through a video of less than 10 seconds. Indeed, the complexity of those brands could not be summarized so quickly; it would completely destroy the image of the brand that would seem to be sloppy.

However, Pouy explains that Instagram and Virtual Reality are more adapted to luxury brands. Indeed, the quality of content and a free duration is fitting way better with their image compared to Snapchat. He continues by saying that Virtual Reality is transporting users into new digital experiences that seems to be real-life scenarios in a store or even at a fashion show. Moreover, the fashion industry is led by professional photographer, which use a lot of adjustments software that are compatible with Instagram and its filters. Moreover, the fact that posts on Snapchat are disappearing after 24 hours could be an issue for those brands. Lot of them are using social networks to show to the world their future collection that will be available in stores in the next months. Pouy pursues by highlighting the importance of Instagram that recently overpassed “classic magazines”; “More and more catwalks are made for Instagram because when the designer thinks about the product, they're going to think, ‘Oh, this [will] look good on Instagram.’”

To conclude with this article, I would say that all social networks became important for brands in nowadays society. Obviously, some are more compatible with given brands but it seems to be important for any brand to be present on all of its and to maintain a social network diversification in order to reach as many people as possible.

Pierre Spinelli

Source:

http://www.adweek.com/digital/why-youtube-more-important-platform-snapchat-luxury-brands-170204/#/

14 Tips to engage your Facebook audience

Facebook counts nearly 2 billion monthly active users and needs to be taken into account for any Digital Marketing strategy. Amanda Zantal-Wiener, from Hubspot, offers us 14 tips for an engaging business page.

1) Don't create a personal profile for your business, do not miss out on all useful business tools offered.

2) Avoid publishing mishaps with Page roles, define page’s publishers and train them.

3) Add a recognizable profile picture, for example your company logo.

4) Choose an engaging cover photo, high quality and catchy.

5) Add a call-to-action (CTA) button, add buttons such as “Watch video”, “Sign up”, “Book now”.

6) Fill out your 'About' section with basic information, and add company milestones, get people to like your page.

7) Post photos and videos to your Timeline, visual content is very important.

8) Determine the ideal timing and frequency for your posts, use a social media editorial calendar, schedule your posts.

9) Leverage Facebook's targeting tools, set metrics for your preferred audience, and one you think might not want to see your content.

10) Pin important posts to the top of your page to promote things like new lead-gen offers, upcoming events, or important product announcements.

11) Decide whether you want Facebook fans to message you privately, and only enable it if you have the time to respond.

12) Monitor and respond to comments on your page.  

13) Promote your page to generate more followers., create ads.

14) Finally, measure the success of your Facebook efforts, use social media report tools.

These tips follow the main steps for every successful marketing strategy: plan, create and analyze the results. The author described the main and most important steps to be taken in an exhaustive way.  

Source: https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/how-to-create-facebook-business-page-ht

3 Ways Artificial Intelligence Will Affect Marketing in 2017

Our society is undergoing a major transformation. New tools and ways of working are emerging and it’s important to understand how we can use these changes in our work. AI is one of the trendiest subject and it is developed in every industry: healthcare, travel, bank … To handle this evolution, marketers have to be prepared to incorporate this technology in their daily work.

We already know how powerful AI is but do we know the real impact on digital marketing?

To answer this question, it will be interesting to focus on three main areas: Advertising, search and customer behaviors.

First, marketers want to create a better way to implement advertisement. It isn’t only about the target of the ads or when to show them, is about create more personalized ads in order to improve the quality of their message. AI will use the Natural Language Processing to match ads with user’s interest thanks to their research (keyword) and based on the context. This will completely change the traditional approach of audience segmentation and will keep the users more satisfied.

Indeed, the implementation of AI will also improve marketers marketing campaign. Users are always seeking for relevant and helpfull information. With AI and especially RankBrain (Google), now it is possible to recognize a wide range of queries who were previously unrecognizable. Marketers can take advantage of this technology to be able to produce better content, based on voice search for example.

The most interesting changes bringing by the AI will be the new way to analyze customer behavior. For example, Facebook is already using deep learning technology to analyze and detect the human face, understand their feelings or to understand the nuances of language. Thanks to this tool, marketers will be able to clearly understand what their customers feels, what they think so marketers will be able to do better segmentation or targeting for ads.This also mean that they will meet user's need in a very pertinent way

To conclude, putting these new digital needs into the right perspective are very pertinent ways to meet both customer and marketer’s expectations. It’s important to stay informed about innovations and technologies in order to be competitive.

Thalia Lafond & Sarah Lundqvist

http://medicalfuturist.com/googles-amazing-digital-contact-lens-can-transform-diabetes-care/