The Playbook - Prisa Digitalboletines.prisadigital.com/ShopIgniter_ThePlaybook... · close the loop on social-driven commerce and better understand your most influential fans. Additionally,

The PlaybookPromote and Sell ProductsUsing Social Media

July 2012

Promote and Sell Products Using Social Media

Whitepaper

The Playbook

Table of Contents1. Introduction

2. The Challenge: The Purchase Gap

3. The Solution: Promoting and Selling Products in Social Media

4. How To: Building and Executing Your Strategy

1. Define Goals + Segments

2. Choose Products

3. Choose Experiences

4. Build Experiences

5. Promote Experiences

6. Learn + Optimize

5. Conclusion

Promote and Sell Products Using Social Media

Whitepaper

The Playbook

IntroductionEveryone needs to deliver social ROI, but there’s a gap between discovery and purchase

It was only late September 2006 that Facebook first allowed the general public to create profiles. Twitter didn’t hit critical mass until SXSW in Spring 2007. Pinterest and Instagram, while skyrocketing, are even younger. Social media, as we know it, has just started elementary school.

But, we’ve learned a ton in a very short time and have changed our organizations in the process. As social has grown in popularity and become a Marketing tool to reach and engage customers, we’ve quickly applied our digital marketing skills and creativity. In this early phase we’ve primarily focused on growing fan counts and engaging them using a mix of “content and conversation”, and it’s been really fun.

However, while content and conversation are great for building loyalty and mind share, they are not great for increasing revenue and market share.

Many of us have invested in dedicated resources and tools to help us manage our social efforts. But as investments have grown, inevitable questions about returns have arisen, and for many, quantifying value has been elusive.

As sites like Pinterest, Instagram and Facebook are enabling and a number of innovative brands have shown, promoting and selling products using social media can activate loyal fans, drive acquisition of new customers, generate and amplify brand momentum and refer purchase-ready social customers to retail -- online and off.

To generate business returns brands must better integrate products into their social efforts

www.shopigniter.com503.232.2021

The Challenge: The Purchase GapMoving social customers from discovery to consideration is a significant challenge requiring tools and expertise

There are 3 major challenges that digital marketing departments face when considering a strategic approach to promoting and selling products using social media.

The Purchase Gap We’re doing a great job at the top of the “funnel” where awareness and brand engagement are the objectives. Content and conversation posts work very well up there. When we use more advanced tactics like engagement apps we’re going a bit further down the path to purchase but because we’re not integrating products we’re unable to drive discovery or progress further towards consideration and purchase. It’s not that we don’t think brand work isn’t important, far from it, we’re suggesting only that there’s an essential piece missing to most social media marketing strategies today.

In traditional digital marketing we used ad banners, search and email to drive customers to our eCommerce stores. Over time we realized that context mattered and so we began to focus on landing pages and optimization. We learned that customers need a “transitional experience” between an ad and a purchase and that driving directly to standard detail pages, for example, wasn’t as effective. Working with some of the world’s largest retailers and brands we’ve discovered this framework is even more important in social.

When we implement a strategy focused on our products we see a different set of steps than we’re used to. Starting with rich posts across social networks meant to drive sharing/discovery we drive traffic to branded product experiences that drive participation, amplification and ultimately consideration and enable social customers to easily move to points within the eCommerce purchase flow or to retail.

Social Media Management The job of Social Media Manager has now become widespread and for some brands we’re starting to see dedicated social teams and even some social executives, this is really exciting.

But, with new roles comes uncertainty and as many of us have found, it’s difficult to fit-in and grow within changing organizations. For many, the job includes a wide spectrum of responsibilities ranging from customer support, community moderation and social media monitoring to social marketing and optimization. On top of all that, we’re expected to integrate complex marketing programs “into” social, post to every social network on the planet, create content and gather and report results. Today, the people responsible for promoting and selling products using social media are spread very thin. The integration of


Detail

Cart

Checkout

Retail

Awareness

The Purchase GapPath to Purchase Content & Conversation Product Promotion

Social ProductExperiences

Engagement Apps

Discovery

Participation

Consideration

Decision

Purchase

Brand Posts Product Posts


products into our social strategies will require a more disciplined and focused set of resources and tools.

Tools and Expertise Lastly, as content and conversation became our primary focus, an ecosystem of tools and expertise emerged. These solutions have grown-up incredibly fast and there are now great options for page, messaging and campaign management and measurement. This too is exciting as it illustrates how important social has become for business. As our efforts expand, a similar toolset and expertise that are purpose-built around promoting and selling products is required. This is our mission at ShopIgniter.

The Solution: Promote and Sell Products Using Social MediaSocial product experiences are required elements of your social strategy, they should also replace your traditional product microsites

There are 3 elements to product strategies – rich posts, product experiences and seamless integration to purchase.

“Social product experiences” are the heart of your strategy as they are what draw people through your rich posts, engages them and ideally puts them on a path to purchase. Social product experiences can live as microsites, Timeline apps within facebook or as mobile websites.

Social product experiences must fuse the best of microsites, eCommerce and social and sit directly behind rich posts on your chosen social sites.

Microsites Rich and immersive product imagery integrated with compelling content and storytelling

eCommerce Descriptive product info, reviews and convenient and trusted purchase options

Social Media Enable easy sharing and conversation, integrate view into customer’s social graph and provide exclusive access to product and offers

The Social Product Ecosystem

Fb

TwTwitter

PiPinterest

FbFacebook

InInstagram

YtYouTube

Networks

Experiences!

Retail$$

Web

eCommerce Store

Facebook Mobile


When your product experiences become this rich and integrated you gain benefits in all phases of the Marketing cycle.

Earned Impressions + New Customer Acquisition These experiences generate earned impressions from customer’s liking, commenting and sharing. Not only earned but personal referral impressions from friend to friend which are far more valuable. These impressions often bring new customers to the brand. Purchased media is supplemental and used to accelerate momentum and sharing.

Engagement + Conversion When done right, many customers will engage with your products and content by exploring, commenting and sharing. Also, due to the mechanics of Facebook, some features require opt-in that allow you to capture demographic information and enable you to connect Facebook and Twitter fans to your customer databases and into ongoing retention efforts. Since engagement drives amplification, loyalty and purchase, these returns cannot be understated.

Path To Purchase We recommend driving purchase-ready customers to your existing eCom store to start as the integration is easiest and the experience good enough. Over time or depending on technical integration options, extending your existing shopping cart to your social product experiences is worth consideration. We see consistently higher referral rates from social product experiences than directly from posts, tweet and pins. When commerce is enabled we see higher add-to-cart rates (+15%), cart conversion rates (+50%) and visitor conversion rates (+5%) than traditional eCommerce.

Actionable Insights When you drive a social customer directly to your eCom store and they don’t buy (likely 97% of them), you learned very little. When you drive them through a social product experience you capture behavioral and demographic insights and often the coveted opt-in to future communications. By integrating posting, experiences and purchase, you’re able to close the loop on social-driven commerce and better understand your most influential fans.

Additionally, managing the customer experience across social and mobile platforms is difficult but

essential. +40% of users on Facebook and Twitter are on mobile devices and this trend is increasing. All of your social experiences need be optimized for mobile or you risk losing a prospective customer or worse, eroding existing loyalty. When designs are responsive and experiences context-aware, engagement and sharing rates increase.

To maximize returns you must minimize investments

If you’re active in social you’re probably paying for management tools and campaign apps. You’re probably also paying for social media strategists to create custom microsites or apps and to buy media to drive traffic and awareness. This model isn’t sustainable or cost effective when promoting products.

You need solutions that allow you to create and manage remarkable social product experiences across your brand and seasonal calendars and easily promote those experiences across all your social networks – in a repeatable way and without prohibitive costs. You also need a partner who is solely focused on tools for product promotion. Expertise matters.


How To: Building and Executing Your StrategyNow that we’ve established that you must integrate a product strategy into your social efforts, let’s roll-up our sleeves and go through the development and execution of a typical program.

Define Goals + Segments When setting goals, it’s essential that you simplify and focus. How you rank these goals will define what experiences you create and how you promote them.

Discovery Are you focused on getting your most exciting products in front of new potential customers?

Participation + Amplification Are you focused on getting people to learn about, talk about and ultimately consider your products?

Consideration + Purchase Are you focused on selling or liquidating (moving dead stock) products?

Many brands have now amassed millions of fans. If you haven’t, don’t worry, what’s most important is getting your most engaged and rabid fans to participate and share.

We’ve found that your efforts should be focused on the subset of your fan communities that are “real” fans, those that love your products. You may see less total engagement with product-specific posts and experiences than you do with more general polls and quizzes, for example, but this isn’t a problem. When customers engage with your products it’s more powerful to them and to their friends and is more likely to lead to real business outcomes.

As you develop and promote your experiences, always think about activating your most rabid fans.

Choose Products Many of us have a mix of pre-planned seasonal and brand calendars and ongoing promotions we run in social. This is great; the more integrated your messaging, experiences and offers are with the rest of your marketing mix, the better. That being said, we find that some products and collections perform better than others. Here are a few tips on how to choose.

Product Promotion Work�ow

4. Build + Promote Experiences should be

well-branded and repeatable. Then promote across all your

social networks with rich product posts

5. Learn + OptimizeRoll-out new products

and features, monitor and test ideas, iterate and

increase returns

1. De�ne Goals + SegmentsWhat’s most important, ampli�cation, engagement or conversion? What do you know about your “real” fans?

3. Choose ExperiencesAre you promoting one or many products? Do you need to build buzz or does the product already have a lot? What additional content is available?

2. Choose ProductsWhat’s the best productor collection for social ampli�cation?


Product Launches Product launches are made for social. When you have a new product and the goal is to generate buzz and momentum at retail, social product experiences and offers are essential.

Social Products Some products are inherently social. Jawbone’s Jambox, any Apple product, Nike’s Air Jordan’s…if you’re lucky enough to have a “high-passion” product that makes fans rabid you’d be insane not to get smart about using social to amplify awareness and excitement.

Curated Collections Groups of products picked by celebrities, designers or experts are great. These work well because they are special, limited and appeal to both your fans and the fans of the celebrity/designer/expert.

Event-Specific Collections Tying a set of products to a specific event gives it an exclusive/time-limited feel. From the Olympics to Fashion Week to Haley’s Comet, make your collections time-limited.

Building social experiences around your standard seasonal collections, Valentine’s Day for example, doesn’t seem to work very well. Making a few special items in addition to your standard set is a better approach.

A product or collection that appeals to a segment of your audience is OK too. A special Yankees or Red Sox collection, for example.

Choose Experiences Once you have goals, audience segments and product ideas it’s time to decide what types of experiences are best. You need solutions that are flexible enough to customize but are quick to deploy and manage. Here’s how to think about social product experiences.

“Spotlight” Landing Pages Best for one product or a single brand, these “landing page” experiences amplify existing social momentum and give prospective customers a rich view into the excitement your product is generating. It brings together your best imagery and content with a select set of Instagram and Pinterest photos, YouTube

videos and Tweets about your product. You’re able to curate the content and customers are able to explore, participate, share and click through to purchase.

“Showcase” Experiences Best for a collection of products tied to a seasonal or brand campaign, these are rich product experiences that fuse imagery, copy and video and are designed for participation and amplification. You choose products and guide look and feel and customers explore, participate, share and click through to purchase.

Social/Mobile Storefronts Best for a collection of exclusive products, storefronts must be optimized for social engagement and work great on mobile. When they are time-limited they work even better. These experiences can contain additional rich content like video and reviews but tend to be more focused on commerce.

Offers + Incentives While it’s best to keep it simple, sometimes you need to integrate enhanced features into your product experiences. Here’s a short list we recommend,

• Membership, Rewards + Badging

• Voting

• Limited Time Offers

• Group Unlocks

• Social “Verbs” (want, own, covet…)

Rich Posting As streams across social networks get richer, you need to be able to distribute rich posts to drive traffic to your social product experiences. With the right tools, you can even sell products directly in a Facebook post or Tweet. Lastly, you also need the ability to measure post effectiveness and attribution.

Custom Our customers have seen great success with our core offerings and we continue to improve and grow our toolkit, but sometimes you need a fully custom solution. We have done big projects for Target, Levi’s and Nike, for example, and are able to do them for you.


Build Experiences There are two key areas where social product promotions fit into your marketing mix.

Product Campaigns When Marketing runs big product campaigns that include media, PR, microsites, eCom and offline tactics, social is usually seen as an additional digital channel for generating conversation and impressions. It’s usually left to Social Media Marketers to build and execute a plan with a set of pre-determined objectives, ad creative and experiences.

These type of projects are fun because they are big and often rich, but social requires more than a simple extension of provided assets.

Executing a product campaign without an integrated social product strategy is foolish

We must take control and accountability for the entire social strategy and must have the tools and partners to deliver both the brand experience and business results required.

Ongoing Social Media Marketing Most of our time is consumed with the day-to-day management and growth of our communities…and posting, tweeting and pinning.

Product promotion needs to play a key role in our ongoing social efforts as well. This can be in the form of a series of fan-only exclusives, product participation programs or a set of offers.

Promote Experiences Promoting your social product experiences is an essential part of your strategy. We spend a lot of our time creating, managing and scheduling posts across our chosen social networks. While there are some great tools, none are easily integrated with our product experiences which makes it difficult to manage posts and quantify end-to-end results.

Think of wall posts, tweets and pins as a mix between banner ads and collection pages on your eCom store. When your posts present products a customer’s mindset is in the browse/discovery phase. In the social context, they may be interested but are not yet in a shopping frame of mind. As we’ve learned with search and email, the most effective path to purchase from the initial touch is an optimized landing page or experience. Additionally, when your customer is on a mobile device it’s even more important that posts are descriptive and compelling and that users can begin the experience in-stream. Upon click, the product


experience and path to purchase must be compelling and effective in mobile too.

We recommend that you integrate product promotion posts into your existing schedules but that you consider how you will build momentum over the life of your program.

We see that multiple posts over time on a common theme can be really effective. Just posting a picture of your most popular colorway one week and then the new colorway the next isn’t as effective as posting a launch video and two product posts the first week and a new colorway announcement with an offer the second week, for example. Now that you have a richer experience to drive to, your posts can include richer product assets and be more strategic as well.

Different social networks require slightly different strategies. Here are some insights for each site.

Facebook Facebook knows that the newsfeed is their most important asset. They are constantly working to make the stream richer and more relevant.

Richer posts perform better – use Gallery posts and integrate video, offers and polls for example.

Twitter Like Facebook, Twitter too knows that the stream is essential and they too are working to make it richer and more relevant.

Mix it up, tweet the product launch video and a link to the experience, give away product to followers and retweet Instagram photos. Twitter is even more time-sensitive than Facebook so tweeting about real time events that integrate products is great too.

Pinterest Pinterest is about discovery, great photography and now video. Users tend to browse their own feeds and search for brands and categories.

While posting straight product photography to specific Boards can be an effective way to solidify your presence, the pins that get the most engagement, repins and clicks are the ones that are particularly stunning, provocative or unexpected. Authenticity is even more important here so personal photographs of

your products by staff, celebrities or other influencers with a bit of a story work great.

Lastly, do your research. Search for pins in your most popular categories and find who are the key influencers and what types of pins are getting the most engagement, then do your version of what works.

Learn + Optimize There is much (digital) ink about social media ROI, analytics, dashboards, etc. This is important because so few marketers are experienced in this realm, but the most important thing to know is – focus on what needs to change.

Marketing objectives are straight-forward but digital is complicated. We have a tendency to wallow in the nuances of digital measurement but quickly realize that we’ve either wasted a bunch of time and/or ended-up with more questions than answers. Leave the data crunching and reporting to your analysts, Marketers must focus only on how they’re going to improve their efforts.

• What makes for an effective post on each network? Can you repeat your success?

• Are fans entering your experiences? How can the landing page be improved to get more people in?

• Once in, are fans engaging? Are they exploring the product, commenting, sharing, etc.? How can you increase engagement?

• Are you driving fans to retail? How can you drive even more?

Like all marketing, promoting and selling products using social media needs to be iterative and in order to quickly improve results you must focus on the things that matter most - the things that drive your business.


ConclusionWe are tremendously excited and optimistic about the discipline of promoting and selling product using social. We feel very strongly that going beyond Like buttons and building purpose-built social product experiences and posts that are both web and mobile optimized is the most urgent path forward for Social Media Marketers and their marketing organizations. We think the best way to realize returns across the entire marketing cycle from discovery to revenue is to become expert at promoting products using social.

We work with innovative brands like Target, Nike, Levi’s, Macy’s and others and are eager to work with you. Give us a call to discuss how we can help you get started. 503.232.2021

About ShopIgniterWe enable innovative brands and retailers to promote and sell products using social media. We offer an end-to-end solution including tools and expertise around social product promotion strategy, rich posting across social networks, remarkable product experiences that live on the web, in Facebook and on mobile and secure integrations into existing eCommerce systems.

AttributionSome of the diagram art uses iconography from,

• The Noun Project - http://thenounproject.com/

• Pixeden - http://www.pixeden.com/vector-objects/infographic-vector-elements

Burberry and adidas are not currently customers of ShopIgniter, Kaenon Polarized and Mia Shoes are.

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The Playbook - Prisa Digitalboletines.prisadigital.com/ShopIgniter_ThePlaybook... · close the loop on social-driven commerce and better understand your most influential fans. Additionally,