In advertising, distribution drives content. On the other hand, in social media marketing, content drives distribution – that is, you have to have something important or interesting to “say” in order for someone to be interested enough to engage and pass it along. It is the content strategy that delivers distribution opportunities, audience cultivation and, ultimately, how a social media campaign may play out.

So how do you develop content that provides distribution? Here are four ways to break down social media marketing into specific content and distribution tactics.

Social Broadcasting

This is the most fundamental form of social marketing. Almost all companies engaged in social media marketing are doing Social Broadcasting. This type of campaign is about pushing your message out through social media communities and hoping the story gets further distribution on the network. It is akin to putting a story out on the wire with the hope that it gets picked up for broader distribution.

The Basics: The most basic tactic is to push offers and press releases to fans on Twitter or Facebook pages, or to push blog posts and articles out on Digg or Reddit.

More Advanced: Social applications, videos, games, custom social sites, contests and promotions all fall under more advanced social broadcasting tactics. Distribution can be on any number of social networks that are general (ie. Facebook) or very specialized (ie. YouTube for videos, or industry-related social networks).

You also want to be sure that you are not just pushing shameless self-promotion out to the social media world at large. Mix it in with some actual content that may be of interest.

Social Recruiting

Social recruiting is focused on building an audience. The goal of Social Recruiting is to have as many people as possible subscribe to your social media profiles or communications. This is closely aligned with lead generation for email marketing programs. The general idea is that “friends” or “fans” or “followers” are people whom the business can communicate with directly anytime, without the expense of advertising media costs or paid mailing lists.

The Basics: Many companies start out sending a social media page to colleagues, friends and family with the expectation that their networks will also be interested in connecting via social media. And we are sure everyone at some point has received a new follower on Twitter in hopes that they would reciprocate the follower. You can tell this tactic when you see that the person who follows you is following hundreds or thousands more people than are following them.

More Advanced: Many companies will engage in promotions, paid advertising and extensive content creation to build dedicated audiences of fans, followers and friends. Some companies may build customized support areas for specific customers to create an installed base of experts or promoters.

Social Engagement

Social engagement refers to active discussions with people on social media networks. With social media, everyone is a media magnate with an audience; businesses that engage that audience have an opportunity to amplify their message with genuine endorsements from trusted sources – friends, families and colleagues – or head off trouble quickly if someone is unhappy with the product or service. This is a tricky situation because many companies have gotten in trouble for misrepresenting the true identity of the person engaging with customers on social networks.

The Basics: Having an open message board on your social profiles lets customers have a place to give you their feedback. Think of it as an open suggestion or complaint box.

More Advanced: Many companies employ “digital street teams” to constantly comb the web and engage where necessary. In some cases, automated messaging mechanisms are employed to find, connect and automatically message to people based on a set of business rules.

Social Monitoring

One of the aspects of social media most discussed is the ability for social media to provide access to unfiltered customer discussions and feedback. By listening to customers, businesses can learn a lot and address issues quickly. Social Monitoring is all about simply listening to the chatter on the web and analyzing that information for insights, and then turning those insights into promotional opportunities.

The Basics: The most basic way to do this is to use search engines on sites such as Google News, Technorati or Twitter to monitor news, blogs and tweets.

More Advanced: Many companies use proprietary or 3rd party search algorithms to comb the web for feedback and data related to their products, customer opinion and competitors. They then compile this data to analyze for trends, research and insights.

Concluding Thoughts

Our goal in providing this framework for social media has been to emphasize creativity and content as the driver of social media success.We hope you take this framework, improve it and make it your own as you take social media down new and interesting paths.

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Let’s talk more more about social media marketing solutions! Contact us to start a discussion.

© 2010. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Salsa surpassed ketchup in dollar-volume sales in 1991 and was worth $931 Mil in 2008 (that’s more than 379 million jars!). Now, part of that may be because Salsa doesn’t last as long as ketchup. But hey, that’s not salsa’s problem.

Salsa first gained notoriety in the 1970s due to increased interest in Southwestern foods, healthier foods and higher tortilla chip sales (you gotta dip all those chips in something). Nowadays, you’ll find many varieties of salsas. Pace introduced 5 new varieties in 2008 alone.

If you read our recent post about BBQ sauce, you’ll remember a problem that small producers have: shelf space. The big guys run the show for salsa much in the same way they do for BBQ sauces.

So where does that leave smaller producers? Well they need to rely on the web more to generate interest, sales and trials.

• Be sure that you have a website that lets people know where they can buy your salsa.
• Share your URL on your packaging.
• Let consumers order directly from your website.
• Give your consumers some tantalizing recipes
• Tell your story (where did you get your recipe? has it been in the family for years?)
• And for heaven’s sake try to use the word “chipotle” on your website. It’s the Mexican ingredient du jour, and that term alone is searched by more than 90,000 consumers each month on Google.

Something of interest is that some of the biggest brands out there do not have a presence on the big social networks. But they do have a presence on the supermarket shelves.

So, as a small packager of salsa, what are you to do?

90% of all salsas are sold in a bottle or can. The rest is sold fresh in the produce section of the market, or at specialty locations (including restaurants).

In California, most supermarkets sell a fresh option. It is usually quite tasty. And it will usually last a a few days. It is usually made right at the supermarket.

I almost always opt to buy my chips and salsa at a local Mexican restaurant in Los Angeles called Tito’s Tacos. It is worth the drive and the wait (there’s always a line).

And that’s the thing about salsa. If you have a good salsa, people will search it out. But you need to help them find it.

That’s where your website and social presence comes in.

As mentioned above. You may have a reasonably even playing field when it comes to Facebook and Twitter. Currently, Big Salsa is not there. So if you get your brand out there, and build up a fan base now, by the time Big Salsa gets around to it, you’ll be in a good place.

But as you can see from the Facebook Fan Page of a hot sauce (the “Southern” cousin of salsa), just being there is not enough.

Dave’s Insanity Sauce has over 1,100 fans, but only one post.

Give your fans something to talk about. Start the conversation. The Superbowl is coming up. Remind them that it’s your salsa that should be sitting on the table next to the tortilla chips. And give them a reason to order it (a coupon and a place to redeem it, free shipping, a recipe, etc.)
Don’t just ask one question and expect your fans to do the rest.

As far as search engines, there’s bigger competition than Pace or Ortega. And that’s the romantic latin dance made popular by the 80s movie “Salsa” (tagline: “It’s Hot”). A search for “Salsa” comes up with more than 39,000,000 results. So what to do?

Recipes. Make sure your website has a lot of them. And be sure to use keyword-rich, tantalizing recipes (such as chipotle).

Engage fans where they are. Everyone has to start somewhere, so set up your Facebook Page and start building your fan base. Send a free order of salsa to anyone who gets 25 people to join. Become part of the party.

Remind people of reasons to enjoy salsa (i.e.: Happy Cinco de Mayo).

Lastly, if you must eat Big Salsa, may i recommend Herdez? I “discovered” it in a small Mexican market in Los Angeles years ago and have always kept it as my backup salsa (there’s always a jar or can in the cupboard). But I guess I’m not the only one who likes it because I just noticed that they are now owned by Hormel. Little salsa becomes Big Salsa.

Learn more about our email and social marketing solutions, Thrivepoint Engage™ and Thrivepoint Remarketing™, or contact us to discuss how we can help you build your brand, sales and distribution.

© 2010. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

“You learn more from failure than you do from success but the key is to fail early, fail cheaply, and don’t make the same mistake twice.” – Former Proctor & Gamble CEO, A.G. Lafley

We love this philosophy because it has so many important lessons – “always try new ideas,” “make sure you have data to learn from,” “be smart about how you allocate budget” and on and on. And while this philosophy helped Proctor and Gamble go from a 15-20% success rate with new products in the 1990’s to a 50% success rate more recently, it is not an approach that only the biggest companies can afford.

So, what does this have to do with Food, Beverages, Email and Social Media? Cost-effectively using online marketing to build a successful food and beverage brand, of course!

As discussed in our previous post, the key to efficiently spending your marketing budget is to engage and activate your customers, and communicate with them directly through cost-effective means, while avoiding an over-reliance on advertising (at least the paid kind).

The strategy you can employ to do this is through collecting data from your customers online, and communicating with them through email and social marketing. When you have a dedicated base of customers, you can communicate with them at will. This provides you a critical, and cost-effective, opportunity to test, learn and understand how your products can be successful, how you can drive more sales, and how you can increase your distribution.

Implementing such an approach ties directly into the core activities needed to build awareness, sales and distribution of a food and beverage product. A recent study published from Emarketer sheds light on the testing strategies that you can employ to test marketing concepts via email and social, by outlining the top activities people are likely to do after receiving marketing messages directly from consumer package good (CPG) companies:

• Download and print coupons (offers, upsells)
• Purchase products online and offline (sales, distribution)
• Try a new product for the first time (awareness, cross-sells)
• Order a product sample (trial)
• Research more about the product and company (awareness)

According to the same study, 74% of people who receive opt-in messages from CPG companies, “have a more positive impression of the company,” and 70% are “more willing to engage with [the] company.” Best of all, collecting customer data on your website and building email and social marketing programs is cost-effective, turn-key and provides a plethora of data that you can use to analyze and plan your next move.

Learn more about our email and social marketing solutions, Thrivepoint Engage™ and Thrivepoint Remarketing™, or contact us to discuss how we can help you build your brand, sales and distribution.

© 2010. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Halé Bob, a Los Angeles-based clothing company globally known for its unique style and celebrity clientele, employs its website as a key strategy in servicing its global client base, but the website itself was not producing the desired customer relationships or revenue impact. Some factors included: declining revenue during 2008-09 recession; most people leave the site without engaging; Poor performance from online marketing.

Thrivepoint Solution

Thrivepoint implemented Thrivepoint Engage™ – its proven marketing optimization solution – to:

• Completely map the conversion funnel and identify new engagement opportunities;
• Engineer design and message test to increase sales and signups while decreasing abandonment;
• Align online media, paid search and social media with the new strategy;
• Implement SEO on each page to increase organic traffic.

Implementation

Through the conversion funnel analysis, Thrivepoint established that repeat visitors were exponentially more likely to purchase and first-time purchases required a high frequency approach. Halé Bob’s current approach emphasized high reach and low frequency. Thrivepoint recommended implementing a conversion funnel that emphasized first time visitors signing up for remarketing programs that would provide them fashion exclusives and discounts on merchandise. Remarketing was defined as signing up for email, following Halé Bob’s Twitter profile or becoming a fan of Halé Bob on Facebook and the goal was to use these cost effective remarketing programs as the primary channel to introduce the higher frequency needed to turn one time visitors into repeat visitors and then customers.

With this strategy in place, Thrivepoint implemented website optimization consisting of offer, design, message and content testing on key website entry points — i.e., high traffic web pages — to maximize sales and signups to the remarketing programs. Through the course of website optimization, Thrivepoint also implemented search engine optimization by using proven messaging and content from the testing programs. Finally, the improved conversion flow and messaging were integrated with the paid advertising campaigns to ensure that ROI from paid media was maximized.

Campaign Results

The campaign has been a big success!  Declining revenue trends have been reversed and the channel is growing again.

Due to conversion optimization focused on the engagement model and conversion funnel, engagement rate from advertising increased 15x and overall site-wide engagement rate increased 851%.

Due to the improved conversion funnel and website usability, online advertising effectiveness increased allowing spend to grow by 3x which delivered an absolute increase in the size of the remarketing prospect database of 60% in just four months. Revved up remarketing efforts increased the quality and frequency of visitors to the site which contributed to higher visit to sales conversion rates and revenue. As a result, visit to sale conversion rate increased by 124% because visitors were introduced to remarketing programs and encouraged to come back to the site, which ensured that the quality of traffic to the site was continually increasing.

Thrivepoint continues to work with Halé Bob to optimize its marketing programs, website and search engine optimization.

Read more Case Studies from Thrivepoint or contact us to discuss your business’ needs.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The problem is that the current state of social marketing is much like online marketing was 10 years ago when every channel – search, email, affiliate, display – was lumped into the same general “online marketing” category and marketing strategies were applied uniformly across all. In the time since, the industry has evolved to understand that these channels have unique opportunities for engagement and should be managed as such.

Social marketing is in that same early stage with many marketers treating Twitter and Facebook the same by simply synching their Twitter Tweets with their Facebook Newsfeed. What gets lost in the excitement is that Facebook and Twitter offer completely different opportunities for brand building, direct marketing and customer engagement.

A look at how each site classifies connections tells you all you need to know about where Facebook and Twitter fit in the mix.

ON FACEBOOK YOU MAKE FRIENDS
Facebook offers a rich interactive experience with the “friends” you make. Facebook provides a multi-dimensional interface for discussion and engagement with prospects and customers. Marketers using Facebook at its best are interacting with their friends on an ongoing basis and not just broadcasting mass market messages. For example:

• Engaging in conversations started by anyone (not just the marketer);
• Posting, tracking and sharing events with others;
• Sharing, tagging and discussing relevant photos by anyone;
• Posting and discussing content such as industry news, emails and blog posts.

On Facebook, brands are interacting one-on-one with key customers and influencers. Generic messages have a limited place in that kind of environment. A personal touch will pay off in spades.

ON TWITTER YOU GAIN FOLLOWERS
Twitter is the place to listen and join in on the mumblings and shouts of the web at large. Unlike Facebook where users must be “friends” to participate with each other, Twitter allows anyone to see a user‘s updates. This provides a whoe set of opportunities for marketers on Twitter. For example:

• Broadcast events live with tweets, twitpic, etc. to gain more participation;
• Monitor tweets via Twitter search or Tweetmeme to gauge public opinion and attitudes;
• Follow specific users to see what they are saying on an ongoing basis and join the dialog;
• Broadcast deals, news and other important information out to their followers.

Just as important as broadcasting, Twitter provides a completely unique opportunity for marketers to listen to their customers’ general attitudes and thoughts about brands and competitors. This latent monitoring – of sometimes seemingly irrelevant thoughts – can provide incredibly valuable insight into the mind of a customer.

One other key difference with Twitter is that discussions are broadcast in short messages for all to see. This allows anyone to join the conversation at any time, and as a result it also more difficult to track the history of a specific discussion or the full thread. In effect, it is less of a discussion and more a running dialog on any number of topics at any given time with any given number of people.

Click to read more posts about Earned Media or Social Media.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Earned media is publicity without payment to the person or company who provides the publicity. One of the primary reasons for the buzz is that earned media is often used synonymously with the term “free media”. The other reason for its recent buzz is that platforms for easily distributing earned media – like Facebook and Twitter – have become very popular over the past couple of years.

Despite the recent buzz, the term ‘earned media’ has been in use for more than 20 years since its first reference in a 1988 Newsweek article by Jonathan Alter and Howard Fineman. At the time, the authors were referring to broadcasting one’s message on TV or radio without any payment to the broadcaster. Since then, the application of the term broadened to include any type of mention of a company or brand in the news. This landed earned media firmly in the court of public relations professionals.

Consumer broadcasting accelerated with Email Forwards and Link Building
With the growing popularity of the internet in the late 1990′s, and email in particular, consumers began to send trillions of emails and many companies attempted to find the next big email forward hit (think dancing baby) or tell-a-friend program.

At the same time, online search engines started to give away billions of clicks for free to websites who appeared in their listing; listings were gained partially through linking between websites. Businesses, called SEOs, quickly appeared to help businesses take advantage of the opportunity and in the process have developed a $3B market for this service.

New terms emerge
As the internet boom picked up steam in 1999 and later after it deflated in the early 2000′s, the opportunities for earned media continued to grow and soon word of mouth marketing became a popular method for marketers to reach consumers. Word of mouth marketing refers to consumers telling other consumers about a product or brand with professionals focused on facilitating this process. Similar to word of mouth marketing, viral marketing refers to consumers passing along a specific marketing message to other consumers (coupons, promotions, entertainment, tools, etc.)

Social media provides consumers with drastic improvement over email for mass broadcast capabilities
More recently, social applications like Blogger, Digg, Facebook, Youtube and Twitter (ie. blogs, link sharing services, and social networks) provided consumers with a superior forum to broadcast their thoughts, opinions and ideas. Whereas previous earned media broadcast opportunities were from central authorities determining who got airplay, social applications enabled consumers to reach hundreds or thousands of people with one unfiltered broadcast. The power to guide is now in the consumer’s hands and they are actively endorsing companies, products, and ideas to their friends, family and colleagues.

The old adage that a happy customer tells two people and an unhappy customer tells 10 has now been amplified with social applications so that a happy customer tells 200 people and an unhappy customer tells 1,000.

Earned media is not reserved to social networks
Companies that earn media best always invest resources into growing the opportunity. This could be in the form of public relations, SEO, promotions, software development, customer service and hundreds of other ways to build and communicate one’s brand. In the end, earned media is the ultimate branding exercise where the company educates the public on its products and then observes how the market communicates that teaching back to itself.

If you would like additional information on this topic or to meet with an advisor to discuss earned media, please contact a Thrivepoint Advisor.

© 2009. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.

Challenge: Thrivepoint was hired by Uplifting Athletes in June-2008 to help generate donations for an upcoming event at Penn State and to help launch the Ohio State chapter. Uplifiting Athletes had created a Google Adwords campaign with a Google Grant that was inactive due to poor Quality Scores. With the key events coming in July, Uplifting Athletes was under a looming deadline to generate awareness of the pledge drive and donations before and during the events. The situation was especially urgent given that the events only take place once per year ahead of football season.

Solution: Thrivepoint created a three-pronged strategy focused on achieving the following goals:

• Re-organize the account to immediately increase quality score and get the campaign live;
• Optimize Google Adwords creative, create new adgroups, and expand keyword lists to increase volume;
• Integrate social media to amplify the results of the campaign across the college campuses.

Implementation: On day one, Thrivepoint’s goal was to get the campaign live and generating traffic by end of day. Upon starting work, Thrivepoint discovered that the root cause of the low Quality Score was that keywords were bundled in one ad group with just one creative. A best practice for increasing Quality Score is to segment keywords into specific groupings with similar concepts and to launch at least two creatives in each AdGroup so that Google’s auto-optimization algorithm may select the best performing creative. Thrivepoint set to work segmenting the campaign’s existing assets into groups that would have a high enough Quality Score to go live. By afternoon, the campaign was live and generating visits to the website.

With the campaign live, the focus shifted to increasing volume and pledges for the donation drive. The campaign started with less than 20 keywords and just one creative. Thrivepoint expanded the number of keywords to 1,200+ across eight different segments. Thrivepoint also created a test matrix and wrote 50+ new creatives across the eight segments (~6 test creatives for each ad group) in order to maximize the learning and performance of the campaign.

Given that college campuses have been early adopters of social networks, Thrivepoint diverted portions of the campaign traffic from the uplifting athletes website to social networks so that results may be amplified by the supporters of the cause. To implement this approach, a portion of campaign traffic was diverted to Facebook to allow people to donate via Facebook Causes and to ‘Become a Fan’ of the Uplifting Athletes group. The goal was to encourage participation by users so that messages would be published in their Friend Feed to people’s social circle.

Part of the campaign was also diverted to YouTube for users to watch Uplifting Athletes videos and to encourage users to embed the videos on their blogs and social networks to share with their audience.

Results: Within just a few days, the campaign went from not live due to Quality Score to generating traffic to generating viral response. The end result of the pledge drives was a success with Penn State giving more than $75,000 to Kidney Cancer research. The Ohio State launch was also a success with more than 60 student-athletes pledging their support and participation in generating donations for Kidney Cancer research. The results were accomplished in less than 4-weeks time from start to finish.

If you would like additional information on this topic or a free needs assessment, please contact a Thrivepoint Advisor.

© 2008. Thrivepoint LLC. All Rights Reserved.