Does Your Marketing Strategy Include Snapchat?

In order to be competitive in an increasingly globalized world, social media needs to be at the forefront of your company’s marketing strategy. For millennials, the introduction of social media had the same impact as the introduction of cell phones did to baby boomers.  Technology is facilitating rapid, easy dissemination of information worldwide, generating new business opportunities and widening corporations’ potential client and customer base.  For marketers, social media is another channel to help brand companies and products, capture competitive information, and listen and respond to the voice of the customer.  In this article, I want to concentrate on one popular social media channel, Snapchat and how you can use it for business.

Created in 2012 by three Stanford University students – Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown Poster – Snapchat is a photo and video platform that allows users to share brief images or videos lasting 1 to 10 seconds.  After those images or videos are shared, they are no longer accessible. There is also a “story” feature where you can link several segments in chronological order.  Stories are available for 24 hours before they disappear. Several media outlets participate within Snapchat as “teams” that offer their content to share. Some of these outlets include CNN, Comedy Central, ESPN, and the Food Network.

Today, the company boasts a $10 – 20 billion value with over 7 billion daily video views online and 200 million daily users.  Snapchat’s predominant user demographic is 13 to34 year-olds.  If your company is targeting this demographic, I strongly suggest considering incorporating Snapchat into your marketing strategy.  Here are some business applications that you should consider.

Branding

Snapchat stories can provide prospective customers with a quick view of a company’s personality and mission without the expense of creating flawless corporate videos.  Some companies have used Snapchat as a tool to give customers an inside look at the company.  For example, one company told several stories on Snapchat showing sneak peaks at new products before they were officially introduced.

Promotional

Other companies use Snapchat as a promotions tool.  For example, if your company manufactures clothing, you can encourage your customers take a Snapchat of themselves wearing your products and send the images to your company’s social media team.  As a reward, you could automatically send participating customers a discount for their next purchase.  This would build support for your brand and expand your customer base.

You can also create a promotional code and “Snap” it to your customers.  They can then get their discount using this code online or via your call center.

Another popular promotion is to send customers a story and have the last frame of the story be a redeemable coupon that they can take a screenshot to be used on their next purchase.  Alternatively, you can use the private chat feature built into the application to send a promotional code.

Announcements

Snapchat is a great medium to announce new products, trade shows and events.  The NBA has used Snapchat during the draft, the All-Star Game and the Finals, to allow attendees of the games to add to the Atlanta Hawks “story” as events were unfolding.

Deliver Special Private Content

You can also use Snapchat to deliver special private content and to convey a sense of personal investment in individual customers. For example, actors Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson appeared at the Paris Fashion Show as their characters Derek Zoolander and Hansel to promote their new movie “Zoolander 2”. They documented their Paris Fashion Show adventure using Snapchat to help followers feel like they were involved in a special private event by creating behind-the-scenes snaps.

Acquiring New Customers

Customer acquisition is always on the hearts and minds of marketers.  You can utilize Snapchat to gather new customers by uploading prospect lists from your address book or utilize a QR code in your digital and print marketing that invites customers to be part of your Snapchat network. Snapchat enables your company to target a younger demographic and build new customer support through innovative outreach strategies and promotions.

Building New Relationships

Customers do business with companies they know and trust.  Use Snapchat to help build relationships. How can you build relationships in 1 to 10 seconds?  By stringing a  series of Snapchats together in a story or a series of events that showcase your products and services, you provide customers with personal insight into your company and help them feel connected to your products and brand.

Conclusion

If you are marketing your products to 13 to 34 year-olds, you should strongly consider Snapchat as part of your marketing strategy.  I recommend that you don’t just settle for one social media channel; synchronized marketing strategies utilizing Snapchat, LinkedIn, and other tools will enable your company to achieve its goals.  You can leverage Snapchat along with Vine, Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter for example, to create a multi-pronged marketing approach that creatively tells your story to attract new customers.

If you want to learn more about me, visit my LinkedIn profile, my website, my Twitter account and my blog.

Photo credit: business.teenlife.com

The Evolution of Technology for Business

I have always been fascinated with the rapid evolution of technology.  Thirty years ago – long before digital cameras and HDTV were invented – companies used multi-image, or multi-projector, large screen slide shows that were synchronized to motivational soundtracks.  When large screen video was introduced, multi-image and photography professionals believed that it would never compete with the crisp, high quality images of 35mm slides.  The industry didn’t anticipate how quickly the public would accept large screen video, despite its inferior image quality to large screen video.  In a matter of months, 35mm slide companies went out of business or had to reinvent themselves to make way for the new large screen video technology. Technology evolves rapidly.

From a retail perspective, the film distribution industry has also changed dramatically.  Local video stores like Blockbuster, Hollywood Video and others boomed with business for over a decade, renting VHS tapes to a wide variety of customers.  Soon that technology was replaced with DVDs, and later Blu-Ray high definition discs. With the advent of online streaming for movies and television shows, many of the retail stores closed due to declining sales, and were replaced with external DVD and Blu-Ray kiosks like Red Box and others.  As cable companies innovated new ways to provide more bandwidth to customers, online video streaming became the latest feature in evolving technology. Now you can order new and old movies from the comfort of your home thanks to Netflix, Vudu, Hulu, Amazon Prime and a host of other online services.  Thirty years ago, the thought of streaming video to a telephone would have been unthinkable.  Today you can stream broadcasts of your favorite shows, news and sports events, and other entertainment to your home, cell phone, tablet and other devices.

Where is business technology going?

According to Forbes*, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, has partnered with Samsung on a new adventure to revolutionize communications via mobile Virtual Reality (VR).  Using a Gear 360 camera and a virtual reality headset, VR via mobile phone will soon be a reality. In the 2015 movie Kingsman: The Secret Service, there is a scene where two men are sitting in a boardroom.  When they put on special glasses, holograms of other Kingsman agents sitting around the table appear – virtual reality achieved through eyeglasses.  The Kingsman virtual reality boardroom is now on its way to being a reality, thanks to the creative efforts of Samsung and Facebook’s mobile VR project.  Dick Tracy, a police detective character from the 1931 comic strip, had a wristwatch that functioned as a two-way radio. What was science fiction back then is now being sold in retail stores under the brands of Samsung, Sony, Qualcomm and Apple. In the 1989 movie, Back To the Future 2, the main character, Marty McFly escapes his enemies on a hoverboard (a skateboard without wheels).  Lexus released its first hoverboard, propelled by magnets and conducting blocks cooled by liquid nitrogen, last summer. Who would have thought 20 years ago that you could watch television on your computer, have portable music devices the size of a packet of matches or 110” Ultra HDTV flat screen televisions in our homes?

Innovations in Internet technology are also transforming the ways in which companies conduct business and connect globally. Google Hangout provides on-air conferences that stream live to YouTube so anyone around the world can watch conference proceedings and webcasts online.  Take that reality a step further and imagine what Google could do if Hangouts were combined with Facebook’s emerging virtual reality (VR) technology. Instead of posting updates on Facebook, you have a VR reunion with family members all over the world. Rather than trying to schedule in-person business meetings for your company to pitch new ideas, you can have VR collaboration meetings that connect Bangkok and Beijing with New York.  Add 3D printing to the mix and now you’ve opened the door to world-wide product development and innovation meetings without leaving your office or home.  One might argue that we can basically do that now with video conferences using Skype, but VR takes everything to the next level.  Colleagues can walk around the room with you without really being there, see what you are seeing, and work side-by-side with you from across the globe.  According to Entrepreneur.com, even McDonalds is getting into the VR conversation by rolling out a VR viewer that can be constructed from a Happy Meal box.  As advanced as technology has become over the past 30 years, we are just scratching the surface of possibilities of technology for business.  To quote an old Bachman-Turner Overdrive song, “You ain’t seen nothin yet.”

If you want to learn more about me, visit my LinkedIn profile, my Twitter account,  my website and my blog.

*To read the Forbes article, cut and paste this link into your browser.  http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2016/02/22/mark-zuckerberg-virtual-reality-samsung-galaxy-s7/#17dec0ac4a64

Photo Credit: Kingsman: The Secret Service

How to clean a dirty customer database

How many people do you know that enjoy cleaning dishes after a party or family get together?  Not many.  To me, cleaning a customer database is very similar.  It needs to be done, but not many people like doing it.  At one company where I worked, the executive management team didn’t believe in cleaning customer data.  They would just continue to buy lists without de-duping.  They would throw tens of thousands of dollars away every time they mailed a flier, brochure or catalog.  Keeping a database clean isn’t cheap, but well worth the investment.  As I suggested in my article “Clean Customer and Product Data – Your Pot of Gold”, your customer data is one of the most valuable assets that you have and you must protect it.

Here’s a process that has worked well for me that helped keep our customer database clean.  This is by no means the only database cleansing method, but it works well.

1. Create a “Key” using zip code (3 or 5 digits) and primary address (sometimes all, sometimes the first 14 characters or so).
2. The Key record will look something like “505011234MAINSTSW” while the zipcode field still reads “50501-1578” and the primary address record still reads “1234 Main Street S.W.”.  (We could still use the address information when we generated the address labels, since we know that the list will get CASS and NCOA (National Change of Address) processing by the mailer if we wanted to get any sort of postage discount.)
3. If the list hasn’t been CASS certified (Coding Accuracy Support System) yet, we would standardize the Key by doing a global search and replace on things like “Road”, “Street”, and “North”, and change them to standard postal abbreviations like “Rd”, “St”, and “N”. Then we would strip special characters from the Key: dashes, periods, commas, pound signs, and spaces.
4. When you sort by the Key, then by contact name, a formula can be written in Excel to compare addresses, and use segments of the contact name and/or company name to identify duplicates.
5. By doing visual checks of a few hundred records, you can usually tell if the formulas need to be tweaked and if additional processing of the records needs to be done.
6. Concerning demographics and customer value, we use SIC (Standard Industrial Classification) and NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) to help target customers, and tallying sales activity of defined time periods help classify the accounts.  Because we had the luxury of a SQL database, that information was stored within the database and updated as needed. We could identify the SIC or NAICS hot spots in the customer database for target marketing.
7. Phone or e-mail contact with the customer helped keep the contact list up-to-date.  Because the customer service reps would associate an order with a caller by leveraging a SQL database, we could use the data to help identify active contacts, (who placed orders, how often were orders placed, and the date of their last activity).  This activity helped pinpoint when a contact went cold, and helped us identify who to ask for when calling to clean up the list.

After cleaning up the database and before we mailed an expensive piece like a 1,000 page catalog, we would do a smaller mailing to that same list to see what got returned.  We would clean up the list using that information and then we would be ready for our mailing of a more expensive piece.

If you want to learn more about me, please visit my LinkedIn profile, my website and my blog.

Does business intelligence on the web increase sales?

When Amazon launched, everyone seemed to be amazed with their business intelligence system that offered other products they might want to purchase.  This isn’t rocket science and anyone can build a database that offers related products.  If you purchase a hammer, the upsell could be nails. What the business intelligence system and the company of the same name that they originally implemented was called Net Perceptions or Net P.  This system did not offer related product, although it could. The system would analyze purchasing data of customers and provide recommendations of products that are purchased when certain other products are purchased.  I’m not certain if Amazon is still using the Net P engine or something else today, but they still use upsells, bundles and product referrals.

Using the same example as above, customers that purchase hammers might also purchase men’s dress slacks.  They have nothing to do with each other, but they are often purchased together.  If you think about it, it makes sense.  When you go to the grocery store to buy milk, you don’t always buy cereal, although they go together.  You might buy tomato sauce, apples and hot dogs.  The Net P engine would offer those products.  This technology is called “collaborative filtering”. There were some other whistles and bells included in the software like monitoring purchases of customers and when they were due to reorder, the engine would alert the sales rep so they could ask the customer if they wanted to reorder product.

At one place where I was employed, we integrated Net P into our web site, call center and direct sales smartphones.  We increased sales by $4.5 million dollars that year due to upsells.  It wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds.  We also had a unified effort to get more customers purchasing online, offered incentives for the customer service and sales personnel and our executive management “encouraged” everyone to be on board.

I moved on in my career and had another opportunity to integrate the same technology at another place of business several years later.  The businesses were similar, but not the same. Interestingly enough, the business intelligence engine failed miserably the second time.  Why? One reason was the economy.  When we implemented the BI engine the first time, the economy was doing very well.  Spending money on upsells wasn’t a problem.  Also, upselling on  the web was a relatively new thing.  Not many companies were doing it well, so we took advantage of the new technology.  The second implementation had not as favorable economic conditions, customers were getting upsold every place they went and customer fatigue became a factor.

Does business intelligence work on the web?  Absolutely.  Just ask Amazon.  Does it work all the time?  No.  You need to keep all of the factors in play including the economy, customer buying sentiment, and upsell fatigue when deciding to invest and implement online business intelligence. There are newer, more sophisticated toys in the business intelligence toy box today.  If you look at all of the economic implications and customer buying behavior, you can increase your sales using business intelligence.

Keeping Up With Technology

OK, I’m going to be dating myself, but you’ll get the message.  When I was growing up, it was a really big deal to be the first family on the block with a color television set. Soon there after, Walkman entered the scene.  Who would have thought that you could take personal music with you wherever you go.  It was easier with a Walkman versus an 8-track tape boom box.  Cassettes replace 8-tracks and CDs replaced cassettes.  Sony Betamax was going to revolutionize the video recording industry, but VCRs took center stage.  Unless you go to an antique book store, you can’t find LPs or VCR tapes.  In some cases, like the record player is making a comeback.  Now we have streaming audio, movies, TV shows etc.  Gone are the antennas on top of your house, but instead you have Dish Network and Comcast. 

Technology is converging every day.  When I was growing up, if you wanted to call home, you used a neighbor’s landline or a payphone.  Now every 8-year-old has a smartphone with all of the coolest apps.  They also have an IPad, laptop and can hook up any electronics in your house.  They understand and use social media as a way of life.

In the old days, you would send a disobedient child to his or her room or possibly send them to a “time-out”.  The best punishment for kids it to take their cell phones and IPads away.  No device, no connection to their social lives. Times have changed.  They have also changed in the marketing world.

A new study from YuMe.com shows that 92% of millennials use a connected device while watching TV.  I’m not surprised.  My teen-aged son has over 50,000 SnapChats.  Thank goodness I have unlimited data for him or I’d be broke.  People switch devices quicker than they change socks.  If you have a bad phone connection, no problem.  Go to your local cafe and use WiFi.  Device hopping is very common in my house.

With this new influx of tech savvy customers, advertising on multiple devices makes tons of sense.  Wherever the customer is, the advertiser needs to be there.  As we gather more customer information and profiles, the better we can predict where customers are going and when we need to be there.  Good marketers will be there waiting with their product messages.