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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Gen Z Loves AI, Top 5 Industries For Digital Ads, Research on Social Media ROI

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you are ready for a productive week.  Saturday is the first day of Fall! Fall is my favorite time of the year, I love it! Here’s a few business/marketing stories that caught my eye over the last week.

 

Not surprisingly, youngsters are more likely to use AI tools, and become proficient using them. A recent survey by SalesForce found that 49% of respondents have used generative AI tools, with 70% of Gen Z using them. The article also notes that 68% of Baby Boomers and Gen X have not used AI tools.  Apparently anyone born prior to 1981 is automatically ‘old’ now.

 

Five industries will see above average growth in digital ad spending in 2023. They are, in order; Travel, Retail, Healthcare, Automotive, Entertainment. I suppose all those make sense in one way or another, maybe automotive is the hardest to rationalize.  But the others I can see. Speaking of travel, the first Tourism Power List will debut this week, more on that at the end of the post.

 

Sprout Social has released its latest report on the state of social media marketing. From the takeaways that Sprout Social has shared, it seems like many marketers are still struggling to accurately measure the business impact of social media, which is amazing to say in 2023. It was interesting that the study found that 81% of respondents can already see that AI is making a positive impact on their work, but that makes sense from a content creation perspective.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of the Monday Marketing Minute. So tomorrow, I have a new post up on retail marketing, and on Wednesday, I will publish the debut edition of the Tourism Power List. I’m so pumped for that as the tourism space is probably my favorite to work in.  If you want to get a sneak peek at the Tourism Power List candidates, here they are.

I hope you have a wonderful week, enjoy the Fall weather!

 

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Threads’ Userbase Collapses, Data Marketers Use to Personalize Ads, Meta’s Ad Rev Up While X Offers Discounts

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you had a wonderful weekend and are ready for an even better week! You can just feel social media going through a midlife crisis right now, trying to reinvent itself, not sure what it wants to be. And it seems like most of us who have been in this space for years are looking around wondering what happened to all these sites I used to love? It seems the space is ripe for disruption, but I’m not seeing any serious contenders at the moment.  Let’s hope that changes and social media gets back to being social and fun, soon!

Meanwhile, here’s a few news and business stories that have caught my eye:

 

I have a confession to make: I’m not on Threads and have no intention of joining. Now, Meta is announcing that most of you that flocked over on launch, have already bailed.  BTW I love Zuckerberg’s reaction, yeah, how do we maybe Threads STICKIER???  This reminds me of a brilliant post written eons (in social media terms) ago by Tara Hunt. If I remember correctly, she was in a website design meeting where similar questions where being asked about how to make the site ‘stickier’ and keep users on.  She blurted out ‘Where is the ability to throw sheep in this plan?’ Which was an allusion to the feature Facebook had years ago that would let you ‘throw a sheep’ at someone.  It’s a reference to those playful little features that help us build connections and community, which is how you build and sustain growth on a site or social platform, much moreso than ‘stickiness’.

 

Interesting stats on the data that marketers use to personalize user experiences. As I was looking at this list, I’m thinking about what data I would want marketers to use, versus what they prioritize. For instance, my transaction history and any preferences I set sound good to me. But if they get into areas like my social media history or website activity, then I am less receptive. I’d be curious to see how others feel about this.  Hmmm…this may warrant a standalone post at some point.

 

So Meta’s ad revenues get a nice bump, while Twitter/X is having to slash prices to get advertisers back on the platform.  Could these two stories be related? Quite possibly, as I am sure some of this is simply a case of ad dollars being transferred from Twitter to Facebook. While I do believe Elon will eventually get Twitter/X on track, the rest of the year could continue to be very bumpy.

 

So that’s it for this week’s edition of Monday’s Marketing Minute, look for a new post on tourism marketing tomorrow, and I think one on artificial intelligence on Thurs. I’ve been experimenting with a new tool the last few weeks that’s been a godsend for my writing productivity. I can’t wait to share with you what I’ve learned.

Till then, have an amazing week!

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Twitter Making Moves, Clubhouse’s Privacy Concerns, CEOs Bullish on CX, Not on CMOs

Happy Monday, y’all! I hope you had a wonderful weekend and are ready to have a spectacular week. Here’s some news items I spotted to quickly get you up to date on what you need to know in the world of digital and marketing!

 

So Twitter has announced that it is making several moves in an effort to boost revenue. These include letting users monetize their content via newsletters or ‘super follows’ (I saw someone tweet “I don’t know what a ‘Super Follow’ is, but I know I don’t like it’). Now, is this a glass half-empty or glass half-full scenario for Twitter? On the one hand, critics of Twitter have noted that the company has been slow to roll out new revenue streams, so these moves will meet those complaints head-on. On the other hand, Twitter’s recent moves to moderate and even censor content on the platform has led to users leaving the site, either by their own choice or by Twitter’s. Additionally, emerging sites like Clubhouse, Gab and Parler are pulling users away from Twitter. Twitter will likely feel a pinch from users spending less time on the site, and will need to make up for that in some form. These monetization moves can been seen as being proactive moves to increase growth, or as hedges against coming losses. I suspect we will have a much better idea of which it is when Twitter reports revenue for Q2 and Q3.

 

Clubhouse continues to be white-hot among digital early-adopters and would-be influencers. But we are starting to see some cracks in the armor. I’ve seen some complaints about room moderation and letting hateful speech be shared (I honestly haven’t experienced any issues in any rooms I have been in), and now there are complaint arising over privacy concerns. One of the disappointing aspects of Clubhouse rooms is that the conversations happening in the room aren’t recorded or available to the users. Or so we thought. It turns out that the conversations in every Clubhouse room ARE being recorded. They are recorded in real-time as they happen. If a complaint is made about the content of the room while the room is still open, then the audio will be saved and can be used in any later investigations. If no complaints are made while the room is open, then the recorded audio is deleted when the room is closed. This is why I always advise clients to take a wait and see approach with any new ‘hot’ social media platform. Clubhouse could easily be 10X bigger by the end of the year, and it could just as easily have folded by then. As I said in my Backtage Pass newsletter earlier this month, I think you should be aware of Clubhouse, play around with it and become familiar with it, but for most businesses it doesn’t make sense to jump on the platform with both feet. If your customers are already there, and you can use the tool to connect with them in a way that creates value for you both, fine. That’s standard for any emerging social media platform. Always be wary of the hype from early-adopters. And when it comes to privacy concerns over social sites and apps, just remember that if you aren’t paying for the product then YOU are the product.

 

Finally, I thought these findings from IBM were interesting. They found that for CEOs feel that improving CX (customer experience) and building better relationships with customers to be the top priorities over the next 2-3 years. What’s interesting is these same CEOs said that they didn’t feel that CMOs would play a vital role in reaching their goals for improving CX and customer relationships. Instead, they felt that CFOs and COOs would be the main positions driving these efforts. What I suspect this suggests, at least in part, is that many CEOs don’t feel that their CMOs have a solid grasp of the digital marketing tactics and strategies that will be necessary to deliver better digital experiences to customers in the coming years. Let’s remember that even most corporate early-adopters to using digital marketing to reach customers barely have 10 years of experience creating and implementing digital marketing strategies. Many have far less than that, and even in 2021, there are many top companies that are still hesitant to make digital marketing the priority in connecting with customers. This will continue to change, and obviously the shift to digital will be accelerated by moving both employees and customers to home due to covid restrictions.

 

 

So that’s it for this Monday’s Marketing Minute. If you haven’t already, please do click the image below and signup for my Backstage Pass Newsletter. It’s delivered every Friday morning, so it’s perfect to read and digest over the weekend, then begin to implement what you learn on the following Monday. I’m super pumped about this Friday’s issue, as I’m going to do a deep dive into how your company can develop a training system for your digital marketing team. I think it’s vital that all employers have a plan in place to constantly work with all employees to upgrade their skills. It leads to higher productivity, and less churn among workers. Plus, it makes for a happier workforce! So on Friday I’ll talk about how you can create a system to improve the skills of your employees AND I’ll include a special offer on how I can work with your team to create a skills improvement program for your company. But you have to be subscribed to the Backstage Pass Newsletter to get the information, and the offer.

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Monday’s Marketing Minute: Tik Tok Partners with Oracle, Digital Body Language, How Gen Zers View Brands

Hey y’all! Let’s get cracking with another week of business and marketing goodness!

 

Tik Tok rejected Microsoft’s offer to buy the company then an hour or so later turned around and agreed to partner with Oracle as a ‘trusted tech partner’. This is not a sale (at least not yet), and it appears Oracle will help manage US operations for Tik Tok, likely lending its cloud computing technology.

 

Digital body language is a wonderful topic that too few marketers think about.  My dear friend Kelly shared this fabulous article that breaks down what can be happening on your site and how you can convince the visitor to become a buyer:

 

 

Now this graph in this tweet immediately caught my attention:

First, it’s ridiculous to combine Gen Xers with our Boomer parents as we are completely different groups, but whatevs. But what really caught my attention was note the percentage that choose brands based on friend/family recommendations falls with every age group. Now I checked the fine print and the results are coming from a survey of Snapchat users, so that will likely skew the results some.

But I found this quote from the article about how Gen Zers view recommendations from friends and family to be fascinating:

“Part of that, of course, is that such recommendations are now much easier to come by, as you can see what people like and advocate for via social media. Past generations didn’t always have this as a reference point, so it makes sense that they’re less instinctively reliant on the same.

But Gen Z has adapted to the modern communications environment, which underlines the importance of facilitating advocacy through influencers and regular customers on social networks.”

This tends to suggest that who Gen Zers consider to be ‘friends’ could be much broader than their older counterparts. In fact, could this even be suggesting that Gen Zers view influencers they like as their ‘friends’? I think this is a very interesting area to explore and research further. Perhaps the definition of who a ‘friend’ is more abstract for the youngest digital natives, and becomes more literal as we age? Again, I find this fascinating and worthy of further research.

 

Oh Twitter…you just can’t help yourself, can you? It appears that Twitter is now positioning itself to be in a position to censor any election day tweets that discuss who has won or lost any of the races on Election Day in November:

This is so scary for so many reasons. Here’s a hypothetical; Let’s say a group of hardcore Trump supporters were put in charge of monitoring tweets on election day. And let’s say these Trump supporters are ACTIVIST supporters, who are put in charge of monitoring. In theory, they could delete any tweet that contains phrases like ‘Biden will win’ or ‘I think Biden will win’ and claim it is ‘unverified election results’. That would result in there appearing to be almost no excitement for the Biden campaign, which could easily influence undecided independent voters. Moves like this are why we are likely headed toward a day when big social media sites are regulated by the government as publishers, not platforms.

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Buzzwords Are Ruining Careers and Destroying Companies

Have you heard of the latest buzzword, ‘Emotional Intelligence’? I hadn’t either till I saw marketers using it all over Twitter last week.

What is ’emotional intelligence’?  Or rather, what other idea or thing has been co-opted by this buzzword?  As soon as I heard the term, my first thought was ‘Wait, they mean empathy, right?’

So I looked up the buzzword ’emotional intelligence’. Google tells me it means: “the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one’s emotions, and to handle interpersonal relationships judiciously and empathetically.”

Now apparently, this buzzword has been around for at least a decade or so, but it seems marketers are now discovering it and it is the latest ‘it’ concept that companies, and the agencies that consult them, are rushing to. Marketers do this every year or two, they rush to the latest buzzword/concept in an effort to better connect with clients and position themselves. I get why it happens, I just get irritated that we sell buzzwords over concepts. Years ago it was ‘social business’ then it was ‘digital transformation’, now it is ’emotional intelligence’. I even got some industry peers upset with me years ago when I said they needed to stop marketing the buzzword ‘social business’ and actually start educating companies on what they think the concept is, and how it would impact a business.

As we did with ‘social business’ and ‘digital transformation’, we will now start to see a landrush of consultants branding themselves as offering to teach your company how to leverage ’emotional intelligence’ into all facets of your organization. And we will no doubt begin to have many executives that will start to see all these articles about the importance of ’emotional intelligence’ popping up and think they are missing the boat if they don’t get them some of that ’emotional intelligence’!

Look, I get it. It’s a tough world out there for consultants, agencies, and the executives they want to work with. Those of us on the services side need every advantage to stand out and get noticed. It’s not enough to just be talented, I know that better than anyone (#humblebrag #buzzwordbingo). And for executives and even mid-level managers, you don’t want to miss the next wave. You see your peers suddenly talking about a buzzword like ‘digital transformation’ or ’emotional intelligence’ and you think ‘Is this something I need to know about?’

It’s not about the hype, it’s about the solution.

Seriously, if you were a VP of Marketing, which sounds more interesting to you?

A – “I’m going to show you how to improve your marketing efforts with #emotionalintelligence

B – “I’m going to show you how to improve your marketing efforts by better understanding your customers.”

 

I’ve been blogging for 15 years. I think I can safely say that I can count on one hand the number of posts I have written about ‘social business’, ‘digital transformation’ and ’emotional intelligence’. Because I think discussing concepts and solutions has more value than discussing buzzwords.

Hype or solutions. Which is more important to you?

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Research: CMOs Say Social Media Budgets Are Surging, But Finding Solid Results Still a Struggle

Companies are spending more on social media marketing according to CMO Survey, but they also continue to struggle to see quantitative results from their digital efforts.

The survey of 324 marketers sheds light on where CMOs will be focusing their budgets and attention in 2019.

  • Spending on digital marketing will increase by 12.3% over the next 12 months, while spending on traditional marketing will fall by 1.2%
  • Currently, digital marketing accounts for 44.3% of all marketing budgets. Over the next 5 years, digital spending is forecast to increase to 54.1% of total marketing spend.
  • Spending on Social Media is expected to increase by 66% over the next 5 years

Even though spending on Social Media is surging, marketers are struggling to show the actual business impact of its Social Media efforts.

The CMO Survey found that 39.3% of respondents could not show any business impact from using Social Media. Another 36% said they are seeing a qualitative impact, with 24.7% seeing an quantitative impact.  In short, that means 25% of marketers can show the ROI for their Social Media efforts.

So obviously, companies won’t continue to increase spending on Social Media without being able to show a return on those dollars. Digging deeper into the numbers, I believe I spotted two reasons why some of these marketers are struggling to prove the effectiveness of Social Media for their companies.

First, one of the questions posed to respondents was “How Effectively Does Your Company Integrate Social Media?” The question was scaled from 1 to 7, with 1 being “not at all effectively” and 7 being “very effectively”. When it came to “integration level for linking social media to marketing strategy”, the score was 4.2.  When it came to “integration level for integrating customer information across purchasing, communication, and social media channels”, that score was 3.5. So while companies are doing better at integrating its social media strategies into their larger marketing strategies, they continue to fall short when it comes to sharing customer information and communications across the enterprise. This hurts overall marketing effectiveness and can lead to a disjointed and inconsistent service experience for the customer.

Second, only 3.9% of marketing budgets are devoted to employee training and development. This amount actually represents an 8% decline over the last 6 months. What’s worse, for B2C companies, that figure is only 2.8%.

So you can see how these two areas would be related, to a degree. First, I’m a big believer in equipping your employees with the proper training and skills they need to do their jobs effectively. It increases employee productivity, as well as their satisfaction with their work. And research has shown that just a 10% increase in the efficiency of your social media strategy nets a 2% increase in revenue. Corporate training is a smart way to increase production and employee satisfaction.

Check out the entire CMO Survey here. It’s got a ton of great takeaways on where marketers will be focusing their attention in 2019.

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How We Find Podcasts, Why AR is beating VR and Mobile Marketing Implications of iOS 12

Hey guys, I found a few links I wanted to share with you. These are articles that I found interesting, but couldn’t justify writing a stand-alone post for. So I decided to corral a few of them here and share with you as a group.

We bloggers used to do this all the time in the days before Twitter 🙂

 

1 – Augmented Reality Poised to Eclipse Virtual Reality – A big hurdle in new technology adoption is how seamlessly the new technology integrates with the technology we are already using and comfortable with. This is a big reason why AR adoption is outpacing VR. Whereas you can often integrate AR functions into your smartphone via simple apps, VR requires new headsets that honestly offer an inconsistent and often clunky experience. eMarketer says there will be over 51 million AR users in 2018, compared to just 37 million for VR. A lot of money is flowing into VR and as the tech improves, adoption will as well. But for now, AR is the more popular choice.

2 – Here’s How Listeners Discover New Podcasts – No stunning information here, but it’s good to know where the listeners are coming from.  Social media (60%) is the top driver, followed closely behind by word of mouth (57%). I did think it was interesting that half of podcast listeners say they download and immediately listen to the episode right then.

3 – Five Charts: How Marketers Use AI – This article does a research-based deep dive into how marketers are implementing AI and their reasons for doing so. Audience targeting is the top reason marketers are using AI, and ‘impact on sales’ is the most desired outcome. There’s also a podcast attached to this article on AI (mostly in Canada), so you may want to check it out as well.

4 – New iOS 12 4 Big Things Mobile Marketers Need to Know – Nice roundup of the changes that iOS 12 poses to mobile marketers. If you are a content creator, you can no longer ignore mobile traffic. For most sites, mobile traffic has now passed desktop traffic, and I am increasingly hearing from companies who are resigning their websites and how they are optimizing for mobile users first, for the first time. We’re past the tipping point and any content you deliver, whether it is marketing, thought-leadership articles, blog posts, must look good on mobile devices. There’s no way around it.

5 – Why Marketers See Gaps in Their Attribution – I’m sure for a lot of marketers, this is speaking to an issue you are constantly grappling with. Research gets into the reasons why, but the biggest takeaway likely isn’t earth-shattering: too many marketing teams are siloed, from sales, customer service and even from other areas of marketing, think digital vs traditional. Often, improving attribution and accurate sales tracking requires a bit of a culture and organizational change, but it’s worth it in the long-term.

 

Hope you enjoy these articles, BTW do you have a favorite site or aggregator that you use to stay up to date on marketing news?  Please leave a comment with your favorites, I’d love to check them out!

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How to Convince Your Skeptical Boss to Invest in a Brand Ambassador Program

Whenever you attempt to sell your boss on launching a new initiative, there’s a few things you need to do to improve the boss’ chances of signing off:

1 – Help the boss understand the value

2 – Help the boss understand the cost

3 – Help the boss understand the scope of the initiative and the changes that will be required

 

Unfortunately, the idea of a ‘brand ambassador program’ can mean different things to different organizations, and it’s often difficult for your boss to know what the program is or the impact it could have on their business. When you tell the boss that such a program will cost likely tens of thousands to fully implement and it will take up to a year to see maximum results, well it’s easy to see why many bosses pass.

So in order to improve the chance that your boss signs off on launching a brand ambassador program, we need to address each of your boss’ possible objections head on.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Value of a Brand Ambassador Program

As I mentioned, a brand ambassador program can mean different things to different companies. Some companies, for example, hire infuencers or even celebrities to act as their brand ambassadors. Patagonia is a good example of a company that follows this model. When I work with clients, I typically advise them to structure their brand ambassador program so that the ambassadors they select are current customers that love the brand. These customers are already proactively engaging with other customers and promoting the brand, we are just going to build a program that gives us a framework to work with and connect with them regularly.

In general, there are four ways that brand ambassadors benefit your brand:

1 – Promotion. Brand ambassadors are constantly encouraging other customers to buy from your brand. Even if you don’t connect with them, they are already promoting your brand. These are the customers that will stop you in a store and give you an unsolicited recommendation for a product you are considering. The benefit of having a brand ambassador program is that you can work directly with these customers to help them promote your brand in the specific way that you want.

2 – Reputation Management. Your brand ambassadors are the customers that are online and offline protecting your brand. They are defending you from troll attacks, they are defending you when other customers criticize your brand. The benefit of a brand ambassador program is that it gives you a way to train these customers on how to best respond to complaints about your brand that they encounter either online or off.

3 – Customer Service and Support. Along with the previous point, brand ambassadors will proactively help other current or potential customers with issues associated with your brand and its products. The benefit of a brand ambassador program is that it gives your brand a way to provide training for these customers and to give them a way to contact the brand directly if they encounter a customer who needs more help than they can provide.

4 – Customer Feedback. Brand ambassadors are in constant, direct contact with your customers, and are constantly collecting feedback from them. This is honestly the most underutilized benefit that brand ambassadors provide for your brand. By launching a brand ambassador program, you have a more efficient way to collect, categorize and draw insights from the customer feedback that your ambassadors collect.

 

Now if you’re having to sell your boss on the idea of launching a brand ambassador program, the odds are he doesn’t fully see and/or appreciate the value that ambassadors bring to the table. For example, if you tell your boss that brand ambassadors help your brand by promoting it and the brand’s products, he probably sees the value in that promotion. But when you get further down the list to things like customer support and feedback, the value can appear a bit murkier for a boss that isn’t familiar with the idea of a brand ambassador program to begin with.

And it’s worth remembering that when you launch a brand ambassador program, it will likely need to be a gradual rollout. You will want to start with a smaller group of ambassadors, likely with limited responsibilities. I always tell clients when launching a brand ambassador program to “start small, nail the process down, then expand”.

So out of necessity, and in an attempt to make your best case for a brand ambassador program to your boss, it makes sense to start the rollout of a brand ambassador program gradually. For instance, start with the promotional aspect of a brand ambassador program first. This is where most bosses will understand and see the immediate value.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Cost of a Brand Ambassador Program

Building on the previous section, understand that if you start by first focusing on how your brand ambassadors can better promote the brand, you are also significantly lowering the cost of the program. Think of it as adopting a payment plan system for paying for a brand ambassador program instead of needing all the costs paid upfront. Start smaller, with just the promotional aspect, nail the process, then you expand.

Here’s another key: Start with a smaller group of ambassadors. This will also significantly lower costs. If you envision having a nationwide ambassador program, you could start with a single market, maybe it could be your most prosperous market, maybe it could be the one where your headquarters are. Either way, by starting with a small group focused on only one aspect of the program (promotional), then you greatly reduce the cost of the program, and make it much easier to manage.

Here’s the best part: By adopting this segmented approach, you not only reduce time and cost, you can, if managed correctly, have the brand ambassador program pay for itself as it is launched and rolled out. Increasing promotion will lead to increased sales and increased revenue. That increased revenue can then be used to fund the next stage of the program’s rollout; focused on brand reputation management. If done smartly, the only new costs associated with the program could be those involving the promotional aspect at launch.

 

Helping Your Boss Understand the Scope of the Initiative and the Changes Involved

By adopting a segmented or tiered launch/rollout of the brand ambassador program, we’ve significantly reduced the scope of the rollout, and the associated costs. Additionally, we are focusing only on the promotional aspect at launch, which is likely the area that even a skeptical boss will see and understand the value in. This also means that necessary changes within your organization will be kept to a minimum. If you start by first focusing on the promotional aspects of a brand ambassador program, this can be launched with minimal disruption or additional work from your staff. Ideally, your brand already has at least one manager for your social media efforts, and this person or team could also assist with helping your best customers promote your brand. Additionally, your brand may want to explore launching a brand ambassador program for your employees, and a promotional aspect is typically the cornerstone of such an initiative.

By starting with just the promotional aspects of a brand ambassador program, you’ve reduced associated costs and maximized the potential benefits.

 

One Final Note About Starting a Brand Ambassador Program

When you bring up the topic of launching a brand ambassador program to your skeptical boss, one of the thoughts he will have (whether he shares it with you or not) is “Ugh, how much is this going to cost us?” It’s worth remembering, and spelling out to your boss, that a brand ambassador programs takes what your business is already doing, and makes it better.

Your boss will likely understand and appreciate the value brand ambassadors can create by promoting your brand and its products. But make sure he understands the other ways that ambassadors can help your brand, and make your current efforts more efficient while also reducing costs.

For example, your brand likely has a set dollar amount placed on every customer service call it receives. In other words, your brand knows what the business cost is for each call it receives.  Let’s say that cost is $7.13 per call based on the call length and what your brand has to pay a customer service representative to handle the call. That means that every time one of your ambassadors helps a customer and eliminates their need to call your brand for customer service, your brand has saved $7.13. Each customer service call that is averted by the actions of your brand ambassadors is a cost-saving to your brand! You can find similar ways to calculate cost savings for reputation management (an improvement of online sentiment by one point results in an X percent increase in sales) and customer feedback as well. These cost-savings that the brand ambassadors create also help offset or even eliminate the cost of expanding the program.

So if you want to improve the chances of getting your skeptical boss to invest in a brand ambassador program, do the following:

  • Don’t try to launch everything at once, focus on a staggered rollout.
  • Start small, with a limited group and focus first on the area that your skeptical boss can clearly see the value in where your brand can quickly see results. Focusing on promotion first is a good start.
  • Once you see results from your initial efforts, grow as necessary, and use gains realized to fund the growth of the program.
  • Make sure your skeptical boss understands that your brand ambassadors will increase sales AND lower costs for your brand.

 

Still have questions about how to sell your skeptical boss on a brand ambassador program? Fill out this contact form and I’ll be happy to help you!

 

 

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It’s Time For Your Company to Move on From Facebook and Twitter

This has been a frustratingly difficult post for me to write on multiple levels. For years, I have advised my clients to ‘plant in the gardens that they own’ when it comes to social media. Focus on your blog and newsletter, or the delivery channels that you control versus putting all your eggs in a social media basket. If you’re thinking of your digital strategy as a house, your website and blog should be the foundation, not social media sites like Facebook and Twitter.

But now I am advising clients and companies like yours to put even less emphasis on Facebook and Twitter. The reason why is simple; Because if both companies continue on their current paths, neither will be around in five years.

Let’s Start With Facebook 

Facebook has been in the news recently over complaints about how freely user data is shared on the site. Recently, reports came out about how a firm, Cambridge Analytica, had collected Facebook user data from users who had participated in a third party app/quiz, and that user data was then reported made available to the Trump campaign during the 2016 election. This actually isn’t a new practice, the Obama campaign also mined Facebook user data collected from third party apps during the 2012 election. Both instances have raised some very valid points about how Facebook needs to be more transparent with how it uses our data, and also about how Facebook users need to be more responsible with what apps they give access to their accounts. Mark Zuckerberg will be testifying before Congress this week and will no doubt be asked early and often about the site’s plans to better protect and care for user data moving forward.

Companies have also struggled for years to make sense of Facebook’s constantly changing algorithms when it comes to determining organic reach for its content. Increasingly, content for brands has seen its organic reach decrease as Facebook has encouraged companies to move to a paid strategy to maintain or increase reach with its audiences. These moves have especially hit small businesses hard, many of who have basically leveraged a brand page on Facebook as their de facto website. Additionally, it creates frustration for social media managers everywhere because just as they seem to adjust to Facebook’s latest ‘algorithm’ change, a new one is sprung on them that throws their engagement efforts into a new tailspin. The end result for companies from every change by Facebook seems to have one commonality: Less organic reach for your content.

And Then There’s Twitter 

I joined Twitter in March of 2007, and ever since then, I have had a love/hate relationship with the site. I love the site and how it gives me the ability to so easily connect and talk directly with so many interesting people. But I hate how Twitter’s founders (Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams) have always wanted the site to be a broadcast platform and not a social one. Replies were never intended to be a part of Twitter. Think about that…Twitter was founded without any thought given to incorporating the functionality for users to talk to each other. The feature was later adopted due to pressure from the Twitter community, and as you can tell from Ev’s update in 2008 on how Replies work on Twitter, he’s obviously not a fan of them.

In fact, one of the earliest changes Twitter made to replies signaled how the founders didn’t value users being able to connect with each other organically. Up until around 2008 or so, you saw every reply that anyone you followed made. For instance, if I’m following Jake, and Jake replied to Mary, I saw Jake’s reply. Why was this a big deal? Let’s say I’m not following Mary, I have no idea who she is. But she’s a friend of Jake’s, and she happens to have the same taste in movies that I do. Before Twitter changed how replies work, when Jake and Mary started discussing the movie Memento, I could see Jake’s replies to Mary, and then I would know that Mary loves the movie Memento as much I do! Suddenly, I’ve found a new friend to follow who shares my taste in movies, thanks to seeing her conversation with Jake. But Twitter decided early on that if Jake (who I follow) was talking to Mary (who I don’t follow), then I can’t see their conversation. Which means I may never meet Mary or have any idea who she is or that she loves Memento as much as I do. This move to limit how you see replies seems inconsequential now especially to anyone that joined Twitter after 2008 and has no idea what I am talking about, but trust me, this was a wonderful way to organically meet new and interesting people. And the fact that Twitter didn’t see or appreciate this, was very telling.

And then there’s this recent tweet from Jack Dorsey:

This is Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sharing a tweet from fellow Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, about a radical political article that appeared on Medium. The article on Medium, in short, calls for an end to attempts at bipartisan agreements in politics, and the elimination of one major political party so that the other party can ‘rule’ the country. Putting aside how scary it is for the CEO of a major social media site to so openly promote such incendiary political commentary, such ideas fly in the face of everything that is supposed to make social media so incredible. The great promise of social media was always this: Everyone gets a voice. For the first time in recorded history, the majority of the planet now had the ability to create content and reach the majority of the planet. We can talk to each other, we can learn from each other. And perhaps most importantly, we can talk to people with different viewpoints than our own.

Jack’s enthusiastic sharing of this article suggests to me that we have a very different view of what makes social media so great. And yes, I’ve been doing a slow burn about this tweet for a few days now.

I started blogging in 2005. Back in those days, many of us used a tool called Technorati to check our incoming links. I did as well, and since I was at the time writing for an advertising blog, the links I got were typically from other advertising blogs.

Then one day I saw an incoming link from a blog I’d never heard of. It contained what appeared to be Japanese or Chinese symbols.  I clicked on the link, and discovered it was the personal blog of a 13 year-old girl in China. Suddenly, it hit me what had just happened. I had written a post in Alabama, that I teenager in China had read and enjoyed so much that she had linked to it on her personal blog. A year prior, it would have been all but impossible for me to reach anyone in China, much less a teenager. Now, thanks to social media, I had tool called a ‘blog’ and I could reach her, and she could reach me.

The power of social media has always been about more connections and more conversations, not fewer. Facebook and Twitter are arguably the two most powerful social media sites in the world, but I fear that the founders of both sites have lost sight of what makes social media so incredible.

What Does the Future Hold For Facebook and Twitter. And Should Your Company Be a Part of It?

There is growing distrust among Facebook and Twitter’s users toward both sites. Both sites need to be more open and willing to listen to their users. This has always been a problem for both sites, I remember having conversations as early on as 2009 with other Twitter power users about how the site needed a Community Manager, someone that could be a liaison between the users and the company. Too often, it seemed like users of both sites would advocate for changes, then without warning, the sites would announce changes that seemed to be completely disconnected from the changes that users actually wanted.

In short, if both Facebook and Twitter continue on their current paths, neither site will be around in 5 years, at least not in any form resembling how it looks today. In social media as it is in life, nothing lasts forever. Just ask MySpace.

Having said all this, there is still potential value for your company on both Facebook and Twitter. If you’re already active on either or both sites and seeing results that meet your goals, then stick with it for now. But moving forward, make sure that you depend more on the channels you control, such as your blog, and less on the ones that you don’t, such as social media sites. In fact, if you want to try something new with your digital strategy, launch a newsletter before you get on Instagram or Snapchat. In other words, be more dependent on channels you own, and less dependent on the ones you don’t.

Long-term, you should ask yourself “If Facebook and Twitter went away tomorrow, how would we reach our customers?” Increasingly, your customers are either considering a move away from these sites, or they are actually leaving.  In the last fiscal quarter of 2017, Facebook actually reported a marginal decrease in US users. Twitter also struggled to hold onto users in 2017.

My advice to clients remains the same as it has always been: When it comes to digital content creation, plant in the gardens that you own.

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How to Create a World-Class Brand Ambassador Program

Creating a World-Class Brand Ambassador Program

This post on 10 Thing to Remember When Creating a Brand Ambassador Program remains one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written. So to start off the new year, I wanted to do a deeper dive into the topic of creating and launching a successful brand ambassador program, and walk you through the process from the brand’s point of view.

So where do you start? How do you measure results? How do you choose your ambassadors? How do you integrate the program with your other marketing and sales functions? We’ll get into all that in this post, so read on…

First, I have to say of all the consulting work I do, helping companies build out brand ambassador programs is probably the most fulfilling. I love the challenge of creating a plan that’s going to help companies better build relationships with their most passionate customers. It’s so rewarding to know that you’re helping to build something that will greatly help the brand, but even more importantly, that will provide a much better product and experience for the customer.

If I were going to work with your company to help you build a world-class brand ambassador program, this would be the process:

Plan Your Brand Ambassador Program; How Does the Brand Benefit, and How Will Your Ambassadors Benefit?

Related: How to Incorporate Millennials Into Your Brand Ambassador Program

At a high level, your brand needs to ask and answer two questions when you start fleshing out your brand ambassador program:

  1. Who is our ideal brand ambassador?
  2. What relationship will we have with our ambassadors?

To further expand on the second point, you want to as clearly as possible detail how your brand benefits from an ambassador program, and how your ambassadors will benefit.

The benefits to both your brand and its ambassadors need to be clearly defined, and very obvious and desirable to both parties. Too many brands can clearly point to what they want to accomplish with an ambassador program, but they struggle to detail meaningful benefits to the ambassadors if they participate. This is why it’s so key to create solid benefits to the ambassadors. You want your ambassadors to be thrilled to join, in fact you want so many customers applying to be ambassadors that you could never accept them all.

Think of it this way: Let’s say you want to launch a brand ambassador program because you want to increase sales of a particular product line by 20%. That’s a pretty heavy lift that you’re asking of those ambassadors, so you have to do some heavy lifting of your own and make it worth the ambassador’s while to join and then be committed to acting in a way that will help you realize that 20% increase in sales.

The more clearly defined and OBVIOUS the benefits you offer ambassadors, the more likely they will be to want to join your program and help your program reach its goals.

    Benefits - Ambassadors

  • Salary
  • Greater Access to Brand
  • Early Access to New Products
  • Recognition and Promotion
  • Professional and Personal Development

          Benefits - Brand

  • Increased Sales
  • Increased Promotion
  • Product Feedback
  • Customer Feedback

As far as measuring and tracking results: Clearly define what your goals are for your brand ambassador program. Maybe you want to increase sales, or decrease calls to customer service centers, or improve customer sentiment online. Start with your core goal, then clearly define precisely what you want to see happen.  The more precise you are with your goals, the more accountable everyone will be for reaching them.  Don’t just say ‘increase sales’, say ‘increase sales by 8% for the first year of the brand ambassador program’. And your KPIs will flow from your goals and desired outcomes.

An additional note about goal-setting: Don’t be afraid to regularly revisit your goals and measurement tactics to make sure you’re on a realistic course. This is especially important during the first year of your brand ambassador program. Self-audit frequently, at least every 3 months, monthly is better for the first 6 months. There will be a lot of trial and error involved in launching your brand ambassador program at all levels. Be mindful of this, and don’t be afraid to change course if something isn’t working as expected.

Your Brand Ambassador Program Needs Internal Ambassadors

Before you do anything else as far as fleshing out your brand ambassador program, you need to know who will own it and who will fight for it internally. Ideally, you want more than one person who are customer-centric, and who can clearly communicate to their bosses the value of the brand ambassador program, especially in the early days when a direct impact on the business bottom line will be harder to quantify. These will be the people that understand how a brand ambassador program will benefit their brand, but they can also envision how such a program will improve the product and brand experience for the ambassadors, and all customers.

Your Brand Ambassador Program Should ALWAYS Be Integrated Into Your Existing Marketing, Sales and Customer Service Efforts

The quickest way to ensure that your brand ambassador program fails is to put it on an island within your organization. Left by itself, a brand ambassador program could take years to see measurable results that justify its cost. At best. Few companies will be willing to invest the money necessary to reach that point. The good news is that a brand ambassador program can begin benefiting your company almost immediately, if structured correctly.

A well-designed brand ambassador program will directly impact and positively affect most of the core functions of your business:

  • Marketing: Ambassadors will help promote your products to other customers
  • Sales: Ambassadors will drive new sales
  • Customer Service: Ambassadors will interact directly with customers both online and off, addressing their concerns and answering their questions.
  • PR: Ambassadors will not only spread positive news about your company, they will also proactively defend it against trolls and attacks.
  • Product Design: Ambassadors will collect valuable product feedback directly from customers, which your company can then implement to improve product design.

Think of it this way; You’re not reinventing the wheel by launching a brand ambassador program. As my friend Kelly Hungerford says, a well-designed brand ambassador program makes everything your company is already doing, work better.

Kelly Hungerford

" A well-designed brand ambassador program makes everything your company is already doing, work better."


Start Small, Grow Big

For most companies, the idea of launching a brand ambassador program is a completely new initiative. There’s a steep learning curve involved at first, and much of the process will honestly be trial and error in the first days. To minimize the expense and improve efficiency, it makes sense to start with a smaller core group of ambassadors. The idea is that you want to iron out the kinks with a smaller group, then once you’ve got the process nailed (and you’re seeing the results you want), then you can branch out with a larger group.

For example, if you are targeting single moms, maybe start out with a group of say 5 or 10 ambassadors, and over time as you develop your program, you can scale it out to 100 or even 1,000 single moms. If you want your brand ambassador program to drive sales at your retail locations, maybe focus on only your San Jose market at launch, with the idea being to eventually branch out into a national program.

Create Channels to Directly Connect Your Ambassadors to Each Other, and Your Brand

This can be something as simple as a Facebook or LinkedIn group or a Twitter group DM or a Slack channel.  Also, you want to have the brand representatives that they will be working with regularly present and active in these groups as well.

Why this is important:

  • It gives your ambassadors a place where they can get to know each other
  • It gives your ambassadors a place where they can share ideas, bounce questions off each other and get help
  • It gives your brand a place where they can directly communicate with your ambassadors
  • It gives your brand the ability to quickly and easily collect feedback from your ambassadors
  • It communicates to your ambassadors that you take their feedback and connection seriously, which further motivates them to be more active

Beyond this group, you want to ensure that your ambassadors have as much direct access to your brand representatives as possible, as often as they need it.  Let’s say one of your ambassadors is ‘in the field’ and talking to a potential customer about your product. The customer is considering purchasing your product, and asks a technical question that your ambassador doesn’t know the answer to. If your ambassador had a way to message a brand rep and quickly get that information, it could result in an easy sale. This works regardless of how you will be using your ambassadors and across many core functions such as sales, PR, customer service, customer feedback, etc.

Collect and UTILIZE Feedback From Your Ambassadors

No matter what your working relationship is with your ambassadors, you should always focus on how you can empower your ambassadors to do a better job of collecting feedback from the customers they interact with, and from the ambassadors themselves. There’s a couple of key reasons for this:

  1. Think of the feedback collected from your ambassadors as being free market research. They will interact directly with current and potential customers, and get unfiltered product and brand feedback. The ambassadors will also have their own feedback to provide.
  2. Current and potential customers are more likely to give HONEST feedback to an ambassador than to your brand. Your ambassador will, for the most part, be viewed as just another customer by the people they talk to, so those people will let their guard down and give unfiltered feedback. That feedback may be more critical, but it will also be honest, and it will tell your brand exactly what it needs to do to win that customer’s business.

Your brand’s ability to collect and utilize feedback from its ambassadors is one of the biggest benefits from launching a brand ambassador program. The feedback your ambassadors collect from other customers aids your marketing, PR, customer service, and even product design. It’s invaluable, and a core tenet of your ambassador program should be to design it so that a premium is placed on collecting customer feedback.

All Your Ambassadors MUST Be Compensated

Whenever I talk to companies about compensating ambassadors, I stress two points to them:

  1. All your ambassadors MUST be compensated
  2. Paying them with cash should be your last option

Let’s take a closer look at each point.  First, you must compensate your ambassadors. The level of involvement and work you’re asking of ambassadors is about the same as a part-time job. By compensating your ambassadors, you are communicating to them that you value and appreciate their hard work, and that you aren’t taking it for granted. This keeps them motivated to work hard on your brand’s behalf. On the other hand, if you don’t compensate your ambassadors, they feel as if you are taking advantage of them and their time. Because you would be.

On the other hand, you should only compensate your ambassadors with cash if there are no other options. Paying ambassadors with cash frames their work as being a job. You don’t want the ambassador’s involvement to be viewed as work, you want it to be viewed as an act of love. They love your brand, and they want to work in a way to help grow and foster it.

So if you take cash off the table, how do you compensate your ambassadors? I always tell clients that cash should be the last option and ACCESS should be the first. Give your ambassadors better access to your brand and its products. Let them talk directly with the people that bring their favorite products to market. Let them have a first-look at new products, before even the press gets a chance to review them. In fact, in many ways giving ambassadors early access to new products can be a simple extension of what your brand is already doing with reaching out to the press to let journalists review your products early before they hit the market.  Treat your ambassadors as special people, because they are. Give them early access to products, give them tours of your facility, let them talk directly to the product and brand managers that help bring their favorite products directly to market.

And above all, ask your ambassadors how you can make their involvement worth their while. You will be amazed, but one of the best ways you can compensate ambassadors is to give them better access to your brand, and to take their suggestions seriously. Listening to your most passionate customers and ACTING on their feedback is one of the best ways you can reward them.

To be honest, simply paying ambassadors is pretty lazy. If that’s your best idea for compensating your ambassadors, then you really don’t know them very well. Go back to the drawing board till you come up with a better idea.

Don’t Just Read This Post, Act on it 

Too many people will read this post, think it’s a great idea to launch a brand ambassador program, then do nothing about it.

Yes, it’s a lot of work.

Yes, it may be hard to convince your boss to commit to it.

Yes, it will take a lot of time.

But the bottom line is, your customers are worth every bit of it. A well-run ambassador program is one of the greatest competitive advantages your brand can have. And as a brand employee, there’s nothing more satisfying than working directly every day with customers that genuinely LOVE your brand.

That’s what you get to do if your brand runs an ambassador program.  Start today, building the case internally for launching a brand ambassador program. Analyze your business, and detail all the ways that a brand ambassador program could positively impact your bottom line.  Scroll back up to the section on integrating your brand ambassador program as I’ve already given you the list.

Create a proposal for a brand ambassador program and present it to your boss.  Don’t position as ‘this is what it will cost us’, instead present it as ‘here’s how our brand will benefit’.  At worst, a well-run brand ambassador program should pay for itself.  At best, it will be a huge competitive advantage for your business.

Besides all of that, you are creating something amazing for your customers. You are creating a vehicle that allows your brand to not only get a better sense of who your customers are and what they think, but that also takes that customer feedback and IMPLEMENTS it and utilizes it within your brand.

And if you need help making the case to your boss and creating your plan, feel free to email me.  I’ll be happy to answer any question you have about creating a brand ambassador program, even if we don’t work together on it. I’ll be happy to help you get started, no strings attached, just reach out and I’ll be happy to help answer any general questions you have.