Dạo 2 tháng trở lại đây, cả xe máy lẫn ô tô đều tự nhiên bốc cháy. Nguyên nhân vẫn chưa rõ nhưng đồn đoán của mọi người thì nào là do các hãng khác chơi xấu Honda, xăng có hàm lượng metanol-ethanol cao, xăng Trung Quốc,… Ảnh hưởng đầu tiên là uy tín của hãng Honda bị xuống. Giá bán của Lead, Airblade trên thị trường giảm xuống thấp hơn giá đề nghị. Sau đó đến lượt các hãng khác cũng giảm giá tương tự. Trước mắt, điều lợi là người tiêu dùng đang mua sản phẩm đúng giá trị mà lâu nay bị thiệt. Nhưng không biết sau này giá có tăng cao trở lại không. Nhưng nếu ai đang muốn mua xe thì lúc này là lúc tốt nhất đây.
Hiện tại chưa có nguyên nhân chính xác về vụ cháy xe. Nhưng đứng trên quan điểm một người làm Marketing, mình có vài nhận xét về ý kiến ‘chơi xấu hãng Honda’ từ các hàng khác.
Một người làm Marketing chân chính phải biết yêu thích sản phẩm mà mình phụ trách. Qua đó, truyền được cảm hứng tới cho không chỉ thành viên trong công ty mà còn xa hơn là người tiêu dùng. Nhưng yêu thích thì không có nghĩa là phải làm mọi cách hạ bệ, nói xấu đối thủ. Điều này vừa hạ thấp chính mình vừa ảnh hưởng không tốt đến sự nghiệp của mình. Giấy không gói được lửa. Ai biết được những điều mình làm sẽ mãi là bí mật khi mà đồng hành với quyết định là cả một team, một ban lãnh đạo của công ty. Khi cơm không lành, canh không ngọt, ai dám chắc mình sẽ không bị người khác tố?
Ngoài ra, việc nói xấu đối thủ không hề làm lợi cho chính mình. Còn đó các đối thủ khác trên thị trường, họ sẵn sàng nhảy vào dìm cả công ty bị nói xấu lẫn công ty nói xấu khi mọi việc được sáng tỏ. Chiêu ngư ông đắc lợi này không cần tốn công mà tự dưng được hưởng, ai lại không thích. (Tự nhiên nhớ tới vụ nước tương 3-MCPD. Tương tự như vậy, công ty mà ai-cũng-biết-đó-là-công-ty-tên-gì-ấy đã chơi một cú ngoạn mục khi hạ bệ nhiều đại gia trong ngành nước tương mà vươn lên đứng đầu. Không biết nên học hỏi hay tránh xa ‘case study’ này đây).
Quay lại vấn đề, với những lý do trên, mình thật sự không tin có ai thuộc đối thủ của Honda lại dám làm việc mà mọi người đang đồn đoán. Nguyên nhân là gì, chắc chắn tương lai cũng sẽ có câu trả lời. Chắc khoảng trong vòng 2 tháng nữa!
Nói thêm là mình đang rất nóng lòng coi Honda xứ lý dư luận không tốt về sản phẩm mình như thế nào. Ai ngờ rằng sản phẩm của các hãng khác cũng bị tương tự. Thế là Honda bớt áp lực phần nào. Mất một Case Study hay.
Nhưng mà, biết đâu được, sự việc đang diễn ra chính là điều mà mình mong chờ được xem….
How do you stand apart from the crowds of the holiday season when everyone — from the big-box store down to the mall kiosk, from the major manufacturers to the niche retailers — is inundating consumers with messages of sales and discounts?
That was the challenge facing Pioneer Electronics (USA) Inc., when the company decided to promote its new in-dash navigation models — AVIC-Z110BT and AVIC-X910BT — with holiday rebate offers.
The company’s solution: target its audience with razor-sharp precision by finding them in online forums, and let the message speak for itself. Pioneer turned to PostRelease, which provides an automated way to insert sponsored posts into relevant forum discussion threads.
Before using PostRelease, Pioneer advertised heavily in car audio and automotive enthusiast magazines. Over the past four years, these audiences shifted away from magazines and moved to online forums. Pioneer knew its enthusiast audience was on these websites, but there was no good way to reach them. Banner campaigns on these forums resulted in exceptionally low click-through rates.
When PostRelease was presented as an advertising option, Pioneer saw it as a way to reach its target enthusiast audiences with content. Pioneer was able to provide information that its audience wanted in a way that was less “advertising” and more informational.
Forums offer a highly targeted audience ready for product messages
Forums are online gathering places for people who share a similar interest, communicating with each other by posting messages. There are millions of highly targeted online forums, for people who want to talk about cars, video games, music, fashion, sports, hobbies, and the list goes on.
People often are there precisely to discuss products or services, even specific brands. They pose questions to the community, ask for guidance, or simply look to connect with people who share their passions.
A challenge when targeting audiences in online forums is that it’s time-consuming to find the right forums, identify the relevant discussion threads within those forums, and manually contribute content and manage replies to those posts. Also, it’s usually against the forum’s rules to post promotional messages. But PostRelease has relationships with a network of forums, giving them permission to post relevant messages. The PostRelease software fully automated the identification of relevant forums, insertion of Pioneer’s message into these forums, and the tracking of the reads and clicks that the campaign generated.
PostRelease and Pioneer crafted a sponsored forum post that included product images, direct links to the product web pages, and the rebate page on Pioneer’s website. (See one of Pioneer’s posts here.)
The campaign ran as a sticky post — meaning the post remained in the lead position — in relevant audio-related discussion categories in 55 automotive-themed forums, from Nov. 2 to Nov. 9, 2009. The post was clearly marked as from PostRelease and Pioneer and, once unstuck, moved down the page as a regular forum post would. It remains part of the forum content for the life of the forum.
The five forums to generate the most clicks and reads for Pioneer’s holiday campaign were ClubFrontier.org, Camaroz28.com, DuramaxForum.com, Z06Vette.com, and 300CForums.com.
Hyper-targeting has residual benefits
Pioneer achieved a 60 percent click-through rate by using PostRelease to target automotive enthusiasts in online forums. Pioneer had past experience with PostRelease and expected the high click rates and targeted reads. The pleasant surprise for Pioneer was the fact that the posts continue to generate response months after the paid campaign has completed. Pioneer continues to benefit from posts run months earlier, from a campaign for which it only paid for one week’s run.
The reason? Forum posts contain content that can be discovered in search engine results, driving traffic to the ad not only from the audience of the forum in which it appears, but also directly from organic search listings.
After the seven-day campaign, Pioneer’s click-through rate was 57 percent. Today, six months later, the click-through rate is averaging 65 percent. The PostRelease campaign shows up in Google, Yahoo, and Bing search results on the first page for keywords “pioneer navigation rebate,” averaging a 7.2 position.
These results are typical. In fact, sponsored forum posts, clearly marked as advertisements, increase in ability to drive response over time — by an average of more than 100 percent one year after a paid campaign has ended, according to an analysis conducted by PostRelease. After 60 days, the total number of click-throughs increases by an average of 40 percent, and after 180 days, it increases by an average of 77 percent.
Since Pioneer’s offer was valid for a limited time only, one challenge was how to handle sending the residual traffic to an expired offer. The solution was to update the landing page with the latest offer information so that residual traffic would see current programs.
The one thing Pioneer would do differently in the future is to add social media “bumpers” to each post. A new feature from PostRelease, these bumpers would link to Pioneer’s Facebook fan page, Twitter feed, and website, to take full advantage of the consumer’s focused attention in the moment.
Social Media Marketing is in full swing nowadays, and almost all of the world’s top brands are utilising it in one way or another. The campaigns aren’t always the easiest to execute (and sometimes go bad, although that’s another blog post), but if done correctly they have the potential to generate a massive return on investment. Here we look at a rundown of the ten best social media marketing campaigns of all time:
Dunkin’ Donuts came up with an awesome campaign to promote the launch of their Coolatta beverages – a sweepstakes where Dunkin’ Donuts Facebook fans could upload a photo of themselves with a Coolatta beverage to Facebook and automatically be entered into a daily giveaway. The relatively low cost campaign built up their social network following, increased brand & product recognition with the mass of Coolatta-related images flying around the web, and obviously encouraged people to buy their iced-coffee drink too.
Although these kinds of campaigns certainly aren’t rare nowadays, this was one of the first of it’s kind, which is why I think it deserves a space in the Top Ten. Dunkin’ Donuts still have a strong Facebook presence to this day, and run a similar ongoing campaign called Fan of the Week.
Keep It Coolatta Was One Of The First Campaigns Of Its Kind
Google did something very uncharacteristic of the search giants on February 2010 and ran a TV advertisement campaign entitled ‘Parisian Love’ in the advertising break of the 44th annual Superbowl. The ad demonstrated some of Google’s many search-based features, and was based around somebody debating whether to move to France to meet up with a lover. The ad definitely generated a lot of buzz, and stocks rose almost instantly, but was it worth an estimated $5,000,000 price tag for the 53 second slot? Who knows, although the company was last valued at $153.4 billion, so it’s not as if they’re short of the cash.
Google later capitalised on the buzz surrounding its Parisian Love campaign by launching a Search Stories mini-site, where users can create and share their own Superbowl-style advertisement.
Dove’s viral video ‘Dove Evolution’ was part of its ‘Campaign For Real Beauty’ launched in 2006, and was the first purpose-built viral video to make a real impact on a marketing campaign for the company. The video features model Stephanie Betts being given a makeover then later being photoshopped, and is supposed to highlight how our perception of beauty is distorted. The video managed to acquire over 11,400,000 views on YouTube, and it has been estimated that it brought in a massive $150,000,000 worth of exposure for the company. Not bad.
The video also managed to inspire a number of spin-off videos, most notably ‘Slob Evolution‘, which went on to be nominated for many prestigious awards, such as a Daytime Emmy and Webby award.
My Starbucks Idea is an excellent example of crowd-sourcing quality information for the purpose of business development. The great thing about this campaign isn’t just that they acquired (and continue to acquire) a huge amount of business ideas for free, but that they’re also generating brand awareness and customer engagement as a bi-product. And just imagine how happy it would make that special someone who got their idea implemented? Priceless. Here are a few of the ideas that made it:
Low fat & high-protein items for breakfast
Free coffee for Gold Card members on their birthday
Evian launched its ‘Roller Babies’ video in July 2009 as part of it’s ‘Live Young’ campaign, and instantly gained success. The video notched up 27,000,000 views on the official YouTube video, and an estimated 61,000,000 views across the web in total, making it the most popular online advertisement ever. What Evian are most proud of though, is the videos ability to inspire conversation – research shows that over 80% of people who watched the clip in either France or America considered discussing it, and over 65% wanted to share it.
The most interesting aspect of Nielsen’s research though, was the fact that 95% of the people in France (one of the countries where the advertisement was first launched) who viewed the video online had not seen the ad on TV. This statistic really cemented the need for online video to run alongside – and possibly even replace – traditional media channels.
In probably the most noble campaign in our top ten, Everywhere, a social media communications and content company based in Atlanta, Georgia, launched a campaign to raise money for various non-profit cancer organisations. The campaign was based around the idea that #BeatCancer’s sponsors – eBay/Paypal & MillerCoors Brewing Company – would donate $0.01 to charity for every time the hash tag ‘#BeatCancer’ was mentioned on either a blog post, Tweet or Facebook status update. The campaign earned over $70,000 for various charities, and really showed that it’s possible to do something amazing with social media.
The Inspiring #BeatCancer Campaign Raised Over $60,000 For Charity
‘Will it Blend?’ has been going for 3 years now, and is still generating buzz around Blendtec’s products. There’s no doubt that it was (and still is) a successful marketing campaign – it won .Net Magazine’s 2007 Viral Video campaign of the year, the Bronze level Clio Award for Viral Video in 2008, and was also nominated for the 2007 YouTube award for Best Series. Currently, the Will It Blend? series has gathered more than 100,000,000 hits, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down any time soon.
It’s been well documented that Social Media was a huge part of Obama’s election campaign, and that can be backed up by some fascinating statistics regarding what the campaign achieved:
5 million ‘friends’ on more than 15 social networking sites
13 million email subscribers
8.5 million monthly visitors to MyBarackObama.com (at its peak)
3 million online donors
It’s also interesting to compare Obama’s Social Media campaign to that of his nearest rival, John McCain. For example: On election day Obama had 3,000,000 Facebook supporters opposed to McCain’s 600,000, 859,000 MySpace friends opposed to McCain’s 319,000, 115,623 Twitter followers opposed to McCain’s 4,911 and 117,873 YouTube subscribers as opposed to McCain’s 2,902. To sum it up, he absolutely destroyed McCain on every major social media platform, and maybe – just maybe – that’s what gave him the edge in the election.
Obama’s Social Media Campaign Helped Him Become The First Black President
The UK-based car insurance comparison site Compare the Market launched its legendary Compare the Meerkat TV campaign in early 2009. The campaign was based around ‘Aleksandr’, owner of Compare the Meerkat, who was getting rather annoyed with people getting mixed up between Compare the Meerkat and Compare the Market, so decided to launch a campaign to inform people of the differences between the two. The campaign went viral in the offline space almost immediately, and the online world wasn’t far behind when the Compare the Meerkat mini-site was launched along with Aleksandr’s Twitter account.
In my opinion, the Compare the Meerkat campaign was the most innovative out of the top 10 – the virality of the content is second to none; I can’t count the amount of people who have asked me if I’ve seen the advert, or reciting any one of the numerous catchphrases associated with it. The real power comes from how the campaign is so closely linked to the Compare the Market brand, though – Excellent viral content + Heavy brand association = successful marketing campaign. Simples.
Yeah, yeah – I know it’s so cliché, and I really was going to put it at number two just to be different, but there are just too many reasons why the Old Spice YouTube campaign was the best of all time. Let’s look at a few of them:
More people watched its videos in 24 hours than those who watched Obama’s presidential victory speech
Total video views reached 40,000,000 in a week
Campaign impressions: 1,400,000,000
Since the campaign launched, Old Spice body wash sales are up 27%; in the last three months up 55%; and in the last month up 107%
Amazing, huh? Sure, a 107% increase in short-term sales is an insanely good return for a marketing campaign, but you really don’t appreciate how good it is until you have a think about the ROI. You see, this particular Old Spice campaign didn’t require a $5,000,000 ad spot, a $8,000,000 celebrity paycheck, or a$15,550,000 video campaign – it’s estimated that the campaign cost a very modest $250,000 to run. Sadly it’s still too early to calculate the actual ROI of the campaign, but you can bet your bottom dollar that it’s going to be positive.
Thanks for reading! If you think that there’s a campaign that deserves to be in the top 10 that isn’t, please post it in a the comments below.
SIX WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR DIGITAL MARKETING IN 2012
‘Tis the season…to start thinking about how you’re going to grow your business in 2012.
Based on what we’re seeing out there, here are a few things that you need to include in your digital marketing plans for 2012.
Develop a Mobile Strategy
The iPad 3 will be dropping next year, Amazon’s Kindle Fire has a web browser, and more tablets are entering the marketplace. In addition, more and more people are walking around with computers in their pants, also known as smart phones.
“Mobile” covers a lot of ground: location-based apps, QR codes, SMS marketing, text messaging and more. But the best place to start is with a mobile-friendly website. People on mobile devices have different needs and expectations than they do when they’re on a desktop machine.
What do your customers want from your website when they’re on the move? Directions? A phone number? Store hours? Lengthy bios on all your staff? (Not.)
Be sure to view your website on an iPhone, Droid and Blackberry. How does it look? Will it help turn visitors into customers?
Improve your Facebook Presence
If your prospects are on Facebook, make sure you have a strategy that works.
Start with a landing page that is optimized to accomplish one goal: get people to like you.
Follow up by creating engaging content on your Facebook business page that encourages people to like, comment and share your content. This will land you on your customers’ news feeds, and help you stay front of mind.
You may also want to experiment with some targeted Facebook ads to attract new prospects.
Turn Your Blog Into a Lead Generation Machine
Search will continue to be a critical tool for attracting new business. If you want to rank well at Google, then you’re going to need to blog for your business.
Create keyword-rich blog posts that answer your ideal customers’ most important questions.When they ask these questions at Google or Bing, your blog posts can appear near the top of the results. This will help drive qualified traffic to your blog where you can establish your credibility and drive interested prospects to your contact form.
These days, video is inexpensive, easy to create, and incredibly engaging. So why aren’t you doing more of it?
In 2012, set yourself a goal that you’re going to create one video every week that addresses your prospects’ big questions, shows how to use your product, gives a tour of your facility, spotlights one of your customers using your products, or whatever it is that will convince your ideal customer that they should be talking to you.
Post your videos to YouTube, and give them keyword-rich titles, descriptions and tags. Embed them in your blog, post them to Facebook, and promote them through Twitter and LinkedIn.
The most important asset most businesses and non-profits have is their list. The easiest way to build your list, and to get permission to email the people on it, is to get people to sign up for an email newsletter.
To increase your subscriber base, you’ll need to create a piece of email bait: something of value that will encourage your prospects to give their email addresses to you. This might be a white paper, or entry to a giveaway, or discounts in your online store that are only available to subscribers. Whatever will motivate your prospects and customers to subscribe, that’s your offer.
Every page of your website should promote your email bait for maximum results.
This is our new six-month program, open to 10 businesses, non-profits and individuals at a time, who are looking for some real help in growing their business in 2012.
In Conclusion
Next year is going to be an amazing year of growth and profits for your company once you put some of the right pieces in place.
It’s going to take hard work, commitment and consistency to succeed, but we know you’ve got it in you.
