We were asked to talk to the Board Members of the VKE Kosmetikverband in Dusseldorf, Germany. The members comprise senior executives from companies such as Chanel, Estee Lauder, Clarins, and Coty.
The question we were asked to answer was " If you were in our shoes, why should we invest in social media?
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Social media and Germany - realising the value
1. Thank you and intro’
20 minutes
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What do we do?
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2. We are a specialist beauty media insight company and tell brands
what’s being said about them on social media and in print media.
In terms of print media as you can imagine with over 4,000 brands
active in the market it’s impossible for a marketer to keep track of
them all.
So what we do is collect data on every single beauty brand in
terms of their print advertising and PR activity and give our
customers the whole market.
We took these learns in print and developed our social media
service.
We monitor over 70 million website, globally in 20 languages in real
time.
Our expertise has meant that we have become the UK beauty
industry’s standard for this type of social and print media research.
We have since taken that expertise into Australia, and now
Germany, and working with Melanie we have fortunately already
agreed contracts with 2 major German based beauty companies.
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Who do we work with?
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3. These are some of our bigger UK clients
And this is what one or two clients have kindly said about us
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What do they say about us?
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5. Thomas Schnitzler asked me if I was in his shoes why would I
invest in social media?
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How de we get value?
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6. How do we get value out of social media and see the return on
investment?
I will answer that and give some example of how successful social
media marketing can be, but I must emphasise that we all have
common challenges, we’re all in this together in that the final
objective is to always sell more products.
So as a start point in answering Thomas’ question, I went out and
asked my colleagues and friends in the beauty business what the
word ‘marketing’ meant to them.
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What is marketing?
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7. It’s the art of selling”….is what Kenneth Green said in answer to
my question.
Michelle Feeney : CEO PZ Cussons Beauty answered by saying
“We ask ourselves that question every day and the answer has
morphed and changed. Right now it’s about understanding who
you need to speak to. Where they are. What they’re interested in.
Creating mechanisms and ways to tell your story. It’s gaining and
keeping fans.
I also asked whether beauty is any different from any other
consumer product when it comes to marketing.
Kenneth said “it’s about touching people intimately. You need to
understand the fulfilment and emotion of the products”.
Blake Hughes the MD at E Arden UK said it’s about “Selling
emotions “ and added that “with fragrance you are selling a mood”.
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The Difference
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8. So how does social media fit into all that?
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What’s different?
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9. I have been talking to my beauty clients about the importance of
social media since early in 2008 and it is only in the last 18 months
in the UK that we have seen so many brands beginning to
embrace it.
However there is no magic about social media and let’s not lose
sight of the end game in that it’s about selling and Michelle
Feeney’s view is that “Social media is just another marketing
platform”
And my view is that the one thing that hasn’t changed as far as
marketing is concerned is that for a message to be more effective it
needs to be delivered from as many platforms as possible. Social
media should be one of those platforms.
Quite simply, online media works better when combined with offline
and offline works better when combined with online.
But one thing that HAS changed is the way that the consumer
buys, they are taking control through the internet now more than
ever.
As you know they can review and exchange information and
thoughts on just about any product and can share those thoughts
across the globe in real time.
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What’s different (magnet)
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11. As the consumer becomes more media aware they have come to
expect to have a relationship with a brand, and in response
marketing is changing in that it’s about consumer-attract rather
than brand-push and social media is the perfect vehicle for “selling
emotions and touching people intimately”.
But I am sure that you all know this already and I want to tell you
more about what I mean with a real and possibly surprising
example
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What’s different VW
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12. Concluding with the memorable tag line “We pluck the lemons;
you get the plums,” this famous Volkswagen ad from the 60’s
teaches us a lot about social media and teaches me that as beauty
marketers you already know a lot about reaching out to your target
market.
By calling their own car a lemon, VW related to the reader on a
personal level. VW is not a faceless corporation imploring you to
spend more, but a company that has real people rejecting cars for
something as minor as a hair line scratch in the windshield. The ad
relates to the consumer in a direct, personal way, to the point and
with humour.
The ad was a breakthrough in product-to-consumer relations, and
social media is all about customer relations and starts before
you’ve even got a customer.
Let’s dissect that ad a bit more, then talk about fishing.
It relates to the reader on a personal level by talking to them. It
respects their intelligence as real people. It’s understood that
they’ll ‘get it’. It uses humour, it’s personal, it’s direct.
Social media does the same thing. For the word ‘direct’, transpose
‘engage’, and there is no doubt that humour always attracts people
to you and social media is the perfect vehicle with which to do that.
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13. So what’s new? Nothing really. It’s just the platform from which
you can deliver your message is different, and can potentially
reach the whole world.
When it comes to swaying consumers, nothing beats word of
mouth.
92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family
when making a purchase decision. That’s a great stat if you’re a
friend, but being liked on Facebook isn’t the only way to make
friends.
How do we make friends? We have common views and
experiences, we share ideas and thoughts, we are like-minded. A
conversation over coffee can range from fishing to shopping to
holiday to the weather, in the time it takes to say cappuccino. We
like fishing but we like other things as well and social media allows
us to eaves drop in on all of that.
We listen to a friend because we are aligned. We like their
personality and we listen to their recommendation because we
trust them.
A brand is never going to be a true friend, how can it be? However
it can create a personality but beware, consumers are savvy and
their antennae is on the alert for when that conversation moves
from a friendly chat to ‘buy this’.
However a brand can have a personality and a consumer will
identify with that personality and will want to get aligned in some
way. They may even buy it, like it, and tell someone else.
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The Audience
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14. Let’s look at some top line stats for Germany
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Who’s out there? Germany
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15. With 83% of Germans using the internet and over 30% of the
population using Facebook there is no doubt that the web is widely
used in this country.
In fact, 67 million people, in Germany are now using the internet
and 25 million people are on Facebook, and we can look at that in
more detail now.
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Who’s out there? Germany (Facebook)
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16. Facebook is a good indicator as to the health of the German
appetite for social media, even though it’s notable that Facebook
does not dominate the German market quite in the way it does as
in so many others countries.
But the interesting point for beauty is that the profile, highlighted in
red, is skewed towards the typical beauty consumer.
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Who’s out there? (Likes)
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17. And for beauty brands the good news is that 80% of all Facebook
users, not just Germany, prefer to get in touch with a brand
through this social site.
Nielsen’s latest Global Online Consumer Survey of over 25,000
Internet consumers, from 50 countries, endorses what I said earlier
and tells us that recommendations from personal acquaintances,
or opinions posted by consumers online are now the most trusted
forms of advertising.
But I do say that it does not have to be all about Facebook and I’ll
come onto that later.
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Who’s out there? Germany
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18. If we look at German social media users as opposed to general
internet users it is estimated that the usage will increase from 32
million people this year to just under 40 million in 2017 which
means that nearly 50% of the population will then be interacting in
some way with a social media site.
And to help us there is a great deal of information from which we
can understand how consumers use social media.
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Who’s out there? USA women
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19. There is no doubt that the USA is ahead of the world with social
media usage so it’s worth looking at some numbers and see how
they might relate to the core beauty target market of women,
because the learnings from the USA do have relevance for the
European market
Please note that this is all products and not just beauty.
55% of daily active social media mums said they made their
purchase because of a recommendation from a personal review or
blog
78% of women in the US use the Internet for product information
before making a purchase
92% pass along information about deals, promotions or things
they’ve found, to others
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Who’s out there? UK Beauty
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20. Those number from the US were for all products not just beauty
but the number of people interacting with beauty brands online in
the UK is now at 15 million and you can see how just one brand,
Clinique, can generate a huge number of conversations in just one
week. This is based on a top line search we undertook of any site
globally using the English language.
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Online v Social
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21. At this point I would like to step back from the numbers and make a
clear differentiation about social media
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What does social mean?
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22. Social media is the ‘catch all’ phrase for Twitter, Facebook,
Pinterest and so on, but also is used, incorrectly, to include the
bloggers, e-zines, the.com publications as well as all the other
news sites.
Incorrectly because the latter are not really social sites in the true
sense. They’re news sites and media platforms. They’re not
‘social’ media in that the audience doesn’t engage in the same way
that they do with a social site.
We prefer to differentiate and call that group ‘online’ or ‘digital’
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What does social mean?
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23. Online is news and social is relationships.
Both can work for a marketer equally well, however online is easier
to get to grips with and social requires more subtlety. I have said
this before but my question to the request “Join my baked beans
Facebook page” is still “Why?”
The power of online is that it provides plenty of platforms.
However because they are fundamentally news sites there is still a
strong element of push culture around the message, therefore a
marketer should not necessarily expect the results to be radically
better than offline.
Conversely, the attract culture around social is hugely powerful
because social is about making friends, recommendations.
Remember the real value online can unlock is the power of
recommendation - consumer / blogger recommendation is more
powerful than many expensive advertising campaigns
It’s a balance, as so much in life is, and marketers do sometimes
struggle to get the balance right, but that is beginning to change.
However we do recognise that many CEO’s underlying concerns
still stem from the fear of viral negative conversations.
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24. When social started that was a valid fear, because in most cases if
someone was bothered to go online and post a review it was very
often negative. That has all changed
What’s also changing is that many more UK beauty brands are
putting more and more effort into online as well as social.
And this is what I want to talk to you about in a practical way
based on what is happening in the UK now.
Now today the UK beauty business is still concentrating on product
placement, PR, albeit on a digital media platform but from the
same publication, for example Vogue.com rather than Vogue on
the news stand, and of course the .com version has the benefit of
a different demographic profile.
There has been a definite positive change within the UK beauty
industry in terms of embracing digital and I would say that even
this year digital is a the top of the agenda as opposed to last year.
That’s all good and if it sells more product that’s even better, but
budgets are important and you will still want to understand the
ROI.
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Start small think BIG
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25. My advice is to start small and concentrate on the areas that you
can control and measure the return on, for instance the reaching
out to the bloggers and the online publications.
Get your PR teams to be pro active.
The reverse of that is reactive and there are hundreds of online
conversations going on around your brands as we speak now, and
they can of course be monitored and acted upon.
However, my advice is that the place to start is with the online
magazines and bloggers. Digital-only launches, bloggers-only
dinners and tea parties and events, are increasing and all work
well.
Those PRs who have honed their skills with offline are seeing the
rewards as they transfer those skills to online.
Again whilst talking to Kenneth Green over a coffee he said to me
that their worry was that social media had changed the way brands
should market themselves and asked what advice I could give.
My answer was simple. I said “Kenneth you are a master at
communicating with people, it’s one of the many things you are
well known for. You already know how to communicate your brand
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26. story to the consumer, so just do what you are doing now”.
In fact you are all masters at doing that but be aware that some of
the ground rules are changing. The Blogging community is
increasingly influential and as individuals they are also increasingly
commercial with some bloggers charging up to 1,000 Euro per day.
But without doubt Bloggers provide both a highly effective
marketing platform as well as an immediate way to reach out to
consumers in a trusted, third party way.
Conversely, Bloggers have been described as a ‘movable feast’
with some Bloggers appearing and then disappearing making it
hard for marketers to keep up to date as to who they should be
engaging with.
And then there are also some bloggers whose only real interest is
in obtaining free samples.
But there is plenty of data such as a Blogger Leaderboard and
other metrics to help you target the most relevant and influential
brand ambassadors.
However Germany is behind the curve for social media and that is
good news and a great advantage.
It’s good news because you can start in a place that’s taken the
UK beauty brands two or three years to get to. I would suggest
that with potentially 50% of Germans predicted to be engaging
with social media the fuse is lit and the timing is right to really push
your brands.
Also there is value in first mover advantage over the competition alternatively those that are too slow to adapt (and more importantly
learn) could be left behind by more pro-active competitors…
and on that note let’s take a top down look at some UK success
stories.
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Case Histories
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28. I want to talk you through just a few case histories to show you
how other brands have realised the value of social media and
online.
And whilst the first example is not actually a beauty product, it is
aimed at women and their quest for beauty, however we might
want to define that elusive term.
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The ROI - Sales
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29. With no above the line advertising and no marketing apart from
Facebook and Twitter, Malcolm Bell the inventor of the slimming
fashion product ’Hotpants’ took his company, Zaggora, a start-up
from a turnover of zero to £10 million in one year.
He gave 2,000 product samples away through Facebook,
encouraged ‘Likes’ and sent out over 3,000 Twitter messages in a
3 month period.
His basic ‘Hotpant’ sold for 57 Euro and he sold over 200,000 pairs
in year one. Zaggora now spend about £50k a month on a cost
per click strategy and are turning over £30 million a year after just
three years with a much broader product portfolio.
Well, we all deal in beauty and that’s what I expect you want to
hear about, so in preparation for today we researched our client
base and asked how importantly they rated online and social
media as part of their overall media mix and I want to emphasise
that last point.
As part of their OVERALL marketing mix.
So before I take you through the beauty case histories I wanted
you to see the results of our own research.
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31. In every case we had a 5 apart from one 4 and this what they said:
Social media is a 4 for us. It would be a 5 except that Europe is so
far behind the UK and US in terms of leveraging social media in
PR terms that we have to fight to get approval to use it - especially
with the super-luxury heritage brands. At the moment our French
colleagues see it as something that needs to be "tamed" and
controlled through carefully orchestrated social media PR
campaigns that are so complicated, no one understands them and
the personality of the message is invariably lost in translation!
I will now take you through our 5 case histories.
Because of confidentiality you will understand it is not possible to
get into detailed brand specifics, apart from the next one, so the
others are some real but neutralised examples of how online has
been successful.
They are based on real data analysed from real campaigns and
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32. show how you can amplify a message and reach a greater
audience than a static offline publication can with a fixed audience
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The ROI - one reaches many
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33. The Jean Paul Gaultier On The Docks launch in September
delivered an impressive reach on twitter of 518,000 impressions
from the 100 or so tweets made just on the one launch night.
They combined online with offline for the overall campaign and that
tweeted message has alone reached potentially half a million
people, not all will have been based in the UK, and the other offline
activity will have added many times to that number.
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The ROI - global
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34. Just one Tweet from a magazine editor, made at this UK launch
event, was re-Tweeted, and this amplification created 29,0000
impressions which were then followed in 5 other countries in one
night.
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The ROI - Impressions
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35. The brand Twitter handles for this event, which launched a
skincare product, (on the left of the chart) was retweeted 679 times
and made over 3.5 million impressions in total.
The Hashtag (the results are on the right hand chart) is important
to get right because it helps consumers identify with a product, and
in this instance just the one Hashtag at the top where we’ve
changed the name to ‘confidential’, made 2.7 million impressions
Now just for clarification, an impression is a measure of the
number of times an item is displayed, whether it is clicked on or
not. Each time an item displays it is counted as one impression.
It has been said that this of course is no different to TV ratings or
magazine circulations. We know the numbers but can never really
know whether the message was seen.
However with social, the very fact that a Tweet has been re
tweeted is clear evidence that the message has been seen.
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36. This is part of the analysis we ran from this brand’s launch.
It’s another skincare product, but was the first ever digital -only
launch for the brand.
Just online titles and bloggers were invited, again this brand’s
identity has been withheld, but it is the purple one you can see
highlighted in red.
Amongst other things we looked at whether it was the bloggers or
publications that posted the most coverage, and in this instance it
was the online titles.
It is quite clear that the activity took share of voice away from their
competing brands across the activity period, July and August 2013,
and that was one of the key KPIs on which the success of the
campaign was measured.
In fact they increased their share by over 500%, as you will see on
the next chart, and that we know had a direct impact on sales uplift
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The ROI – before and after
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38. This is the result of the share of voice analysis which showed that
post-launch the brand’s share of the online voice increased to 62%
up by over, as I mentioned, 500%
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The ROI – brand values
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39. And finally this post-campaign conclusion for a cosmetic could just
have easily been derived from an offline campaign as well as an
online one.
We have included this to show that it is possible to understand how
an online campaign worked in the same way that you do now with
traditional media.
In this case one of the objectives for the launch was the positioning
of key messages and product attributes, and the need to see
whether the media and the celebrity played them back, which in
general they did not.
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Thought
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The question is not if, but how….
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41. We are coming to the end of the presentation and I hope that I
have put these thoughts into your mind.
Our advice is to be clear on what you want to achieve and the
recommendation is to plan and devise, as a first step to
demonstrate value, an online product placement PR strategy.
The basis of that could be to simply start by listening
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…by listening to what they say
to what’s being talked about around your brand
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43. The idea is to make social media work for you rather than make
you do more work, or there is a danger of analysis paralysis
So it’s not like this….
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….no. There is a more structured way
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44. Measurable and actionable analysis of campaign activity is key
and needs of course to be based on clear objectives agreed from
the outset, which could be impressions, influencers, key messages
or even monetary value so…..
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The value AVE
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45. …lastly, where a Euro value is required, results can be measured
against costs.
Advertising value equivalents, that is what was the value of the
online coverage worth had it been paid for advertising, can also be
applied. Not to Twitter, but certainly to many publications and an
increasing number of bloggers.
In this instance you can see that Online for this campaign
performed better than offline and for a hard pressed Financial
Director that is a tangible KPI.
I hope that this has all been helpful and to summarise…
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Conclusion
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47. Thomas asked me to talk about the value of social media, if I was
in your shoes why would I invest in social media?
In conclusion, what I hope I have shown today is that the basis of
the decision to invest in social media is essentially no different than
the decision to invest in any media activity.
It is not a sliver bullet, but it is measurable and delivers a huge
audience, and is relevant, and is aligned to the way the consumer
wants to engage with and buy into brands today.
My point of view is that social media is the perfect vehicle to get
alongside your consumer, build a brand’s equity through personal
recommendation, and really develop a consumer-attract strategy
as opposed to a blunt brand-push culture.
For German brands social media is still slightly behind the curve,
but it’s building fast and that’s your advantage.
You are in the perfect position to benefit from the hindsight of
others, you are at a start point that’s taken them 2 to 3 years to get
to.
So include it within you marketing mix, and accelerate sales even
faster as your economy continues to grow.
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