Presented 7-14-2015 Every modern marketer knows that social media is now an integral part of a business. But how can you get the most out of your social media presence? In this presentation, Ken Bowen, Manager of Editorial Content, Daniel Burstein, Director of Editorial Content, and Kylie Davidson, Manager of Academic Curriclum, all of MECLABS, discussed strategies and skills necessary to executing a successful social media campaign while impacting the bottom line. This content was prepared for the graduate class of Lakshmi Goel, Ph.D.

1. Social Media Strategy

2. 1. Use a significant offer to attract
attention
2. Ensure you can track from social to
in-store
3. Build on previous success to develop
an audience
Case Study: Hesselson’s Sporting Goods Store
Challenge: Small family-owned business that operates only as a brick-and-mortar, wanted to reach
customers online.
Campaign: Hesselson wanted to see how much a small business could benefit from social media by
creating a coupon campaign hosted on the store's existing Facebook page for three weeks.
Steps:
Source: http://bit.ly/Hesselsons
Creative Sample:
Facebook Coupon

3. Coupon
Source: http://bit.ly/Hesselsons

4. Coupon
Results:
• A 23% increase in online-to-offline conversion
• Over $5,500 generated in net store sales
• A 1,100% boost in ROI
Source: http://bit.ly/Hesselsons

5. About MECLABS
MECLABS is a research institute focused on discovering what really works in marketing.
We conduct real-world experiments with companies around the world to understand why
people say “yes”.
Our scientific approach provides the basis for education and training resources that help
create exceptional, customer-centric marketing organizations.

6. Ken Bowen
Manager, Editorial Content
MECLABS
Daniel Burstein
Director of Editorial
Content
MECLABS
Kylie Davidson
Manager, Academic
Curriculum
MECLABS

7. 1. Methodology
2. Discovery
3. Application

8. 1. Methodology Overview

10. Attract Attention
ea = 2at + I + as
• Attraction has the highest coefficient
because if the banner ad does not capture
the attention of the viewer, the likelihood of
the ad achieving it’s objective is significantly
diminished.
• A banner ad can attract maximum attention
with positional and creative elements.
• Positional elements: eye path, placement on
page
• Creative elements: color, size, shape, motion,
text

11. Attract Attention
ea = 2at + I + as
• Attraction is has the highest coefficient
because if the banner ad does not capture
the attention of the viewer, the likelihood of
the ad achieving it’s objective is significantly
diminished.
• A banner ad can attract maximum attention
with positional and creative elements.
• Positional elements: eye path, placement on
page
• Creative elements: color, size, shape, motion,
text

12. Build Interest
ea = 2at + I + as
• One of the best ways to build interest in
something is to create a need.
• Create a need by identifying the
problem/match the customer’s need.
• I want to look responsible
• “Help us: Every time you use you X card, we donate $X to the X Foundation”
• I want to be special
• Provide a customizable or exclusive credit card
• Every ad has its own value proposition.
• If you don’t demonstrate a value, you may get a click, but you
likely will not get a sale.

13. Build Interest
ea = 2at + I + as

14. Ask for the click
ea = 2at + I + as
• Online users need to be guided to an action.
• Use a clear, simple, clickable button on the
banner ad.
• Establish credibility on the ad to minimize
anxiety about clicking through.

15. Ask for the click
ea = 2at + I + as
• Online users need to be guided to an action.
• Use a clear, simple, clickable button on the
banner ad.
• Establish credibility on the ad to minimize
anxiety about clicking through.

17. Motivation
• Motivation has the highest coefficient because it is the
most important deciding factor in the sales process. It
consists of 2 components:
• The nature of the customer’s demand for the product (why)
• The magnitude of the customer’s demand for the product
(want)
• To understand a user's motivation and design relevant
web pages to their need, you must analyze the
behavior of both online and offline traffic channels.
• Keywords, page depth, time on page, button clicks,
new/returning, demographics

18. Motivation
Initial questions to ask ourselves using available
data:
• What do I know about this person?
• What assumptions can I make about this person?
• Can I predict what they are looking for based on
these assumptions?
• Can I provide what they are looking for in this
medium or do I need to redirect?
• Am I offering something relevant to the visitor?
• How much is the visitor interacting with my content?

19. Clarity of Value Proposition

20. Clarity of Value Proposition
• Especially on social media, we need to be able to execute a strong value proposition.
• Appeal (“I want it”) – Three factors contribute directly to a prospect’s degree of “want”: relevance, importance,
and urgency.
• Exclusivity (“I can’t get it anywhere else”) – Exclusivity is related to the number of competing options. The lower
the number, the better.
• Credibility (“I believe in it/you”) – 3 ways to intensify credibility are: specificity, quantification, and verification.
• Clarity (“I understand it/you”) – Is the message clearly articulated and can the prospect easily find the message.

21. Clarity of Value Proposition

22. Friction
• Friction is the psychological resistance to a given
element in the sales process. It is composed of two
components:
• Length – this might be the number of fields or the number of
steps from Point A (desire to buy) to Point B (purchase).
• Difficulty – this might be the nature of the fields, a disruptive
eye-path, or page elements that cause visitor annoyance.
• The objective is to minimize not eliminate friction.
If you eliminate all friction you, necessarily,
eliminate "the sale" (visitors may be forced to log-in
in order to view your social media page).

23. Friction

24. Anxiety
• Anxiety is the psychological concern stimulated by
a given element in the sales or "buy" process.
• You must seek to relieve and/or correct for
anxiety at three different levels:
1. Specificity – corrective measures address the precise source
of anxiety.
2. Proximity – visitor experiences corrective measures at the
same time and place as anxiety is experienced.
3. Intensity – amplify corrective measures to overcome
irrational fears.

25. Anxiety
• Anxiety is the psychological concern stimulated by
a given element in the sales or "buy" process.
• You must seek to relieve and/or correct for
anxiety at three different levels:
1. Specificity – corrective measures address the precise source
of anxiety.
2. Proximity – visitor experiences corrective measures at the
same time and place as anxiety is experienced.
3. Intensity – amplify corrective measures to overcome
irrational fears.

26. Incentive
• An incentive is an appealing element such as a discount, a
bonus, or special offer introduced to stimulate a desired
action.
• Incentive is used to “tip the balance” of emotional forces
from negative (exerted by friction elements) to positive.

27. 2. Discovery
What can we find out about our customers?

28. Data sources
• Web analytics can tell us about visitor motivation and points of
friction/anxiety
• What kind of visitor behaviors or characteristics correlate with conversion?
C = 4m + 3v + 2(i-f) - 2a©
What kind of visitor
behaviors or
characteristics
correlate with
conversion?
Where did they go
before leaving the site?
How did they reach the site?
Have they been on the
site before?
What did they view?
Motivation
Friction/Anxiety
Value Proposition

29. Data sources
• Social media
• Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, blogs, YouTube
• Generates 3 billion data points per day according to a recent DataSift
webinar
• Influencers’ screen names
• Metadata available depends on platform, user settings
• Gender
• Age
• Language
• Location
• Profession/role
• Challenging to connect social media to specific customers/prospects
• Freeform and non-text data can be difficult to process
Definition
Metadata: Data that provides
information about other data.

30. Data sources
• How can we use this data?
• Which types of customers generate the most revenue?
• What is frequently ordered together?
• How frequently should I contact customers?
• After what length of time should I give up on a lead?

31. Social media and data analytics in practice
In a survey of marketing professionals,
more than half tracked Social Reach, and
almost half tracked Referrals by Social
Media Channel
• Few tracked ROI or Sales by Social Media
Channel
• Relative difficulty of tracking

32. Social media and data analytics in practice

33. Social reach

34. Social reach

35. Traffic referrals by social media channel

36. Traffic referrals by social media channel

37. Traffic referrals by social media channel

38. Conversions by social media channel

39. Conversions by social media channel
What it looks like:

40. Conversions by social media channel
What it looks like:
Where it comes from:

41. Conversions by social media channel
What it looks like:
Where it comes from:
What it tells us:

42. Engagement per post

43. Engagement per post

44. Top influencers

45. Top influencers

46. Top influencers

47. Tweet Deck

48. 3. Application
Case Studies, Stats & Strategies

49. General Social Media
• Testing will improve your ROI over time
• Tracking post performance and adjusting regularly can increase your ROI exponentially
• If you have a poor performing campaign don’t be afraid to turn it off and try again
• If you have a well performing campaign try tweaking it and continue to track
• Best practices, assumptions, and marketer’s intuition are unreliable; Data is KEY

50. #WebClinic
Assumption:
Responsive design will always
increase mobile clickthrough

51. #WebClinic
Experiment: Mobile side-by-side
Responsive
54%In Clicks
Unresponsive

52. #WebClinic
Assumption:
Upfront costs scare off prospects

53. #WebClinic
Experiment: Sex offender registry
$6 a month for full
access
Control
$6 per month
+ $20 activation fee
Treatment
XNo Difference
in conversion
99%In Revenue

54. #WebClinic
Assumption:
The call-to-action should always
be placed “above the fold”

55. #WebClinic
Experiment: Call-to-action placement
Control
• Call-to-action
placed “above
the fold”
Treatment
• Call-to-action
placed “below
the fold”
220%In Conversion

56. #WebClinic
Assumption:
We should leverage our unique
brand design whenever possible

57. #WebClinic
Experiment: Local newsletter sign-up
Control
• Simple, traditional typeface
• Standard form field
• Brand-specific typography
• Branded design for sign-up form
Treatment
51%In Conversion

58. Facebook: Mellow Mushroom Case Study
• Posting often is good but relevance is great
• In a recent Marketing Sherpa case study pizza giant Mellow Mushroom
revealed their strategy to effectively harness both post frequency and post
timing
• Use your current followers to get more
• Large companies often request their followers submit content and
participate in campaigns to spread awareness. Asking followers to upload
photos with products or write reviews is a good first step
• Shoe company, Gravity Defeyer, sends product samples to fitness bloggers
in exchange for socially linked reviews. This has created a 450% ROI on
their social campaigns
• Calls to Action are key
• Providing followers a clear way to interact with every single post increases
engagement and will increase your audience
• Be Succinct
• Followers decide if they want to engage within seconds. There’s no need to
put all the info in the main post. This is a great place to leverage the
heuristic.

59. Twitter: Myrtle Beach Case Study
The Myrtle Beach Tourism Group made four key changes for
incredible results
• Event tweets
• The team started sending out even related tweets to increase
engagement with interested audiences
• Promotions
• Twitter is a great space for giveaways because retweets can increase
your audience in leaps and bounds. There are programs like Lead
Generation Cards that allow users to enter without leaving the platform
• Clickable elements
• The team used new video cards on twitter to share lots of information
with users via an interactive page element
• Segmentation
• The team segmented their audience and worked to target core groups
based on interest
Results: A 5% engagement increase with video cards, a 225%
increase in video views, 11,000 new followers in 2 months, a
30% decrease in CPA (cost per acquisition)

60. Pinterest
• This is the shopper’s social media
• 67% of people on Pinterest use it as a consumer; people want to buy
• The entire structure of Pinterest is skewed to users who want to save
and clickthrough on products and content
• One company in a MarketingSherpa case study saw a 5% increase in
sales and 77% increase in sales traffic due to simple Pinterest campaigns
• Producing content increases clickthrough and sharing
• Pinterest users are trained to clickthough to read content which can
increase site traffic
• Pinning of an article not only increases your follower base but can also
increase SEO of your sites content
• Leverage collaborative boards
• Find users who already post in your space and segment and team up or
find users who are interested in your topic and build on their base
• By using collaborative boards wallpaper company, Murals Wallpaper, has
seen a 700% lift in Pinterest impressions
• Know your audience
• 68% of Pinterest users are women
• Need to target men, try manteresting.com

61. Instagram
• Facebook-owned photo sharing site launched in 2010
• With over 300 million users, Instagram recently surpassed the much older Twitter in
users
• 70 million photos and videos shared daily
• 2.5 million “likes” per day
• Arguably the most powerful marketing platform for the 18-34
demographic
• 90% of Instagram’s users are under the age of 35
• Most attractive platform for many apparel, entertainment, and media brands focused
on the 18- to 34-year-old age bracket.
• 68% of users are women
• Skews urban
• Instagram users favor quality over quality
• Instagram accounts for only 7% of daily uploads among the top four most popular
photo sharing platforms
• Advertising Policy
• Only from large companies with a history of producing engaging Instagram content
• Based off Facebook demographic data
• Less about conversion than spreading brand values and message

62. 3 Instagram Lessons you can learn from Taylor Swift
• Taylor on Instagram
• Over 37 million followers; among the highest in the world
• Relative other more elusive celebrities, Taylor Swift has facilitated much of her
success by making fans feel like friends
• Hosts and personally appears at secret fan parties around the world for “all-
star” supporters
• Uses Instagram as a Visual Storytelling Tool
• Taylor uses her Instagram to make fans feel connected to her life
• Quirky photos of her cats, pictures of her baked goods, video of her hearing
her song on the radio for the first time…
• Integrates across Social Media Platforms
• Taylor shares her Instagram posts across Twitter and Facebook
• Allows her to reach different audiences depending on how they process
content
• Chooses the right time to promote
• Make promotion secondary to social engagement
• Fosters goodwill and gives promotion more impact

63. Instagram Success Story – New York Public Library
Watch the Video

64. Reddit
• One of the most difficult platforms to effectively market on
• Readers do not want to be marketed to
• Any interaction that looks like marketing is unwelcome and/or deleted
• What marketers should know
• Reddit is not a single community, but a platform to join or create sub communities
• Each sub community is started by a reddit user, who assigns rules and moderators
• It is vital to understand the policies of the subreddit you intend to submit your content to.
• Certain domains only
• Articles must be a certain number of months old
• New users and domains are subject to strong anti-spam elements
• Voting system puts heavy emphasis on first ten votes
• First ten votes carry as much weight as the following 100
• The following 1000 votes carry as much weight as the preceeding 100, etc.
• How you should post content
• “The biggest question to ask when participating in Reddit is: Are you contributing? That’s essentially what you should
be asking yourself before beginning any type of ‘marketing.’”
• Before you even think about posting, spend as much time as possible in the subreddit, contributing to other topics
and building credibility and relationships
• Avoid being too promotional when you do post. Moderators can swiftly ban content that is transparently salesy.
• Learn and use proper reddiquette

65. Reddit
Watch the Interview

66. Yelp
• Yelp gets over 35 million hits per month, with over 25%
coming from mobile devices
• 84% of people report that online reviews influence their buying
decisions (Nielson)
• Social media aspects allowed Yelp to overtake other rating sights,
leading to a NYSE valuation of nearly $1 billion
• Elite Yelp reviewers have become the new restaurant influencers
• Encourage reviews
• Create signage throughout the restaurant to encourage reviews (“Love
us on Yelp!”)
• Personally reach out to regulars and ask if they would mind leaving a
review
• Creates momentum and positive word-of-mouth
• Reach out to influencers; South Beach’s MLT sandwich shop
increased sales, social media buzz, and word-of-mouth by
holding contest.
• Involve your staff
• Designate a social media/Yelp manager for the pub
• Hold contest among staff
• Reward staff members who get 5-star reviews
• Leverage other social media channels

67. YouTube
• Highly Competitive
• 20 billion video views per month
• 35 hours of content uploaded each minute
• Stand out by creating compelling, relevant content
• Videos should be helpful and valuable to prospects or customers
• The best videos address a specific need
• How To’s; FAQs; Expert Interviews, etc.
• Make your video findable
• Use targeted keywords in first few works of title
• “iPhone 6 Screen Repair: How an iFixit kit and a 15 minute tutorial can save you $150”
• Using “Player View” rather than “Grid View” as your default view allows your video to autoplay, positively impacting your visiblity
• Brand your channel
• Create a professional, custom, brand-specific background, and feature your best or most popular content in a prominent playlist
• Leverage Annotations, Bulletins, Ads, and other social media or content platforms
• Annotations = Clickable calls to action (subscribe, links to other videos, etc.)
• Bulletins allow you to alert your followers that you have new content available
• YouTube ads operate similarly to Google PPC, but tends to be far less expensive; when prospects search for related terms, your CTA ad
(which can be linked directly to your site) is returned alongside other results
• Learn from Analytics

68. 1. Methodology
2. Discovery
3. Application

70. Questions?