The target audience of MINI itself is young people who care about design and fun on cars. Usually these kinds of people are just the heavy user of digital media. Therefore to make a full digital strategy to market is a good idea.
I think MINI did the best job on social media. MINI must have some experts building social media. I think they have already done a perfect job and don’t need more instruction and just keep what they are doing. There is only one thing that I think it needs to improve.
MINI post the same content on its entire social media. But sometimes the platform would have its own characteristics. Like Facebook, for example, it posted a beautiful picture of the car’s detail part. All the conversation under this post is like “love my MINI” and “Color seems awesome” which is kind of lacking of interaction but just praise by customers. When it goes to twitter things totally changed. The MINI Twitter I think response and interact too much. Sometimes I even don’t know who are they responding to and what for. Because people cannot see customers comments but they can only see MINI’s response on their page. MINI needs more understanding on how to properly use social media in specific social media platform. Although the same content is easy to manage and check on data basis, I recommend MINI to consider making different content to better cater the social media platform.
I think MINI should use content marketing in the Internet marketing strategy. Because MINI is a brand can easily use inbound and content marketing due to its fancy appearance and close relation with fashion.
MINI can use its fashionable characteristic in the marketing by release e-books with great photos, e-mail newsletters with great photos and creative campaign links, blog articles and video content. For example make an e-books, which cooperates with fashion magazine. Ask the magazine to provide hottest model or famous person to attend the e-books with photo and interview. Make the book a timeline for easy reading. Release the e-book for free on all kinds of media and platform like social media, magazine, email list, official website, etc.
MINI doesn’t have an app in the App Store. I think it is a big problem to deal with in the mobile strategy. There is one idea that I want to recommend to MINI. They can do a Racing Ranking campaign in mobile marketing. Now most of the mobile phones have the GPS inside, which can record the route the phone has been. In the campaign MINI can set up an app that can link with the Bluetooth of the car. Once people get on the car and link the Bluetooth, the recorder would start to record the route their MINI has drive. And MINI can ask people to share their route record and mile numbers on social media. Also they can ask their friend to join this mile ranking to see who drives the most in the month and who have been more states in one year. It would bring much more fun by driving MINI in mobile marketing.
For the KPI of the target reaching, the first KPI should be view number in 30 days. The cookie inside the website could provide the view number. Also the app could provide click number. The second one should be area. Knowing people from where click your website is important, especially for cars. Also the KPI that how the audience interact with the app and website is important. It could help optimize the engine. Also important KPIs like time they stay, the hottest picture or content that people interact, review, rating, share number are the things that needs to be checked.
I think the basic budget of this full digital strategy should be 8 millions. Cause it is impossible for me to get newest advertising reference fee for free. I just do them on the template. There should be more advertising used for MINI. But the basic spend for this strategy should be 8 million dollars per year. Including the advertising fee for Internet advertising and building a new app. There is not much to improve in the official website and social media part. So the new app would be biggest cost in the budget. As for the email marketing, e-books and other blogs, it should be much less cost.