10 Ways Brands Can Target Moms by Fusing Online Advertising and Social Media

Posted By Jaime on Mar 28th, 2011

This article by Hollis Thomases originally appeared in ClickZ on March 8, 2011.

A study recently released by Burst Media looking at “What Mom Likes Online” generated interesting findings. Among them: “Most moms say online ads promoting products geared towards the family and home fall flat” and “Moms found these ads ‘irrelevant or distracting’,” but that “Online ads that offer product coupons, sales promotion codes and/or other incentives resonate better with moms.” Other Burst Media findings highlight moms’ reliance on social media, niche websites, and mobile devices, echoing what was reported at last year’s ad:tech NY conference. So, what’s an advertiser to do? Here’s a great list for starters.

Give Mom what she wants. Since research finds that moms prefer ads with special offers and discounts, why fight the tide? Attract Mom to your site or social media channels with ads offering coupon downloads, rebates, or sample requests. Encourage her to share these offers with her friends and contribute back to the community with product reviews, fun photos, and other comments.Be a resource to moms. Use social media to offer truly helpful and useful branded content like tips, ideas, advice, how-to videos, news, etc. Moms love recipes (attention food product advertisers!), which not only makes for good resource and advertising content, but recipe communities are also great niche sites on which to advertise.

Build a community around your brand. A branded community like Pampers’ MommyCast can become the hub within which your mommy audience can congregate, ask questions of each other and/or experts, share information, and participate in informal research. Promote this community through your online and offline advertising.Bring your branded social media efforts alive in your ads. Not only do you want to incorporate social media into your brand, and your brand into your social media, but you can also literally pull some of these efforts into your online advertising. There have been a number of brands like Volvo and Juicy Juice that have pulled their live tweets into display ads.

Deliver a message that’s cause-worthy. According to 2010 Cone Cause Evolution research, 95 percent of American moms believe cause marketing is acceptable, 92 percent want to buy a product that supports a cause, and 93 percent are likely to switch brands because of the brand’s support of a cause. These are some pretty potent stats! For example, Coke’s “Give it Back” campaign promotes recycling with concrete correlations that resonate with moms.

Cater to Mom’s mobile lifestyle. Don’t overlook mobile devices – moms rarely find themselves untethered these days. Mobile makes Mom’s life easier, and advertisers have a huge opportunity to literally put their brand in Mom’s pocket…or at least her pocketbook! Moms like branded apps that are truly useful and help save them time. Toys”R”Us has built a mobile app for iPhone and BlackBerry that sends deal alerts.

And Starbucks uses QR codes to let customers pay for coffee via iPhones.

With mobile social networks growing, advertisers can also look for sponsorship opportunities to gain visibility.

Put Mom in the driver’s seat. Instead of funneling ad messages through one social media channel, you have to reach moms on all fronts. Moms like control, they like having a lot of options, and giving them both lets them tap into their creative side. Let moms customize how they communicate with your brand. Make it easy for moms to connect with your brand on their own terms, whether it’s through Twitter, Facebook, e-mail, text alerts, mobile, or directly on your website. Use advertising to promote these options.Keep moms entertained. Multimedia rules Mom’s world. She loves videos, digital games, and mobile apps that engage, assist, entertain, and inform her…plus a bit of “cool factor” doesn’t hurt either. Generate the kind of ad creative that has a better chance of getting Mom’s attention and shared than a sales pitch. For example, Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” YouTube campaign (just as easily converted into an infomercial) showcased the company’s blender power in a very attention-getting way. The campaign was such a huge hit that within two years, retail blender sales increased by 700 percent!

Make it personal. The Aberdeen Group found that a move from segmentation-based marketing to one-to-one personalization can improve conversion rates by 22 percent and customer retention rates by 60 percent. Take advantage of this when developing social media and ad campaigns like MomsRising.org did with a campaign to boost its membership. It created a tool that lets users personalize a video using Mom’s name. You could also try personalizing to Mom’s needs and lifestyle, like Swiffer’s “Cleaning Personality” campaign.

Make sure Mom knows how to find you. Prominently display your social media accounts (are they visible in your ads and on your website? Where is Ann Taylor’s social media presence on its site, for example?). Have direct calls-to-action encouraging moms to connect with your brand. (Caution: if you are going to do this, you better have worthwhile and active accounts to visit – there’s nothing worse than a brand promoting its social media account and having it be lame when you get there.)

The bottom line: moms are social media power users – they are savvy, shrewd, and not likely to be as easily fooled by advertising gimmicks. Use social media and advertising together well, however, and you’ll be pleased at the extended mileage you can get from your efforts.

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Twitter, Facebook, Groupon, and Social Media – What Online Advertisers Need to Know

Posted By Jaime on Apr 12th, 2011

This article by Hollis Thomases originally appeared in ClickZ on April 5, 2011.

Did I get your attention? Of course I did…and that’s my point. Today, social media topics attract advertisers’ attention like bright shiny objects to a fault. By my own observations, because they do capture so much attention, almost any headline containing the words Twitter, Facebook, Groupon, or social media gets clicked, shared, forwarded, and tweeted five times more than other digital advertising or marketing-related headlines, oftentimes without the article even ever being read. In fact, I confess to writing this headline as an experiment, just to prove my point.

Is this all so bad? Isn’t social media a way for brands to connect individually with their consumers in ways they never have before? Heck, didn’t I write a book on the subject?!

Are You Focused On Your Goals?

My concern lies in the ability for advertisers to focus on the kinds of online tactics that will help them reach their goals. When advertisers (and key decision-makers, quite frankly) get too distracted from proven tactics or develop unrealistic or untenable perceptions, it does them no lasting good. For example, last week at the Search Engine Strategies New York Conference, I spoke about expanding beyond pay-per-click search advertising and into display advertising. The room was about half full. The timeslot before this session, I spoke on another panel about Twitter, and the room was almost completely full. Yet, while many companies have successfully leveraged search and display to generate direct and measurable revenue, those doing so through Twitter are fewer and farther between.

Furthermore, I found it interesting that of those audience members in my “Leap from Search to Display” session, by a show of hands, only about half had even ventured outside of Google AdWords and into the Google Display Network, let alone into other forms of online media buying. I had to ask myself how many of these people, however, were also busying themselves setting up and populating Facebook pages or Twitter accounts before they ever even leveraged their search advertising successes? And when I asked the audience how many knew of ways to serve online ads besides through the direct serving of traditional banners and buttons, scarcely a half-dozen hands went up (by my count, there are at least 13 other types of ads or ways for these ads to be served).

While I’ll be the last person to dispute that social media and its respective platforms have merit, I find myself constantly reminding marketers that social media is just another tool in the toolkit. You should take out this tool if it’s the best tool to help you build or fix something, but if a wrench can do a better/faster/less expensive job, why use a hammer? And if you’re going to venture into the sun-shiny terrain of social media marketing, don’t go in with blinders on.

Reality Check

I’m a two-sides-to-every-story kind of girl, so I don’t want to paint a completely bleak picture. I formulate my opinions and recommendations by doing a lot of reading, listening, and observation (my parents are happy I’m putting my anthropology-sociology-social psychology college degree to good use). For example:

I recently overheard an advertiser saying that Facebook Ads worked better than PPC for them to reach their more affluent audience. This made sense to me, and Merry Morud wrote a great article on this for ClickZ’s sister site, Search Engine Watch.A Harris Interactive-RightNow post-holiday 2010 report found social media could create brand advocates – two-thirds of the 85 percent of customers who posted a negative review of a shopping experience and were then contacted by the retailer wound up taking a positive action through social media that directly negated their original negative posting.B2B advertisers, according to new research from Forrester, might not believe in online display advertising’s effectiveness, but I say they might find great success in LinkedIn Ads. (Forrester’s research also points out that B2B advertisers cannot merely port over their true blue print media practices and expect them to work.)While manufacturing companies sometimes flounder to figure out how to leverage Facebook and Twitter, they forget that video demonstrations of their products are a YouTube must-do.Though many local businesses have found success with Groupon and their imitators, others claim to lose money (Rice University Graduate School of Management study) or customer loyalty (New York Times Blog). Know what to expect before you dive in.

So you can see that social media definitely has its place in the overall marketing strategy. I just encourage advertisers not to fall prey to all the hype and dig a little deeper to understand the facts and what’s appropriate for their particular business, industry, and short- and long-term goals.

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13 Poster Online

Posted by Rodneyon 24. 10. 2010in News Chat

The remake of the Georgian film 13 Tzameti, simply titled 13 has its first domestic poster. I have been waiting for news about this, but was slapped in the ear after seeing this.

The remake will star Ray Winstone, Alexander Skarsgård, Jason Statham, Mickey Rourke, Michael Shannon, Sam Riley, David Zayas and Ben Gazzara. Pretty impressive right?

Oh… and 50 Cent. Slap.

Want to know how to ruin any anticipation of your adaptation of a critically acclaimed foreign language film?

Put 50 Cent on the poster like he matters.

I am so tired of this guy in movies. He is never good. I gave him a chance, and he is aweful. Say what you want about Mineral Water or his music career, but this guy is just not a good actor. He isn’t even showing those glimmers of hope that make you think he will be one of those exceptions to the rule.

And putting his name on top billing hurts more. The hope that he might play a minor role or a background thug character… nope. Top billing.

And honestly, if he wants us to take him seriously, he really has to start identifying himself with a name. You know, like when The Rock decided he was done with Wrestling and decided to become a real actor? He is no thespian, but at least he is doing a hell of a lot better than “fiddy”

I have heard so many good things about 13 Tzameti, and had hopes of it being translated well. But 50 Cent takes any anticipation away from it for me.

Via

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Rabbit Hole Trailer Online

Posted by Rodneyon 25. 10. 2010in News Chat

Rabbit Hole is a vivid, hopeful, honest and unexpectedly witty portrait of a family searching for what remains possible in the most impossible of all situations.

Becca and Howie Corbett (Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart) are returning to their everyday existence in the wake of a shocking, sudden loss. Just eight months ago, they were a happy suburban family with everything they wanted. Now, they are caught in a maze of memory, longing, guilt, recrimination, sarcasm and tightly controlled rage from which they cannot escape. While Becca finds pain in the familiar, Howie finds comfort.

This looks like a powerful movie that is sure to jog the emotions. Kidman has been just off the radar, but this looks pretty damned solid for her.

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