As usually happens with people, things got social at MINT Global 2017! In the light of universal marketing trends and best practices, social media channels can have huge impact on business development and are still to be explored.
“Social is the fastest place to understand what’s happening on the planet right now,” said MINT Global speaker Clive Roach, Social Media director at Philips Lighting at the event in Amsterdam last week. He also explained that social media is not just an important channel to have your message ‘out there’, but a great tool with which to gather impressions. He shared his valuable insight with delegates, telling them to take their story into the marketplace and to learn what people think through honing the art of social listening.
In order to really deliver to clients’ changing expectations and keep up with new demands, marketers first need to understand where they stand. And not just by benchmarking, but by analysing their own target group and followers and interpreting results based on evidence.
It is crucial in this fast-developing market to know what your customers like and don’t like about you, as well as what you can learn from all this information.
Roach also encourages marketers to look at the big picture, by ‘narrowing’ the possible options to three fundamental truths: The known knowns, the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns!
To have an overview of the digital transformation journey, visually charting and reporting results on big screens also proves to be beneficial, as it encourages real-time ‘A-ha’ moments and improvements on the run, allowing a cross-dimensional impact throughout the organisation.
While some companies integrate social media to their marketing mix, the major underwear company in Belgium and The Netherlands chooses to mainly focus on social media for reaching out to clients and creating a long-term relationship: “Social Media is always on, it is the start of the marketing plan,” said Kirsty Montgomery, International CRM manager at Hunkemöller.
She familiarised the MINT Global delegates with the Hunkemöller business background in order to highlight the choice of social media as core marketing strategy. A niche business, existing for more than 100 years, it was on the edge of a financial crisis eight years ago. Montgomery joined the team and started revolutionising the business model. By firstly creating fun and inspiring stores with social walls, selfie walls and ‘more yummy elements’, as she describes them, the company positioned itself closer to its audience and encouraged open communication.
She realised that the Generation Zs don’t want to be sold to, so reaching out by the people they do want to hear from creates quicker engagement – another key element in developing just the right strategy.
With more than 80 brand ambassadors/social influencers, the concept is even more powerful. And engaging employees through an internal app and giving them the chance of becoming brand ambassadors is another way of harnessing people power – this time from within the business.
Real-life people images and loyalty programs are among the things customers love and also keeps them coming back, Kirsty Montgomery added.
The third speaker on Social at the MINT event was Tom Ollerton, from WeAreSocial, who is already foreseeing ways in which the rapid progress of technological devices will change the social experience as we know it. He told delegates that the future is not something that happens to you, but rather the result of your own perspective and actions.
Among the hot topics he addressed were Chatbots (particularly his team’s work on the ‘Dom’ prototype – Domino’s Pizza chatbot), Snapchat Spectacles and also Artificial Intelligence. But he said innovation is easy to talk about, but great ideas are not so easy to implement – as he sees it, it’s guess work. However, he added that it makes a lot more sense after listening to the impressions of previous speakers, who confirm that innovation is strongly related to ‘having guts’!
The message from the speakers was that, as the world is changing, so is our ‘social encounter’ and the best way marketers can keep up with that is to be present and sensitive; actively listening to what customers have to say and aggregating relevant and available data. Thereby, the key to success. But adding extra value is the personal approach. Once all the information has been absorbed, it is time for marketers to start looking into new opportunities and opening the gates to innovative ideas.
Read also:
Is social media now a key marketing channel? Expert reveals how he maximises social media success
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