Social Marketing - Microsites & Competitions

Social marketing in essence is word-of-mouth. Its about creating excitement and buzz around your brand and generating referral business. Word of mouth marketing has always been the most powerful form of marketing. People are far more likely to make a buying decision based on the advice of a friend then they are to make a decision because of an advert they saw on TV. With web 2.0, the power of word-of-mouth is taken to another level. The 'new consumer' is more connected then ever before.

Godfrey Parkin refers to social media marketing as 'the new PR'. In his new book, Doing business digitally, he talks about using competitions and microsites to tap in to social marketing. This is an example he gives in his book.

“Honda was one of the first companies to explore social marketing. The best selling car in the US is the ford's F150 pick-up truck. And it has been in the top slot for more then thirty years. At number two is another truck, the Chevrolet Silvarado. The Toyota Camry occupies the third slot and the Honda Accord is in hot pursuit at fourth. Car companies believe in capturing the the hearts and minds of consumers at a early age, because the first car you own will very likely establish you as a brand loyal customer for at least a couple more purchases in your life. So if you want to maximize the lifetime value of a customer, get to them early. All car manufacturers want to get teenagers to desire their entry level vehicles – those cars targeted at first time buyers, which are frequently paid for by parents. Honda's problem was that there was little awareness of its entry level vehicle, the CR-V, among the target population, and no cachet among those who did know of it.

The first thing Honda did was to examine the things that mattered to the target mid-to-late teen population, how they communicated and what they shared. They then decided to change the pronunciation of CR-V to 'Crave'. They built a microsite to host a competition that challenged people to upload a photo of their 'favorite crave' to the site, along with a few lines about why they craved it. In the process, they captured names and contact details. The top half of the branded competition contained of thumbnails of the images submitted. If you moused over an immage, it expandedand also provided the name of the submitter and his or her comments about the image. Visitors could, with one click, vote on how much they liked each entry. The competition board was covered in images of dogs, food, girlfriends, boyfriends, exotic destinations, sports teams and cars of all makes. Every entry was available in the depths of the site. Visitors could click a button to see a screen filled with the most recent entries, but only the most popular stayed on the home page leader board.

Something remarkable happened. Those who had uploaded an image told friends and family to go and look at it and vote for it. When they did so they were inspired to upload their own image and tell etheir friends and family about it too. So they wrote about it in their blogs and on their MySpace pages, they provided links to the competition microsite and tagged in on their social bookmarking sites such as Digg and del.icio.us. The microsite started getting top rankings on Goggle. The traditional media found the story fascinating, and the competition featured on radio and television talk-shows and news broadcasts, locally and internationally. Virtually every newspaper in the country wrote articles about it. The micro site cost Honda a few thousand dollars, yet it generated tens of millions of dollars in free publicity. Ic captured thousands of potential sales leads and it boosted brand awareness among the target population to levels never dreamed of. In 2007, from out of nowhere, the tenth bestselling car in the US was the Honda CR-V Honda didn't need to offer a car as an incentive to enter its competition. The reward was participation and the ego satisfaction of having your creation on the leader-board.”

That is what social marketing is all about. And I'm sure you will agree, if you get it right, it can be an extremely valuble to your business.

Creating a competition:

Know your market
Make sure you know exactly who your target population is and what they like before you start planning the competition. The more you know about them the more specific and effective your competition will be.

Define the rules

Set out a clear list of rules around your competition and how it will work. What do participants have to do to enter (give contact details, submit a picture, perform a task etc.) How do they win (vote, random draw etc)

The site
The idea of competitions, like the Honda example above, is to immerse your target market in your brand. Make sure the site is very well branded and put together professionally!

Do it right
Competition encouraging user generated content is inexpensive and, if done correctly, can produce results that no traditional advertising campaign could ever dream of producing. Because it is so inexpensive, the temptation is to slap a site together. If you want to succeed in web 2.0 PR, you are going to have to take some risks. Spend some money getting it done properly.

Market it
Let people know its there using all the other techniques on this blog. People don't automatically swarm to your site just because you worked hard at it. You have to tell them about it. Use social networks, forums, SEO etc. to get the word out.

Read the book
Read Doing Business Digitally by Godfrey Parkin a couple of times before you start. It is available at all major book stores