SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING: Keys to Successful Social Media Strategy

Keys to Successful Social Media Strategy

July 29, 2014 - Blog

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When I began my journalism career in 1985, my main tools of the trade were a reporter’s notebook, a Rolodex of sources and a lot of pens. Fast forward to 2014, and I would hazard a guess that young J-school students have never touched a Rolodex or even a reporter’s notebook for that matter.

Times have changed, and technology has ushered us into a “gotta have it now" society where online communities like Twitter, Facebook. LinkedIn, Instragram and Pintrest provide a platform to share information, ideas, personal messages and other content. And while we all use social media in some form or another, it has become an essential business tool for companies across the globe.

Most companies post content to social media sites, but attracting purchasing consumers as a result requires tight integration between social media efforts and the overall marketing strategy. When social media and other tactics like email marketing and advertising work together, brands are equipped to grow a loyal consumer audience. Companies whose products possess a nutritional benefit have even more social media influence when it comes to attracting consumers.

This topic will be addressed during the Food Product Design track of the SupplySide Education program, sponsored by BASF, Oct. 7 from 3-3:50 p.m. I invite you to join Todd Pauli, partner, The Shelton Group, and Suzanne Shelton, president, The Shelton Group, who will lead the “Three Steps to a Successful Social Media Strategy for Nutrition-Focused Brands" presentation.

The session will cover each of the three steps necessary for building a successful social media strategy: content planning, interacting with social sites, and using social analytics. Attendees will walk away with tangible, easy-to-implement tactics for building a successful social media program, including how to set up a content calendar that integrates across their marketing efforts, what to look for in choosing a person to post social content, and how to measure success with analytics.

To cover these concepts Pauli and Shelton will walk through building a social media strategy for a fictional food brand enabling attendees to easily relate the content to their own brands. The last portion of the presentation will address the advantages nutrition-focused brands have when it comes to social media, along with specific strategies that can be used to leverage these advantages.

SALES & MARKETING: A New Revolution in 3D Food Printing

A New Revolution: 3D Food Printing

Judie Bizzozero

July 10, 2014 - Blogs

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I am a huge fan of ABC’s hit show Grey’s Anatomy. The medical drama is mixed with storylines of plane crashes, death, life, loss and reconciliation … well you get this picture. But this past season, the writers were definitely in tune with what was trending in the real world that we live in. Enter the world of 3D printing.

One of the season’s main storylines centered on Dr. Meredith Grey’s research into how 3D printing can be used to customized patient treatment. After a first run, in which she 3D printed a fork to the disappointment of the rest of the medical team, several doctors identified a number of life-saving uses for 3D printing, including a creating heart conduit for a dying baby.

So what does all this have to do with food and beverage development? The answer is a lot.

Hod Lipson, director of Cornell University’s Creative Machines Lab, gave a lecture at the IFT Annual Meeting and Food Expo where he said while 3D printing has been around for about 30 years, its popularity has exploded in the last two to three years and the technology is “worming its way into every field." 3D printers have become more affordable, and the range of materials that can be used in printers has expanded beyond plastics to nearly any material, including foods.

Lipson said 3D food printers will have a huge impact on consumers in the future. The Cornell team began printing frosting and chocolate, and then moved on to other edible pastes, powders and gels. He said the future holds many possibilities, such as being able to control the nutritional components of food.

This hot topic was recently addressed in the most recent issue of the SupplySide Boardroom Journal, “A World Without Hidden Hunger. The article “The Industrial Revolution of Food: 3D Food Printing" examined the potentialeffects food printing could have food production, storage and distribution, and, beyond that, how 3D food printers could impact global malnutrition.

Pablos Holman, senior inventor at the Intellectual Ventures Laboratory, is working on just that. When you’re talking about global nutrition and malnutrition, there are what Holman calls compounding macro trends—population growth and variety in diet.

“If you look globally, they get almost no meat," he said. “So what we need to figure out now is how to take those two compounding trends and figure out how to feed more people with higher amounts of nutrients and do it efficiently."

Holman said what they imagine for the future is making printers more versatile, larger and cheaper, and start using them in food manufacturing—developing technology so it’s able to print a meal for you—a pixel of food versus a pixel of plastic.

The article (click here to download the free digital issue) also mentioned how the Lipson’s Cornell team created a 3D food printer that creates mini space shuttle-shaped scallop nuggets (seen in the image on this blog), and baked goods like cakes that, when sliced, reveal someone’s initials or a buried message. It is also printing a new style of corn chip made out of corn masa dough in the shape of a flower.

There is no doubt that advancements in 3D printing technology are paving the way for many industries, but it just may be the next food revolution. Let’s face it, we are going to need new methods to feed the nearly 9 billion population by 2050.

SMALL BUSINESS OPTIMIZATION: Four sales mistakes you're likely making and how to address them

Four sales mistakes you're likely making and how to address them

RYAN CALIGIURI

Special to The Globe and Mail

Published Friday, Jun. 27 2014, 5:46 AM EDT

Last updated Friday, Jun. 27 2014, 5:46 AM EDT

Let’s face it, we all make mistakes. What’s important, however, is learning from our mistakes and avoid any errors in the future.

For sales professionals, it’s important to recognize mistakes and address them right away, otherwise they could have a significant impact on the bottom line which could have many negative impacts throughout the organization.

These four mistakes need to be addressed by every sales professional responsible for bringing new opportunities to table.I work with sales professionals every day of the week and have seen a number of mistakes come to the surface repeatedly by a large majority of professionals and it is affecting their ability to drive opportunity in a big way.

1. Lack of preparation before a sales meeting. In sales, it’s your job to come into a meeting as prepared as possible. At the very least, you should examine the prospects website, search for them on your search engine of choice, and if possible look at case studies to understand, how they make money.

All of these basics are important for forming a picture of the prospect in your head, but do not stop there, create a list of questions that will help you get more insight on your prospect.

These questions should two things: go beyond what you already know and they need to make the prospect think deeply about their own situation. Some sample questions might include:

• Why is your current service/product/technology/situation/issue no longer working for you?
• You mentioned your current provider is not able to deliver XYZ. If you work with us, what are you hoping will be different?
• What does success look like for you, your business or this project?

2. Not focusing on clients. This is a common issue that many sales professionals fall victim to because they love their product or service so much and spend too much time talking about their offerings. This is a terrible mistake because you’re jumping directly into solution selling before you can even identify the key challenges or reasons behind why the prospect and you are meeting in the first place.

It’s okay to introduce yourself, what you do and who you’ve helped to make sure the prospect knows about you, but after that, get right into your questions and understand what the client needs. Once you are able to paint a complete picture of the client and their needs, you can begin to offer up some solutions for the prospect.

3. Believing that ‘no’ is the end of the road. What’s your first instinct when a prospect says no? Do you assume this means the prospect is not interested and you completely erase them from your sales database? If so, this is a big mistake.

The reality of the situation is that a ‘no’ is not a roadblock, it’s an opportunity for a seasoned salesperson to uncover the prospect’s concerns by probing even deeper.

If you’re in accounting and you call a prospect that tells you they are not interested, you need to ask them questions that make them question their current provider and learn about the key benefits of working with you.

A sample response question could be, “how much does your current firm save you on taxes a year? I ask because our firm focuses heavily on ensuring our clients know all the ins and outs so we can maximize their savings every year. One client, similar to you, saved X amount last year because of what we did for them. Would you like to hear more?”

4. Not having the persistence to make something out of nothing. One of the most common things is that those who persist are annoying, cross the line, or are going to do more harm than good. Let me ask you this: how many people are you going to get through to by calling or e-mailing once or twice? Chances are very few.

Following up is one of the most important factors in penetrating accounts and closing sales. It’s not about being the best or having the cheapest price. The one who wins in most cases is the one who works the hardest at getting in front of the client, understanding their business and driving value through consistent communication.

If you want to win more in business and capture more sales, you need to stop listening to those who play it safe and say following up too much will do harm than good, because they are just plain wrong.

I get criticized often for telling people that I followed up with a prospect 102 times before they became a client of mine. What those people see is a sleazy salesman trying to close a sale and move on to the next.

What they do not see is the creativity behind each follow up, the lifelong relationships, and the great results that came about because of persistent follow up. When someone is able to approach, follow up knowing all of this is possible, follow up doesn’t become a dirty word – it becomes a passion, something someone does to unlock a future filled with many wonderful possibilities.

My challenge to you: If you’re currently making any of these sales mistakes, I want you pick one and try your hardest to avoid making it again. We are already at the halfway point of 2014, so use the remaining six months to eliminate one of these mistakes from your sales habits. I know that if you are able to do this, you will be much more successful as a result.

Ryan Caligiuri is the president of Ryan Caligiuri International, a consultancy focused on driving revenue growth through creative growth strategies for professional services firms. Mr. Caligiuri is also the founder of The Growth Network, a program that provides sales/marketing resources & training to help grow professional services firms.

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SALES & MARKETING: What is your preferred advertising method - Digital or paper?

Digital ads may be the future, but consumers remain loyal to paper flyers

LINDA NGUYEN

TORONTO — The Canadian Press

Published Friday, May. 30 2014, 1:41 PM EDT

Last updated Friday, May. 30 2014, 2:29 PM EDT

For two weeks last March, the country’s largest sports retailer didn’t print a single paper advertising flyer.

Sport Chek ran the test to see what would happen if it migrated all its advertising to Facebook.

Duncan Fulton, the head of marketing at FGL Sports, which operates Sport Chek, said the retailer wanted to run the experiment after discovering that only an estimated 17 per cent of its customers actually read their paper flyers.

For those two weeks, the retailer, which sells everything from clothing to sports equipment, saw its national sales spike 12 per cent, year over year, while sales of featured items jumped 23 per cent compared with the same period a year ago.“The flyer is a horribly inefficient marketing vehicle for Sport Chek,” he told reporters recently at the annual general meeting for parent company Canadian Tire Corp.

It’s latest two-week test run ends Sunday and could lead the way for the company to divert about 25 per cent of its advertising budget for paper flyers toward digital advertising. The retailer spends about $20-million a year on printing its flyers. Canadian Tire, in comparison, spends about $100-million annually on flyers, printing about 11 million copies weekly.

But not all retailers are convinced that consumers are ready to give up the ubiquitous paper flyers.

“There is a lot of costs with paper flyers and retailers would love for digital to replace it, if it could be just as effective,” said Philip Scrutton, of Toronto-based market research firm BrandSpark International.

“They don’t feel like they can do that just yet. Print flyers are still a big part of shoppers’ habits.”

He said consumers, particularly those who like to shop at discount grocery stores, like paper flyers because they can carry them around, circle deals and easily access them for price-matching at competing retailers.

In a study from November, BrandSpark found that 95 per cent of 18,700 Canadian adults polled said they still check grocery store flyers at least once a month, either from the mail or in-store. About half of those polled reported checking print flyers before shopping and 23 per cent said they looked at online flyers.

But as more Canadians use their mobile devices for shopping, it’s only natural for retailers to expand their advertising budgets to include digital, said Wehuns Tan, the CEO and co-founder of Toronto online advertising company Wishabi.

He said change has been slow, with many retailers merely supplementing their paper advertising with digital flyers, but not eliminating the leaflets completely – a move he doesn’t expect for at least two to 10 years, if at all, despite the many advantages of digital over paper including eliminating printing and distribution costs and the ability to track sales through online clicks.

“We’re not just targeting a group of households or blanketing Canada with flyers, but we’re able to target consumers who might have an interest in the products,” said Tan, whose company includes many American clients as well as Hudson’s Bay Co., drugstore chain Rexall, and The Brick and Leon’s Furniture Canada.

“Being able to customize and merchandise the right product to the right consumer is critical for the future of flyers.”

For example, a pet store may not want to send flyers to someone they know doesn’t have a pet, while home hardware retailer Home Depot can use weather reports in their digital flyers as a way to push related merchandise, such as shovels and snow-blowers during a winter storm, to specific areas of the country.

Tan said the success of digital flyers will depend on their accessibility and ease of use. Last November, the company launched a mobile app called Flipp, which aggregates flyers. The app, which can be used on a tablet or smartphone, has 500,000 users a week who use it to search all flyers for deals and create shopping lists.

With Sport Chek, their Facebook ads showed up in the newsfeeds of all users, and usually highlighted a lifestyle instead of just one product. When the retailer wanted to sell hiking shoes, it had an ad that showed an athletic outdoorsy man hiking through the woods. When it wanted to sell a bicycle, it showed a trail rider tearing through a forest.

Even though digital may be the future for Sport Chek, Canadian Tire will likely stick with their tried-and-tested paper leaflets for some time, Fulton said.

“I don’t think the Canadian Tire flyer is going anywhere, any time soon … I still think it may be the most well-read piece of paper in the country,” he said.

“But one day, it will be insane to remember the days that we put out 11 million pieces of paper to advertise offerings, given where digital is going today.”

BRANDING: Why marketers need to adapt to fading brand loyalty - Canadian statistics

PERSUASION

Why marketers need to adapt to fading brand loyalty

SUSAN KRASHINSKY - MARKETING REPORTER

The Globe and Mail

Published Thursday, Jun. 05 2014, 4:18 PM EDT

Last updated Thursday, Jun. 05 2014, 6:19 PM EDT

Those in Sales and Marketing should pay attention to branding programs and market share!

According to a new report from Veritas Communications and Northstar, brand loyalty in Canada is slipping fast. Roughly three-quarters of people they surveyed said they had switched away from a “preferred” brand in the past year. And nearly 7 in 10 plan to do so in the coming year.

“These are large numbers, and we’re not talking about any brand; we’re talking about favoured brands,” Tricia Benn, Northstar’s chief marketing and strategy officer said. “This is becoming more common.”

Other research, such as Deloitte’s Pantry Study, has found that brand loyalty has been on a steady decline in recent years. Recently, Bond Brand Loyalty, an agency that focuses on loyalty marketing specifically, released a report that found 29 per cent of consumers said they would not be loyal to a brand without its loyalty program.

“Many brands rely overly heavily on points, discounts and rebates to influence customer behaviour. The risk for these brands is that customers are loyal to the discount, not to the brand,” Scott Robinson, a senior director with Bond, said.

The team at Veritas and Northstar attribute slipping brand loyalty partly to a growing cynicism toward advertising, as well as the way communications have changed.

One-third of survey respondents said they see themselves as influencers. Veritas’s research shows that the endorsements of friends and family have twice as much effect on decision making as any other source, including experts. As the media people use to converse with each other make it easier to solicit advice or influence others, it is complicating things for marketers. Businesses have always known that word of mouth is powerful, but now it has become amplified. That means the opportunities have grown for people to consider a different brand or to be influenced to try something new.

“The result of this is that brand loyalty is fleeting,” Veritas president Krista Webster said.

But it also complicates how brands speak to people. Because friends have such a big influence on consumer decisions, many brands try to speak in the voice of a friend, especially on social media. They are attempting “to mirror the most trusted sources,” Ms. Benn said.

That can work against marketers when consumers see through it. And since consumers are feeling more empowered than ever to communicate their like or dislike with brands and to influence others in their lives, they see through marketing more than ever.

The best strategy for marketers, then, is to quit pretending their brands have a special place in consumers’ hearts. Instead, they should provide experiences that are actually valuable to people.

“Too many brands are making themselves the hero of their story,” said Darren McColl, global chief brand strategy officer for marketing agency SapientNitro, and author of Storyscaping. “There’s an impatience with it.”

He points to an example that he worked on: the 2009 “best job in the world” campaign for Tourism Queensland in Australia. People competed to be hired as caretaker for Hamilton Island on the Great Barrier Reef.

The offer attracted more than 34,000 video applications from all over the world and was covered in more than 6,000 news stories. That’s the kind of promotion Queensland could not buy.

But it did something else as well: Rather than pushing tourism to Queensland, it encouraged people to think of themselves as the centre of the story. Contestants created their own video stories as part of their applications. But even those who did not enter but simply saw the campaign likely spent a few minutes daydreaming about living in an island paradise.

In other words, the job was a vehicle to make people put themselves in the story.

“My client at Coke once said it perfectly. I’ll never forget it: ‘How much of a relationship does a mum want to have with her orange juice? Not much. But we have to find a way to make it meaningful,’” Mr. McColl said.

Sometimes, that’s as simple as being useful. Mattel Inc. and its agency Ogilvy & Mather Paris came up with an ingenious way to promote the company’s classic Scrabble game to smartphone users. It provided free WiFi Internet connections in public places. In order to connect to the Scrabble Network, users had to spell a word from Scrabble tiles. Higher scoring words gave users longer access to the network.

People spelled more than 6,000 words in two weeks and the company gave away more than 110,000 minutes of WiFi. It was a campaign that rewarded people for their time by being useful and fun. (Those who shared their scores on Facebook got even more free time.)

Walt Disney Co. has been working on a way to make its experiences at its parks more tailored to individual visitors. Last year it introduced MagicBands, rubber wristbands embedded with RFID (radio frequency identification). The wristbands work as hotel keys, tickets, and authentication to charge meals and other purchases to a visitor’s room.

It also allows the company to personalize visitors’ experiences: Disney characters might wish your child a happy birthday by name, for example. And the company can use the data it collects about how people move around the parks to better tailor their services in future. Some have reasonably criticized this level of tracking as creepy. But the manufactured “magic” is a sign of how smart marketers are trying to create some of the brand love that is increasingly hard won.

“It’s critical not that they sound like your friend, using the same familiarity and language. It’s about understanding me,” Veritas’s Ms. Webster said. “You can’t have that authentic voice if you don’t understand the true context of your consumer.”

*********

74 per cent: Canadians surveyed who reported switching away from one or more of their “preferred” brands in the past year

69 per cent: those who said they are planning to switch from a “preferred” brand in the coming year

39 per cent: people who looked to traditional media for information before trying a different brand

32 per cent: those who sought out information online before switching

31 per cent: those who looked for information on social media such as Facebook or Twitter

25 per cent: those who were influenced by online communities such as chat rooms or review sites

19 per cent: those who found information on a company’s app or blog

43 per cent: survey respondents who said they look for advice from others before trying out a new brand

*Source: Veritas Communications Influencer study, conducted by research firm Northstar. The company surveyed 500 adult Canadians across the country in English and French.

SOCIAL MEDIA: One year in, Twitter's Canadian arm strives to define itself

One year in, Twitter's Canadian arm strives to define itself Add to ...

JAMES BRADSHAW - MEDIA REPORTER

The Globe and Mail

Published Wednesday, Jun. 04 2014, 3:37 PM EDT

Last updated Thursday, Jun. 05 2014, 7:31 AM EDT

It has been a year of growth, hiring, and thousands upon thousands of tweets at Twitter Inc.’s Canadian outpost, but Kirstine Stewart still struggles to find the right yardstick to measure its progress.

As head of Twitter Canada, Ms. Stewart’s main job is convincing broadcasters and brands that her company’s network is a place where they can engage with more people, whether they’re on their sofa or on the move. Even after many milestones, there is much more to do to convince companies to pour their marketing budgets into 140-character promotions.

One year after it set up shop in Toronto, the company’s Canadian arm still holds to its startup ethos. There is no clear five-year plan, which makes it harder to explain what Twitter is, and will be. For now, Ms. Stewart has been extending a hand to nervous former colleagues in the broadcast world – her last job was heading up CBC’s English services – and promising to help them find “new life” and new audiences in a fast-changing digital landscape.

“We have a great opportunity to help transition traditional media into a newer space,” Ms. Stewart said in an interview. “Did video kill the radio star? No. Things move and change. That’s just the world of media.”

Among the success stories so far is the fact that all of Canada’s major broadcasters signed on to Twitter Amplify, a program that lets them embed videos and other content into tweets targeted at users with particular interests. Thanks to the power of algorithms, the corporate account for Hockey Night in Canada can now blast out clips of goals scored in the NHL playoffs within moments, reaching targeted hockey aficionados who are not yet among its 248,000 followers.

The key is Twitter’s ability to mine data on hundreds of millions of users – some of whom have come to view the network as an indispensable tool – that is more specific than the broad age and gender categories that have shaped decision-making in conventional television. “I’m a 40-something woman with a couple of kids at home. I don’t watch Oprah,” Ms. Stewart says, to illustrate that “no one is ever typical.”

Initiatives like Amplify have driven Twitter’s rapid growth. Its first-quarter revenue more than doubled to $250-million worldwide, and its global recruiting has nearly kept pace, rising from 1,500 employees when Ms. Stewart became the first Canadian-based hire in April, 2013, to nearly 3,000 today.

The Canadian office has swelled to more than 20 people and expects to surpass 30 by summer’s end, which will soon force a move from its King Street West location to make room for new arrivals. Here, seniority is measured in months, or even weeks. Revenue has also “multiplied,” Ms. Stewart said, though the company doesn’t release country-specific figures.

Yet investors are still wary. Growth in the number of users has been slowing, and the first quarter saw just a 5.8-per-cent increase in the number of users, to 255 million. Some have questioned whether Twitter can secure the mass appeal needed to make it profitable. The company publishes select metrics such as ad revenue per 1,000 timeline views, and has 360 ways to profile its users, from location to gender or the device they use.

Even so, it can be tricky making those numbers tell a simple story that shows how Twitter measures up to Facebook Inc. or Google Inc. “People try to fit you in a box,” Ms. Stewart says.

She still hears from naysayers who think Twitter is filled mostly with people commenting on their lunch, but less often. More broadcasters, brands such as Visa Inc. and organizations such as the Canadian Olympic Committee have been experimenting with Twitter’s ever-expanding suite of promotional products.

But marketers often carve up their budgets between conventional and digital media, which can hamstring investments in Twitter. The solution, Ms. Stewart says, is education. She has brought on board new managers to work closely with particular industries, such as head of sports Christopher Doyle, who joined recently from CBC Sports. Their message is that businesses “have to think more in real time” about reaching users, and that Twitter can be the connector.

“It’s hard to define that success and explain it in a simple way,” she says. “But it’s pretty clear what it is when you’re on the platform.”