Corporate Eye

...compare, compete, excel

Archives for 2014

The Rise of Social Logins in the US and UK

social login lockSocial logins have become the norm and consumers not only look for a social login option on brand sites and mobile apps, they also expect a social login option.

Gigya’s 2014 State of Consumer Privacy and Personalization study recently surveyed 2,000 people between the ages of 18 and 55 in the United States and the United Kingdom. The results showed that 77% of U.S. consumers and 60% of U.K. consumers have logged into a brand website or mobile account using a social network account.

This is a huge jump (45% increase) from 2012 when just 53% of U.S. consumers used social logins.

The rise of social logins is happening for three very specific reasons according to the Gigya report:

  1. Convenience: Fewer passwords to remember
  2. Ease: Particularly on mobile devices where filling out registration forms is difficult
  3. Relevance: By using a social login, consumers believe they get more personalized, relevant content and offers

In addition to convenience, ease, and relevance, consumers also believe that social logins offer greater transparency. The Gigya report explains:

Social login gives consumers the power to permit brands access to the data points housed within their social profiles needed to provide them with more relevant and timely user experiences, effectively striking a balance between two traditionally competing goals: privacy and personalization.

In other words, consumers feel like they have more control over their privacy and data sharing when they use a social login to access a brand site or application. With that said, it’s important to note that far more respondents to this survey used social logins because they’re convenient and easier than respondents who used social logins for greater transparency, relevance, and personalization.

Here’s the breakdown of why U.S. and U.K. consumers use social logins:

  • I don’t want to spend time filling in registration forms = 53% U.S. and 60% U.K.
  • I don’t want to create and remember another username and password = 47% U.S. and 46% U.K.
  • I feel that my personal data is better protected when I use social login = 21% U.S. and 15% U.K.
  • I want to share articles, products, or other content with my social network friends = 26% U.S. and 12% U.K.
  • Other = 3% U.S. and 4% U.K.

What Should Brands Do?

First, it makes sense to provide an option for consumers to use social login on your website and in your mobile apps. Make sure that you clearly communicated how and why their information is used.

Furthermore, don’t ask for information beyond what you need to give the user what they’re looking for. The Gigya survey found that 84% of U.S. consumers and 81% of U.K. consumers have abandoned an online registration form because they weren’t happy with the amount or type of information that was requested. It’s nice to get extra information that you can use for targeting in the future, but you need to weigh the worth of that data with the possibility of not getting any data at all when users abandon your form. This is a time when split-testing will be extremely helpful in creating the highest performing forms possible.

Does your brand use social logins on its sites yet? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Camilla Ahrensball

Excellent Company Blogs to Benchmark for Brand Marketing

blog with mouseWhat makes a company blog stand out from the crowd?

Whether it’s a corporate blog that reflects the company brand or its a blog that focuses on a single product or service brand, there are several elements that must be present in order for a company blog to be a successful.

Following are five key elements that go into developing a company blog that people will actually want to visit and read along with some examples that you can use for benchmarking.

5 Key Elements of Great Company Blogs

1. Relevant and Useful

whole foods blogIf the content of the company blog isn’t relevant to the target audience, that audience won’t visit and read it. Furthermore, if the content isn’t useful to them, they could click away with a negative perception of your brand in their minds. Bottom-line, irrelevant and useless blogs can actually damage your brand reputation, which can lead to negative word-of-mouth marketing and lost sales in the future. Instead, publish relevant and useful content that is highly shareable.

Example to Benchmark: Whole Foods

There aren’t many company blogs that get a lot of positive comments on their posts. Check out the Whole Story blog from Whole Foods and you’ll find tons of posts about recipes, food, and more. Read through the comments and you’ll see that they’re very engaging in a positive way.

2. Not Self-Promotional

oracle blogAs with all social media marketing and content marketing, your blog content cannot be overly self-promotional. That doesn’t mean you can’t publish the occasional self-promotional blog post, but 80% of that post should be useful and no more than 20% should be self-promotional. In fact, the 80-20 rule should apply to all of your blog posts. Make sure that at least 80% of the posts you publish on your company blog are not self-promotional. If your blog reads like a series of ads or press releases, no one will stick around or visit again.

Example to Benchmark: Oracle

Visit the Modern Marketing Blog and you might not even realize its from Oracle. The Oracle Marketing Cloud logo in the upper right-hand corner of the page is the only clearly visible identifier when you first land on this blog. The posts are filled with information that is helpful to marketers with very little self-promotion.

3. Content Variety

getresponse blogAvoid publishing the same type of blog post again and again. For example, if your brand is in the travel industry, avoid publishing post after post about the same travel destination. If your brand is in the email marketing industry, avoid publishing posts that are only about email marketing. Instead, go beyond the obvious content topics and look for indirectly related topics that can add variety and interest to your blog.

Example to Benchmark: GetResponse

GetResponse is an email marketing tool, but its blog isn’t entirely focused on email marketing. Visit this blog and you’ll get lots of useful information about email marketing, but also, you’ll find posts about social media, blogging, and much more. Nearly everything directly or indirectly relates to email marketing in some way, but the blog isn’t just a series of posts about that one topic. The variety of content makes it much more interesting to read on an ongoing basis.

4. Personality

eat24 blogWhat is your brand personality? It should be reflected in your blog content. Your company blog should not read like a corporate document or an advertisement. It should read in a voice that will resonate with the audience and accurately reflects your brand personality. Of course, keep it professional!

Example to Benchmark: Eat24

The Eat24 blog is a bit controversial, but that is exactly why it’s so great. Posts are snarky and often politically incorrect, but they fit the brand personality and the target audience. You don’t need to drop f-bombs in your company blog posts like Eat24 does, but do inject the personalities of the brand and the writers into every post to make them your brand seem human and more engaging.

5. User Experience

buffer blogThe user experience on your company blog must be reflective of your brand promise. For example, your company blog should be visually appealing and match your brand image. It should load quickly and be updated often to keep visitors coming back and to motivate them to tell their friends about it.

Example to Benchmark:  Buffer

Buffer is a social media application that enables users to schedule social media updates to publish on multiple social media accounts using a single tool. The blog is filled with a variety of useful information that is not entirely self-promotional and accurately reflects the brand personality. The user experience is highly streamlined. There are no sidebars. There is no distracting clutter. Visitors only see the blog posts so they can focus entirely on the useful information contained within each post.

What are your favorite company blogs? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Svilen Milev

The Growing Impact of Mobile on Purchase Decisions

shopping bag iconThis year, nearly 146 million people in the United States will shop using mobile devices. They’ll be “window” shopping as well as researching and comparing different types of products and specific brands. Over 102 million of them will actually make a purchase using a mobile device this year.

Those statistics come from eMarketer and put the importance of mobile marketing into perspective. However, the mobile marketing funnel is longer than you might think.

According to research from Ninth Decimal, consumers start browsing, researching, and comparing products long before they make a purchase online or in a brick-and-mortar retail store. The study found that 81% of U.S. mobile users browse, research, and compare products, brands, and stores well before they ever visit a brick-and-mortar store to buy.

As you might expect, the more expensive the product, the longer the mobile marketing funnel is. The research found that consumers started their mobile research 45 days before making a purchase for products with price tags at or above $1,000. That doesn’t mean low-priced products get little mobile “shopping” time. The research found that consumers started researching items from $1-$49 using their mobile devices 10 days before buying.

This mobile shopping research doesn’t stop when consumers get into a brick-and-mortar store either. Nearly one in five U.S. mobile users (19%) continue their research using their mobile devices while they’re in stores making their final purchase decisions.

For marketers, this growing reliance on mobile “pre”-shopping is extremely important. The Ninth Decimal study revealed that mobile users are more likely to engage with mobile retail ads before they visit a store and make a purchase decision. In fact, nearly three in four (73%) of mobile users claim that they actively engage with mobile ads before they hit the stores while 27% claim that they engage with mobile ads while they’re shopping.

What do consumers want brands to offer in their mobile ads? Discounts and sales won by a landslide among respondents to the Ninth Decimal survey. In total, 60% of U.S. mobile users who responded to this survey claimed that they would respond to mobile ads that included discounts or sales. That’s nearly double the number of people who said they’d engage with mobile ads that offered product reviews (36%) or product information (35%). Faring even worse for marketers in this survey were giveaways (25% of respondents would engage), directions to the nearest store location (21%), offers or information about other products the consumer might like (13%), and style tips (7%).

How is your brand engaging with mobile consumers early in the marketing funnel? Leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Image: Morgan Akens

The Evolution of the Coca-Cola Brand

coca-cola signJust last week, I published an article here on the Corporate Eye blog about leveraging company culture for brand storytelling. A couple of days later, Fast Company published a perfect example of using brand history for storytelling that I want to share with you today.

In its 2-minute and 11-second video, the team at FastCo Studios tells the 128-year history of Coca-Cola using words and images.

It’s not just a great example of brand storytelling, it’s also a great example of visual storytelling through short-form, social content. The video is brief, laser-focused, fun, interesting, and highly shareable.

You can take a look at the video below.

What makes this video work so well? As a brand storytelling device, it includes two ingredients that brand marketers should take note of:

1. The Nostalgia Factor

The video includes some well known stories from the history of the Coca-Cola brand like the 77-day lifespan of New Coke and the iconic “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” commercials. The video is filled with nostalgia that will surely evoke emotional reactions from many viewers.

For those of us who are old enough, did you remember that Kim Carnes and Michael Jackson appeared in Coke commercials? Sure, we remember the Michael Jackson hair-on-fire Pepsi commercial, but how many people remember his Diet Coke commercial?

2. The Trivia Factor

At the same time, the video includes some lesser known facts that make viewers sit back and say, “I didn’t know that!” For example, did you know that the original Coca-Cola recipe, one of the most guarded trade secrets in the world, was originally developed by a pharmacist? Did you know that the pharmacist’s bookkeeper designed the Coca-Cola logo using his own handwriting? Did you know that Coke sales doubled during the 1920s prohibition in the United States? These aren’t boring facts like how many awards the company has won or who its executives are. These facts are actually interesting, and that’s why they work so well in this video.

As brand marketers, we have to step back from the companies behind the brands that we promote and look at the brand story from consumers’ perspectives. What parts of the brand story would actually be interesting to consumers? Effective brand storytelling needs to tell the stories that consumers want to hear, not the stories that the company wants to tell. While these two things could be the same, they are far more often not.

Image: anyjazz65 licensed CC BY-2.0

Dealing with unsuccessful candidates – without damaging your brand

unsuccessful-candidate
Being rejected in life is a normal thing that happens to everyone once in a while.

It’s not much different in the corporate world. I remember when I received rejection letters in the past. Somehow the content was always very similar, they included words such as “unsuccessful”, “unfortunately”, “unable to consider you for this position”, “regret to inform you” etc. That’s surely something that nobody enjoys reading. Therefore, I would like to provide you with some tips on proper etiquette when dealing with job candidates who have not been chosen for an interview.

Do’s:

  • DO reply to every candidate who expressed their interest in a position including those who seem not to fit, for whatever reason.
  • You could write it by following these steps:
    • Acknowledge and appreciate the person’s time and interest in applying for a certain job at your company.
    • Explain that the company decided on someone else, in a respectful and considerate way.
    • Finish on a positive note (for example by adding “Never give up!) and wish the person success.

Now here is the dilemma: There are companies who receive hundreds or even thousands of applications a year. Google, for example, gets well over 2 million job applications a year and can only hire a tiny percentage of those great talents. Thus, writing to each of them would surely be a time consuming task. One might therefore wonder what the best approach would be to deal with a high volume of applications without damaging a corporate brand.

The answer is to try to reduce the number of inappropriate applications, and to use automation wherever possible.

Consider:

  • Trying to reduce the number of inappropriate applications by:
    • Making the pre-screening criteria visible and clear.

      • If people fail these, but still apply, send an automated reply

  • Making the culture clear, perhaps including self-test tools and employee interviews, to discourage applications from those who wouldn’t fit.

    See, for example KMPG, whose self-test tool makes the culture clear.

  • Use automated assessment (CV filters and/or psychometric tests)

    Again, if people are deselected at this stage, send an automated response to explain why
  • Use automated responses wherever possible at the various stages of application, including after interview
  • Resourcing appropriately

    With careful planning, the number of remaining applicants should have been sufficiently reduced through the filtering process that the number of personalised communications becomes far smaller.

Don’ts:

  • Don’t be brutally honest by telling them what the real reason for your rejection was (even though every job applicant would be interested in knowing it!). Bear in mind that you could be sued for your personal statements. Therefore, do it in a polite, diplomatic, thoughtful and professional way.
  • Don’t let candidates wait too long for a reply. As mentioned earlier, explain the timescales for responding, and write a letter/email within a reasonable timeframe. Don’t make them think that they have to chase you in order to find out if there is a chance for a job interview.
  • If you think that writing rejection letters to unsuccessful job candidates is a waste of time and doesn’t make any difference, I would like to highlight the benefits that your HR Department can receive in taking the extra time to respond to candidates. Your company will be perceived as an enterprise that:
    • takes their job applicants seriously and respects their valuable time
    • works in a professional and efficient way and
    • cares about their reputation and image (offline and online).

Some companies might not realise that by ignoring job applications they can severely damage their company’s reputation. It leaves an impression about the way a company operates and cares about other people. The question is: Can a company nowadays in such a competitive world really afford an approach like this?

Unfortunately many companies do not take the time and make the effort to reply to potential employees. In today’s technology driven world we need to remember that social media can be very powerful. Every upset candidate who might feel disappointed about not hearing back from any company (after investing time in writing tailor-made CVs and cover letters) might be tempted to vent their anger online. This can happen with a comment, an email or a video going viral. Just imagine…. A candidate can easily do it within seconds, from any device, from all over the world and most importantly at no cost!

Companies need to think about what impression they want to leave behind. Here I’m not just thinking about the job applicants themselves but also all those people that they are going to share their negative experience with, such as friends, relatives, acquaintances and strangers online. And by the way, it is a fact that negative comments are being spread more often than positive ones. It would be advisable to not underestimate the power of “many ordinary people” because it can have a dramatic impact on your bottom line.

Instagram Tips for Brand Marketers

selfie smartphone instagramDo you use Instagram for brand marketing? While it’s not the top social media tool used for marketing, it can be very effective in building brand awareness, communicating brand experiences, and developing brand perceptions among consumers.

Recently, Dan Zarrella of Hubspot conducted a study to try to determine how to get more followers and likes on Instagram. Brand marketers, listen up. There is some really useful information in the data.

Zarrella studied nearly 1.5 million images from more than 500,000 Instagram users to come up with his conclusions. You can see the details in the infographic at the end of this article. Here are the highlights that should help you improve your brand marketing results on Instagram:

1. More Hashtags Lead to More Engagement

The study found that as the number of hashtags used in an Instagram photo posting went up, so did the number of likes and comments. The lesson for brand marketers is to use more hashtags on Instagram.

2. Fewer Filters Lead to More Engagement

The data showed that photos on Instagram that use no filter effects get the most likes, follows, and comments. The lesson for brand marketers is to stop using filters on Instagram.

3. Stronger Calls to Action Lead to More Engagement

Here the data gets really compelling. Instagram photos with the word “like” in the caption got 89% more likes. Photos with the word “comment” in the caption got 2,194% more comments. The lesson for marketers is simple. Remind your audience to like and comment on your Instagram photos within every caption.

4. Colors Lead to More Engagement

The research found that photos which are desaturated (meaning the colors are very dull and washed out) get fewer comments and likes. In fact, highly saturated photos got 598% more likes than desaturated photos. Furthermore, photos that have higher levels of luminance (meaning they’re brighter), get 592% more likes than dark photos. That’s not all. The data also revealed that photos dominated by cool colors like blue, green, and gray got more likes than those dominated by warm colors like yellow, orange, and red. The lesson to brand marketers is to embrace bright colors on Instagram but stay cool.

5. Faces and “Busy-ness” Lead to More Engagement

The research corroborates what most other marketing research has found for decades. Images with people’s faces in them lead to higher levels of engagement. In this study, Zarrella found that the number of likes increases by 35% when faces are included in images. In addition, busy photos got higher levels of engagement than stark photos. Zarrella analyzed the number of edges in photos and found that images with more edges (i.e., more stuff in the photo that makes it busier) got 125% more likes than very simple and stark photos. The lesson for marketers is to avoid going minimalist on Instagram, and be sure to takes lots of pictures of people. Instagram is the one place where selfies are not only accepted, but they’re also expected.

instagram likes and followers infographic

Image: Rob Owen-Wahl