Why Are CMOs Increasing Their Social Media Investments?

According to the CMO Survey report 2019 (see footnote), CMOs are increasing the social media marketing spends.
This, as per the survey, is inspite of a relatively modest contribution of social media to enterprise performance.

So Why are CMOs Doubling their Social Media Investments now?Following reasons have been identified for this trend in 2019:
1. Social media can provide powerful insights about the consumers. Beyond the engagement, social media help in sentiment analysis,measuring online behaviour of consumers and brand engagement.
2. Social media is made for mobile and mobile is the future of consumer engagement.
 Visual content and short updates are apt for social media and consumers
 interact with this bite-size chunks throughout the day using their 
mobile devices. That not only helps in building consumer profile but 
also amp up the marketers’ reach though post likes, shares and comments.
 Esp. the latter part is not possible with digital advertising.
3. Social media engagement and ad reinforcement is more memorable
 than the extremely costly digital advertising. As consumers are exposed
 to so many ads per day, it’s unlikely for individual interactions to 
realise returns.
4. Social media as a platform can be controlled and is relatively low-cost to operate. Companies can continually test campaigns on their platform, get immediate results, and scale successful outcomes.
Note: According to this survey, outside social media agencies
 continue to play an important role in guiding social media activities 
in companies, with this survey recording the highest level of engagement
 in several years.
The CMO Survey is sponsored by the American Marketing Association, Deloitte and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.

Did you know that 77% of customers would recommend a brand to a friend after having a single positive experience [1]

And if you care for good customer experience, then you cannot afford to undermine the importance of customer service. According to a study by Hubspot[2], 93% of customers are likely to make repeat purchases with companies who offer excellent customer service.

The Visibility Factor

Customer service is always going to be a crucial aspect of customer experience. But in the digital age, it is also lot more visible to everyone.

Consumers have started taking their customer service inquiries online, including offline retail customers. For someone who made a purchase through an online channel, chances of her engaging online for post-purchase sales are high. For retail store customers, social media is a quicker way, although it’s likely that they might do it publicly.

Hence from online reviews to customer complaints and issues, everything is easier to find on social media than ever before.

And this customer experience feedback is not sitting isolated on social platforms. Everyone is so connected on social media. That makes a perfect case for brands to use social media as a customer service tool. In fact, many brands have developed significantly more active social accounts, all for the sake of interacting with the massive user base spread across social media channels.

The Impact of using Social Media for Customer Service

One of the common social media mistakes which businesses overlook is that they ignore comments. Even brands with dedicated resources sometimes overlook such an important aspect of brand experience.

Offering customer service on social media offers an easy way to speak directly to the customer.

Answering a customer complaint can increase customer advocacy by as much as 25%, meaning that responding to complaints can help create loyal customers [3].

Using social media for customer service helps in building good reputation by highlighting positive reviews and customer experience stories. It also allows dealing with negative reviews or bad experience quickly

It gives an opportunity to collect all the data and identify trends, common customer pain points or requests for new features/products.

If you believe that good customer experience leads to better brand advocacy and improved sales, then do not ignore the customer service opportunity on social media platform. For professional assistance, work with a professional social media agency.

OH! Design Studio is an integrated branding and social media agency in Mumbai. The firm has provided social media services to various B2B & B2C clients like software, F&B, SaS, electronics, fashion, etc.

References:

[1] https://experiencematters.blog/2017/02/23/customer-experience-leads-to-recommendations-charts-for-20-industries/

[2] https://blog.hubspot.com/news-trends/customer-acquisition-study

[3] https://www.convinceandconvert.com/social-media-research/5-social-media-customer-service-stats-you-must-know/

More Marketers Are Embracing This Style of Corporate Brochure

Corporate brochure is an important company marketing collateral for every business. It gives a voice to the company. It communicates the brand values, highlights the brand strengths and creates the desired brand image which is made up of facts, vision and feelings. When used strategically, a corporate brochure can serve as an excellent tool for corporate storytelling.

Increasingly, marketers are deciding to make company brochures more engaging. They are embracing a different style of corporate brochure design to take it to the next level.

What is it that marketers are doing differently?

Well, they are indulging in presenting the company information in a highly visually engaging way. Marketers are opting for coffee table book inspired corporate brochures to present their brand in a memorable way.

Corporate Brochures Inspired by Coffee Table Book Format

Coffee table book format is larger and lavishly illustrated. They are like high-end art books and designed to offer visual treats to its readers.

Leading Indian coffee table book design company OH! Design Studio believes that presenting a company brochure in the form of a coffee table book is a wonderful way to create a powerful visual impact on the readers and stakeholders of the company.

Here are some such corporate brochure projects shared by one of the top corporate brochure design companies in India — OH! Design Studio. OH! Design, a Mumbai-based integrated branding and digital marketing agency, specializes in designing compelling, inspiring and state-of-the-art coffee table books.

1. Portfolio of a leading Indian architectural & interior design firm

ZZ Architects use this brochure as a coffee table book to engage their clientele in the reception area or meeting rooms ,while the latter is patiently waiting for their host to join them.

The brochure has a grand and exclusive feel to it. At the same time, the graphics are modern and clean. Together these elements communicate and highlight the brand promise of the client’s firm and do justice to the presentation of their bespoke and contemporary projects.

2. Corporate brochure for the largest valve manufacturers in India

Using the coffee table book format, OH! Design Studio designed this company brochure to express the legacy of an iconic company. By using stories, imagery and design, OH! presented a visually engaging journey of this company through time.

For more information, connect with OH! Design Studio at letstalk@ohdesignstudio.com

Other links that might interest you:

A unique corporate brochure design for a financial services firm

How Coffee Table Books are used for sparking conversations in marketing.

8 Ways in which businesses use marketing brochures

Why An In-House Social Media Team Almost Got Fired

I once sat in a meeting where the company’s in-house digital marketing executive reported on social performance and was delighted that they get N likes on an average for their posts on Instagram. The team decided this was a success as they were achieving their goal of ‘building brand awareness’.

However, on closer inspection, the e-commerce website had hardly seen any traffic increase from these sources.Unfortunately, the business was unable to justify the role of their in-house digital team as they could not see any social media RoI.

Why Did this Happen?

Not setting social media goals is one of the biggest social media mistakes marketers make. But setting vague goals which are not relevant for the business would be like setting yourself a trap.

In this case, the digital team and the business both had a common goal i.e to increase brand awareness. But they failed to define it in a meaningful way.

In the absence of well defined social media goals, the team was unable to point to specific actions and steps to be taken to meet their business’ needs. They got distracted by the good-looking reports instead of measuring performance to meet their business’ needs and justify their role.

Key social media goal setting mistakes they made

The goal was not specific.

What does “increase awareness” mean? Does it mean more followers? Or does it mean making more people interested in learning about your product?

Also, how much better do you want to get at it? You want new followers or an increase in traffic on product pages?

The goal did not have any metric

“Increase Facebook followers” or “increase web traffic” is fine, but it needs some kind of a metric and there should be a way to measure it.

So you could say ‘I need 1000 new Facebook followers ….’ or ‘I want a 20% increase in website traffic……’ . Both are measurable, the former one from FB insights and the latter one from Google Analytics.

The goal was not time bound

When goals are not time bound, there is no accountability for progress.

Coming back to your goal, you could say “I want to increase FB followers to 1000 by end of the month’ or ‘I want to increase website traffic by 20% by the end of the quarter’.

The S.M.A.R.T goal framework

The S.M.A.R.T goal framework helps in structuring the growth objectives in a way that’s clear, trackable and helps in planning actions and steps to achieve those goals.

SMART is an acronym that stands for

Specific: Well defined, clear, and unambiguous
Measurable: With specific criteria that measure your progress towards the accomplishment of the goal
Achievable: Attainable and not impossible to achieve
Realistic: Within reach, realistic, and relevant to your larger business objectives.
Timely: With a clearly defined timeline

As a social media marketing strategist, my role was to assess the current situation, set SMART goals and prepare a strategic social media plan for this business. The client’s in-house digital team was then aligned to the updated social media marketing strategy.

The writer works as a social media marketing strategist at the branding agency OH! Design Studio. OH! Design Studio is an integrated creative and digital agency based in Mumbai, India.

Looking for a social media agency? LetsTalk@ohdesignstudio.com

What is the relation between a brand & its logo

For starters, a logo is not a brand. Logo design is definitely a part of a brand and its identity, but it is not everything.

Let’s understand the meaning and purpose of each of the following before looking at how they are all related to each other.

Brand
Brand Identity
Logo

What is a Brand?

Brand is like any other living being with a name, identity and personality.

Like how people form impression about other people, they also make inferences about your company.

If you sell consumer products, then your product is your brand- good or bad depends on the expectations and experiences of the consumers with your product. Now even if your competitor is selling exactly the same product, however your brand’s value as perceived by your consumer is what really differentiates your product from what your competitor is selling. Products can be copied but brands are unique.

Brand design, visuals and colors gives a unique visual appearance to your brand, but the effort required to create differentiation of your brand in consumer’s mind goes beyond the design and graphics.

For more about brand perception in simple terms, following link is recommended: What is a Brand?

Brand Identity

The visible elements of a brand comprising of brand name, logo, colors, typeface and graphics are some of the things which form the brand’s identity. But there’s more to brand identity than just the physical aspect of the brand that makes it visually recognizable.
Brand Communication Style i.e. how the brand communicates, its tone of voice, writing style, design style in marketing collaterals, signage, messages and actions.
Brand’s value system

Logo Design

Logo is the central identifiable visual element that helps people remembers a brand. This graphic appears on everything that relates to the business to reinforce the visual identity of the brand.

The purpose of logo is identification.

Example:

Mahindra’s CanvasM corporate logo design by branding agency OH! Design Studio

Use of this logo for online and offline communication:

Published by OH! Design Studio — a niche branding agency in Mumbai, India. From brand strategy to brand activation on online and offline channels, OH! Design Studio provides 360 degree creative services for launching new brands, re-branding and online brand activation & marketing.

Build A Lifestyle Around Your Brand

Early this week, at OH! Design Studio, our branding team was brainstorming a new product launch for a client.

How do you create desire for a product, we asked the team.

Customers have access to a broad spectrum of products and the choices are limitless. But they don’t want to be “sold to” by brands. Instead, they’re looking for an experience that could motivate them to invest and buy.

Today, brands need to embed themselves in their audience’s lives and that too in the long run, not just for some short term gain.

And it reminded us of this famous branding quote by Eva Chen

Build a lifestyle around your brand and the audience will follow.

Creating a lifestyle brand is about defining who or what your customer wants to become in the future, and giving them the solution that will help them to achieve that end goal.

It’s not about creating the perfect cup of tea , but convincing your audience that your tea brand strengthens the powerful relationship your audience have with themselves…. or it’s not about how great your running shoe brand is, but assuring your audience that your brand will help them become fit and healthy.

Looking for more branding inspiration? Check out more such branding quotes.

Visual Cues For Social Media Marketers on Smaller Teams To Build Brand Recognition

Often small businesses and non-profits site lack of marketing team strength as a reason for ineffective social media marketing outcomes. It’s interesting to note that even larger teams often make same type of social media marketing mistakes.

I was browsing through the social media profile of a company where a fellow brand marketer works.

The company is a reputed 60 year old wealth management advisory and a national level brand. They have a full fledged in-house marketing team, which includes three digital marketers.

So let’s say they have a fairly resourceful team.

Yet, their social media feed lacks visual consistency. Clearly, they do not have a social media branding strategy in place.

If you’re wondering, why visual consistency matters, then here’s the short answer.

For the starters, you don’t want to confuse or alienate your existing fans. They’ll not be able to quickly differentiate your brand from the competition or the general clutter of the feed. And new followers will not be able to build recognition in the first place.

I’ll give an example.

In my social media feed, when I come across any news post, I have a tendency to not believe it unless it is from a trustworthy news publisher. I generally check the account name to decide whether to click ‘see more’ link in the text caption of the post or skip it.

But when I see the posts which look like the following, I know where it’s coming from. I recognize the brand just by looking at the visual presentation of the content- their fonts, logo placement, yellow highlights.

If you’re looking for a more relatable example, then here’s one from Cadbury.

Did you notice the account names? These sample posts are from different accounts of Cadbury, and yet you can see the visual branding elements being consistently and coherently used by the globally distributed teams.

So if team size has no impact on maintaining brand aesthetics consistently, then what is it?

The answer is social media style guide. This document has a wider scope, but a part of it includes visual design guidelines for social media content. It helps in keeping in-house, outsourced and distributed or even a one-member team consistent in the visual presentation of the brand on social media.

The writer works as a social media marketing strategist at OH! Design Studio. OH! Design Studio is an integrated branding and digital agency based in Mumbai, India.

Looking for a social media marketing agency? letstalk@ohdesignstudio.com

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