April 2013

Handle Negative Feedback on Social Media Like a Pro

April 30, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Seeing a negative comment about your brand on a social network can be a horrifying sight, but these tips will help you manage negative feedback on social media the right way.

Before you can understand how to deal with negative feedback on social media, it is first important to understand what kinds of negative feedback exist. From there, you can apply some of these tips when the situation comes up (don’t worry, it happens to the best of us) and come out looking like a pro.

Types of Negative Feedback

There are essentially three types of negative feedback that can come up on social media: product issues (malfunctions), service issues (complaints) and brand issues (PR and brand crises).

When customers have an issue with your product, they may try to reach out to you through social media channels. The same goes for customer service when it comes to complaints. We recently posted an article about Social Care (customer service on social media) in which we noted that one-third of active social media users prefer Social Care to conventional customer services options (e.g. phone). That also means that a third of social media users may prefer to vent to your brand on social networks rather than on a private phone call.

The third type of negative feedback on social media has to do with a crisis. This relates closely to brand and reputation management on social media.

So what are a few tactics you can use when it comes to dealing with these types of issues on social media?

Tip #1: DO NOT Stay Silent

Burying your head in the sand may make it seem like there is no issue and everything is just fine, but the reality is that with every passing moment that you say nothing, the issue gets worse. Even if you simply post a generic “We are working hard to resolve this issue. Thank you for your patience and we apologize for any inconvenience.”, this is still better than nothing at all.

That said, direct engagement with individuals is better than a mass message. It shows people you care and lets them know that their business matters to you. Just because it is your average customer posting on Twitter does not mean they should be ignored. They speak for the masses, and silence looks more like you don’t care than anything else.

Tip #2: Act Fast

Social media moves at the speed of light. Some experts estimate that the lifespan of a tweet is a mere 15 minutes, and that of a Facebook post is just a few hours at best. So if you wait hours or days to respond to people, you will be jumping into a conversation that has no participants.

Social media is happening in real time, and if people are talking and you are not talking back, they will not care what you have to say in a week. You weren’t there when it mattered and they made up their minds.

Tip #3: Plan Ahead

What are you going to do if it all goes down without a moment’s notice? Do you have a plan in place? How will you respond to irate customers on social media? Planning for issues and negative feedback on social media is very different from other types of crises. As noted, this is a real-time, very public conversation, so it is in your best interest to have a plan in place in case it all unfolds.

Tip #4: Pick Your Battles

While it is important to be engaging with individuals across different networks, you need to know what comments you should be engaging with and which ones you should let go. At the end of the day, there are some battles you just are not going to win, and engaging in those – for example, someone lambasting your brand on some unfounded grounds – can lead to nothing but a long, drawn out argument that makes you look bad and gets you and your clients nowhere.

Tip #5: See It As An Opportunity

There is nothing more valuable in business than brand advocates. What are those? These are customers that are so enamoured with your product, service or the way you treat them that they go out of their way to promote your brand and advocate your business without any incentive other than the fact that they like working with you.

If there is one opportunity that a crisis or negative feedback on social media presents it is the chance to turn a disgruntled customer into a brand advocate and have a whole group of other users see it happen. People like personal attention. Engaging with them during a crisis and helping them through the process with a personal touch can very easily make them go from an angry client to a strong ally.

Whether it is an industry influencer or one of the little guys, everyone can and should be treated like the most important client you have – it is hands down the best way to turn them (and everyone watching the conversation) into a brand advocate.

Can you think of other tips that can help when dealing with negative feedback on social media? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

How To Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile: 4 Tips for Success

April 29, 2013/by Corey Padveen

LinkedIn can be one of your strongest business resources, but you first need to optimize your LinkedIn profile.

There are hundreds of millions of users on LinkedIn, the majority of whom do the bare minimum when building their profile. There are the basics that are needed in order to get started, but for many, that (or a step or two later) is where the process ends. LinkedIn is not a what-you-see-is-what-you-get model, like, for example, Twitter.

There are numerous fields that can be used to optimize your LinkedIn profile, and this set of tips should help get you started on the right track.

1. Tell People Who You Are

Sure, your name and (possibly) place of employment are on LinkedIn from the get-go, but people want to know more about you. So tell them!

LinkedIn features sections for everything from your education history to a list of publications. The more impressive information you can feed to your LinkedIn profile the better your results will be. Furthermore, this is an opportunity to showcase your expertise to an audience of professionals more so than on any other network. The LinkedIn profile is a truly a medium for self-promotion, and since those are so few and far between in the world of social media, we suggest you use it as much as possible.

2. Optimize Your LinkedIn Profile for SEO

LinkedIn is a miniature search engine…of one billion annual searches. While this might be a tiny fraction of the searches done on monster engines like Google, it is still significant, and each of the searches done on LinkedIn are within a very narrowed scope. Therefore, it is very important that you optimise your LinkedIn profile for search purposes.

LinkedIn – like Google or Facebook’s EdgeRank – has the Relevance algorithm. This is the criteria by which search results are ordered. While most people are searching for someone or something in particular, there are still those looking for broader results, like “Manhattan Real Estate Agent” or “San Francisco Caterer”. Though the top results will always be first-degree connections followed by second- and third-degree, you will certainly want to optimize your profile for keywords.

According to an article by blogging4jobs.com, the most relevant areas in which to place keywords are your name, headline, company name, job title and skills.

3. Seek Out Endorsements

Once again, LinkedIn is a medium for self-promotion. Now that does not mean that you should not be engaging in the conversation, but it does mean that you can actively pursue help from your network to grow your business through LinkedIn.

One of the best credibility criteria on LinkedIn is also one of its newest features: endorsements. Though people know that endorsements are not necessarily the most trustworthy measurement for credibility (just like asking for friends to ‘Like’ your Facebook page, you can do the same with LinkedIn) a large number of endorsements for different skills (and you should fill out all 50 that you are given) does look impressive and does hold some clout when you are leading the conversation.

4. Engage in the Conversations

You are allowed to be a member of 50 groups. There is no excuse for anyone not be a member of 50 groups. With over 1.6 million groups, you will be hard pressed to find a forum in which you cannot participate in the conversation. And that is one of the most powerful features of LinkedIn.

Engagement can mean several things including increased visibility, increased traffic and increased credibility. You might have an impressive profile filled with links to your blog or website, but with hundreds of millions of people talking, you are pretty tough to find organically. By engaging in the conversation and starting some of your own, you increase the likelihood of being found and getting the most out of LinkedIn.

Some of these tips may seem intuitive, but the reality is that few people are actually taking advantage of all that LinkedIn has to offer. To really boost your activity and the success you are seeing from LinkedIn, implement some of these tips and see how quickly you derive the benefits of LinkedIn.

What other tips can you think of that can help with optimizing a LinkedIn profile? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media: Week-in-Review, April 27, 2013

April 27, 2013/by Corey Padveen

In case you missed some of the topics we covered this week, here is the social media week-in-review!

Effective SEO Tips for Optimizing Content on Your Page

There is an curious irony when it comes to SEO: everyone knows that it is important when it comes to getting found, but few people understand how it works. While it may seem like a complicated endeavour to optimize your content – what with all the talk about algorithms and pandas – there are few simple steps you can take that will make a big difference!

Social Media for Small Business [INFOGRAPHIC]

Social marketing is not something that should be adopted only y big companies. Businesses of all sizes, even small businesses, can use social media to their advantage and help grow their business! Find out how social marketing is helping small businesses in a great infographic!

What are ‘Targeted Tweets’ and How Should You Use Them?

Recently, Twitter unveiled their newest marketing tool: Targeted Tweets. This new feature brings in an entirely new advertising angle from which marketers can take advantage. Find out what these updates are and how you can use them to gain a competitive edge early!

Social Media Case Study: Honda

About a year ago, Honda noticed a growing trend and near-obsession with Pinterest. They decided that the best way to promote their newest CR-V was to launch a cost-effective campaign aimed at spreading the word virally. The approached worked and Honda created a campaign worthy of a feature in this week’s social media case study.

Social Equity: The Effect of Social Media on Your Brand

How does your brand’s image benefit from your involvement in social marketing? In this week’s Social Equity segment, we decipher how your brand equity increases both in the short- and long-run with the strategic use of social media marketing.

Have a look through some of these great articles and enjoy your weekend!

Social Equity: The Effect of Social Media on Your Brand

April 26, 2013/by Corey Padveen

The direct impact that social media can have on brand equity translates into a significant boost in Social Equity.

Social media has created an entirely new avenue of measurement when it comes to brand equity. The value of a business is based on, among other things, the quality of work it produces, the position it holds in the market and, perhaps most important, the public perception of the brand. Social media tackles each of these aspects in some way or another, and that level of power means that the benefits to Social Equity can be great.

There are three key areas of focus when one looks at the impact social media has on a brand’s image: reputation and crisis management, customer service, and market influence. Social marketing has quickly become one of the cornerstones of increasing a brand’s value in each of these categories, and the results are increased Social Equity for a business in both the short- and long-term.

Reputation and Crisis Management on Social Media

The power of social media can make or break a company’s reputation. Peer-review sites are among the most trusted in the industry, and a poor reputation here can mean a fast downfall of your brand. Managing your brand on social media can significantly boost your Social Equity.

People look to engage with a brand, particularly in the time of a crisis, and if you are listening and conversing with these users, you not only quell any unease customers might have, but you have the opportunity to turn these people into brand advocates.

By carefully monitoring and managing your brand’s reputation in real-time on social media, you eliminate much of the risk of bad press being out there and not even being aware of it.

Customer Service on Social Media

This is a relatively new concept referred to as Social Care. In a recent study by Nielsen and NM Incite, results showed that one-third of active social media users prefer to engage with brands on social networks in order to deal with questions or complaints as opposed to conventional methods of customer service (e.g. by phone).

The ability to engage with your audience on multiple platforms adds to both your brand’s transparency and approachability. These are both crucial to developing customer loyalty and, in turn, building your Social Equity.

Influence on Social Media

There are plenty of services, like Klout, Kred or PeerIndex, that aim to measure a brand’s influence on social media. Influence is of ever growing importance, particularly when it comes to brand equity. Building your industry influence and establishing your brand as the foremost expert in your vertical has never been easier than it is with the strategic use of social media.

Using multiple networks and implementing a methodical engagement program can quickly help you boost your credibility to a much wider audience than ever before. Furthermore, it can be done much faster than ever before. The results? Increased brand trust and subsequent business and Social Equity.

Brand and reputation management are of ever growing importance. The ability for an international set of consumers to share opinions, complaints and praise of brands with one another has never been easier. With the right strategy in place (and a good product never hurts!) it will not be long before you see the impressive results from your efforts in terms of Social Equity.

How do you manage your brand’s reputation online? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media Case Study: Honda

April 25, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Honda was looking for a way to promote their new CR-V to a specific demographic, and they found that the best way was through Pinterest.

The Honda CR-V has a very specific audience in mind: young adults on the verge of a major step. Whether that is starting a new career, getting married, or beginning parenthood, the Honda CR-V is aimed at making the transition easier for this group.

So how do you market to them?

The Campaign

In 2012, Honda decided to take advantage of the growing addiction to Pinterest among young adults to market their brand. How? By making people stop (for a whole day)! The #Pintermission campaign was intended to get influencers fitting the targeted demographic to stop using Pinterest for 24 hours and go out to live life. This is the aura Honda aimed to cultivate with the new CR-V, and this campaign was how they got that message across.

What was the reward for not pinning? Well, Honda reached out to a group of 5 key influencers and asked them to stop pinning for one day. In return, Honda offered them $500 to put towards making one of their dream pins a reality. Each of the five users was given a board on a designated Honda Pinterest page and asked to pin about activities they dreamed of doing. The reward money for not pinning over the course of 24 hours was then to be put towards making one of these dream activities a reality.

So how did the campaign do? Nearly 5 million users were exposed to the Pintermission boards. Furthermore, these five pinners managed to garner over 5,000 repins and 2,000 likes in a very short time frame. And what’s most impressive? There were over 15 million impressions on different media platforms. That’s a lot of exposure for Honda.

The Lessons

Some of the most important lessons from this social media case study appear to be counter-intuitive when it comes to marketing and advertising. But the proof is in the numbers; this method works.

Never Ignore the Power of Influence

Similar to our social media case study on Kotex, Honda reached out to influencers on Pinterest in the hopes that their reach would mean a viral campaign. Once again, this method proved to be a winner.

Influencers can take your campaign to the next level. Honda reached out to five people. Five. Granted, they have an internationally-recognized brand to fall back on, but they still attained those numbers with little effort. The brunt of the reach was due to the fact that these pinners had 6- and 7-figure follower counts.

Never ignore the power of influence on social media. Your average high-school senior can have more social clout than the most powerful executives in the world. Keep that in mind.

Make It Easy for Others to Do the Work

Apart from creating the #Pintermission campaign and the designated boards for the five pinners, Honda did not have much involvement in the evolution and growth of the campaign. They simply asked that they be included as collaborators on the individual pin boards in order to garner exposure.

There were no fancy apps or special requirements for the pinners to qualify, they simply offered five people a chance to win $500 (that’s right, the campaign only cost $2,500 plus some time) for not using Pinterest. After that, it was entirely up to the participants to provide the content.

By making a simple, straightforward campaign, Honda managed to reach audiences far beyond expectations and for minimal cost. When you open the door for others to collaborate on social networks, you can very easily decrease the costs of running a campaign.

Engagement > Selling

Honda did not, at any point in their campaign, try to sell a car. That was not what this campaign was about. The CR-V is intended to get people off the couch and outside to experience life. This campaign was about making people realize that, and having Honda to thank.

By creating a campaign that promoted the spirit of their product, and linking that product to the campaign, very superficially, Honda managed to capture the attention of a massive portion of their target demographic.

One of the most important marketing rules when it comes to social media is to avoid selling (at least, in most cases). People are on social networks to engage, not to be bombarded with promotional offers. Honda recognized that and their success is the proof that it worked.

What is your favorite aspect of the Honda #Pintermission campaign? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

What are ‘Targeted Tweets’ and How Should You Use Them?

April 24, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Targeted tweets were recently announced by Twitter, and it is still a little unclear as to what they are and how targeted tweets can be used.

There has veen quite a bit of speculation about how Twitter planned to monetize their audiences. Sure, there are 500 million or so accounts on the microblogging network, but where does the company stand to generate revenue from those numbers? Last week, Twitter unveiled their answer to that question: Targeted Tweets.

We have all heard of Promoted Tweets – essentially, these are tweets designed to reach a broader audience based on a select criteria picked by the user paying for the ad. Well, this next generation of Promoted Tweets takes targeting your Twitter audience to a whole new level. With targeted tweets, marketers can take a wealth of new steps to increase engagement and conversion rates. Namely, tweets can be targeted by location, platform (e.g. mobile) and even outside an account’s follower base.

This can mean a lot as far as Twitter marketing is concerned. Below are a few things to consider when it comes to advertising and marketing your brand on Twitter with the new targeted tweets.

Promote for an Audience in Mind

Promoted Tweets, as they were originally designed, were intended to reach a broader audience, and not much else. Thus, tailoring your tweets for a specific audience would not necessarily do much good seeing as how you did not have control over those viewing your message. Targeted tweets changes that.

Now, as noted above, you can target your content to a very specific audience. Therefore, you should not be sending out the generic promotional 140-character message. Pick your audience based on the given criteria and write a message for them. People do not simply want to see a piece of advertising from a brand on Twitter. They want to feel like a brand is talking directly to them. So write for your audience. You’d be surprised at the success you find – initial reports are showing engagement rates of 11%. That’s high by any standards.

Get Mobile

Targeting messages by platform means that you can now advertise to people on the go. That’s a whole new feature for Twitter. Sure, their smartphone app is great for on-the-go users, but for marketers, there was no real way of marketing directly to smartphone users – until now.

The ability to send targeted tweets to mobile users means that you can now create mobile campaigns specifically for Twitter. And, considering the fact that the pricing scheme for these tweets is based on clicks, you don’t have to worry about spending on a mobile-oriented campaign that is seen on desktops.

Use Your Analytics

Along with these new changes on the frontend comes some new features in the backend. The analytics featured with these targeted tweets means that you can be monitoring the progress and success of different campaigns in real time. It might be a CPC-styled campaign, but you need to pay attention to your insights!

With the new targeting abilities of promoted tweets, you need to be constantly reshaping and evolving your campaigns in order to reach the largest, relevant and targeted audience available. These analytics help you do that and they help you in a timely fashion. So instead of the set-it-and-forget-it mentality that many marketers take to social campaigns, keep an eye on your analytics and see how you can further optimize your targeting strategy to get even more out of your Twitter marketing efforts.

These are some exciting changes for Twitter. The ability to create targeted tweets means that marketers can now go a step further with their Twitter marketing and advertising strategies. Just when people thought Twitter was at a standstill, they release an exciting new feature.

Do you plan on using Twitter’s new targeted tweets feature? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media for Small Business [INFOGRAPHIC]

April 23, 2013/by Corey Padveen

There is no shortage of benefits when it comes to social media for small business.

There is a common misconception that social media is a tool best used by big businesses and multinational corporations. While it’s true that some of the best and most recognizable case studies happen to be from major brands, there is plenty of use when it comes to social media for small business. And that goes for both full-scale and small-scale programs.

Social marketing is a growing trend in all verticals and in businesses large and small. Each day, new businesses are adopting a social media program and seeing tremendous results. However, adoption is taking longer for some than for others, and understandably so. Social media for business is not fully understood by everyone and not a simple “plug-and play” style of marketing. That is particularly true when it comes to social media for small business. With all that small business owners need to manage and tend to, social media does not always make the cut. That’s a shame, because the benefits when it comes to social media for small business can be just as great, if not greater, than all those major case studies mentioned above.

Essentially, social marketing can level the playing field and place small businesses in a category where they never thought they were competitive. It also opens a new set of markets and potential that would have otherwise been closed off.

This infographic breaks down some of the more popular uses of social media for small business, where these companies are seeing some notable results and a few good lessons to take away if you are planning to incorporate social into your marketing strategy.

Take a look at the infographic and let us know how you or a colleague’s small business is using social media! Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Effective SEO Tips For Optimizing Content On Your Page

April 22, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Content that cannot be linked back to is not going to be useful to your business or SEO at all.

The same goes for content that you can’t share. Content is important for the search engines these days, especially with all the changes being made.

This is especially true with the Penguin and Panda updates. Creating content these days has to not only come across as attractive to real customers and visitors, but it needs to be attractive to search engine robots.

Here are a few of the many tips to help you get both objectives met in your content.

Length of Content

No matter what you’re writing, from articles to blog content, you want to make sure they are longer than 300 words. This is because anything less than that is going to be hard to get basic information across. You need more than 300 words to explain a product or service, and writing more gives you a better chance to do so. Web pages are ranked for the value and information they bring to the table.

The longer the content you write, the better it is for your site and for SEO purposes. However, don’t get out of line with writing long content. A good rule of thumb is anything from 300-1000 words.

Avoid Duplicate Content

There’s nothing worse that writing the same articles over and over again for your site. You shouldn’t have the same two pages on your website and if you do happen to have duplicate content, this is going to be frowned upon by the robots crawling your site.

However, if duplicate content can’t be avoided, be sure you use robots.txt to prevent them from going to a particular page.

Use Semantic Techniques or LSI for Your Writing

It’s always good to use variations of keywords such as phrases or synonyms that can relate to the primary keyword. For instance, if you have a website that is dedicated to engines, you want to have content and phrases in your content that relate to engines.

Maybe talk about some of the engines you deal with. Using these phrases here and there on your website is going to allow you to reinforce how relevant your website really is.

Getting to the Technicalities

You will need to have title tags that are going to be well thought out for SEO purposes. Make sure it stays below 70 characters and you should always use your primary keyword in the title. The main headlines in your page are the H1 tags and these should be descriptive and get to the point. Subheadings can also help your content flow a lot easier.

Social Equity: Blogging and Your Business

April 19, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Blogging was one of the incipient forms of social media marketing, and it adds a great deal of Social Equity to your business.

Considering the online attention span is only 8 seconds, it is hard to imagine how a lengthy blog article can be so beneficial when it comes to Social Equity. The fact of the matter remains, blogs address key issues, and if someone lands on your post, it is because you have already grabbed their attention and they want to know more.

Essentially, a blog is a lead generator. People are arriving at your site because you have information they want access to. And if done right, a blog can mean a tremendous increase in business and, subsequently, Social Equity.

The Power of Blogging

While any form of social media marketing is going to require an investment of time and resources, blogging requires a little bit more. Considering you are developing original, lengthier content, it is not surprising that you will need to ramp up your investment and efforts for a blog to function at maximum capacity. But the payoffs can be outstanding.

According to surveys conducted by the inbound marketing experts at HubSpot, blogs can be more powerful than any of your other social activities when it comes to generating business. Their findings showed that 92% of companies blogging multiple times per day acquired a new customer through their blog. And for those companies that simply have a relatively active blog – 57% of those businesses acquired a customer with it. Furthermore, 81% of marketers agreed that their blog was useful to business development and lead generation.

With regards to inbound marketing, perhaps the most surprising statistic was that companies that blog have 97% more inbound links than those that do not. When you consider the added advantage of social link-building, this is a very important statistic.

Social Equity of Blogging

As noted above, Social Equity is derived very directly with blogging. Furthermore, there is an indirect value added to your business from blogging.

With regards to the direct Social Equity, a blog generates leads and business. The ability to acquire new clients directly from your website means that the aforementioned investment blogging requires can be recouped from the direct impact it will have on your business alone.

The indirect impact blogging has on Social Equity is tremendous. Blogging, more so than any other form of social media marketing, enables you to establish yourself as an expert and leader in your industry. You know everything there is to know about your business. How can you show that to people before you acquire them as a client? Blogging is the best means of achieving this. Showcasing your value as an expert to your market is reflected in an added value to your business.

It is clear that blogging can do wonders for your business. With time and devotion, a blog can significantly impact the value of your business in a very positive way. Blogging is amongst the strongest methods of garnering Social Equity.

Have you seen a value added to your business as a result of blogging? How so? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

Social Media Case Study: Harley-Davidson

April 18, 2013/by Corey Padveen

Harley-Davidson is known to have one of the most active social media programs of any major brand, but the use of mobile marketing by Route 66 Harley-Davidson was exceptionally impressive.

At Christmas time in 2011, the local Oklahoma Harley-Davidson dealership, Route 66 Harley-Davidson, decided to launch a social media campaign, designed by 7 Media Group, that took advantage of the growing number of mobile users. The holidays are always a time for marketing innovation and that has been especially true with social media. And the 12 Days of Christmas campaign by Route 66 is a perfect example of that.

The Campaign and Goals

Route 66 had a very specific goal in mind: they wanted to maintain visibility with current customers and generate increased revenue by attracting a new customer base during the holiday season. Sounds simple enough. After all, the holidays are a great time for promoting your products since consumers are out looking to buy. But when every brand from Wal-Mart to Microsoft is promoting holiday specials, and your brand is known as a luxury item that not everyone can afford, you need to find a way to compete.

Route 66 decided they would take advantage of social media and promote a 12-day SMS campaign to their fans, followers and customers. Essentially, Route 66 created a Call-to-Action (CTA) encouraging users both in-store and online to text RT66 to a designated number. If they did, they would receive twelve days of discounts, whereby the dealership offered a 20% discount on different items each day.

For Route 66, the holidays were typically slower. People seemed to forget that there is so much more to the Harley-Davidson brand than just motorcycles. So Route 66 decided to do the most obvious thing with a social media twist: remind them!

The results were outstanding. For the items being promoted in the campaign, sales skyrocketed. For example, one of the promotions was for T-shirts. On that particular day, sales were 250% more than a normal day of business. On Helmet Day, the single-day sales equaled the previous week’s in their entirety. Furthermore, there was an increase in dealership traffic as a result, and that could easily turn into new customers down the road.

The Lessons

There are a few important takeaways from the social media and mobile marketing techniques used by Route 66.

Always Use a Call-to-Action

For Route 66, it was simply encouraging social media users and customers to opt-in. Where was the incentive? They were receiving discounts. Your CTA’s should be direct, clear and require little from the customer, regardless of what your campaign is.

Campaigns, emails, posts, and anything else you can think of with CTA’s often see at least twice as much engagement as those without. Don’t rely on people to take that next step on their own – help them out!

Cover All Your Bases

Route 66 engaged customers and fans both in-store and on social media. Why? Because choosing one or the other no longer applies when you want to have a successful campaign. As the promotion approached, Route 66 needed to ensure that every avenue through which they could engage with their audience was covered and covered thoroughly. So next time you are putting together a campaign – regardless of its nature – be sure you reach out to your leads on every avenue and do it often.

Keep Them Coming Back

Route 66 had twelve promotions over twelve days leading up to Christmas. (The campaign ran from December 12-24.) Users could opt-in at any time, and the campaign was promoted simultaneously with the live event. Don’t stop promoting your campaigns once they have started. People hate the idea of feeling like they missed out, and if you can put together a longer campaign that gives people a chance to take advantage of your offer, you stand to generate a much greater return than if you create a campaign that is somewhat exclusive.

Keep It Simple

Sure, a fancy, multi-layered campaign might wow your audience, but what it has in flash it lacks in simplicity. Simple is good. People like the idea of taking one step and reaching the finish line. Making your clients jump through hoops creates a disincentive to participate. Do you think Route 66 would have seen the same success if customers had to go online, create an account, fill out a survey, print coupons and, after all that, be in the store on the right day to redeem it? Probably not. This is a method that deters a lot of people and can be much more expensive. So, put yourself in the customer’s shoes and ask yourself, really, if you would participate in the promotion.

By engaging an audience on social media and creating a simple, straightforward campaign, Route 66 was able to do exactly what they set out to do. The goals were clear from the start and the methods were easy for both Route 66 and the customer. The results speak for themselves.

Have you tried your hand at a mobile marketing campaign? Was it successful? Why or why not? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!

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