According to the Boston Consulting Group Millennials are going to be a critical market segment across product and service categories. In the U.S., by 2030, Millennials will likely outnumber baby boomers 78 to 56 million. Millennials expect a two-way mutual relationship with brands and companies must make marketing to Millennials a priority now.
According to the 201 4 Mobile Behavior Report “marketers often think of mobile as an entire category of non-computer technology: smartphones, tablets, e-readers, and so on. Contrastingly, consumers tend to view mobile as a single device: their smartphones.”
A lot of brands are looking for social media marketing nirvana only to be disappointed because they can’t connect the dots between their efforts and the all important ROI. However, there are some key lessons from brands who are using social media to deepen their relationship with superconsumers.
I have been consulting for 5 years and frankly I’m sick and tired of cleaning up the mess left by social media consultants. The last company I worked for hired a big name consultant who wrote a book and charged them a small fortune. What he left in his wake was an organization that was more confused and wasted a lot of money. This is the 3rd time I have experienced this and it’s time to stop the insanity.
$19 billion for an app that has 450 million users? That’s what Facebook paid for WhatsApp and a lot of people are finally scratching their heads and asking “what in the hell is going on here?”
Superconsumers represent 10% of a category’s customers but account for 30% to 70% of sales and an even higher share of profits according to an article in HBR . It’s easy to reach them. This means that you can dramatically increase the efficiency of your advertising and promotions. Instead of trying to activate lapsed users through expensive mass- market campaigns or paying large sums to deliver coupons to customers who haven’t bought your product in months (and probably won’t buy it now), you can focus your efforts on a narrow slice of your customer base. Direct and digital marketing are often much more effective with super- consumers than with others. That effectiveness can be especially valuable to large CPG companies, some of which spend billions of dollars a year on advertising—and for which a 1% increase in the efficiency of ad spending can therefore be worth tens of millions of dollars.
According to Tony Haile, CEO of Chartbeat, which measures real-time traffic for sites “We’ve found effectively no correlation between social shares and people actually reading”. That means that retweets may not be a true measure of engagement.
A couple of years ago when I was shopping for a car turned to the auto makers Facebook page to see what others had said about their experience with the brand. I purchased a Subaru Outback but I noticed that there were several complaints from disgruntled customers that had gone unanswered for days & weeks. Why would any brand do this when 26.1 percent of brands reputations have been tarnished as a result of negative social media posts; 15.2 percent lost customers and 11.4 percent lost revenue?