Last week, I recapped the top 3 marketing trends of 2013. One of them, gamification, deserves a little more explanation. Over 70% of Forbes Global 2000 companies plan to use gamification for the purposes of marketing and customer retention. By harnessing people's natural desires to compete, achieve, gain status and money, express themselves and even to be altruistic, marketers can turn their product into a game, and actively engage their audience.
Popular Types of Gamifaction
Check-ins and Badges - Used often with fitness sites and apps such as Foursquare, virtual badges are awarded each time a customer reaches the next "level". These levels correspond, for example, to the amount of time someone has exercised, how many people they've recruited, how many restaurants they visited and logged with their apps, and so on. This is similar to the idea of frequent customer rewards, where if you collect a certain number of points, or spend a certain amount of money you get bonus gifts, but is even more engaging and cost effective. These apps encourage frequent use, and provide constant feedback and reward. It is just as rewarding to receive a graphic badge for an achievement as it is to receive a physical prize, and the idea of "leveling up" makes customers feel like they've earned the reward at the end.
It's important, when using this sort of gamification, to balance individual rewards with community rewards. Rewards only for community achievement can encourage coasting, and when sticking to just individual rewards it's easy for customers to get bored or plateau. The solution, as found by a recent MIT study, is to reward participants not just for their own contributions, but by how much their
contributions inspire others. He likens it to academia, where a
publication is deemed more or less influential by the number of
citations it receives in subsequent research. This encourages users to improve themselves, and keep leveling up individual ling, while also striving to better their standing and influence within the community.
Treasure Hunts/Narrative based marketing
This is a rarer form of gamification, as it requires more set up and investment on the part of the company, but is often more engaging and rewarding then simple badge and check in systems. This sort of gamification is generally attached to viral marketing, and works well when a new product, album or movie is being released. The idea is that users must follow a series of clues and puzzles, or accomplish a series of tasks to unlock additional content and prizes. Often, a loose narrative is created, such as the theft of the brand new product that must be recovered by the careful sleuthing of the customer base.
The idea of gamification, in all it's forms, is to encourage consumers to feel like the marketing they are doing, or the product they are using, is fun. That it is rewarding. That each time they buy a product, or refer a friend, they are accomplishing something. There's nothing more satisfying then physically crossing a task off a sheet of paper. By tapping into the human desire to compete, improve, and increase their status, companies can encourage their client base to do the marketing for them.
First five comments get a free response! If you have any tips, comments or suggestions about games and marketing, let us know in
the comments below and on
twitter and facebook.
Showing posts with label social media marketing tips. Show all posts
Showing posts with label social media marketing tips. Show all posts
Tuesday, June 11, 2013
Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Top 3 Marketing Trends in 2013 (So Far)
At the end of 2012, the top marketing trends and predictions focused on gamification, mobile marketing and content marketing. Now that we're halfway through 2013, did these predictions hold up? Has mobile marketing hit its saturation point? Is the focus still on content and a broad social media and mobile presence? Let's take a look at how these predictions held up, and how they changed.
Mobile Marketing - is still on the rise. If growth continues at the current rate, by 2015 more users will access the internet through mobile devices than their computers. It's just a fact - when your phone is a portable computer you will use it whenever you don't have your laptop or desktop. Thanks to smartphones, every minute of someone's waking day could potentially be spent online. It's not a coincidence that 42.8% of marketers planned to increase their marketing spending in 2013, it's just good business sense.
Content Marketing - Recently, there's been an emphasis on content. Not just amount of content, but quality of content. With the advent of the blog, the initial theory (and instinctual impulse) was to just put as much information out there as possible. Update as often as possible and let the rest sort itself out. Now is the time to sort all that content out. Companies are re-evaluating their approach to content. How they organize, how they curate it, whether quality of content is more important then quantity of content, and the hammer is coming down on the side of quality. Producing less content, but of a higher quality is proving itself to be a better strategy then providing a lot of content without much consideration to content. While having a blog filled with posts back to 2007 is impressive, readers would rather not have to slog through a lot of mediocre content to get to the gems. Instead, they would rather read only the best of your posts, even if there are fewer.
Gamification - is a relatively recent marketing innovation, that's seen a lot of use in the beverage and food industry. Essentially, it turns marketing strategies into a game. The most classic example is when companies hold contests or surveys and let the consumers decide what the new candy flavor will be, or the logo, or the mascot. An adaptation of this strategy to the internet, particularly to social media, is to offer prizes or rewards based on likes, shares and re-tweets. For instance, if you share a certain link x amount of times, you get a special reward, rank or badge. Companies have also arranged internet "scavenger hunts" where consumers unlock certain rewards at each level, where each level involves some form of promotion, purchase or use of the product.
Whether these trends continue, or some new marketing strategies arise to take their place remain to be seen. What trends have you noticed so far? Is there any marketing strategy that you're glad to see go? Let us know in the comments below twitter and facebook.
Mobile Marketing - is still on the rise. If growth continues at the current rate, by 2015 more users will access the internet through mobile devices than their computers. It's just a fact - when your phone is a portable computer you will use it whenever you don't have your laptop or desktop. Thanks to smartphones, every minute of someone's waking day could potentially be spent online. It's not a coincidence that 42.8% of marketers planned to increase their marketing spending in 2013, it's just good business sense.
Content Marketing - Recently, there's been an emphasis on content. Not just amount of content, but quality of content. With the advent of the blog, the initial theory (and instinctual impulse) was to just put as much information out there as possible. Update as often as possible and let the rest sort itself out. Now is the time to sort all that content out. Companies are re-evaluating their approach to content. How they organize, how they curate it, whether quality of content is more important then quantity of content, and the hammer is coming down on the side of quality. Producing less content, but of a higher quality is proving itself to be a better strategy then providing a lot of content without much consideration to content. While having a blog filled with posts back to 2007 is impressive, readers would rather not have to slog through a lot of mediocre content to get to the gems. Instead, they would rather read only the best of your posts, even if there are fewer.
Gamification - is a relatively recent marketing innovation, that's seen a lot of use in the beverage and food industry. Essentially, it turns marketing strategies into a game. The most classic example is when companies hold contests or surveys and let the consumers decide what the new candy flavor will be, or the logo, or the mascot. An adaptation of this strategy to the internet, particularly to social media, is to offer prizes or rewards based on likes, shares and re-tweets. For instance, if you share a certain link x amount of times, you get a special reward, rank or badge. Companies have also arranged internet "scavenger hunts" where consumers unlock certain rewards at each level, where each level involves some form of promotion, purchase or use of the product.
Whether these trends continue, or some new marketing strategies arise to take their place remain to be seen. What trends have you noticed so far? Is there any marketing strategy that you're glad to see go? Let us know in the comments below twitter and facebook.
Tuesday, May 21, 2013
5 Tips to Improve Your SEO
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically, how do you make Google work for you. Anyone who's ever used a search engine understand the concept: the results on the top of the first page are the ones you click on. So how do you get there? Honestly, it's better to just hire a SEO certified professional, or a marketing team to handle it for you. But here are some tips to get you started.
1. Keywords - Figure out what sort of words people use to search for your product, and include as many of them as you can in your website. This is often done on a coding level, where the website itself is designed to make it as easy as possible for search engine indexing to find it.
2. Cross Linking - The more times people click through to and around your site, the higher it climbs in the search engine rankings. One strategy is to have, essentially, sets of links, where the main page takes you to a second page which takes you to the content you're looking for, to have links to other pages on the most important pages. There are ways to do this organically, without disrupting or annoying the user, such as linking to a page with services, then having the user click on each individual service to see examples of it.And/or, when organically mentioning another service in the description of your current one, linking straight to that service in the text.
3. Inbound and Outbound Linking - Advertise your website. have links to your website on your social media sites, on your blog, and links to your blog on your website. The more places that your blog or website shows up, the more it will be scene, and more importantly, the more it will be trafficked. One of the things search engine crawlers, the things that find and rate the sites, look for is how often your site gets mentioned on other sites.
4. Data and Analytics - Once you start getting traffic, you need to track that traffic. Search engine algorithms change all the time. Make sure that you know who's visiting your site, when, where and how, so you know how to change your website and your SEO tactics to match your demographic. Most companies that provide SEO help or expertise include analytics and tracking as part of the package, as it's hard to optimize something when you don't know h0w it's performing in the first place.
5. Sponsored Links - If doing SEO the organic way just isn't producing the results you want, you can always pay the search engine to get featured at the top of the results. Whether or not this is actually effect is up in the air. Many people, myself include, specifically avoid the sponsored links because we assume that their not actually the best results. Search engine user like to think that the reason an article or a business is at the top of the list is because it's the most popular, and most relevant result. Sponsored links bypass that, and as silly as it sounds, feels like the company is blatantly "cheating" to improve their standing.
These tips can get you started, but as you've probably figured out, SEO is best left to professionals. Luckily, there are a lot out there (including my company, UnimarPR). Just try to focus on companies that provide "organic" SEO optimization over sponsored links or pay per click, as search engine companies prefer websites and businesses that game the system naturally.
How important do you think SEO is to a business? If you have any additional tips or suggestions, things that worked or didn't work for you, let us know in the comments, or by contacting us on twitter and facebook.
1. Keywords - Figure out what sort of words people use to search for your product, and include as many of them as you can in your website. This is often done on a coding level, where the website itself is designed to make it as easy as possible for search engine indexing to find it.
2. Cross Linking - The more times people click through to and around your site, the higher it climbs in the search engine rankings. One strategy is to have, essentially, sets of links, where the main page takes you to a second page which takes you to the content you're looking for, to have links to other pages on the most important pages. There are ways to do this organically, without disrupting or annoying the user, such as linking to a page with services, then having the user click on each individual service to see examples of it.And/or, when organically mentioning another service in the description of your current one, linking straight to that service in the text.
3. Inbound and Outbound Linking - Advertise your website. have links to your website on your social media sites, on your blog, and links to your blog on your website. The more places that your blog or website shows up, the more it will be scene, and more importantly, the more it will be trafficked. One of the things search engine crawlers, the things that find and rate the sites, look for is how often your site gets mentioned on other sites.
4. Data and Analytics - Once you start getting traffic, you need to track that traffic. Search engine algorithms change all the time. Make sure that you know who's visiting your site, when, where and how, so you know how to change your website and your SEO tactics to match your demographic. Most companies that provide SEO help or expertise include analytics and tracking as part of the package, as it's hard to optimize something when you don't know h0w it's performing in the first place.
5. Sponsored Links - If doing SEO the organic way just isn't producing the results you want, you can always pay the search engine to get featured at the top of the results. Whether or not this is actually effect is up in the air. Many people, myself include, specifically avoid the sponsored links because we assume that their not actually the best results. Search engine user like to think that the reason an article or a business is at the top of the list is because it's the most popular, and most relevant result. Sponsored links bypass that, and as silly as it sounds, feels like the company is blatantly "cheating" to improve their standing.
These tips can get you started, but as you've probably figured out, SEO is best left to professionals. Luckily, there are a lot out there (including my company, UnimarPR). Just try to focus on companies that provide "organic" SEO optimization over sponsored links or pay per click, as search engine companies prefer websites and businesses that game the system naturally.
How important do you think SEO is to a business? If you have any additional tips or suggestions, things that worked or didn't work for you, let us know in the comments, or by contacting us on twitter and facebook.
Tuesday, April 23, 2013
Social Media Etiquette
So you've just started a social media site for your company. You've probably been using Facebook and twitter in your personal life for years, and you know how important it is to have an active online presence not just for yourself, but for your company. What many businesses seem to forget, is that the rules, so to speak, are different when you're not just representing yourself. Here are few basic etiquette rules for social media sites.
1. Use proper punctuation and grammar, even on twitter. This may seem obvious, but you would be surprised (or maybe not) at how often allegedly professional accounts stop using capitals and punctuation on the internet. Even on Twitter, where you are sometimes obligated to use abbreviations simply because of the character count, and it can be tempting to just not punctuate (because every piece of punctuation counts as a character) do it anyway. If you can't say it in 140 properly punctuated and spelled characters, don't say it at all.
2. No one cares what you had for breakfast, unless you're a breakfast food company. You use your personal Facebook and twitter accounts to update your friends, families, and acquaintances on your personal life, thoughts, and feelings. Your business twitter or Facebook page is being used to update your clients on your company's life, interests and ideas. Don't mix the two. Unless your personal life and/or preferences some how directly relates to your business life (we regret to inform you that our CEO is stepping down due to an unfortunate bacon and eggs related incident this morning), your customers don't need to know about it.
3. Spam is for sandwiches, not newsfeeds. No one wants to wake up one morning to find that they're entire Facebook wall, for pages and pages, is nothing but minute by minute updates of what you had for breakfast. The same thing applies to your business accounts. Spread out your updates and vary the content. Cross platform spamming - posting the same thing to your Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn pages, is excusable, and in fact necessary, since your audiences won't be identical across the sites. Deliberately posting the same or similar things more than once in a short period of time will only serve to annoy and alienate your client base.
These are just a few basic etiquette rules to get you started. What annoys you the most about how businesses conduct themselves online? What are some of the most common etiquette mistakes you've seen? Let us know in the comments, or on our own (perfectly polite) twitter and facebook accounts.
1. Use proper punctuation and grammar, even on twitter. This may seem obvious, but you would be surprised (or maybe not) at how often allegedly professional accounts stop using capitals and punctuation on the internet. Even on Twitter, where you are sometimes obligated to use abbreviations simply because of the character count, and it can be tempting to just not punctuate (because every piece of punctuation counts as a character) do it anyway. If you can't say it in 140 properly punctuated and spelled characters, don't say it at all.
2. No one cares what you had for breakfast, unless you're a breakfast food company. You use your personal Facebook and twitter accounts to update your friends, families, and acquaintances on your personal life, thoughts, and feelings. Your business twitter or Facebook page is being used to update your clients on your company's life, interests and ideas. Don't mix the two. Unless your personal life and/or preferences some how directly relates to your business life (we regret to inform you that our CEO is stepping down due to an unfortunate bacon and eggs related incident this morning), your customers don't need to know about it.
3. Spam is for sandwiches, not newsfeeds. No one wants to wake up one morning to find that they're entire Facebook wall, for pages and pages, is nothing but minute by minute updates of what you had for breakfast. The same thing applies to your business accounts. Spread out your updates and vary the content. Cross platform spamming - posting the same thing to your Facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn pages, is excusable, and in fact necessary, since your audiences won't be identical across the sites. Deliberately posting the same or similar things more than once in a short period of time will only serve to annoy and alienate your client base.
These are just a few basic etiquette rules to get you started. What annoys you the most about how businesses conduct themselves online? What are some of the most common etiquette mistakes you've seen? Let us know in the comments, or on our own (perfectly polite) twitter and facebook accounts.
Saturday, February 23, 2013
On Social Media
In celebration of Unimar’s emergence on Twitter and Facebook we bring you an exciting book recommendation. The
New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Blogs, News
Releases, Online Video, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly,
2nd Edition, by David Meerman Scott, is a must read if you want to take your business to a new level when using Social Media.
Have you read this book? Agree or disagree? We always love to hear what you think so contact us on Twitter and Facebook.
Scott has some great insight on how to
use Social Media to drive your business in an organic way, providing a
great counterpoint to more traditional interruption-based advertising.
There are an incredible amount of tips and tricks, theories and methods
in this book, but Scott has boiled it down to a few basic principles:
1. Target a specific audience. Create a
page that reaches an audience that is important to your organization. It
is usually better to reach a small niche market than try to go large.
2. Be a thought leader. Provide valuable
and interesting information that people want to check out. It is better
to show your expertise in a market or at solving a buyer’s problems than
to blather on about your product.
3. Create lots of links. Link to your own
sites and blog, and those of others in your industry and network.
Everybody loves links—it makes the Web what it is. You should certainly
link to your own stuff from a social networking site (like your blog),
but also link to other people’s sites and content in your own market.
4. Encourage people to contact you. Make
it easy for people to reach you online, and be sure to follow up
personally on your fan mail.
5. Participate. Create groups and participate in online discussions. Become an online leader and organizer.
6. Make it easy to find you. Tag your
page and add your page into the subject directories. Encourage others to
bookmark your page with del.icio.us and DIGG.
7. Experiment. These sites are great
because you can try new things. If it isn’t working, tweak it. Or
abandon the effort and try something new. There is no such thing as an
expert in social networking—we’re all learning as we go!
This should be enough to get anyone
started in their own Social Media campaign, but to truly achieve
astronomical results we suggest you give the book a read.
Have you read this book? Agree or disagree? We always love to hear what you think so contact us on Twitter and Facebook.
Saturday, December 29, 2012
The Zen of Social Media Marketing
I recently spent 2 hours at Borders searching for the perfect book about Public Relations or Social Media. Finally I found it: ”The Zen of Social Media Marketing” by Shama Hyder Kabani. This book is a really easy read and is above all very practical. I recommend this book to any small business owner who is trying to get their company name out there and doesn’t have a multimillion dollar marketing budget. The book is filled with several tips that Kabani refers to as “Zen Moments” that work as sort of chapter summaries. The book explains the power of Facebook and Twitter for small companies and she gives detailed advice of how to use both social media websites.
The book contains online resources that I personally benefited from. Just one example is http://jigsaw.w3.org. If you have a website and want to make sure it’s coded properly go to this site, type in your URL, and it will scan it for you and point out any errors you may have.
Have you read this book? Agree or disagree? We always love to hear what you think so contact us on Twitter and Facebook.
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