Oreo started a promotion campaign #playwithoreo to get people all across world to doodle using Oreo! This not only would’ve made a lot of people crave Oreo cookies but also re-enforced Oreo as a brand. People bought Oreos and used them to doodle and had fun while doing so. The company’s emotional approach to building up brand value using social media worked well.
One of the biggest highlights of last year that immediately came to my mind was the Ellen Degeneres Oscar Selfie – This selfie with a Samsung phone became the most shared, viewed and re-tweeted image of 2014. The group selfie of celebrities was and still is re-created by biggest Bollywood/TV stars. This is a brilliant example of using social media (and broadcast media) as a platform to push your brand, but in this case it happened organically. This gave Apple a run for their money! 
Another smart move of using social platform for more eyeballs was by Michael Kors fashion brand which got instagram to release its ad back in 2013. This shot up the brands ‘followers’ and ‘likes’. This shows how impactful visual promotion on social media of your brand/product can be for building exposure.
These two amazing social media usage strategies are prime examples of digital marketing.
I identified 2 detailed case studies one of which involves use of social media, mainly twitter, as a way to market company’s product digitally while the other focuses on how email marketing worked for a dot com.
#KFbeerup – 2011 onwards – SMM (Twitter)
Premium beer brand Kingfisher started a campaign #KFbeerup on twitter where they promised to provide free kingfisher beers to twitter users on registrations. Kingfisher announces 1 month in advance which city will get this benefit and invites twitteraties to register and tag their friends for maximum benefit.
This move led #KFbeerup to trend on twitter. People wanted free beer! Kingfisher’s strategy to start buzzing on social media smartly extended to a real life event with consumers pouring in. Below are some benefits that the brand avails by hosting #KfBeerup:
1- The event helps spreading the word of mouth about the brand right from registration stage. A live event leads to post event tweets by users sharing their experience, making #KFbeerup reach thousands of people.
2- An exciting event creates brand enthusiasm amongst the twitter community and the enthusiasm impacts the brand equity.
3- All the buzz before and after the event must have created new loyalists of the brand. Their followers increased and they became talk of the town. User engagement once has opened up communication strategies for Kingfisher in long term.
4- This move gave them mainstream media coverage for innovation further helping in brand building.
5- By providing an impactful experience they secured future sale prospects.
6- They brought people engaging in virtual world to real life interaction thus birthing brand advocates.
Kingfisher as a company touches all possible social media platforms for interactive engagement. Their budget for social media was 5% in 2013 but was soon doubled and continues to increase. The company does most of its marketing through unpaid or organic search and advertising. Kingfisher’s marketing head shared that there have been spikes in product sales during loyalty engagement programmes and redemption offers.
Futurebazaar.com (2011-12) Email Marketing
Futurebazaar dot com provides a one-stop shopping destination from all it’s flagship stores including eZone, Pantaloons and Big Bazaar online. Email marketing seems to be the best fit for them, i.e it delivers the best ROI to the company in comparison to any other element of digital marketing.
They wanted to increase engagement with subscribers, create leads and reduce costs. By getting proper expertise on-board, their open mailers eventually increased to 25% on an average increasing their overall engagement and ROI.
Being a leading e-commerce company, FutureBazaar had proactively invested in email marketing as a cost effective, efficient and non-intrusive medium of reaching out to its customers. However, the challenge was to get better ROIs from this medium of communication. Futurebazaar initially faced some issues with e-mail marketing in terms of low open & click-through rates, poor scheduling and poor technical responses.
They focused on introducing relevant offers for targeted audience and also segmenting lists that resulted in close to 30% open rates for select categories.
Insight and learnings
Futurebazaar’s case study gave me an insight that email marketing is a permission based approach. It keeps the users always engaged as they would always check mails but could miss out on a trigger on social media platforms.
Also emails tend to grab more attention since they are personal. Companies usually provide coupons, deals or discounts on emails increasing both engagement and sales. Furthermore, emails are easier to create, control and take measure of impact than social media marketing tactics.
Social media marketing is more indirect and has an entertaining approach whereas email marketing converts better due to personal/emotional reach out by brands by making removing the fit-for-all angle of marketing.
Image Credits: playappsforpc
