Mediaboss Marketing

April 18, 2017

The popular headwear brand wanted to update its social marketing strategy, and found success doing so through Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

LIDS, a sports apparel company that rose to prominence on the back of its stellar selection of ballcaps (colloquially known as lids), quickly established itself as a force in sportswear. But you don't have to be a sports fan to see the impact LIDS has had on popular and urban culture.

From the fitted cap era, though the snapback craze, and into the current five panel frenzy, LIDS has maintained a strong brand in urban fashion, and garnered hundreds of thousands of fans on social media. But for all its prominence, LIDS found itself in need of a more robust digital and social media marketing strategy.

As an org we know we need to become more digital and social, and more loyal. That's the expectation of the consumer today. They want to interact with brands socially, says Jeff Pearson, SVP of marketing and eCommerce at LIDS.

Pearson and his team went about meeting these evolving social challenges by implementing a social command center of sorts at its new headquarters in Indianapolis. Dubbed the Press Box, this social command center consists of eight 55-inch flat screen panels all packing into a large room at LIDS' revamped HQ. The screens feature a number of social insights, and are used by company marketers to optimize their social marketing in real time.

These TVs are powered by the Salesforce Social Studio product. We're able to show the content that we are promoting, communicating, and capturing across social channels, as well as aggregate the posts that we've made, Pearson says. Social Studio gives us a dashboard where we can post to social, and the command center aggregates all of that information and creates reporting dashboards around it.

Indeed Salesforce Social Studio, part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, is a key component to The Press Box, and facilitates much of the power of the initiative. Through the Social Studio, The Press Box works by pulling customer data, journey data, advertising data, and more to depict the customer experience as accurately as possible.

[LIDS'] Press Box brings all of the digital touch points together, says Rob Begg, VP of product marketing in social and advertising at Salesforce. Usually, there may be only a handful of people that are really aware of how a digital campaign is going. LIDS has really put that information front and center, so that the experience can be absorbed by anyone at the company.

The company has reaped the benefits of the Press Box almost since day one of its implementation, but before getting into the results of the initiative, it's important to touch on a powerful bit of foresight by the LIDS team.

We wondered how we could extend this social reach to our employees, because we're not able to put a Press Box in every store,Pearson says.

Instead of installing eight TVs in all of its stores across the country, LIDS opted to bring the insights garnered by the Press Box to its larger team through an app called the LIDS Access Pass. The app allows us to see the four key social channels we operate out of, and the posts we've made to those channels. We've trained our store managers and associates on how to use the app, Pearson says.

This company-wide to initiative to better utilize social media has been a runaway success for LIDS.

When we first put the box in place in last October, we were at 495,000 followers on Facebook. We've grown that by a little more than 300,000, and are hovering today around 800,000 followers, Pearson says. It took us years to garner half a million followers. In just six months, we've almost doubled that.

Of course, any marketer with experience on social media understands that followers are worth about as much as impressions in other digital media channels. Valuable to be sure, but not quite as much as other metrics.

Followers aren't enough. You need engagement, Pearson says. To garner that engagement, the brand reached out to its followers with content that it knew would resonate with sports fans. We ran various contests around fans' favorite teams or hats, and we've just rolled out a new rewards program in addition to a new app and we've had really good engagement, Pearson says.

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LIDS Tips its Hat to Social Media - DMN

Participants at a workshop held to examine the use of social marketing in messaging to targeted audiences TRAFFIC Shanghai, China, 13th April 2017around 40 wildlife conservation and law enforcement officers, together with NGO representatives, met this week to examine the use of social media in awareness raising and promoting messaging encouraging changes towards consumption of illegal wildlife products.

The New communications approaches to reduce demand for threatened wildlife and enhance public awareness workshop was co-hosted by the Shanghai Wildlife Conservation Association, Shanghai Zoo and TRAFFIC.

Social marketing is rapidly gaining momentum in China as a means to raise awareness of particular issues and for encouraging behaviour change initiatives for social good. Messaging can be highly targeted, encouraging actionable solutions by certain groups using audience segmentation and insight learning.

In 2015, Moving targets: Tracking online sales of illegal wildlife products in China, a study released by TRAFFIC, highlighted the migration of wildlife cybercrime from e-commerce platforms to social media networks, where communications and financial transactions are easier to conceal.

Faced with this challenge, enforcement officers are seeking ways to interact through social media outlets. The workshop featured ways to utilize social media to change the behaviour of consumers, raise public awareness and motivate responsible action by industries along trade chains.

Social media, typically mobile internet applications, such as Wechat (an interpersonal messaging app) and Weibo (Chinas equivalent to Twitter) have now become the major information sharing and social communication platforms in ChinaWechat had more than 700 million users by 2016.

Social media is therefore a pivotal battleground in tackling wildlife trafficking and also in reaching out to potential consumers to reduce demand for certain products.

Thanks to this workshop, our wildlife conservation and enforcement officers have been brought up to date with the latest social media tools and techniques to mobilize public support for wildlife conservation, said Wan Ziming, Deputy Director of the Shanghai branch of Chinas Management Authority for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES MA).

Wan Ziming, Deputy Director of the Shanghai branch of Chinas CITES Management Authority addresses delegates TRAFFIC The new Wildlife Protection Law has put the onus onto internet companies to prevent illegal wildlife trade advertisements appearing online. It is a critical time for law enforcement departments to be talking to internet providers and users through social media and new communication approaches, said Tu Rongxiu, Deputy Director of the Shanghai Wildlife Conservation Association.

Participants discussed the development of effective communications strategies and practiced using the social marketing tools learnt during the workshop to formulate possible creative solutions to overcome challenges. They also examined case studies on raising public awareness about conservation of Shanghais wildlife and TRAFFICs campaigns targeting specific consumer segments, such as handicraft collectors and Chinese citizens visiting Africa.

There has been a huge growth and development in social marketing since we first held this meeting in 2015, said Zhou Fei, Head of TRAFFICs China Office. During that time we have gathered and compiled relevant case studies and training resources to share with our government and NGO partners and we encourage participants to replicate successful approaches in their own work.

TRAFFICs work on addressing illegal wildlife trade was generously supported by GIZ on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) and the German Federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (BMUB).

For more information, please contact: Sammi Li, Senior Communications Officer, TRAFFIC, China Office Email: xiaojia.li@traffic.org

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Shanghai workshop promotes use of social marketing to change illegal wildlife consumption - TRAFFIC - Wildlife Trade News

Anthill online

Digital and social marketing basics: Why knowing your audience is very important Anthill online Studies show that there will be over 2.6 billion social media users by 2018. With an estimated global population of 7.5 billion people, that's almost 35 per cent of the world's population using social media. As with digital platforms such as forums ...

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Digital and social marketing basics: Why knowing your audience is very important - Anthill online

Dive Brief:

The move consolidates Heineken's digital channels under one agency and Jonathan Nelson, CEO of Omnicom Digital, told MediaPost that Heineken would be able to "leverage Omnicom digital and social capabilities" beyond Red Urban.Omnicom is one of the four largest agency holding groups in the world and has recently won the business of other major brand marketers including McDonald's and its nearly $1 billion account.

One of the current trends in client-agency relationships is a reduction in the number of shops brands work with. The shift comes on the heels of a time when brands sought out specialty boutique agencies for specific channels, audiences and even campaigns, and also as competition from non-traditional players like global consultancies heats up.

Procter & Gamble's Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard, who's spoken broadly on the tensions between marketers and their agency partners, recently bemoaned the disappearance of one-stop agency shops and the proliferation of specialists that don't always successfully communicate with one another.

"Bottom line: We need you to get simpler," Pritchard said of agencies at the 4As Transformation conference earlier this month.

Sources reported on by MediaPost suggest that transition plans are in place for the agencies that previously handled Heineken USA's digital and social media to complete those contracts. In June and July 2015, Heineken parted ways with Wieden + Kennedy as its lead creative agency and announced Publicis Worldwide as its global advertising agency.

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Heineken USA consolidates digital, social marketing duties to ... - Marketing Dive

RALEIGH, NC: Social marketing software company,Sysomos,today announced the industrys social marketing and analytics platform that unifies all social management functions and capabilities, also shares content and insights across all Sysomos applications. TheSysomos Platform provides prescriptive insights for marketers by consolidating and cross-informing campaign initiatives.

Social media spending as a percentage of the overall marketing budgethas tripledin recent years, paving the way for the social analytics marketto growto $5.4 billion by 2020, representing a 27.6 percent compound annual growth rate. However, the industry has struggled to unify social media marketing and analytics for building campaigns. Customers have wrestled with disparate data silos, service that doesnt meet their needs and high costs of licensing multiple tools.

By linking applicationstoSearch,Discover,Listen,Publish,EngageandAnalyzeon social media, the Sysomos Platform now gives marketers access to all the paid, owned and earned data needed to create strategic campaigns, take action in real time and measure those actions in one upgraded user interface. Furthermore, with role-based customization, users can design their own workspaces to access the insights that matter most to them.

Identifying insights, creating campaigns and measuring the effectiveness of those efforts all with increasingly strained resources have become challenging for marketers, said Peter Heffring, CEO of Sysomos. We built the Sysomos Platform to meet these challenges head on, by providing a single technology platform that guides marketers to the exact insights needed to increase commercial opportunities for our customers.

The Sysomos Platform also incorporates artificial intelligence (AI) that discovers and automates unseen insights, showing marketers how to instantly take action. The algorithms uncover correlations, anomalies and associations by using machine learning to process trillions of data points every second. With the Sysomos Platform now integrating and aggregating millions of digital data streams, the company plans to accelerate development of more advanced AI for the social analytics industry.

In addition to the Platforms ability to instinctively inform and share data insights across applications, Sysomos which counts brands like Mondelez, Coca-Cola, Marriott and Yamaha among its customers offers:

Apply listening insights to paid, owned and earned content within a single workflow:

The Sysomos Platform integrates listening with publishing and engagement capabilities, allowing users to discover trends in real time and curate content that can be applied immediately to cross-channel campaigns. For instance, if a company discovers its brand virally trending on Instagram, it can engage with users and leverage their content all within the same platform.

Improve the effectiveness of paid media campaigns:

Sysomos can measure campaign efficiency as well as evaluate the earned media impact within the same platform. Using Sysomos market-leading listening and search technologies, marketers can assess the effectiveness of their ad messaging based on the text and visual content their audiences share, and whether it had an impact on the overall conversion for the brand.

Having access to all of the tools that Sysomos has to offer under this new integrated platform will deliver valuable insights for building accurate customer profiles, said Fabiola Romero of Yamaha Motor Corporation. The platform succinctly marries data, allowing us to understand and act upon essential information when timing is of the essence.

While the complete Sysomos Platform encompasses all the Search, Discover, Listen, Publish, Engage and Analyze applications, companies that have one of the applications easily can activate the others. The Sysomos applications previously were named Map, Gaze (acquired in 2015), Heartbeat and Expion (acquired in 2015); now Map is part of Search, Gaze is part of Discover, Heartbeat is part of Listen, and Expion is part of Publish, Engage and Analyze.

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Number of employees - MarTech Advisor