W2GI Team | Feb 13, 2015 9:53:57 AM
8 Min Read
Do you ever wonder how effective your marketing campaigns are across all locations?
In this episode of Marketing Circle we sat down with Manish Patel, CEO and founder of Where2GetIt, to explore how to successfully analyze your local-social-mobile efforts on a single dashboard.
Marketing Circle is brought to you by Where2GetIt, the top digital marketing agency located in Anaheim, California. Stay up to date with our Marketing Circle podcast series by subscribing to our iTunes channel, RSS feed, or visiting our Knowledge Center!
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Mireya: Hello and welcome to another episode of Local Marketing Circle, brought to you by Where2GetIt. Today we will be discussing the relationship between local-social-mobile and reviews. Before we dive into that I want to introduce to our listeners, again, Manish Patel, CEO and founder of Where2GetIt. Welcome Manish.
Manish: Thank you, happy to be here!
Mireya: Cool, let’s get started. So let’s briefly discuss the types of consumers that marketers are selling to with mobile devices. While buyers from all generations are now mobile, we can’t ignore the fact that mobile habits from millennials have lead the way to the future of mobile marketing. Can you give our listeners some context as to why we think millennials have made such a huge impact on the need for brands to implement campaigns optimized for mobile?
Manish: Definitely, if there’s one thing we all can agree on it’s we need to give credit to millennials for leading the charge.They’ve grown up with technology, they use it 24/7, but the reality is the market has shifted. If you look at the statistics, 50% of our traffic is being driven by mobile devices. So it’s now a lifestyle that all of us are used to real-time communication. We’re on the go. We’re using mobile devices. We're constantly searching. So once and for all why don't we get rid of the label of “mobile” marketing and talk about the future of marketing - which doesn't really matter about the device - lets just keep it to marketing, and how we're going to market to this audience.
Mireya: Okay Manish, so that’s a very interesting point that you brought up about removing that label. What is the most commonly used channel on mobile?
Manish: Well, one definitive way is Social. Social media is the top activity in the U.S. on mobile devices. Nearly half of smartphone users use social media every today. Today all of us either use Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter to post pictures and tweets. We write reviews on Yelp and Foursquare and other places, like Google where we will leave reviews based on our experience.
So if brands need to - really need to - understand there’s a four step process and that four step process is:
Monitor what is happening, triage or analyze what is being said about them, respond in kind, and then also build that audience. And hopefully throughout this conversation we're going to get through those four stages.
Mireya: Great, that triage is very interesting, and I think we can explore it and the conversation. But let’s focus on, you know, you talked about tweeting, reviews, and a lot of activity that consumers, or anyone that has access to a mobile device and is interacting with these social channels. These consumers are leaving behind a lot nuggets of information. There’s a lot of data out there available so it sounds like national brands, advertisers, [and] multi-location strategists can extract a lot with that information. What would you say are the types of information that you feel would be most useful for brands to extract?
Manish: Well I think definitely one specific way that is most useful is to listen at the local level. And what are you listening to? You are listening to reviews. And really what you need to do is meet the consumer at the point of conversation. So, rather than thinking nationally, think locally. Your consumer's have a local voice and as a brand, as a whole, the type of information should be - which locations are generating those bad reviews? What is the type of sentiment that is happening at those locations? Which locations are doing well? And how do I apply those practices of locations that are doing well to those locations that are not doing so well? So the most specific way is to meet the consumer at the point of conversation and meet them at the local level.
Mireya: Local is definitely the hot topic for most national brands, and I’m glad you actually brought up reviews. When we look at bad reviews I know a lot of businesses tend to shy away from actually responding or doing anything about it. Do you have any tips for brands who are trying to tackle online reviews and meet the demand for real-time communication?
Manish: Yeah, for sure. First of all I think the days of ignoring [bad reviews] are gone. You know, 90% of consumers are checking to see what others have said about them before making purchasing decisions. So learning about what [consumers] saying and understanding a few things. What are you trying to do? Are you trying to save them time with the money they're spending with you? Are you giving them an experience? Are you teaching them something? By listening, you’re going to get better and I think that’s the most important thing, listen to improve your business. They’re telling you a goldmine of information, that it just doesn't pay anymore to ignore.
Mireya: That’s very good. So lets elaborate more on local and how to listen. [Brands] should not only be listening, they need to respond and act. Can you give us some insight as to what tools are available or a strategy [brands] could use?
Manish: What I said earlier was monitoring, for these reviews and what are you monitoring? Satisfaction or sentiment. I also said earlier about triaging or analyzing, and what are we triaging? That’s good reviews or bad reviews. I said earlier about responding, and again in this situation you're either going to offer a canned response or a personal response or it maybe a semi personal response. And then again, the last part would be to build the audience and that way is through means that what we're talking about here is an organic way and in a little bit we're going to talk about paid. but to build an audience through organic means you know the customers are on social and they're going to be social. So how do you find those influencers that are on social media? How to you build that relationship to have a two way dialog, to build that relationship with that influencer?
Mireya: Thank you Manish, that was really good insight. So one point that I think we left out in that answer was some tools. Are there any tools that you can think of that can help national brands listen - locally?
Manish: Yeah, thank you for keeping me in line, I did skip over that part. So three tools: Hootsuite is one, I would say that you monitor at a national level [with Hootsuite]. One thing to keep in mind with these tools is that very few exist to monitor at a local level. So Hootsuite, Reputation.com of course I would be remiss without plugging our own tool here which is Brandify. Brandify allows you to monitor at a local level. [Brandify enables you to] monitor, respond and in-time build reviews with the audience that has seen you in a favorable light. You can actually interact with them and ask them to rate you and review you on Yelp, Google, and other websites.
Mireya: Great, so let’s talk a little bit about paid [social]. The direction we all are in agreement in is that social media is going to move closer to a paid channel for advertisers. So any tips that you may have for [brands] looking to get more audience, build their database, and effectively push their social promotions?
Manish: Right, as we mentioned you know there are two ways to build that influence or audience.
One is the organic way. We’ve heard the term “earn” media and of course now were talking about “paid” media. So in paid media, Facebook in recent months released the ability to do more targeted and localized advertising. And with 500 million tweets being sent out everyday you have to think about how you are going to show up in a place like Twitter. And of course in a B2B environment you need to think of what to do on a LinkedIn perspective with content you might be trying to promote. The idea is to really observe your analytics. Understand what happened organically so with paid promotions - similar to the old days when we talked about Google adwords - it’s like turning on the faucet. One of the greatest things about social media, in terms of the analytics, is that you can derive from social media advertising things like demographics, interests, behaviors, custom audience, [and] location. So there’s a lot of learning that you could get from organic(earned) [and from] paid [social]. There are a lot of benefits.
Mireya: Alright, so we've talking about organic, paid and the activity that national brands need to do when they're using those different mediums. My question is - before brands actually get to that level of organic and paid [social advertisements] there are some fundamentals that need to be established. Can you share with us what those are?
Manish:Well definitely the first thing that one needs to do is establish a foundation for local. I think we've learned over the years that local marketing is the most cost effective means to reach consumers in a one to one, personalized manner. Some of those strategies and tactics to have established campaigns are adding location. Having location based campaigns with your local pages is the first step. Second is claiming and making sure all your information is claimed on the properties - whether it’s social directories, search engines, etc. Obviously there are nuances inside of all this to bring it together. In Facebook for example it’s claiming parent and child [pages] or in Yelp there might be some things that are specific. [For example] you need to start with reviews or know the number of reviews you can respond to in a day. But those are the same tactics that we've learned in local that now apply to build an audience, an influencer type audience, for social media.
Mireya: That’s very insightful and is there a way to actually be able to monitor reviews in a centralized fashion? And not only be able to respond to reviews, but also be able to track successes?
Manish: Well for sure. The tool really is just a means to identify and give you transparency of what's happening across all of your locations. And that's of course the reason why we created Brandify. Brandify allows you - within one interface - to monitor reviews, to respond to reviews, to understand what people are saying in terms of sentiment satisfaction and also give you the ability to build on that audience that has rated you favorability. So how do you understand if whether that marketing campaign was successful or not? That’s through BrandScore. One of the most effective ways is to see your score go up or down based on the success of the type of implementation, and type of campaign that you're running. So if you compare your BrandScore before that campaign with your BrandScore after the campaign that’ll tell you measurably the type of information in terms of engagement, what people have said about you, to the competitive ratings that you have and so forth. We tie that all together into one measurable score and basically tell you whether that campaign moved the needle or not. And if it did you know that, that’s the type of thing your audience was looking for. So BrandScore really ties it together and gives you that success metric.
Mireya: Well I’m glad to hear that there's actually some analytics and attainable data that brands can actually look to to understand their effectiveness across reviews management.
So, Manish, again, thank you for joining.
Manish: All of you can reach us easily at Where2GetIt.com, on social media, and personally you can reach out to me @manishw2gi. I look forward to hearing from you all and thank you for joining today.
Topics: Brandify, Mobile, Local, Podcasts, Review Monitor, Blog, review management, Social, brandscore
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