Fun experience or a brilliant marketing campaign?

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The first time I used Augmented Reality was probably when I tried the Pokemon Go game on my mobile phone. Augmented Reality uses the environment that already exists and put other information on top of that. This differs from virtual reality, which is when you are isolated from the real world and you are in a totally artificial environment.

The augmented reality is getting more and more popular and you can see a lot of companies that are adapting this technology to their marketing strategy. One marketing campaign that I think was really successful was when Fox promoted the fifth season of the The walking dead. They made a digital billboard with a camera on it, so you were able to see the actual street behind the shelter. After a while you could see zombies walking towards the bus shelter and starts to stalk you.

 

The Walking Dead bus shelter. Source

A lot of marketers are struggling today because it is hard to grab consumers attentions. People spend only one second on your ad when they are scrolling through their phones. Therefore I think the augmented reality can solve this problem and you can create fun ads that are engaging with customers on a whole new level. The question is if the augmented reality will just be a fun experience or if the consumer will actually remember the message that the marketers wants to deliver?

I think the zombie marketing campaign really succeed because it grabs attention and it is also bringing the right emotions for the show. They brought the TV show into reality so the viewers can be in the TV shows. This is also something that you haven’t seen before and grabs peoples attention. In a video about the campaign you can see how people are starting to film the shelter with their phones and are probably sharing it with their friends. That is exactly how you want people to react to an ad and that is why I think that this campaign has succeed.

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Do you think augmented reality will just be a fun experience or a brilliant marketing campaign?

#Likeagirl

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In 2014 Always by Procter & Gamble made a campaign that turned into be a huge success. In the video men and women are asked to do things like a girl. Many of the men and women started to flip with their hair, fail when throwing things and giggle. After that, they asked young girls the same thing and the response was completely different. The girls started to kick and fight with power and started to run as fast as they could.

Girl kicks like a girl. Source

In puberty many girls experience a decline in confidence. What Always wanted to do was to change the meaning of “Like a girl” from being an insult to a powerful statement that all women should embrace. The video encourages girls to ignore gender stereotypes, overcome limitations and do what ever they want. The video became a huge success and had more than 85 million global views on YouTube from over 150 countries.

“Change the meaning of “Like a girl” from being an insult to a powerful statement that all women should embrace.”

There are a lot of things that I like about this video and also why I think Always succeeded with this campaign. First of all they succeeded with delivering a message that is relevant and also a currently trending topic. People want to buy and represent brands that stand for the same thing as they do and have the same values. So instead of selling their new product they delivered a message in order to connect with the consumers on a more emotional part in order to make them feel more connected to the brand. This is a very effective marketing tool that is also called content marketing.

They also manage to make the video viral by making it sharable and unique. By having a hashtag people who has seen the video could easy share their thoughts and spread the word. The uniqueness and the simplicity of the ad is also something that I like about this video. It feels real and it is very relatable.

Like a girl campaign. Source

Watch the video here

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If you have seen the video, what do you think about it? And why do you think the campaign succeed?

The power of geofencing

Marketers today have plenty of options when they are deciding what type of marketing communication tool that are going to use. Since everyone of us is getting exposed of many different advertisements everyday, it gets harder for the marketers to grab the consumers attention and to chose the right marketing tool.

One marketing tool that I think is a great option is geofencing. Geofencing is when you send push notification to your app users when they are entering a geofenced area. The push notification is a targeted message with for example offers or news about your business. This is an excellent marketing tool for coffee shops, who can send notifications when a user is entering the geofenced area and give them a 2 dollar coffee in the morning. This tool can also be an affective marketing tool for real estate agencies who can send out push notifications when a potential buyer is walking pass an open house or for a retail store to show all the new arrivals. From a consumers perspective I rather prefer to receive promotions when I actually can use it instead of seeing an ad of a store that is located on the other side of the town.

Picture of Geofencing. Source 

Pizza Hut is one company who is using geofencing in a successful way. They are using text messages to send out promotions when a customer entering a geofenced area. According to Pizza Hut, this marketing tool resulted in 2.6 times more effective marketing compared to online display ads.

One thing that marketers have to think about before using geofencing is to not send out push notification everywhere the user is going. This will have an opposite effect on the customer and might lead to the users deleting your app. The purpose with the geofencing tool is to improve the customer experience. That is why you as a marketer really have to think about when it is most effective to send out this push notifications so it adds value to the user and provides them with benefits. If you manage to do that, the geofencing is a great marketing tool that will make users come to your location and make you sell more products.

Do you think this is an effective digital marketing tool?

A successful email marketing campaign

E-mail marketing is a great marketing tool that will create and build relationship with customers. I´m sure that a lot of you receive a lot of emails all the time and might think they are kind of enjoying. This is why digital marketers need to know how to create a successful email marketing campaign.

I found one email marketing campaign from Charity: water, which I think is really good. This email is sent out to every customer that once donates to a charity: water project. In many cases when you are donating things you don’t know what is really happing with you money or if it actually helps someone out there. What charity: water is doing really well is that they are sending out emails to everyone who is donating money in order to inform them on what impact their money is making over time. In this way they personalise their emails in a good way by showing the costumer their timeline. I also like the header of this email that shows the logo of the project and what the email is all about. In the body you can read about relevant information about what is going on right now and also see pictures of the water tanks that are under construction. The email finish with an unsubscribe link that is mandatory to include on all commercial emails.

Charity: waters email marketing campaign. Source

What I think Charity: water have succeed with is that they know their customers. They know what content they want to receive and what information that is fun to read about. They have managed to make the email feel personalised and targeted to each individual. They also make their customers feel good about themselves, because they can see what difference they are making in the world. This is how Charity: water are creating a customer relationship that will hopefully lead to consumers coming back and donate more money to other projects. All these things that Charity: water has done are very important to think about if you want to succeed with you email marketing campaign and create loyal customers that are continuing to come back to your business.

What do you think about Charity: waters email campaign? What do you like/don´t like about it?

 

 

 

Using social login to login

Have you ever downloaded an app or clicked on a webpage and they ask you to login? I think a lot of apps and web sites today ask you to sign in to the page in order to continue. What I have noticed lately is that a lot of websites ask me to login with Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn instead of creating a new account. I usually use my Facebook account because then I don’t have to remember a new username and password and it is more time consuming to register a new individual account. Research from 2012 survey conducted by blue research have shown that 54 % of users may rather go to another website instead of complete an individual registration form.

This is how a social log in looks like

I think that the social login is a very clever way for marketers to gather data about the users. With the social login you get to know what age, gender, if they are in a relationship, their interests and a lot of other stuff. This can help you to personalize the user experience. You can promote things that they might be interested in instead of showing a commercial that the user is completely uninterested of. On the other hand, some users might think it is creepy if the advertisements are too personalized. That is why a choice of sign-up option might be a good idea since the customer can choose how much information they want to share with the company. However, in the same survey that I mention before, 88 % admit that they have entering incorrect data about themselves when they did an individual register. This is an implication for marketers that they have to be aware of. One solution might be to confirm the account by sending an email with an link t in order to continue to sign in. This will help you to get rid of some of the fake accounts. Another way to avoid this risk is to make users sign up with their social media account where all the information already exist on their profile.

Have you used the social login before? Do you think it is a good way for marketers to gather information about the users?

 

The future of e-commerce

Two weeks ago ASOS launched visual search in their mobile app. This is an image search service where you upload an image in the app of some clothes or a person wearing clothes that you want to buy. The image will then be scanned in order to find products in the ASOS catalogue that look similar to the picture that you uploaded. What you will also find is products that might fit together with the product you were searching for.

ASOS visual search

I think this is a perfect marketing tool. I spend a lot of hours scrolling through my Instagram feed and I often see clothes that I like and wonder where I could find something similar. It is too time consuming to start looking for a similar thing manually and there are too many online clothing sites to choose from. Today it is easy to find where all the influencers bought their clothes because they usually tag the company or link a site where you can find the product. But all of my friends are not influencers and therefore I think this function is really good. I also found a research saying that social media influences 66 % of millennials buying decisions.

It is also a very effective marketing strategy to be able to see other products that might fit together with the product I´m looking for. This can result in customers buying more stuff and also to impulse shopping, which I wrote about some weeks ago.

I think ASOS visual search is a very good way of market their products. I think that in the future the most successful marketing is the marketing that the consumers are looking for by themselves, not the ads that they are exposed for everyday. This is why I think this is the future of e-commerce. The consumers know what they want and because of the visual search tool, they can search for the item and see the products that they are looking for.

Have you used this kind of tool before? What do you think about it? And what do you think of marketing products online like this?

Are we really paying for advertisements Netflix?

Something that I came across this week was an article about Netflix and that they started to use commercials between episodes. When I first heard about this I got upset.

One of the reasons why I started to pay and use Netflix is because I don’t have to watch a commercial in every 15 minutes. What Netflix started to do was that they having promotional videos for 10-20 seconds that is reminding viewers of different movies and TV shows on Netflix. Smita Saran, spokesman for Netflix said

“These video promos are actually personalized recommendations for titles we think a member may enjoy watching,”

Unfortunately, Netflix users don’t seem to enjoy watching these promotional videos. There has been several posts on Twitter complaining about commercials that they can´t skip and that they are not paying to see commercials.

Netflix users where not happy with the commercials

One struggle for marketers is how to market things without being enjoying for the consumers. In this case Netflix is promoting movies on their own platform that the consumers might enjoy to watching. I think this type of personalised marketing is really effective. I rather get personalised recommendations of movies that I might like, instead of getting a generalised ad that I’m not interested in. But the problem here is that Netflixs business model is the subscription model where users are charged a fee to subscribe to their service. They are not expecting advertisements and that is why they got so mad.

My recommendation for Netflix is to make those personalised recommendation so its not interrupting the users. One example is to have on the first page examples of movies and series that the user might like or a specific topic that only shows recommendations, instead of in-between episodes.

What do you think of this kind of advertisements?

Netflix using advertisements

Impulse shopping online?

Are you usually buying that extra chocolate or chewing gum when you are in line in the grocery store? I do it all the time. Today more and more people buy stuff online so the marketers nowadays need think about how they are market their products online. One thing that I started to think about is the impulse shopping. In grocery stores nowadays most of the impulse products is placed in the end of the store. But how do marketers market these products online?

According to Marketing Drive article, marketers can use personalized content to increase impulse shopping. They can for example show products for the consumers that they usually buy. Another thing they can do is to show products that relate to another product that they are planning to buy. One example of this is if they are planning to buy cacao, the consumer will also see a recipe of a chocolate cake and all the products you need in order to make that cake. This will make it easy for the consumer to buy products that they did not plan to buy in the beginning.

Another example from the article to increase impulse online shopping is to eliminate obstacles. On example of this is to offer free shipping for the consumers if the consumer meets a minimum order size. Since shipping fee isn’t something you want to pay for you might buy an extra package of cookies because otherwise you would have spent that amount of money on shipping.

One advantage that online stores have today compared to physical stores is that they have access to a lot of data. They can therefore personalise the offerings to every consumer. Therefore I think that the impulse shopping online is more successful compared to a physical store, since the online stor “knows” what you want.

Are those kinds of marketing strategies effective on you as a consumer? Or are you more likely to buy impulse products in a grocery store?

Photo by Oleg Magni on Pexels.com

Photo by bruce mars on Pexels.com

Meet a doctor online?

Did you know that you could meet a doctor online? KRY is a company who make it possible to meet doctors without moving from your bed when you are sick. By a video call you can talk to a doctor who help you with your problems, give you advice, prescriptions and a lot more. KRY:s CEO, Johannes Schildt, writes on their website:

“Digital health care is the future in a world which gets more and more connected. Together we can help making this transition a reality and in the end help more people.” Johannes Schildt, CEO and founder of KRY

When I first heard about KRY and that you could meet a doctor online instead of going to the hospital, I did not think that this was going to work at all. So I continued to go to the hospital when I was sick to get my prescriptions, although I constantly got disappointed. I always had to wait for hours with high fever and when I finally got to meet a doctor they didn’t even look at me and were a bit rude. So I started to think about this business ide and how convenient it is to just call a doctor right away, without going anywhere.

But if you look at this business from a marketers perspective it is not as convenient as it might seems. If you want to market yourself as a doctor there are some specific rules that you have to think about before you do a marketing campaign. You have for example think about not market something that is intrusive marketing. It also have to be correct and worthy in both content and how it is designed. For example you can’t do an ad that says “Today you can meet this doctor for half price”. Of course we have these rules because the patient should feel safe when they meet the doctor. So in order to be a marketing manager at Kry you have to come up with new ideas to market your service with out being instructive.

It is very important for marketers to be aware of all these kind of rules before you start a campaign. This is something that especially digital marketers have to consider since there are a lot of rules and also new rules coming all the time. I think that a company like Kry and also other hospitals online have to be extra cautious since they market products for your health.

Meeting a doctor though your phone. Source: http://www.kry.se

 

What do you think about hospitals who market this online tool to its customers?

The filtered me

Hi everyone and welcome to my Digital marketing Blog!

This is my first blog post and therefore I thought it would be interesting for you to know a little bit about myself. Since this blog is all about Digital Marketing, I´m going to present myself through one of my social media channels. So lets take a look at my Instagram page.

Amanda Ottossons Instagram profile, https://www.instagram.com/amandaottosson/

To be hones, this is not how my real life looks like. These are the moments in my life that I like everyone else to see and where I brag about how perfect my life is. If you look through my Instagram page you will see beautiful beaches, sunny weather and happy faces. That is probably because I only post pictures when I´m on vacation or having a good time.

Another thing that is hiding behind those pictures is that I probably have 50 other pictures that I was not happy about and chose not to post. The picture that I thought was the best, is filtered so the sky looks a bit bluer and my skin a bit more tanned.

So can you really get to know me by scrolling through my Instagram profile? Well, you will probably see that I like to travel, which is true, and that I like sunny weather and hanging out with my friends, which is also true. But you have to remember that both people and companies choose what they post on their pages, and it might not always be as fancy and perfect as it looks. So if you want to get to know the real me, you have to see me without all those filters in the real world.

But to be able to choose what to post on your sit can be a very positive thing too. If you are a marketing manager at a company you can decide what picture you want to post so you only show the good sides of the company. I think Instagram is a very good marketing tool to use for every company no matter if it is small or big. You can post funny videos that other people can share and spread to there friends so it becomes something that everyone talks about. One implication for marketers is how can you post things that are engaging with the followers. I think that the most important thing, for both companies and if you just post pictures for fun, is to know your target group, what they like and enjoy watching in order to get people to engage with you pictures.

Do you think it is good or bad that companies can choose the content of their posts on social media? And are you showing the real you on your social media plattforms?