Social Media Strategy Case Studies Using the Customer Experience Lifecycle
In my last post, I presented the Customer Experience lifecycle as a framework for companies defining Social Media Strategy and Business Objectives. This model shows you where consumers are looking for information to meet their needs.
By focusing Social Media efforts on where your customers are looking for information, you can better define your Social Media Strategy around helping customers solve their problems.
To illustrate how the Customer Experience lifecycle is important, the following are examples from the first 2 stages: Realization and Awareness. I’ll cover the next four in future posts.
The Customer Experience Lifecycle:
- Realization - Recognition of a problem or need
- Awareness - Connection between need and your product
- Evaluation - Consideration of you (and your competitors) product benefits and tradeoffs as a solution to the need
- Transaction - Money is exchanged for product
- Consumption - Product is used
- Service - Post-purchase support for your product
Realization – Recognize a Problem
Best Practice – FiLife
- Business Objective: Drive traffic to an ad-driven site
- Tool: Social Comparison – Through their innovative “Stackers” tool, they allow consumers to compare themselves to others
- What They Did Right: By seeing “how you stack up”, consumers can recognize a need to do more in a certain area
- A consumer saving 3% of their paycheck through 401(k) contributions would see that they are in the 10th percentile
- This consumer would likely recognize the need to save more for retirement
- And guess what…FiLife is there with a variety of resources and ads to help the consumer solve their problem
Company to Learn From – Motrin
- Business Objective: Increase sales by creating a “new need” for the product
- Tool: Viral Videos – For the start of International Baby Wearing Week, they promoted videos with a mom describing that carrying her baby is cool as long as she carries Motrin
- What You Should Learn From: They tried to create a need where no problem existed
- All consumers know pain; all consumers know that pain-killers kill pain
- Some say it wasn’t tested, but large companies generally do not put out ads without focus group testing
- But people act funny in paid focus groups. I’m guessing that either no one spoke up in front of the group or that they wanted to “help” Motrin by telling them what they thought Motrin wanted to hear
- Viral videos are typically watched alone and without financial incentives. This behavior led to a significantly different reaction, like these on Twitter
Awareness - Connect Product to Problem
Best Practice – BlendTec
- Business Objective: Drive sales by increasing brand awareness
- Tool: “Will it Blend?” videos that show the power of the blender
- Why They Did It Right – They created brand awareness by entertaining consumers and showing them EXACTLY what they were looking for
- Blenders are not exciting and therefore not talked about (especially among friends on the internet)
- The main (and only?) question facing consumers when purchasing a blender is, will it blend?
- Rather than adding complexity to the need (like competitors were doing by promoting fancy features), they kept it simple (and funny)
Company to Learn From – Target
- Business Objective – Drive sales using recommendations of friends
- Tool: Facebook Group with Insiders- Created a Facebook group with a set of insiders, Target Rounders, that encouraged people to recommend products to friends
- What You Should Learn From This: You can’t force word of mouth to inform customers about products
- On the surface, it’s not a bad idea; Target is a great brand. How many times have you walked out of Target with more than your shopping list?
- When people need something, recommendations of friends is critical; but recommendations must be authentic
- Target tried to force secrecy with emails to Target Rounders that read, “Your Mission: Try not to let on in the Facebook group that you are a Rounder”
- No one wants to compromise their reputation amongst friends by being a shill for a corporation
Other examples you can think of?
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benphoster
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kevin
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Alain Breillatt
