5 Tips for Growing Your Business with Social Social Marketing in Action at T.H. March Oracle Modern Best Practice for Social Creates Real Business Opportunities Social marketing has existed as we know it for more than a decade. Yet many organizations still struggle to produce tangible business benefits from their social marketing activities. T.H. March, the UK’s largest and most experienced firm of insurance brokers specializing in insurance for the jewelry trade, is adopting Oracle Modern Best Practice for social marketing, powered by Oracle Marketing Cloud Service. Let’s say you just purchased your fiancé an engagement ring or maybe that fancy watch you’ve been dreaming about ever since you saw it in the jewelry shop window. If you’re smart, your next step is to insure your valuable investment. That’s the business T.H. March is in. Less than six months after launching its social marketing strategy, the company is already seeing benefits—more followers, more likes, deeper social engagement, and a higher Klout score. “Insurance by nature is an impersonal business. Before adopting Oracle Modern Best Practice for social, we were sending out letters once a year to our customers that began with, ‘Dear valued client’. In this day and age, that’s inexcusable. We needed to change that dynamic.” 2 Neil McFarlane, Managing Director, T.H. March But more importantly, it now has a repeatable framework for actively engaging with customers and prospects that is synchronized with dynamic and timely marketing campaigns to help grow its business. This briefing focuses on social marketing and shares the lessons T.H. March have learned so far. The Journey to Social Here are 5 tips T.H. March has learned on its journey to social: Take a Step Back Content is King Establish Accountability Tailor to Each Channel Seize Opportunities Prior to adopting Oracle Modern Best Practice for social marketing, and despite having some great content at its finger tips, T.H. March had no capabilities for running personalized, modern marketing campaigns. It relied on archaic “snail mail” and outbound email marketing campaigns. Its social marketing activities were selfadmittedly infrequent, random, and lacking strategy. Fundamentally, T.H. March needed first to better understand its customers’ preferences in terms of communications channels: How do customers want to engage with us? When should we send them information and what information should we send? How do we make it easy and compelling for customers to come to us? How do we keep our customers coming back for more products? 3 T.H. March is a 128 year old company that doesn’t want to act its age. Recognizing that on the surface the insurance business can seem downright boring, the company envisioned social platforms as the perfect forum for making it much more interesting. It set the goal of becoming the dominant social player in the UK insurance broker sector. By first listening to learn, T.H. March’s plan will enhance and fine-tune its content needs and messaging to better engage with its customers. Increasing the company’s social following is seen as simply a means to an end. The primary goal is to grow overall revenue by attracting Millennials, reducing customer abandonment, and increasing up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. 1 Take a Step Back Define what you’re doing with social and what you want to accomplish. 4 You have the platforms—now what are you going to say? 2 Content Is King T.H. March has learned that an effective social strategy requires a commitment to sharing a steady and consistent stream of engaging content that its target audience wants to consume. This meant making a major decision to hire a digital content agency. The company chose an agency it has been working with for several years and the two organizations now have monthly meetings to brainstorm ideas and plan their editorial calendar. Ideas originate from both the T.H. March inhouse marketing team and agency staff. T.H. March is often voice of reason in keeping the agency—a creative and production agency—from getting ahead of itself. The team strives to insure consistency in branding, graphics, visuals, and themes to ultimately produce insightful and entertaining content that conveys the authenticity of T.H. March. Social activities generate traffic to the content that lives on their website or promotional landing pads. Social Engagement in Action T.H. March is currently engaging with its social media audience by holding a competition to find a new company mascot. Its #IFoundTommy Facebook application page was built in its social relationship management (SRM) system and automatically aggregates all photos submitted by registered contestants via Twitter and Facebook into a custom gallery. 5 Early on, T.H. March clearly defined roles and responsibilities, starting by identifying who was a good fit for each role—executive sponsor, advocates, media and content managers, champions, and administrators. These roles and rules of engagement extend to its digital agency partner that surrenders a very measured amount of control. The agency helps to create the content and loads it into the social marketing system where the content moves along an automated approval process. 3 Establish Accountability You need to protect your brand and avoid negative repercussions. All content ultimately goes to the T.H. March marketing team for final approval. In addition to assessing the content for branding and campaign alignment, the in-house team reviews graphics and images and considers whether there are any potential insurance industry compliance issues. T.H. March Digital Coordinator Brian Cowan, then marks each post—which vary by social channel—as approved, unapproved, or edited. 6 7 Content may be tailored to a specific social channel starting at the idea phase. T.H. March started by sharing content in each channel that helped build credibility with its B2B and B2C target audiences. Now that it has established a cadence of content, the company continually analyzes what is working and what’s not for each channel. When we started getting the content right on LinkedIn and Twitter—what the jewelers wanted to see—it increased the up-sell and cross-sell opportunities for them. They are now more likely to sell our services rather than recommending someone else.” 4 Tailor to Each Channel Brian Cowan, Digital Coordinator, T.H. March Don’t be afraid to try something new. Facebook offers the perfect forum for engaging with a Millennial audience to learn their preferences and offer products that appeal to their life phases. T.H. March actively monitors interactions, responses, and viewing metrics. If outcomes are positive, the company builds on it; if not, the company can simply change direction. Its goal is not to build a huge following but rather to increase its audience of current and potential customers. “ Facebook: Personal and Fun— It’s the natural platform for engaging with a younger audience most likely to be interested in purchasing insurance for an engagement ring. Along with company news and insurance trends, compelling imagery and phrasing encourage followers to follow links to “get a free quote in seconds” LinkedIn: A Credibility Builder— Where T.H. March demonstrates to its B2B clients that it intends to remain the dominant provider for its market. Company and industry news is shared along with advice and information to inform jeweler clients. Twitter: For B2B & B2C Followings— It’s the ideal channel for highlighting news and trends while also driving traffic to content that includes campaign landing pads, the company’s new blog, and YouTube videos. T.H. March maintains separate pages for consumers and jeweler clients. 8 T.H. March not only listens to what is being said about the company but also monitors competitor news, information, and sentiment. Equipped with this information, it may decide to quickly launch a demand generation campaign that capitalizes on a trend or breaking news. Campaigns are built within the marketing automation system and shared with the social marketing system. This integration enables T.H. March to: • Push a campaign landing page from marketing automation to social marketing • Schedule campaign-specific social media messages • Enable dynamic link tracking and campaign tags to view click-throughs on published social links within marketing automation • Send contacts in marketing automation to social marketing to target them through Facebook Custom Audiences 5 Seize Opportunities Monitor what is happening and capitalize on it. The company is now able to respond in a timely way to genuinely interested prospects with incentives such as free quotes, or comments such as, “We noticed that you were interested in…” Fine watches are making a comeback. This popularity has built a critical mass of opportunity that makes offering protection plans for wearable timepieces profitable again. T.H. March is capitalizing on such trends by running awareness and demand-generation campaigns to add new revenue sources. 9 Copyright © 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Just Getting Started T.H. March is still in the early phases of rolling out its SRM strategy. Already, the company has gained the ability to more quickly and easily provide accurate, relevant, and interesting content to its target audiences. Information captured through social engagement is used to monitor the digital personas of customers and potential customers. If someone engages with the content but doesn’t buy, their contact information is entered into a nurture campaign to keep them informed of future campaigns. Neil McFarlane, Managing Director, T.H. March Overall, demand-generation campaigns are easier to launch and more effective at driving revenue from both new and existing customers. “ 10 We now have analytics to provide the ROI on our social activities. We can go back to the board and show the value of what we’ve invested in.” Copyright © 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. 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Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. 5 Tips for Growing Your Business with Social November 2015 Author: Jim Lein Oracle Corporation, World Headquarters 500 Oracle Parkway Redwood Shores, CA 94065, USA Worldwide Inquiries Phone: +1.650.506.7000 Fax: +1.650.506.7200 C O N N E C T W I T H U S Enigen partner with its customers to assess, deliver and support transformational CRM and Customer Experience (CX) programmes. Enigen have supported T.H. March with its journey, implementing end-to-end Oracle solutions, leveraging business knowledge and innovative technology, through process improvement, efficiency, insight and adoption. www.enigen.co.uk | @EnigenCRM Oracle Social Showcase @Oraclesocial Oracle Social Oracle Social Oracle Modern Best Practice for Marketing \