Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Gift Cards go Social to Market Premium Food

If gift cards are part of your premium food marketing arsenal, there is a great new tool that will allow you to bring them into the social media world.

The National Retail Federation estimates that U.S. consumers spent more than $20 billion on gift cards during the 2009 holiday season. By making your premium food gift cards available for purchase where consumers spend an increasingly large amount of their time – on social media sites and their cell phones – you will help boost your marketing potential and make your brand more accessible.

friendgiftr1

Friendgiftr provides consumers the ability to purchase and send gift cards from a variety of merchants directly from the Web site, from social media sites such as Facebook or, coming soon, from a smart phone.

 

“Simply put, Friendgiftr lets you shop pretty much anywhere through the world’s first ever virtual network of linked commercial applications.”

 

Share

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Premium Food Marketers: Create an eNewsletter from your Facebook Fan Page

E-newsletters are great tools for keeping your premium food customers and prospects updated.  They can be highly informative and helpful, but they can be a huge time commitment.  Here are a few tips on making them more effective, and a little less work for you.

 

Top Two E-Newsletter Implementation Barriers:

·         Keeping your list up to date

·         Creating a sizable “opt-in” list

 

NutshellMail is a new Facebook app that provides an innovative Web-based service that lets users send and receive your messages from social networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Twitter, in your e-mail inbox.

 

Because your newsletter list is made up of fans of your Facebook fan page, it’s more likely they will be interested in receiving news from your premium food company.

 

The application is fairly simple; NutshellMail collects recent activity from your page, organizes it into an e-mail and delivers it to each subscriber on Facebook as per their own delivery preferences.

http://bit.ly/6yHJVy

 

nutshellmail

 

Suggestions to Enhance your Newsletter Content:

  • This is another reason to keep your Facebook fan page up to date- the newsletter will be automatically generated based on your recent social media activity
  • Keep postings diverse and don’t constantly promote your products – customers get tired of being sold to constantly
  • Post relevant articles to your industry and generate a conversation with your fans – they are able to comment on any content in your newsletter.

 

Jason Falls of Social Media Explorer notes the importance of good content in e-mail marketing. Companies today are focusing more on relevant content aimed at consumers who opt-in to the messaging. It’s no longer an e-mail “blast.” It’s a gift-wrapped package of goodness the receiver wanted in the first place.

Share

Friday, January 22, 2010

You’ve Got Mail – Tips for Successful Premium Food E-mail Marketing

E-mail marketing is an affordable and useful tool for premium food marketers, but like most successful marketing – there needs to be a focus on the customer.

 

Just like every step of the marketing process, it is important to plan and summarize how e-mail marketing will further your overall strategic goals.

 

Here’s what top marketers are saying about E-mail Marketing Campaigns:

  • Customers should be seen and heard – Michelle Kohanzo, director of marketing, Land of Nod
  • Ask and ye shall receive – Craig Calder, VP of marketing, Travelzoo
  • Customize it – David Almoslino, senior director of marketing, Trimble Navigation Ltd.
  • Social and e-mail are so very complementary – Gary Spangler, e-marketing manager, DuPont.

 DMNews http://bit.ly/5rtgXu

 

Some suggestions on how to incorporate E-mail marketing into your campaigns:

1.      Customize your messages to specific customer preferences by creating multiple customer lists based on past purchases.

2.      Timing is important – more consumers have smartphones and can receive e-mails at all hours. Try to catch your customers when they could be making purchase decisions to close the loop.

3.      Always link back to social media — use e-mail as a tool to promote your social media campaigns.

http://bit.ly/8xt TEk

 

email

 

Social media activities are becoming more commonplace in most everyone’s overall marketing channel strategy. The growth of links in e-mail marketing campaigns directing customers to the brand’s Twitter or Facebook page is staggering. http://bit.ly/8dtJT1

 

If you employ a social media campaign, don’t forget the vast opportunities to promote it — e-mail should be at the top of your checklist.

 

* Social media sites have gained in link percentage since first quarter of 2007:

http://bit.ly/8dtJT1

 

Above all, listen to your customers and take note of other premium food marketers past successes and failures to hone your e-mail marketing campaign.

Share

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Wisconsin Companies Embrace Facebook and Twitter

As more of our clients embrace social media, we wondered what the general trend was among Wisconsin-based companies. In order to find out, we developed an online survey and sent it to marketing executives across the state. A cross-section of industries responded: associations, healthcare, manufacturing, financial, food companies, legal, sports, attractions and non-profits.
What did we find? Among Wisconsin companies, 80% currently use social media in their marketing communications strategies. Social networking is the fastest-growing area and blogs are on the rise. Facebook, once a niche sharing site for college kids nationwide, and Twitter, a more recently accepted hyper-focused communications tool, ranked as the most popular platforms for Wisconsin companies to communicate their products and services.
Most respondents agreed that social media is an essential tactic deserving a position within the overall marketing mix. Budget projections for 2010 reflect that point with an average 2% increase over 2009.
As a complement to traditional marketing strategies, companies are using social media to:
• Build brand awareness
• Engage target audiences
• Build brand loyalty
• Gain valuable customer feedback
• Attract prospects
• Drive sales
But there are barriers to social media use as well. Social media is a tool that should be refined and refocused based on desired outcome. Survey participants indicated that they stopped using social media because:
• It demanded too much staff time and resources
• Difficult to demonstrate ROI
• Lack of audience traffic
• Regulatory issues within industry
But for those who see the benefit of social media activities, there are many ways to promote them. Interestingly, organic or grass roots marketing strategies rank ahead of advertising when it comes to increasing target audience awareness. The prioritized list includes: corporate Web sites (76%), public relations (73%), updates to the specific social media accounts (66%), corporate e-mail signatures (47%), advertising (39%), comments on other blogs (37%).

Social Networking is Fastest-Growing Area
As social networking for brands becomes an acceptable and essential marketing tactic, 79% of Wisconsin companies entered the arena within the last year. Which social media trail behind Facebook and Twitter in terms of overall use? Survey participants listed YouTube, monitoring and publishing blogs, LinkedIn, MySpace and Wikis.
Facebook is the clear leader in effectively reaching marketing goals according to the 46% of respondents. But it’s interesting to see where marketing resources are allocated and how each social media platform performs against goals.
Social Network How Many Use It Delivers on Goals
Facebook 81% 46%
Twitter 81% 14%
YouTube 61% 11%
LinkedIn 58% 4%
Flickr 26% N/A
MySpace 13% 4%

Even though the jury may be out on the true measure of Facebook’s marketing influence, companies are taking advantage of the most measurable elements the technology offers. The most popular being Facebook fan pages.

Twitter, on the other hand, has more specific uses:
• Product/service announcements and news
• Building brand awareness
• Media relations
• Coupons & offers
• Customer support
The Blogosphere is Expanding
Seems like everyone these days has a blog, and for good reason – they are easy to update and monitor traffic and reader comments. Blogs from Wisconsin-based companies are on the rise. Whereas 38% of marketers established a blog two or more years ago, 62% were launched within the last year.
More than 60% of companies are following industry advice advocating that readers of blogs be allowed to post comments. One company indicated it received up to 200 reader comments each month. Therefore, monitoring blog traffic is a high priority. It appears that blogs will continue to be supported, as 57% are successful in delivering on the goal to “enable engagement with our target audience.”
Idea Sharing and Information
The core of social media is information dissemination. The marketing challenge lies in how a company chooses to package and integrate its complete marketing package to its target audiences.
Whether you embrace or vilify social networking or blogging, learning how each of the technologies touches your customers is critical to marketing success. If it takes seven points of impact for a person to absorb a message, one of those seven should include social marketing.
Stephan & Brady is an integrated marketing communications firm with B2B and B2C clients based in Madison.

 http://www.stephanbrady.com_web
http://www.stephanbrady.com/food4thought| www.stephanbrady.com/bandworth _blogs
http://www.twitter.com/food4thought|  _twitter

-Kristina

Share