Online Promotions

Publicado el 24/04/2013 por admin

Online promotions are an effective way for our company to achieve different and interesting marketing objectives. For example:

  • Increase brand awareness
  • Attract new followers to our social networks
  • Increase fan loyalty
  • Increase the “engagement” of our brand with our fans
  • Promote increased conversions and sales

In this post, we will look at the various considerations we should keep in mind to make our promotions a success.

Creating the promotion

There are basically two ways to create a promotion:

  • Hire a programmer/designer to create the promotion for us. This option has the advantage of being adaptable to match 100% of our needs. However, this option also has some major downsides:
  • Increased costs
  • Long implementation time
  • Unproven solutions, error-prone
  • Less features
  • It can’t be adapted to new requirements
  • It can’t be adapted to changes in the social network rules and regulations
  • Use of an external tool. It is true that this type of platform does not offer solutions for specific needs, but it does have the benefit of solving the problems outlined above. HiSocial offers a white-label solution that enables you, at the design-level, to fully tailor the “look & feel” of the promotions to be consistent with your online and corporate identity. This is achieved through personalized CSS access, where you can configure all aspects of the promotions graphics.

personalizacion_css

 

Setting targets and time frames

It is important to establish a timetable governing how we will implement and disseminate our promotion before launching it. Better yet, the ideal is to design an annual plan that can be rolled out over the following year and that includes: the types of promotions we are going to make, what form they are going to take and how they will be organized. Another post talks about creating a road map for a social media strategy. I refer you to this post, so that you can see how it can be applied specifically to online promotions. To summarize the main idea of that post: you need to set clear goals (you can see more about here)

promo4

 

The scope of the online promotion

We should be clear that, when we talk about online promotions, we should not restrict ourselves to social media promotions, since we can use the promotions directly on our own website. There is no doubt that the social networks are very important, but as I always say, our own website is equally important if not more so. In fact, the ideal solution would be cross-platform, and would distribute our promotion through various channels.

 

Types of online promotion

There are many types of promotion, but the most common are:

Competitions: A competition is a form of promotion characterized by the winner being chosen on “merit”. The following link will lay out some of the things to keep in mind when organizing a competition, how to create an online competition. Alternatively, we also have a guide to creating online contests with HiSocial.

Sweepstakes: In contrast to competitions, in a sweepstake the winner is chosen randomly. Here at HiSocial, we are currently working on the sweepstake module, which will be available shortly.

Coupons and offers: This type of promotion is particularly attractive as it can have a great impact on possible future sales. We must clearly distinguish between printable coupons (for “physical”shops) and electronic coupons (for e-commerce). At HiSocial, we offer specific solutions for each. To learn more about this topic I recommend you read this post: online coupons.

Digital downloads: Under this heading we include all those promotions that offer a gift to the user in digital format (white papers, pictures, wallpapers, songs, demos etc) These promotions, while often neglected, are very effective. We encourage you to read this instructive post: virtual gifts.

Legislation

There should be little need to stress the importance of this issue. Generally, every country establishes its own set of rules that we must follow. Obviously, it is impossible to study each piece of existing legislation in detail here, so we will limit ourselves to giving some general recommendations, and advise you to consult your lawyer about any specifics that may be applicable to you:

  • Be transparent: State exactly what you are offering and all the requirements needed to enter the promotion. For example, if you organize a contest or sweepstake, lay out in great detail the terms and conditions.
  • Identify yourself: Provide all the relevant data surrounding your company, so that users know exactly who is offering the promotion.
  • Personal information: If you collect any personal data during your promotion, you should be aware that there are many laws that lay out what standards need to be met. For example, explain what you will do with the information collected, so users can properly exercise their rights. This should be set out in a document detailing your companies online privacy policy.
  • Carry out to the letter everything promised in your promotion, otherwise the image of your company will be severely tarnished, and obviously, there could be legal consequences for noncompliance.

Social media rules and regulations

Along with the points made in the previous section, if your promotion is spread over a range of social networks, you must consider the different regulations for each of them in turn. In these links you can find information for some of the most popular networks:

https://twitter.com/tos
http://www.facebook.com/legal/terms
http://www.google.com/+/policy/pagesterm.html

It is outside the scope of this post to go over the specifics of each network.: We will instead discuss one common mistake on Facebook. Facebook clearly states that “Promotions on Facebook must be Administered Within Apps on Facebook.com, Either on a Canvas Page or a Page App”, which means that we can not make promotions directly on our Facebook page, but must instead use an external application. There are many companies around today that completely ignore this fact, and are in danger of being “banned” from the network.

Distribution and virality

A promotion that nobody can sees is useless Thats why we must strive to properly disseminate all of our online promotions. A good idea is to carry out some kind of advertising campaign to help spread the promotion. To compliment this, we must ensure that our promotion creates Virality, as this will greatly contribute to the dissemination. At HiSocial, we do a lot of work specifically on this issue, as we feel it is of special importance.

Here are two interesting links with respect to this:

How to get more likes on Facebook?

How to attract more Followers on Twitter?

 

Need more information?

If you want more information surrounding the things discussed in this post, I recommend you look at the following presentation

Now that you know the secrets of successful online promotions, why not get moving?  and start to…..

Create my own free promotion.

Publicado en contests, Coupons, Downloads, Promotions Online | Etiquetado | Deja un comentario

Virtual Gifts as part of an online marketing strategy

Publicado el 22/04/2013 por admin

Virtual gifts are a really useful tool – although an all too often neglected one – to strengthen your online marketing strategy.  In this post, we will analyze some their finer points and explain in detail how to use them as a way of promoting online. But to begin with, here is a brief definition:

What do we mean by virtual gift?

A virtual gift is anything that is made from digital material, and therefore downloadable, that you can use to reward visitors to your website or social pages, foster brand awareness and further strengthen your overall online marketing strategy.

When we talk here of digital material, we will not include those promotions that consist of printable coupons that can later be exchanged for “physical” products. This second type of promotion is also very usful, but falls outside the scope of this post. If you are interested in this type of promotion, you can find out more by following this link: Coupons and offers in social media.

Now we have the definition clear in our minds, let’s take a look at some of the most common types of virtual gift.

Types of virtual gift

Really, there are many possibilities, and each promoter can develop their own ideas in relation to their own potential audience.

  • Ebooks or white papers. When speaking about online gifts, many people forget that they are also valid for B2B businesses. Ebooks, market studies, etc are a type of promotion that regularly works well here on HiSocial. You can see an example by following this link: Effective social media marketing.

  • Images. Another possibility is to reward visitors with some kind of image. For example, screen savers, exlusive photo collections, different types of gif, jpg, png, etc.
  • Music. This type of promotion is obviously ideal for any kind of music group, but there are also many other possibilities, from advertising campaigns that let fans download the soundtrack to an advert, to podcasts containing interviews etc.

There exist lots of other possibilities as the digital format has such a wide variety of materials. Without wanting to dwell on it for too long, lets see a few more examples: promotional videos, software demos, song lyrics, guidebooks, pre-recorded TV or radio programs, and so on.

Now let’s see how to distribute our virtual gifts.

Distribution channels

Here are the most common:

  • The web page. While our main objective is to promote our social networks, we should never forget the importance of our own webpage.  Here we have a number of possibilities, from announcing it with a banner, to sectioning off an area of the main page, or even creating a separate download area. To do this, HiSocial offers you an online assistant to help create banners for your webpage more easily.

 

  • Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. If we are talking directly to the end consumers, Twitter and Facebook are generally the environments in which these types of promotions work best. However, if we are targeting professional groups, Linkedin and Twitter are a better alternative.
  • More possibilities. While the most common ways of distributing our promotions are outlined above, HiSocial also allows you to automatically create a landing page for use on any type of web site.

Another important point to keep in mind is how users will access the promotions we are offering.

Different ways to provide access to virtual gifts

To access a virtual gift, we can ask the user perform certain distinct actions (or combinations of actions), which act in our own best interest.

  • There is, of course, the option to offer a shortcut to the virtual gift without any preconditions whatsoever. While it’s true that this will easily facilitate the download, you may well be losing many hidden advantages, these will be presented later when we talk about the other forms of access.
  • Access via an online form. Here we ask the visitor to enter data that we will find useful in planning future campaigns.  We could ask, for example, just for an email (to carry out permission marketing), or for more extensive information (name and address for direct marketing campaigns), or limit ourselves to asking for a telephone number (for sales campaigns).
  • Fan only access. If our main aim is to increase our presence on Facebook, we could insist that anybody wishing to download the gift must first become a fan of our page. In this way we also succeed in rewarding our existing fans, and thereby increase their loyalty to our Facebook page.
  • Pay with a Tweet. This method is particularly viral, because by insisting on a Tweet, the promotion, along with the virtual gift, is widely distributed on Twitter.

Now, to bring this post to a close are two indispensible pieces of advice that will make your virtual gift a success.

Final advice

  • It is obvious that if nobody knows about your promotion, it will be far less successful. If you only have a few visitors on your website and a few fans and followers on your social networks, it is almost essential to compliment your promotion with an advertising campaign, either offline or even better, online.
  • Viral elements. Functions such as “publish on my wall”, “share on Twitter”, and such like, are a great way to distribute your virtual gift. However, if you are a HiSocial user, you needn’t worry about it. Our platform comes fully intergrated with all these viral optionsSmile.

Now that you know the secrets of successful virtual gifts, why not get moving?  And start to…..

Create my own virtual gift for free

Publicado en Downloads, Promotions Online | Etiquetado , | 1 comentario

Coupons and offers in social media. Keys to success.

Publicado el 28/02/2013 por Albert Mora

Numerous studies show that receiving coupons and discounts is one of the main reasons why consumers follow brands on social networks.

cupon

Source

It is logical therefore, that companies strive to use this strategy to attract new social followers, more so when you consider that this type of follower can directly generate new purchases of products and services. In other words, the ROI of this type of strategy can be significantly greater than for other types of social media strategies.

Companies basically have two ways to create coupons and discounts online:

- Through specialist portals (like Groupon)
- Creating their own online promotions

The first strategy has one great advantage: the increased coverage that our deals will receive. The site itself takes charge of this, and has all of the appropriate means at its disposal (web traffic, emails databases etc). Nevertheless, this type of strategy does have serious disadvantages, among which we can highlight:

- The discounts that these portals demand (Often in excess of 50%)
- The commission that the portal takes from any sales (this can also be in excess of 50%)
- The negative impact on traffic to our social networks
- We will not have a database of the participant’s details to carry out subsequent promotional activities.

Creating our own promotions circumvents these disadvantages and gives us total flexibility over our business strategy. But……it’s not all plain sailing and as I’m sure the reader will realize, it also has a major drawback, if the coupon is not properly distributed it is of no use to us at all.

Now let’s see some essential features to help our discount coupon or promotional offer be a success:

- The offer that we make. It’s logical that our potential market will respond better to a more attractive offer. Let’s look at some of the things to keep in mind.
If we are talking about discounts, the percentage of discount we offer, and on what product we offer it, will have a logical and intertwined effect. Bigger discounts on top products will receive a greater response than token discounts on marginal products. But the reductions do not have to be limited in solely monetary terms, instead there are many other possibilities such as

Free samples
2×1 offers
Easier financing
Extension to guarantees etc

- Distributing the offers. The second basic pillar around which the success of our promotional offers is built is their distribution.  An offer that doesn’t even have the minimum level of diffusion is of no use to us whatsoever. The possibilities to spread the promotions are infinite, we are going to briefly look at some of them.

  • Social Media. We should publish the offer over all of the social networks in which our company retains an active presence.
  • Our webpage. An obvious, but often forgotten, place to announce our promotions is our own webpage or blog, if we have one.
  • Newsletter. We have a database of people who have given their prior and express consent to receive information about our company; this can be very useful in distributing our promotions.
  • Publicity campaigns. If all of the above methods do not have sufficient force to promote our offers, it will be essential to carry out an advertising campaign. Online campaigns often have a better cost to benefit ratio and, specifically campaigns on Facebook and Google Adwords, can give us excellent results.

HiSocial is characterized by being multi-platform and allowing the distribution of deals through various distribution channels. We should take advantage of this characteristic to distribute our promotion as widely as possible.

- Virality, confidence and aesthetic elements. Finally we will look at some other complementary aspects that will help us achieve a greater diffusion of our coupon or offer.
Let’s start with virality. It is important that our promotion contains viral elements to help with its diffusion. Participants in our promotion should be able to easily share our coupon on all of the major social networks.

On an aesthetic level, the promoters should be sure that the images chosen, just like the text that accompanies them, are as attractive as possible. It’s worth taking the time to choose an image that will “seduce” our potential participants, and write a coherent and descriptive text. It is precisely this aspect that is key to transmitting confidence to the users, to adequately describing our company, to clearly specifying the details of the offer and to specifying our privacy policy and legal details of the promotion. This in turn will help to create confidence in the contest, and consequently, the number of participants in our promotions.

Having said all this, it is important to note that experience will also help us improve results and understand what kinds of deal work better. HiSocial lets you create an unlimited number of promotions, so we suggest you take advantage of this feature to improve your overall promotional activity.

Now that you know the secrets of making a successful offer, why not get moving?  and start to…..

 Make my own free promotion.

Publicado en Coupons, hisocial, Promotions Online | Etiquetado , | 1 comentario

Infographic – How to choose an online contest app

Publicado el 14/02/2013 por Albert Mora

Publicado en contests, hisocial, infographics, Social Media Apps | Etiquetado , | Deja un comentario

16 key points to choose an application for creating contests in social media

Publicado el 13/02/2013 por Albert Mora

There is no doubt that online contests are an effective way to increase our online audience and capture new clients. There are many different applications (apps) and platforms to help us to organize our contest. In this post we will see the characteristics and features we should look for in order to take the right decision, and ensure our contest is a successful one.

- Multiplatafom. There is no reason to limit a contest to just one of the social networks. The app should allow us to present our contest, not just on one platform, e.g. Facebook, but on a range of platforms such as Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ etc. To concentrate on just one social network carries with it a high risk, in that you are soley dependent on the  behavior a single platform.

- Don’t forget your website. Social networks are important, but your site is equally as important, if not more so!  We should make sure that our contest is visible and accessible directly from your page. It’s very risky to concentrate all our efforts on a third party website – even if it is called Facebook. An effective platform will allow us, if required, to diversify and distribute our promotional efforts properly.

- Virality. One of the key elements in determining the success of a contest are its viral properties. The application should allow the participants to share the contest over all the social networks, and thereby encourage more users to follow us. To do so, the participants in our contests should be encouraged, in a proper way, to carry out these viral actions.

- Legal compliance and the various rules that regulate the social networks. Obviously, the chosen app should allow us to comply fully with everything set out in current legislation. (for example, specifying our privacy policy, contest rules etc.).  Furthermore, it should adhere to all the legislation covering this type of promotional activity on the networks in which we will be running our contest.

- Different types of contest. We should not limit ourselves to running just one type of contest, and as such, the chosen platform should, as a bare minimum, allow us to run contests with photos, videos and texts. While these are the most common formats, in other more specific cases, it may be interesting to have access to less common contest formats (e.g. songs or other types of music)

- Ease of Use. The process to launch our contest should be quick and easy. The creation phase of the contest should not last more than ten minutes, and should be suitable for everyone, without the need of any prior programming skills.

- Accessibility via mobile platforms. Access to the Internet through this type of device is growing ever more common by the day, so it is advisable that the application will modify any content to be viewed on them correctly.

­- Multiplicity of Contest and distribution methods. There are applications that will charge for each contest, or other promotion, undertaken and often limit their display to just one Facebook page. This system is very inflexible and could considerably affect the final cost. A system that allows multiple promotions and distribution methods for the same price is undoubtedly a favorable and more economical option.

­- Choice of Language. If our publicity objective speaks of a greater range of languages, this characteristic is essential. If not, we automatically reduce its chances of greater diffusion and virality.

- Defining the target market. It is often in our interest to limit participation in a contest to a predetermined country or age group (inclusive of any legal constraints that may apply) The chosen application should allow us to do this.

- Anti-fraud measures. The contests will undoubtedly attract a rouge element with fraudulent intentions, who want to manipulate the results and capture the prizes; this is especially true when the winner is chosen by a voting system. For this reason, the application should offer mechanisms to avoid any such problems, for example, limiting the number of entries for each participant, requiring some form of registration or control in order to vote, limiting the number of votes that any one person may cast, etc.

- Completeness of any information offered. The ideal contest should provide structured, graphical and comprehensive details of the contest, including: a description of the contest, full details of our company, a list of participants etc. This will increase the transparency of our contest, and as a result increase participation. The application we choose should allow us to present this information in a clear and straight forward manner.

- Personalization. We should be able to adapt the look and feel of our contest to be consistent with our brand identity. An application that claims to do this should allow full access to the css file that controls all graphical and visual aspects of the contest.

- Exclusive ownership of all personal data obtained during the contest. We should ensure that we retain exclusive ownership over all data collected during our contest, to do so we should always consult any legal disclaimer offered by the owner. It is also important that we have easy access to the data, for example, being able to download it in an xml file or similar.

- Statistics. We should have full access to all the data relevant to our contest: number of visits, number of and geographical location of the participants, impact on social networks etc. It’s best if the application gets this data from a third party specializing in this area (e.g. Google Analytics). This will allow for greater completeness, and of course reliability, of any data collected.

- Preview. When we are configuring the contest it is important that the application allows us to see how it will look before publication. This will allow us to correct any mistakes and carry out any testing in order to be sure that the contest offered to the public will look exactly how we want.

In a later post we will explain in more detail how HiSocial is designed to meet each of these requirements, and allow you to run truly successful contests. For now, we invite you to try it for yourself free of charge by following the link below:

Publicado en Social Media Apps | Etiquetado | 1 comentario