Avaans Media has been incorporating social media and PR since 2008. We’re a digitally forward PR firm who incorporates the latest social media and digital trends and strategies.

Tag Archive for: Social Media

Travel Loyalty in the Social Media

, , , ,

Social Media Is Your Partner in Travel Branding

It’s no secret that today more than ever, digital branding in travel and tourism matters.

According to Google, only 9% of travelers know the brand they want to book with when they start their digital travel search.  This is both an opportunity and a challenge for hotels, airlines and even destinations.

Does this mean consumers have no loyalty? Well, yes and no. It’s well documented that increasingly, people want experiences over things and travelers today lead that trend. Today’s travelers need one of at least two things: a unique experience (for which they will usually pay more) and on-demand information about pricing. It’s more important than ever that your brand is front and center during all phases of research. It also means that your brand needs to reinforce the experience using digital.

Social Media Throughout The Customer Travel Experience

Social media is useful in all phases, but especially the exploratory phase. The exploratory phase is where initial budgets expand as experiences cement themselves. For example, a traveler may be thinking of going to Hawaii, and every airline flies there. But what airlines make the journey even more special? What location has the most unusual once-in-a-lifetime experiences? And how are real people experiencing those experiences? Integrating the day-to-day experience of the visitor on social media helps the travel shopper see themselves in the experience.  Moreover, today’s traveler wants to see a blend of “glossy” travel pictures combined with unfiltered real life.

But it’s more than that. Once the experience is over, what is your brand doing to reinforce their experience? Do you have a program in place which allows them to easily share their experience via social media? Do YOU share their experience back to them? That’s the cementing of brand loyalty and word of mouth almost all travel brands miss. How are you engaging your customers using digital while they are on-site? What can you do to turn complaints into delightful experiences? How can you show you’re engaged with their entire experience?

The other reason this is important is that the mobile experience is front and center. eMarketer predicted that in 2017, mobile bookings would surpass 40% of digital travel sales. Mobile is social and social is mobile. According to Expedia, 27% of Millennials have posted a potential trip on social media to canvas opinions before booking! Obviously, your website needs to be mobile-friendly, but how on-par is your social branding and advertising?

Does it provide a direct experience for booking?

Are you using chatbots on social to improve customer service?

How can you radically improve the investigation and booking phases using digital?

Convenience is exceptionally important to today’s traveler, who have embraced single-site travel booking experiences. BUT, today’s traveler is ALSO looking for boutique experiences, something particularly unique and for that, it’s almost better if it isn’t on a single-site because it gives the air of uniqueness. So balancing the booking trends with experience demand is important, and social media leads in this regard, because you have the change to meet the consumer where they are.

Millennials Don’t “Own” Social Media Travel

These technologies, like chatbots and mobile-friendly booking, are no longer for just the largest brands. They accessible and important for today’s traveler of all ages. It’s easy to think only “millennial” travelers are using these tools, but it’s simply not true. Consider that GenX’ers are in their mid-to-late forties already and their perfectly comfortable on Instagram and Facebook as well. According to Nielsen, Adults 35 to 49 were found to spend an average of 6 hours 58 minutes a week on social media networks, compared with 6 hours 19 minutes for the younger group.

If you’re looking to engage your potential and current audience in social media and digital branding for travelers, please contact us. We have ideas and most importantly the resources, to step up your digital travel branding in every phase of the experience.

by

The Secret To Captivating Content Strategy

, , , , , , , ,

Captivation Motivations can significantly change your content strategy.


This is the second installment of a series on the seven Captivation Motivations. This installment is all about your owned media and creating a content strategy that meets your objectives while also thrilling and delighting your audience.

 

Did you know that we’re all ruled by a super-powerful hormone? It’s true.
This hormone dominates decision-making, especially split-second choices like the ones digital users are making every day.
Decisions like “click,” “like,” “retweet,” and more importantly, “buy” and “subscribe” are all significantly affected by this hormone.
Savvy marketing strategists have been triggering this hormone for years, some knowingly, some stumbling upon it.

You’ve undoubtedly heard of this hormone.
You’ve heard about in the context of drugs, sex, and even food.
But what does this hormone do for marketers?
I’ll get to that in a minute.

First, a little more about this hormone: dopamine.
See? I told you you’ve heard of it.
Dopamine is best known as the “pleasure hormone.”
It’s the hormone that creates the surge of euphoria that we feel after a particularly satisfying (insert pleasure here).
But, the surge of satisfaction is not actually the most powerful tool in a communicator’s arsenal.

The most powerful tool for the content communicator is anticipation.

And it turns out that dopamine is actually more aptly described as the “wanting and seeking” hormone.
Ah. Now you get it right?
It turns out that the “wanting and seeking” trigger is MORE powerful than the “satisfaction.”
This means we’re hard-wired to keep looking, keep seeking until we satisfy our wanting and seeking.
And then we’re hard-wired to do it all again.

Think for just a moment about the advantage to your content and overall marketing strategy if you can trigger this motivation.
Images can trigger our wanting and seeking. Ever seen a really great close-up shot of your favorite food and searched for how to have it delivered at lunch that.very.day?
Images of just about anything we want can trigger our “wanting and seeking” hormone.
This means you really need to think about the images you’re using in marketing and advertising, because images are incredibly key to the top of the funnel.
While we see food and sex all the time in marketing, it might be that those images aren’t appropriate for your brand.
Good news for you.
Because there’s more.

 

Guess what else fuels our anticipation?

Just guess.
This is super important because not all businesses and campaigns are suitable for triggering food, sex and drug urges.
Curiosity.
The brain experiences dopamine rushes when we’re curious for more information.
Think about the last Google search you did. Ever been sucked down the rabbit hole of Google and found yourself coming out of the other side 45 minutes later?
That’s your insatiable, hormone-driven seeking and wanting trigger.
That’s your brain on the anticipation train.

Our quest for information is basically never-ending.
We’re hard-wired that way, and from an evolutionary standpoint, this is a splendid thing.
Now WHAT information triggers this is the key.
This is where we circle back around to audience identification and personalization.
We’re inundated with information, so we have to be very, very clear on our audience so we understand WHAT kind of information or curiosity triggers our target audience.
Motivational triggers work on all people, but what triggers the motivation is where your marketing research and strategy comes in.

Another thing that triggers our wanting and seeking hormone is unexpected prompts that are auditory or visual.
You know what does this exceptionally well?
Your phone. It beeps, or vibrates or a message pops up and you almost ALWAYS stop what you are doing to look at it don’t you?
If you don’t, it takes an active and conscious effort on your part.
This is why my most hated and dreaded marketing tactic, pop-up messaging is so powerful.
I personally drop right out of a page when I get a pop-up because I feel like it’s insensitive to the reader, but the truth is, it works on the vast majority of people because the surprise triggers the wanting and seeking.
Novelty and unpredictability also trigger our seeking behavior.
This is why “New and Improved” works.

The Counter Intuitive Path

You’ve probably heard over and over again to simplify. The message is too long. The funnel is to long.
Overall, this is good advice.
HOWEVER, once you really understand the “seeking and wanting” hormone, your path can actually be quite long, so long as it keeps triggering curiosity and gives information in small bits and pieces, if it gives anything until it offers the solution.
Ever seen an ugly landing page that was all text that you ended up reading despite yourself?
Really awesome copy writers understand how to use this tactic in writing to move you through the process.
Interestingly enough, the more time you spend on something, the more committed you are.
So long copy, long funnels, they have a purpose and in the right situation, the right circumstance, the right audience, they work.

In A Nutshell:

Here it is in a nutshell, for fast and motivational results: trigger the wanting and seeking hormone.
Make your audience curious.
Lead them down a path that satisfies in bits and pieces.
Experiment with what triggers curiosity in your audience, experiment with the strength of their curiosity with funnel length.
Triggering the “wanting and seeking” hormone is the very premise behind free information in content marketing and the internet in general.

The Pursuit of Pleasure Captivation Motivation is tied closely to how we internalize rewards as well. The next post in this series will be all about rewards, the kinds used in promotions, so stay tuned.

 

About the Captivation Motivations:

The Captivation Motivations are all built around what I call our “other 90%” of our brain. The part of our brain that is the oldest and most developed part of our brain.
I didn’t make up the Captivation Motivations, I’ve been studying them and their effects since 2009.  I’ve been testing them in my strategies and tactics, reading and writing about them.
Simply put, these motivations are not some flash-in-the-pan-do-what’s-trendy-now strategy, these are strategies which trigger reactions from the oldest part of our brain.  Over the last few years, more and more has been understood about these motivations. But one thing is clear: despite the fact that these motivations developed in the earliest days of humanity’s survival of the fittest experiences, these motivations are very much alive and well today. What triggers them in the modern world is just different than what triggered them in our earliest evolutionary days.

 

PS: If you’re really interested in this topic, I suggest you read some of the academic works by Kent Berridge; he’s done some really amazing research on the topic.

by

What IS Digital Marketing Strategy?

, , ,

Why do you need a digital strategy and what is it?

Since digital and social media are so accessible, it’s easy to think the results are just as accessible.
But the truth is, simply BEING on social media isn’t a strategy any more (if it ever was enough).
The digital world has brought us many, many advances, but it’s also brought a much more distracted and diluted market place.

The average person is exposed to over 5,000 messages a day.

Perhaps even more, especially if they are heavy social media users.
We used to tell brands that every person needed exposure to a message 7 times before it sunk in.
With today’s clutter and fast-paced media world, I put that number at closer to 12 today.

But having a digital marketing strategy saves you time and money and can even possibly reduce the number of exposures required.

A lot of people are reluctant to spend the time on a digital strategy thinking that the digital world is so fast moving that the minute you settle on a strategy, things will change.
Actually, it’s the opposite, the more thought out your marketing strategy, the more you’ll be able to roll with the punches.
Strategy allows you to be more fluid, not less.
And even if you DO change your strategy, at least you’ll do so with intent.

So what IS a digital strategy?
A good digital marketing strategy answers ALL you’re “Why’s”
If you can’t defend a piece of content, a post or an answer of how that benefits your company and it’s customers, then you don’t have a strategy.

A good digital strategy has three components:

Outstanding audience identification.

Start with the customer. Always.
Your digital audience may be a sub-segment of your larger audience or it may be your entire audience. It doesn’t matter, really.
What’s most important is that your extremely clear on your audience’s pain points, interests and emotional triggers.
If you’re clear on who you’re speaking to, everything in your digital strategy will improve.
This will require some research, because no matter what you THINK you know about you’re customers, if you do some research on them, you’ll learn something about what resonates, what’s memorable and what matters to them.
The customer research will help you stay on message and consistent regardless of platform choices. You’ll know you’re on the right track because you have the research to back it up.

Product and Service Voice Clarity

How will you communicate with your community in the digital space?
Sometimes, the tone of voice in digital is different from the tone of voice in other mediums.
In fact, most of the time it is.
Once you know your audience, you can start to blend in their preferences with how they like to be communicated WITH along side the brand consistency you’re trying to accomplish. Voice consistency takes time and intention to develop and implement, but once you do it, you’ll be well on your way to executing a great digital strategy.

Digital Distinguishers

Chances are, you have some competition in the digital world.
Take a careful look at your competitors. What’s missing?
What can you do better than anyone else?
This takes brutal honesty because you’ve got to be incredibly clear on who you are, who you want to be and how that meshes with how your community sees you and what you’re willing to do or not do.
The digital user is quick to point out the inauthentic, so be honest with yourself here, so you can be honest with your customers.
Your digital distinguishers should include your product and service differentiation while integrating with what makes your customers unique.
This is the place where it all comes together.

Once you’ve put all these pieces in place, a real digital marketing strategy can emerge.
Now you can start to identify content types, frequency, messaging, and platforms that support your strategy.

With the inundation of messages today, the ONLY way to be in the digital space is to do so with a strategy, otherwise, you’re actually doing damage to your brand and you’re seriously missing out on opportunity, relationships, and dollars.

by

Why You Love to Hate The Kardashians – Social Media Strategy Gone Awry

[rev_slider Personalities-Blog]

 

Are you done yet?
If you’re like most of the media and most of America you’ve had it with the Kardashians.
We’ve moved past not caring and into outrage.

But how did this happen?
We can look to the Kardashian social media strategy for part of the story.
How did the Kardashians go from being little known D-listers with Instagram and Twitter accounts to being the most hated family in America?
I mean, it started off innocent enough, a group of spoiled beautiful girls with a notorious last name, living the day-to-day drama of having too much of everything.
It’s the kind of thing America watches, sometimes to feel morally superior, sometimes with an aspirational sigh.
And the girls were social media mavens.
They WORKED Instagram.
They LIVED on Twitter.
Snippets of their daily lives seeped into our consciousness one tweet and pic at a time.

But the Kardashians crossed several lines, specifically Kim Kardashian, who has turned pop-culture fascination into outrage and disgust.
Here’s where they went wrong:

The Line Between Transparency and Pathology

In the beginning, Instagram and Twitter followers loved how the girls lived their lives shamelessly out loud.
Their family feuds and heartaches on display for all to see.
We loved that curvy Kim and Khloe owned their curves proudly.
We even endured the occasional well-placed stunt by them and their family members.
The personalities turned into personas.
We like personas it allows us to put people in neat little categorical boxes.
It gives us context.
Personas aren’t terrible. Actually, from a branding perspective, they can be quite fantastic.
So even though their celebrity sky rocketed, their personas kept them “real.”
We DID like to see them at some exotic beach, we did like seeing their pretty selfies…until the selfies became over-orchestrated photo shoots.
But the Kardashians forgot something: they were interesting when we could relate to them, or at least identify on an aspiration level.

And this is where they REALLY went wrong:

the Kardashians never missed a chance to put distance between themselves and their followers, in an effort to show how special they really are.
We went from relating to them as they journeyed through life to feeling more and more like they were nothing like us.
Most of America would never marry a celebrity for the media bump, and it isn’t even something most of America aspires to.
Most of America doesn’t make the extreme personal journey of their family members about them.
And now there’s today’s pregnant photo of Kim.

We’re now at the point where the transparency has turned into pathological and pathetic.
With this photo, Kim has managed to make the beautiful, sad.

From Mysterious to Saturated

A well placed nude photo or leaked video (eh, em, Kim) can actually be GOOD for a celeb.
Really good.
But when you start to see nude (or nearly nude) photos of a celeb several times a year, it’s no longer exciting, titillating or even interesting.
Three times this year already we’ve seen Kim nude.
Here: Feb 2015
Here: May 2015
and…
Here: July 2015

I mean, is there no end in sight?
Now, not only are you pathetic, you’re worse: you’re common.
You’re the OPPOSITE of special.
You’re now just another naked person – just like the one we see in the mirror everyday.
Nothing special about pathetic and naked. Nothing aspirational about that. At. All.
Even nude models and porn stars know better than to show up naked on Instagram everyday.
Why?
Because mystery is a good thing.
Leave a little bit on the table.
Let ’em wonder just.a.little.bit.

It’s not just the whole naked thing.
We started to get the sense that the Kardashians never said no to anything that might make them money.
From fashion brands to tell-all interviews.
From appearances to marriages.
If you had dollars, the Kardashians would be there to hoover it up.

Standing For…..Shallow and Surface?

And through all this, America begins to wonder, “What DO the Kardashians stand for?”
I mean, besides makeup, hair extensions and designer brands and boyfriends?
We’re left wondering if they are really as shallow as all that.
Do they lend their voices to causes that might make them more human?
Do they use their celebrity to advance a passion that might make the world a better place?
What little they apparently DO do for charity seems opportunistic and self aggrandizing.
Even Donald Trump, who Kim had to one-up with her naked photo today, has a cause.
You might not agree with Donald Trump, but at least he stands for something besides money and wrap-arounds.
We can’t defend the Kardashians anymore because we can’t even justify their celebrity anymore.

And so begins the downward slide of some of the earliest and most prolific social media celebrities.
We should thank the Kardashians for their lessons in personal branding, except they’d probably charge us for it.

 

by

Case Study and Lessons Learned: Increasing Foot Traffic for Retail Using Social Media and Event Marketing

, , , , ,

Case Study #4: Neighborhood Shopping Center

Background:

This client came to me with a desire to raise awareness of their shopping center and the variety of stores and shops within the shopping center.  The shopping center itself is in a very urban area, but provides services and shopping to a family-oriented clientele.

Listen:

They had previously done an influencer campaign which produced a short burst, but didn’t create anything sustainable and they couldn’t figure out why.

Think:


After hearing about their previous experience, Akamai determined the influencer campaign fell flat because the influencers weren’t neighborhood influencers. These influencers had their own set of chops as foodies and heavy social media users, but these influencers weren’t influencers to the target market either in terms of demographics, motivations or geography. We recognized that the likely shopper to this center had a distinct ethnic and demographic profile.

We actually recommended that the shopping center reduce the number of social media profiles in order to focus on the platform that was most likely to reach their audience.

We also wanted to start building an email list for the shopping center so it could continue to reward and connect with their customers outside of social media. We used promotions on Facebook to build this list.

Do:

We kicked off the campaign with a community, family-focused event which included prizes and give-aways for social media participants.

Akamai Marketing developed a promotional Facebook campaign and contest that created curiosity and conversation among it’s target market while highlighting the variety of stores and shops in the shopping center.  All content was custom developed to resonate with the target audience from a motivational and interest perspective.

The nature of the campaign enabled it to stay fresh for the entire 6 months without duplication.

We then advertised these posts to our highly targeted audience using a small but effective Facebook advertising budget.

Results:

Increased Shopping Center Traffic: 178%
Increased Awareness: 3,800%
Increased Unadvertised Impressions: 87%
Increased Overall Impressions: 644%
Email Registrations: >200 in 6 weeks

Lessons Learned: 

We learned to be highly targeted and clear on audience demographics for each post. We also learned that the stores would not provide content, so we shared what we could and supported the stores by offering to create content for them.

For our target audience, the overly slick content didn’t do as well, so we stayed with a more homey, less “advertising” feel to our content and messaging.

With a newly engaged social media community, we tested the audience with a selfie contest over a heavy shopping weekend. This contest was not successful and we attribute that to the audience, it’s comfort with sharing and the interface hurdles inherent in the sharing of the selfies.

Every shopping center is designed around an ideal customer.  It’s important to embrace that ideal customer’s natural tendencies, motivations and inclinations. Taking risks in social media should be balanced with campaigns that the user will naturally be attracted to.

by