How user actions in social media will change the loyalty marketing landscape
Yesterday I saw the following post on Twitter from @lavidalibre:
Just won a $25 BART card from @SFBART for checking in on @foursquare!
While the idea of idea of rewarding loyalty has always been with us, the number of places where people are now able to publicly profess their loyalty to a brand or location is exploding. And this does not have to take the form of someone gushing about a particular restaurant or pair of jeans via Facebook or Twitter or their blog, but instead can be as subtle as someone following a brand on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook or checking in at a store via foursquare. What to many seems like a bunch of unrelated, inane actions are likely going to become the data backbone behind some of the most influential digital media services of the next decade, in my opinion.
In my post yesterday, I wrote about how I thought this data could be aggregated and leveraged to help individuals discover new and interesting places/locations (click here if you missed it www.ow.ly/SH5k). Today, my post is focused on how all of this data might be used by marketers to more efficiently reach their most loyal customers and the potential of this data to create an entirely new digital ad network.
Let’s take a look at the Gap to see how this might work. It has 503k fans on Facebook, 18k followers on Twitter and approximately 100 people checking in via fousquare at its stores here in NYC. It also has thousands of people adding Gap products to lists on social shopping sites such Kaboodle. I think it is a pretty safe bet that all of these people are big proponents of the brand. That said, the Gap rewards these loyal customers mainly through mass blasts on Twitter and Facebook that come across very impersonally and don’t feel all that different from other couponing programs.
With the advent of social media and the explosion in the number of user generated loyalty actions (e.g. checking in, becoming a fan, adding products, etc.), I believe that tying the marketing message to the action holds significant promise. Not only can it create a scenario where businesses’ most loyal customers feel as though they are being treated special, but also it can allow these companies to reach even more people at the point of purchase. The foursquare example that I kicked off this post with is a great example of this new type of loyalty marketing.
As we head into this next decade, I believe that this type of event-based, loyalty driven advertising will become main stream. So rewarding someone for checking in on foursquare or following you on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook or adding a product to a social shopping site will become more prevalent. However, with the fragmentation and number of platforms where users are taking actions, I expect it to require an ad network to consolidate the market in order for this type of model to really take off. Not only would this provide much needed scale for marketers, but also there is tremendous value in tying all of the actions together. So instead of rewarding someone for simply checking in on foursquare or following you on Twitter, how about giving an even more special offer to one of your Twitter followers who just checked in via foursquare? Or how about enticing someone who added a product of yours to a social shopping site to become your fan on Facebook?
Leveraging the aggregate data and scale is where this type of marketing gets really exciting and the challenges are significant enough that I believe a single ad network or technology provider will eventually come to dominate the space.
