Be a Leader in Social Media : A masterclass for #SMW
September 19, 2016
Leading in Social Media at Social Media Week London 2016
We were thrilled to host the ‘Be a Leader in Social Media’ masterclass as part of Social Media Week’s global event series on 16 September, at our offices in London.
This is the 3rd year we worked with Social Media Week London. Our event sold out quickly (!) and we welcomed senior marketers from a wide range of sectors and companies, including Virgin, Young’s Pub, Ella’s Kitchen & University of West London to our event.
This year we explored key themes important to social media marketers:
- Major trends in consumer engagement and their impact on social media marketing
- Tips for increasing ROI of social media campaigns such as tapping into the emotions and interests of your target market to improve targeting effectiveness
- Proving social media ROI to senior decision makers with our recommended attribution model
We were delighted to welcome Josh McBain (Head of Innovation, Future Foundation) who shared some key insights from DMA research report ‘The Future of Customer Engagement’.
Joel Davis, agency:2’s co-director, spoke next about applying the trends to make key decisions by:
- Connecting with consumers’ emotional side
- Hyper targeting though matrix segmentation
- Understanding audience motivations and drivers to purchase
- Engaging with the audience’s wider interests to spark a connection
- Reporting KPIs that matter most to the board
Our audience was very perceptive and asked many questions, which allowed for the sharing of many practical learning points.
We are already looking forward to next year. If you want to lean more about the discussion on the day, follow the conversation on Twitter using #SMWLeadSocial
A Social Ad Technology Case Study – Top Toy Shop Retailer
April 19, 2016
View the video below to see how our social ad technology achieved £10 Revenue on every £1 spent on Facebook Advertising, through the following advanced targeting:
- Reached a larger, more active audience
- Included advanced audience interests
- Utilised trending content
- Implemented demographic social data into the campaign
If you’d like to speak to one of our social media specialists today, why not get in touch on 0203 567 1380.
#TheDollEvolves
February 25, 2016
Mattel | Barbie
In January 2016, Mattel revealed the evolution of their iconic doll Barbie with the announcement of three new body types – tall, curvy and petite. The response has been exceptional, with social media leading the conversation.
Having worked with Mattel for over a year establishing their social media presence on Facebook across seven European countries, agency:2 was responsible for activating the social campaign for the launch of the new range, providing responsive and always-on social advertising, community management and sentiment reporting.
To elevate the campaign, agency:2 promoted content on Facebook across relevant markets, using their proprietary Social Insight Engine ad technology to hyper-target specific audiences and extend reach.
Joel Davis, Director of agency:2 says ”agency:2 prides itself on pushing boundaries and leading the way in social media. My team and I are proud to be part of this momentous moment for the Barbie brand, supporting the next innovative step in the brand’s evolution.”
Top 5 Tips for Enhanced Social Ad Targeting
February 17, 2016
At agency:2, we believe that implementing current methods of social ad targeting is no longer enough; campaigns must now be elevated through data technology to be precise and optimised for efficacy.
Enhanced social ad targeting uses a segmented collection of enriched, real-time social data to help you reach larger, more relevant, more precise audiences, who are more likely to engage.
Hyper-Targeting through Audience Insights
The most effective way of hyper-targeting through social advertising is becoming increasingly dependent upon using Audience Insights to:
- Connect with a fan’s emotional side
- Understand an audience’s motivations and drives toward purchasing
- Engage with the audience’s wider interests to spark a connection
Top 5 Tips for Enhanced Social Ad Targeting:
- Understand your brand’s customer habits, beliefs and personal buying preferences – it is no longer sufficient to have people ‘Like’ your brand.
- Be aware of who to proactively exclude to keep negative sentiment to a minimum – this will elevate your campaign even further.
- Anticipate what’s next in a technology-driven market – keep up with an unparalleled rate of innovation and growth
- Monitor the cost per engagement in real time – don’t focus exclusively on ROI
- Integrate data-driven, quantifiable components of user journeys to provide more definable, actionable insights – this will significantly reduce the cost per action throughout your campaign.
At agency:2 we use our Social Insight Engine to combine these tricks of the trade to hyper-target a defined audience, which allows our clients to grow their reach significantly, reduce their cost per action and stand out from the competition.
Top 10 technology companies present in NYC
November 18, 2015
Last week, the top 10 technology companies showcased their innovations at a high profile NYC event.
agency:2 was excited to be short-listed by an expert panel as a top 10 London Tech Company. We were delighted to share the event alongside the following top emerging technology companies:
- Newsflare– Has created a platform that licenses video shot by the public to more than 200 media organisations
- Social Insight Engine – Pioneering social ad technology with a powerful audience insight tool reaching 300% more consumers, created by agency:2.
- Screencloud – Has built a powerful end-end solution for digital signage aimed at small businesses.
- Allocator – Provides an effortless solution to the management of fund data.
- Bluebook Academy – A smarter financial training platform, linking education tracks to jobs.
- We Are Pop Up – We are Pop Up is a peer-to-peer marketplace for retail and leisure property.
- Sybenetix – A leading enterprise Behavioural Analytics company working with hedge funds, Asset Managers, and banks systematically.
- Loyalive – Loyalive is a top first App that allows you to store all of your loyalty cards, check your live points balance and redeem the rewards you have earnt.
- StoryGami – StoryGami is an interactive video tool that helps content creators and brands increase their viewer engagement and monetise their videos.
This event was held in association with: UK Trade and Investment, London & Partners, Thomson Reuters, Chinwag & The New York Technology Council.
Top 10 technology companies 2015 / 2016
Digging out the data
November 13, 2015
Our founder Joel Davis spoke at the DMA offices about applying social data for brands. Key take home points included: 1) Facebook pushes brands to pay for increased reach; this is made more significant as bigger pages experience lower organic reach 2) 62% of CMOs rate creating more engaging, high quality content as extremely important and high up on their marketing priority list 3) Creating brand loyalty is essential and can be increased through driving engagement, encouraging consideration, high levels of support and driving conversion
social media at the DMA
Social advertising & Facebook marketing to parents
July 29, 2015
Facebook marketing to parents
Mothers aren’t just active users of social media; they live and breathe this form of networking. They use it for a variety of functions beyond entertainment and are a valuable commodity when it comes to marketing through social.
High level research from Pew Research Center(Sept 2014) shows just how invested US mothers are in social media; they use it for:
– support
– to gain information
– to contribute by responding to questions
– as a method of responsiveness to both good and bad news
What this data reveals is that mothers are active on social media and that it is meaningful to them. They are not ‘passing through’ as mere observers; rather, they are active participants in this life stage and use social media platforms to remain connected within motherhood.
Brands can utilise this info by focusing their marketing on mothers and their activity. Content should be focused and resonate strongly, tapping into the purpose and function of social media in a mother’s life.
Furthermore, Facebook tops the list for percentage of parents who use social media, by quite a large margin. Although other platforms have gained in popularity, Facebook should remain a priority within marketing plans as it has the highest reach by a long shot.
What the research highlights is that mothers are active users on social media, but utilise it for various reasons. Often the goal is to spend time in a leisurely fashion and alternatively it is more purpose driven. At agency:2, our secret is to hone in on the motivation behind social media use and thus connect brands to parents’ Facebook activity through smart content and clever targeting.
Next Gen social insights drive ROI
July 3, 2015
Social Insights Drive ROI
Our challenge: A global hotel chain wants to run a social campaign to highlight their fabulous newly decorated rooms. Traditional digital marketing routes have not yielded results, so they need to think outside the box and figure out how to reach their audience in a new and innovative way.
The Target audience: Young professionals who enjoy short-haul travel.
Our solution: Using specialist insight technology to discover their audience’s passions, the data reveals that this target audience is predisposed to Michael Palin and “trying interesting foods”. Two seemingly random insights…but a post with a Michael Palin quote, superimposed over tempting images of regional dishes, accompanied by a link to book a hotel room, drives significantly more action than a generic post focused on booking hotels.
Our Results: Dramatically increased audience size by over 400% + lower cost per action by 250% = greater sales & happy marketers.
The most effective way of hyper-targeting through social advertising is becoming increasingly dependent upon using AUDIENCE INSIGHTS to:
>Connect with a fan’s emotional side
>Understand an audience’s motivations and drives toward purchasing
>Engage with the audience’s wider interests to spark a connection
>Break through the hyper capacious noise of internet traffic and create meaningful associations
We are proud to use our Social Insight Engine to achieve these goals, a next generation social insight tool which has been developed to give marketers access to audience insights not previously available. This allows them to accelerate beyond their competition into new, exciting realms of marketing.
Cookie Best Practice
April 20, 2012
From 26 May 2012 websites operated in the EU will be required to inform their users that they are being tracked with cookies, and to ask users for their consent. There’s much that brands can do to support site architecture changes by reviewing how they relate to their B2B and B2C customers in two areas:
1. Transparency
Businesses using cookies must be completely transparent in how they collect, store and use data.
Make sure your privacy policy is up to date and that you’ve provided information on how to reject or delete cookies. By making it clear you’re using them, what they are being used for and how users can control them, you’ll educate people about how they are essential for personalisation.
2. Responsibility
Data must be used responsibly. There has been very little misuse of cookies by B2C and B2B companies and this must continue.
Businesses must be aware of all cookies utilised within their website – the legislation includes both your own cookies as well as cookies set by a third party. So remember, you are responsible for all cookies on the site and ensuring they comply with the legislation.
Ultimately, when used responsibly and effectively, cookies are an invaluable way of enhancing the user experience and customer satisfaction, as well as providing marketers with a vital tool to improve conversion rates. Transparent and responsible use of such data will safeguard these benefits for both parties.
What the Facebook changes mean for brands
September 23, 2011
F8 has now happened. It was an event that was heralded as one that would ‘change the world of social media’ – and that has proved to be true. The Facebook that we know and love has been transformed – with big changes gradually being rolled out. Here we explore how these changes will affect brands:
Facebook becomes an entertainment hub
Facebook’s motto for the F8 conference was ‘Read. Watch. Listen’ – and that neatly sums up the changes that have been made. They have unveiled extensive changes to the social network – including key tie-ups with companies such as Spotify, Netflix, Zynga (who made Farmville) and The Guardian to create a new breed of apps, including video, music, films, and TV apps.
Facebook has now become an entertainment hub allowing users to watch films, listen to music and read newspaper articles via an app without ever leaving the social platform.
Maximising engagement through social apps
It is clear that what all these new features are attempting to do is make it as easy as possible for users to spend long periods of time on Facebook. They are doing this by lowering the barriers to connecting with friends and family and delivering more tailored and rich media content.
To this end, Facebook have introduced a ‘Ticker feed’ which shows all updates in real time at the top right hand corner of your newsfeed page. They also announced a completely redesigned profile page, tagged ‘The Timeline’.
The Timeline
Zuckerberg introduced the new ‘Timeline’ feature which will enable users to give a ‘more complete story’ of who they are. This Timeline is an online scrapbook which he said will “help you tell the story of your life”.
The Timeline presents a stream of information about you. You are, in effect, creating a profile of ‘who you are’ through the photos you’ve posted, all your status updates and the apps you’ve used. Split into multiple columns, the timeline shows all of your updates in one place on an endlessly scrolling page.
Timeline is currently in beta (you probably don’t want to access it straight away unless you’re a developer as it is currently experiencing bugging issues) and will be opt-in to start. However, it will soon become the new default profile page for all users.
How this is good news for brands – a new class of apps
Zuckerberg also explained that Facebook was focusing on making a ‘new class of Open Graph applications’. These apps mean that users can access content such as music and newspaper articles directly within Facebook and let users share what they listen to, watch and read with friends.
This is great news for brands. Based on the ‘Like’ social plug-in developers can now customise ways of sharing their content with new created ‘Listened’, ‘Watched’, and ‘Read’ buttons which will see content posted in users’ timelines or the newly developed live ‘ticker’ stream. So a user’s friends will see the latest music their friends are listening to on Spotify for example, or the film they’ve just watched on Netflix.
The result is that brands have gained an important new way to target Facebook users through advertising. So, by utilising these new buttons – which tells advertisers what musicians, films or publications not only a user likes but also what their friends like – advertisers are being given even more insights into the make-up of their audience. So advertisers on Facebook’s Ads API or those who work with Facebook’s Sales team will be able to reach relevant consumers who might not have directly Liked a Page.
To give an example, rather than just targeting a user who has Liked Lady Gaga’s Facebook Page, brands will be able to target anyone who shared one of her songs through Spotify or any of their friends who clicked ‘Listened’ on a story about her.
These changes will also have an impact on Facebook’s Sponsored Stories ad format. Marketers will now be able to target Sponsored Stories to people based on the content they have shared from apps, such as Netflix or Spotify.
The potential for this type of granular targeting is huge for brands. Though at launch, it is only music, video and readable content that will feature these new feedback buttons, David Fischer, Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions, told All Facebook that the site is considering releasing more, including a ‘Want’ button for products. This will provide unique opportunities to more and more industries, such as ecommerce, with shopping brands gaining ‘Wants’ on new products they can promote on Facebook.
Brands need to be more engaging than ever
Facebook also introduced a new ‘lightweight’ sharing feature, in order to give its users the ability to share more things without cluttering their friends’ newsfeeds. This means that all ‘lightweight’ information will be shown on the Ticker feed only. So status updates, photos and posted links to articles will be shown on the newsfeed, while Likes or your score on the latest game will be shown on the Ticker feed in real time.
This is to ensure that your newsfeed contains only the most valuable and relevant content. For brands this means that they must have a robust and effective strategy in place to deliver compelling content that will engage fans and optimises how much they interact with you.
The changes announced at F8 provide a challenge to brands – but also opportunities. They must create truly compelling content that fans want to engage with. This is all about increasing your Facebook EdgeRank – in the face of these new updates it will be vital to alter and optimise engagement strategies and ensure your brand is one that fans want to see in their newsfeeds.
