How can digital media help you reach your target audience? What's the best way to interact with nonjournalist bloggers? Can digital media tactics help drive sales?
Communicators want to know what's working in digital media — in other words, what's really clicking with online audiences. While the same strategies and tactics won't work for every company, there are lessons to be learned in how others are succeeding with digital media. Here is a look at how Ketchum client Kimberly-Clark, maker of such brands as Kleenex facial tissues and Cottonelle toilet paper, recently boosted its public relations work in the digital media space.
Kimberly-Clark Uses Social Media to Reach Millennial Moms
Kimberly-Clark's brands — which include Huggies, Kotex, Scott, Poise, and Viva — can be found in nearly every room of the home. So to further drive awareness and increase sales, the company launched the Room-A-Day Giveaway promotion, in partnership with ABC's The View, in 2007. Since then, the program has awarded 16 winners a year with a $25,000 makeover of a room in their homes. Consumers enter the sweepstakes by signing up online or mailing in an entry form.
This year Kimberly-Clark chose to increase its focus on Millennial Moms. Past campaigns focused more on Gen X moms and relied largely on traditional media, such as television and magazines. But Millennial Moms spend more time engaged in online communities than they do reading print publications. That sent the Room-A-Day campaign into new media territory.
Dawn Bates, manager of consumer promotion marketing for Kimberly-Clark, shares how turning to social media amped up the three-year-old promotion.
Marketing "With" Consumers Rather Than "To" Them
As marketers, we must understand that we are facing decentralized control. Our consumers are creating their own content and delivering messages for our brands. There is no doubt we are experiencing a paradigm shift. Instead of talking to our consumer, we need to be ready to have a dialogue with her on her time and make it easy for her to have a conversation with her network. By having conversations and listening, we create a stronger relationship.
For Room-A-Day in 2009, we really thought about where and when the Gen X and Millennial Moms would be most receptive to engaging with us. So, in addition to focusing our print strategy on magazines that appeal to our target, we started conversations with her in blogs, on social networking sites and through online word-of-mouth. For the first time, Room-A-Day had a Twitter handle so we could tweet about the promotion. These efforts resulted in a substantial number of quality discussions with our target focused on our promotion and brands.
Getting Bloggers Involved
We invited a select group of top "mom" and "home design" bloggers to participate in an online conference, during which they were granted exclusive access to our spokesman, Thom Filicia, host of the TV show Dress My Nest. More than 90 percent of our targeted invitees participated. This event allowed us to acknowledge the bloggers and their influence and to give them access to something not widely available. In turn, they became involved in our promotion. They not only told their friends, but many also became advocates. This expanded the number of online relationships for the Room-A-Day Giveaway.
As a matter of fact, over half of the attendees tweeted during the event, generating organic content about the Room-A-Day Giveaway during the one-hour conference. Many bloggers also followed up with posts about the giveaway. Equally exciting, one of our blogger's posts was picked up by the St. Petersburg Times and ran on the front page of the home section on Super Bowl weekend, reaching an additional one million readers.
In the end, the number of online conversations about Room-A-Day increased dramatically versus the prior year, and the sentiment of the vast majority of those conversations was positive. This goes to show that involving bloggers in a conversation that is relevant and exciting creates energy, and that energy is contagious.
Measuring the Success of Digital Media
Metrics should always be tied to brand objectives. With digital media, just like with all marketing, our goal is response. So first, we must understand the objective and determine what success looks like. Then, it's important for us to create an exchange that incites action. This response may be measured by engagement with the brand, number of conversations, sentiment, advocacy – in any number of ways, really – as long as the metric ties back to the brand objective.
More Social Media Marketing for Kimberly-Clark?
In today's marketing space, there's media fragmentation, new technology, self-selecting consumers and an ever-increasing number of peer groups. The digital space, including social networking, is burgeoning. According to Forrester Research, three-in-four online adults in the U.S. now use social tools to connect with each other, compared with just 56 percent in 2007. Not only are we seeing a change in consumer behavior, we're also seeing a new media landscape with more touch points than ever.
However, at Kimberly-Clark, we don't like thinking about traditional versus new media. For us, marketing is about getting the consumer promise and the touch points right. It's about developing strong commercial ideas so our brands can sell more stuff to more people, more often, and for more money. Key to generating those ideas is an integrated approach to marketing planning. As a result of our integrated process, we have seen our share of spending in digital media increase.
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