Improve customer engagement with Facebook advertising in Hybris Marketing Cloud

As a marketer one of your objectives can be to improve your customer engagement with Facebook advertising. What if you could select your best customers and create a target audience that is based on these customers and also represent people who show similar behavior? And what if you could deliver only relevant messages to this target audience to improve brand awareness, reach, lead generation and conversion?

Paid advertising on Facebook is one of the most immediate ways to impact the reach of your content. Most advertisers understand the real value of Facebook Advertising as a way to generate traffic and real business value. More than 42% of marketers report that Facebook is critical or important to their business.

Some figures:

• Over two billion people use Facebook and over 700 million use Instagram every month.
• Over 1.3 billion people on average log onto Facebook daily and are considered daily active users
• 1 of every 5 minutes people spend on mobile is on Facebook or Instagram.

What are Facebook ads?

Facebook ads are paid messages from businesses that are written in their voice and help reach the people who matter most to them. Advertisers create campaigns that have specific goals, which we call advertising objectives, and they create ads within those campaigns to help them reach those objectives.

For example, a business may create a campaign because they want to get more people to visit their website or webshop. When they create ads within that specific campaign, they’ll choose images, text and an audience that they think will help them get that increase in visitors.

The following objectives are available within Facebook:

• Awareness: Objectives that generate interest in your product or service
• Consideration: Objectives that get people to start thinking about your business and look for more information about it.
• Conversions: Objectives that encourage people interested in your business to purchase or use your product or service.

How to target the right people?

To target the people who are right for your business, you can use the information that is available about your customer(s), such as interests and behaviours, to choose your audience on Facebook.

In Hybris Marketing Cloud it is possible to select your best customers as a target audience and upload them to a Custom Audience in Facebook. Custom Audiences in Facebook help you find your existing customers and contacts on Facebook. Connecting with the people on Facebook who you are already connected to, can help you improve relationships and drive sales.

Furthermore, after you have created a Custom Audience in Facebook, you can also create a Lookalike Audience based on that. Lookalike Audiences helps you find people on Facebook who are similar to your customers or contacts. It uses the insights you’ve gained from your Facebook marketing and increases your chances of reaching people who might be interested in your business.

How do you setup a Facebook Campaign in Hybris Marketing Cloud?

Let’s say that you are a wintersports company that wants to do a Facebook advertising wintersale campaign on last year’s snowboard collection. For this, you have to carry out the following steps in Hybris Marketing Cloud:

1. Plan your Facebook advertising campaign
2. Build your Facebook advertising campaign by selecting your target audience and creating the Facebook ads campaign
3. Execute your Facebook advertising campaign by uploading your target audience to Facebook and creating your ad in Facebook
4. Monitor and adjust your Facebook advertising campaign to maximize results

* Prerequisite: You already own a Facebook Business Manager account with Facebook and have setup the integration between Hybris Marketing Cloud and Facebook for authentication purposes.

1. Plan your Facebook advertising campaign

Use the Hybris Marketing Cloud Marketing Calendar to plan your campaign at the right time by choosing a timeframe and filter to view which campaigns are currently active and which are planned in the future.

2. Build your Facebook advertising campaign

Select your target audience for the Facebook advertising campaign by selecting your best customers in Hybris Marketing Cloud via the Profile Dashboard.

In the Profile Dashboard you can analyze contact data to determine the interests of certain groups of contacts, the sentiments related to these interests, and the channels in which the contacts are active. You can also directly create Target Groups or Segmentation Models from within the Profile Dashboard.

Select your target audience by choosing a specific Timeframe (Q3-Q4 2017), Country (Germany), Interest (‘Snowboarding’ for our wintersale) and preferred communication channel (Social).

Now you have selected your target audience, you can create a target group. Choose the ‘Create Target Group icon on the right top of the screen to create the target group for your Facebook advertising campaign (for example ‘WINTERSALE_FB_TG’).

Choose ‘Save and Open’ to go to your created Target Group and ‘Release’ it.

Now, you want to create the Facebook Campaign in Hybris Marketing Cloud to send your selected target audience (Target Group) to Facebook as a Custom Audience. Go to the ‘Campaigns’ app, select ‘Create’ and choose ‘Facebook Campaign’ as campaign type.

Define a name and description (Wintersale Facebook Campaign) for your Facebook advertising campaign and select Facebook ads as Category. Also, select the previously created Target group ‘WINTERSALE_FB_TG’ and choose ‘Create’.

The flow-based campaign designer is opened and here it is possible to maintain general details for the Facebook advertising campaign, such as Schedule time (Immediate) and Frequency (Recurring), Media type (Social), Priority (High), Interests and Tags.

After the general settings we choose the Facebook campaign action block in the flow-based campaign designer to choose the Facebook advertiser account we want to use and our Objective for this campaign (Reach).

Choose ‘Authenticate’ to authenticate yourself with Facebook.

After a few seconds, authentication with Facebook Ads is carried out successfully.

Choose ‘Done’ to close the flow-based campaign designer.

3. Execute your Facebook advertising campaign

Choose ‘Start’ to execute the campaign and send your target audience to Facebook to create a Custom Audience for your Facebook Ads campaign.

How does this work?

Facebook users are identified by email addresses or phone numbers. Before the transfer to Facebook, data is hashed (one-way encrypted) so that personal data can not be traced. This is also in the context of the new GDPR privacy law which will be effective as from May 2018. In Facebook the hashed values are matched to known email addresses and telephone numbers and corresponding Facebook users are added to the Custom Audience.

Go to Facebook by clicking on the ‘Custom Audience on Facebook’ or ‘Campaign on Facebook’ tile in the campaign and login with your business manager account. Check if your just uploaded target audience is created as Custom Audience ‘WINTERSALE_FB_TG’ in Facebook Ads.

Within this section it is also possible to create Lookalike Audience(s) in Facebook, based on the Custom Audience.Now, we want to create our Facebook ad. Therefore go to the Ads Manager via the Facebook menu and choose ‘Use existing campaign’ to select the just created ‘Wintersale Facebook campaign’.

Within the Ad configuration, section Ad set, you choose the created Custom Audience ‘WINTERSALE_FB_TG’. If created, it is also possible to select the Lookalike Audience(s) and you can select the Location(s) to show your Facebook Ad.

Final step of Ad creation is creating the Ad which will be shown in Facebook.
It is possible to add only text or also use photo or video content. After your satisfied on how the Ad looks in the preview, you choose ‘Confirm’ to start the Facebook Advertising Campaign in Facebook.

Monitor and adjust your Facebook Advertising Campaign

While your Facebook Ad campaign is running or after it has finished, it is possible to check the success within the campaign. Therefore go to the ‘Success’ tab in the specific Facebook Advertising campaign to check the KPI’s such as: Reach, Impressions, Likes and Costs and use this information to improve the results of your campaigns.
It is also possible to view the pre-delivered Facebook campaign operational report ‘Campaign Success for Facebook’ in SAP Analytics Cloud to analyze multiple campaigns at once. This report is available via button ‘Analyze’ in Campaign app.

Enjoy creating your own Facebook Advertising campaigns in Hybris Marketing Cloud and stay tuned for more on building and executing highly effective marketing campaigns in Hybris Marketing Cloud.

The Top 10 Questions Every Brand Must Answer To Grow In 2015

Every marketeer faces a dizzying array of choices in terms of strategy, tactics, and tools through which to reach their customers and inspire them to buy your products. As the media landscape becomes more fractured and the tools more varied, it’s more important than ever to stay focused on the right priorities that will ensure short-term and long-term success. With that in mind here are the top ten questions every brand must answer if they hope to grow in 2015.

1. What is your brand’s purpose? Every marketer is now aware that Boomers, Millennials, and Gen Z generations are looking to brands to be more responsible in exchange for their product purposes. As such, a clear definition of your company purpose is critical to capturing their attention and converting their support to sales.

2. What is your brands story? Once you have defined your brand’s purpose, mission, and vision you need to be able to distil that into a brand story that employees and customers want to share. Only then will you unlock the power of social technologies to amplify your message and build your customer community.

3. How do you align your leadership, employees, and partners around that brand story? Too often marketers think only in terms of how they will share their story with customers and ignore the need to create a company culture that is in alignment with that story.

4. How do you align your corporate citizenship, sustainability and foundation efforts? For decades each one of these areas had been treated as distinct silos within a company matrix. As such, they are often insufficiently connected or aligned with a brand’s story. Only when they are all pointed in the same direction can they amplify one another to generate marketing efficiencies that improve your bottom line.

5. How do you align your company and product brand stories? Many corporate brands have chosen to remain effectively unknown and lead with their product brands. With the new demands for transparency and accountability, company brands are now rising to the challenge of defining their story and aligning their product brands within it.

6. How do you align your external marketing with your internal culture?There is nothing more destructive to a business than for a customer to discover that a brand’s marketing is very different to the customer’s experience. By extension, very easy for an employee to become disillusioned when they see that a brand is telling its customers one thing when their experience inside the company is another.

7. What strategies must you use to tell your story effectively using social technologies? Too often brands bring a broadcast and self-directed mentality to social tools that turn on dialogue, interaction, and intimacy. It’s not surprising then that they find that their employees’ time and marketing spend is wasted.

8. How must you use each social media channel to capture the attention of existing and new customers? Each channel presents a unique way to command the attention of different audiences and to inspire them to amplify the company’s brand story. Only with clear communication architecture can that story and these channels be sufficiently aligned to build the brand and its business.

9. How do you share that brands story effectively at a local level? The people closest to a community are the ones best qualified to share a story. As such, every brand faces the challenge of localizing its overarching story in a way that makes it meaningful and relevant to customers in order to win their attention and purchasing preference.

10. How do you establish your leadership at a global level? Irrespective of your company size, you can now lead a global conversation once you have clearly articulated your point of view on a given cultural conversation related to your products and their benefits. Any ambition smaller than that undervalues the reach and impact of the web, social media, and mobile phones.

Each one of these questions is important in their own right, but taken together they are critical for the short and long-term success of a brand in today’s social business marketplace.

How to let your customers spend 67% more than others

ery organization should consider building a profitable customer loyalty program to cultivate the relationships with their most loyal customers, generate more awareness of their business and increase the average amount their customers spend each time they visit.

Overall, the main goal of a customer loyalty program is growing long-term relationships into impactful connections that help move the needle for your business on an ongoing basis.

According to Inc., it costs a business about 5 to 10 times more to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing one. The average current, loyal customer spends 67 percent more than a brand new one.

Regardless of how your customer loyalty program is structured, measuring its impact on your business is crucial to help determine what’s working and what needs improvement to drive more results.

1. Understand your audience

The first step to properly measuring the success of your customer loyalty programs is understanding your audience online and offline. 

The more information your marketing team has about your customer base, the more effective your loyalty programs will run and the easier they will be to continually measure.

By understanding who your audience is, their typical spending habits, their customer lifetime value (CLV) and more, the easier it’ll be to establish your initial benchmarks from this historical data.

2. Establish your goals

Once you’ve established who your customer base is and other vital metrics that shed light on where your company stands today, develop your goals to align your measurement practices from the start and communicate them across the organization.

Each goal, whether it be generating more sales or increasing long-term customers, should be properly matched with metrics to help monitor the success or failure of each part of your loyalty program.

The main metrics your business should focus on to understand whether your loyalty program is a success are:

• Redemption: The most basic metric, which is the claiming of a coupon, promo code, deal or another feature of your loyalty program.
• Activation: The number of sign up’s or newly active members using your program.
• Sales: The amount of revenue generated from your loyalty program.
• Growth: The increase or decrease in total number of members of your loyalty program.

3. Use powerful tools to automate measurement

To accurately monitor your loyalty campaigns on an ongoing basis, choose the appropriate toolkit to help automate your reporting and simplify the analysis of your programs.

For example, using Google Analytics can help your marketing team better understand the revenue generated overtime from your loyalty programs online from certain segments of your audience.

Most email marketing platforms also offer robust analytics to help a business better understand how their email campaigns as a part of the loyalty program impact customer retention.

Email also allows for powerful segmentation of your customer list, which can provide your team with extensive data on the different demographics that make up your loyalty program.

The performance of your loyalty program subscribers with your emails as measured by delivery rates, open rates, click rates, bounce rates, conversion rates and revenue per email sent is another way your email platform can help inform your measurement efforts.

4. Analyze revenue potential of members and non-members

The revenue potential of members of your loyalty programs should be much higher than customers that are non-members, which is why it is important to consistently understand the ROI of your programs.

According to GetResponse, members of loyalty programs who respond to email generated 11 percent more revenue per email.

The customer lifetime value (CLV) should be continually analyzed to ensure you’re allocating enough spend to your loyalty program, adjusting the structure of your programs to best match your customer base while driving results and that you’re properly assigning different values to each segment of your customer base.

Each segment of your audience, also frequently known as a cohort, is based on groups with similarities in interests and behaviors that your organization should be measuring individually. Since each cohort is unique, how he or she will react to your loyalty programs will differ.

Focusing on cohort marketing with each stage of analysis of your loyalty campaigns will help your team better understand the results of your efforts as you measure the differences between cohorts that are members or non-members of your programs.

It’s all about organizing your data effectively to ensure it empowers your team with actionable insights that shed light on how your loyalty programs are performing for your business. This data can inform future progress, changes and innovation with your loyalty programs, as well as the overall success of your organization.

Drive Customer Experience with Social CRM

Social media and the Web have given rise to a new form of empowered consumers who can research and voice their options, solve problems and have a powerful sphere of influence well beyond their backyard fences. Social media has added yet another digital channel, similar to the email channel in the early-to-mid 90s, that needs to be included in every comprehensive CRM strategy.

It’s widely recognized that the amount of data, both structured and unstructured, has increased at a previously inconceivable rate since the advent of social media. What should you do about all this data and about the burgeoning number of social media channels? Just because social activity is taking place doesn’t mean you should get involved in all of it.

When you consider that the top 10 social media websites experienced 27 percent more visits between June 2012 and May 2013—specifically, visits increased from 2.38 billion to nearly 3 billion —the prospect of managing all your customer interactions can seem intimidating.  But it doesn’t need to be that way. By creating a focused strategy, and using CRM technology to deliver on that strategy, you can get a greater return on your investment than ever before.

Social Media is Here to Stay

Businesses like yours must recognize that social media is not a trend — it will keep growing and evolving, and it’s important that your strategy grows and evolves with it. Whatever your industry, social media can and will impact your business, whether you choose to engage in its usage or not.

Now are the days of the social consumer — consumers who might take a question to Twitter, a customer service query to a user forum, a compliment to Facebook, a photo to Instagram, a thumbs- up to a posting on Reddit or a complaint to Yelp. And, because more and more consumers are communicating with companies and each other this way, a complaint can go viral on a variety of social channels before you know it. Should you react to a complaint or ignore it? Could you have anticipated it? Can you turn a negative into a positive, and gain a louder, more positive voice? Have you thought about taking advantage of positive posts to promote your brand or company?

Change the Way You Work

You need to take advantage of social media as both a channel and a data source by integrating social, mobile, digital media and data into your direct marketing, customer engagement and overall CRM strategy. Consumers value objectivity, referrals and references are more critical than ever, and a social media relationship with one person is now a relationship with that person’s entire social network.

Take advantage of the peer influence-based consumer decision-making process by proactively executing social media-focused campaigns, segmenting campaigns by social media channel, and enriching customer records and profiles with social media attributes. By doing this, you provide your marketing department with a new way of thinking as it relates to creating customer segments and campaigns.

Consumers’ perception of your company, products and services can change rapidly as a result of the speed of social media. You need to respond quickly and effectively when potential issues or problems arise, and when consumers have concerns or questions. That means you need to know how to quickly respond with social media replies, next-best action and next-best experience recommendations across any delivery channel (including traditional ones such as direct mail and email). To drive consumer interest and build loyalty, you should recommend social media offers, customer membership promotions, and more. Additionally, by creating a bridge between Facebook and your company’s website via new social graphs, you can allow consumers to express themselves in new and creative ways.

Make it Relevant

Let’s take a look at some ways your company can use CRM and real-time marketing to leverage social media as a communications channel—and in the process bring effectiveness and finesse to the social media presence.

1. Take advantage of customer deals. You can manage your inventory by using social media and a CRM solution to educate customers about upcoming or last-minute discounts and deals. If you apply CRM principles to your strategy of educating customers about last-minute deals and discounts, you won’t send them every deal you have, because every deal won’t be relevant to every customer. You should send your deals with view and rest periods across media (for example, email, Twitter, and conventional mail), so you don’t become “white noise.” Sending irrelevant offers too frequently is deadly, regardless of the delivery medium. An integrated outbound and inbound marketing platform can make fast work of these needs and effectively coordinate the deals you offer.

2. Make the most of real-time messages. Remember, timing is one of the critical components of the CRM adage of sending the right message to the right customer at the right time via the right medium. You could send your messages as private tweets or as private Facebook posts via the use of triggered events depending on the data your CRM system has about a customer’s social media and digital marketing preferences, privacy settings and online behavior.

Maximize Your Social Media Investment

To maximize what could turn into a significant time investment in social media, you should:

1. Take inventory. Assess what you are doing today in social media. Perhaps you are sniffing for positive or negative mentions of your product. As is growing more common, you may be managing a social servicing department. Or you might have sidebar advertisements on Facebook and/or YouTube pages. Whatever your existing tactics may be, begin analyzing their effectiveness today.

2. Strategize. After you research the topic of social media, brainstorm and strategize about which new social media and digital marketing tactics you’d like to implement. Begin to include social media as  delivery points for your marketing messages and to overlay a CRM-centric approach to your messaging via social media.

3. Set a goal. Define a purpose for your social CRM project based on what it can do to assist and engage customers and on how it can improve a key business metric such as cost to serve, referrals or conversions.

4. Be careful not to overdo it. Layer your new social media strategies and tactics onto your existing cross-channel marketing roadmap or calendar. Treat them as campaigns and include cross-media rules so you don’t oversaturate your customers with “touches.” Remember that social media is an effective medium for customers to share their issues with the world. Use your touches as you would a spice — that is, easy does it.

With the right strategy and technology in place to support it, social media can be used to better understand, serve and communicate with your customers and prospects. By taking advantage of social profile data, you enhance digital marketing capabilities focused on contextual, transactional and addressable branding initiatives. But in order to unleash these benefits, you need to make social media part of your overall customer experience strategies instead of keeping it in an organizational silo.

Social CRM markt zal in 2018 groeien tot ruim 9 miljard dollar

Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM) market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 36.5% to $9.08 billion in 2018, according to a report from RnR Market Research.

According to the report, the market is anticipated to reach $1.91bn in 2013, driven by the increasing focus on customer engagement, emerging SMEs, social platforms and the recognition of sharing ideas on a real time basis. The growth is also driven by companies introducing new applications for social monitoring, social listening, social middleware, social management and social measurement to offer better customer experience to the customers.
In 2013, North America is expected to be the biggest market, while the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region is expected to record increased market traction in the coming years. The report revealed that the Social CRM will become faster and reachable with new advancement, while more information on business analytics will be brought in.

According to the report, enterprises are adopting social CRM as an additional channel in the overall CRM software applications that is a social layer on top of traditional CRM software application.

The social CRM application offers advantages including increased transparency, better communication of business ideas and information, flexibility and performance and focuses on capturing the customers need as well as creating value for them in a transparent business environment.

Onderzoek: 40 procent consumenten zegt dat sociale media klantenservice verbeteren

Veertig procent van de consumenten wereldwijd vindt dat sociale media klantenservice van bedrijven kunnen verbeteren. Dit blijkt uit een infographic van softwareleverancier Oracle, waarin de partij verschillende onderzoekscijfers heeft gezet om te kunnen bepalen of social crm meer is dan alleen een buzzwoord. Volgens de partij betekent social crm dat de klant geïntegreerd is in de planningmix en terugkoppeling, zodat klanten hun ervaring met het bedrijf kunnen delen.

Volgens softwareleverancier Oracle is social customer relationship management (social crm) een buzzwoord geworden. De leverancier heeft een infographic gemaakt waaruit moet blijken of cijfers de term ondersteunen, of dat social crm een rage is. Zo staat in de infographic dat uit cijfers van onderzoeksbureau Gartner blijkt dat crm het achtste belangrijkste aandachtspunt is voor chief information officers (cio’s). De geschatte waarde van de crm-industrie ligt tussen de twaalf en achttien miljard dollar.

De softwareleverancier schijft in de infographic dat social crm inhoudt dat klanten in de planningmix en de terugkoppeling worden geïntegreerd, zodat zij wat te zeggen hebben over hun ervaring met het bedrijf. Externe sociale kanalen als Twitter, Facebook en online customer communities, moeten geïntegreerd zijn in traditionele kanalen zoals e-mail, sms, telefoon en face-to-face.

In de infographic noemt de softwareleverancier ook dat 88 procent van de chief executive officers (ceo’s) dichterbij de klant komen zien als meest noodzakelijke businessdoel. Veertig procent van de consumenten vindt dat sociale media klantenservice verbeteren. Daarnaast heeft 36 procent van de consumenten weleens contact gehad met een bedrijf via sociale media.

Waarom organisaties moeten focussen op social crm is volgens Oracle omdat het percentage klanten dat ‘een persoon als ik’ als hun meest betrouwbare informatiebron noemt, nog steeds stijgt. In 2012 noemde 65 procent van de consumenten een persoon als henzelf als de meest betrouwbare infobron, in 2004 was dit nog 51 procent.

Bekijk de infographic hieronder: