Reward

Posted on December 27, 2010 by Renee

There’s no better time to refocus and redefine goals and strategies than at the end of a year and start of a new one. New beginnings have a way with easing the growing pains of transition making them a bit more acceptable. Dukky has learned a lot in 2010, along with our customers. Each campaign provided us valuable data to better execute and equip resellers and clients with the tools that ensure success in each campaign.

I’m a big advocate of learning from other’s mistakes and successes in life. I do not need to have a first-hand experience to recognize the real value of the lesson from that experience. We try to keep this practice as a vital part of our business model in order to equip our clients and campaigns with their maximum potential by keeping track of the great, the good, and the not so fabulous. So, what did Dukky learn this past year? Take a gander.

The Lessons of 2010

1) We are reaching an interactive audience. Consumers are active and engaged. We saw a continuously increasing level of engagement from consumers across industries throughout various campaigns this year. Businesses that fostered their online life and presence and added sharing technologies to their outreaches saw an overall growth in numbers to lead generation, customer database, sales, and ROI. All by harnessing the power of their active audience.

2) Influencers are your greatest assets. Identifying the influencers in campaigns was not only a way to generate more leads but a way to build community and increase customer retention by placing value on those who are able to carry your message to their peers. This year our clients have not only identified their influencers but developed loyalty programs from their new list of valuable customers. By uniquely engaging and rewarding their influencers, it resulted in increased reach, customers, and conversion.

3) Cross channel marketing took on a whole new meaning with the ability to funnel all mediums into one portal (microsite) for enhanced tracking and analytics. Being able to watch consumers interact and engage with brands and offers has redefined the expectation of results for our clients. In successful outreaches and in the campaigns that did not succeed, it was the ability to see which mediums brought in customers and converted clicks to leads that was vital to planning future campaigns.

4) Analytics do not lie and businesses wanted the proof that their dollars turned into customers and sales. What do your numbers tell you about your campaigns, investments, and ROI? 2010 revealed the do’s and don’ts for our customers. Having access to analytics that covered campaign statistics, demographic information and breakdowns, poll results, sharing activity and lead list provided answers and results in real-time.

5) With the ability to engage consumers through various marketing outreaches (direct mail, email, digital, etc) and motivate them to action through offers and sweepstakes our clients learned a valuable lesson about rewarding the customer. Tell the consumer the value of your offer and what they need to do to get it. When they engage….respond back. Reward them for sharing the offer or being an influencer, thank them for participating in the campaign, remind them to come in-store to redeem the offer, etc. Campaigns that were successful from start to finish did not just start off strong but the marketers were active throughout the life of the campaign, taking a proactive approach to fostering the leads that were generated.

At the end of 2011, we want to fill our review with endless success stories from our resellers and large and small business clients. To start your year off right here are few more tips to take with you into 2011.

Customer retention is just as important as lead generation.
Don’t be afraid of viral campaigns. When your customers multiply your sales increase with it.
Keep your marketing consistent across channels. Don’t separate direct mail, email, and digital into different departments and strategies. It’s one marketing message with multiple channels to drive customers to the same place.
Above all else engage and interact with your customers.
If it isn’t working, change it.

Here’s to starting off 2011 with the tips and tools to taste success from the beginning!

Dukky Hearts Social Media Amber Alerts

Posted on December 10, 2010 by Dominique

Tis the season for goodwill toward men, right? Helping a neighbor out and all that compassion for your fellow man jazz. Well as I was searching for a brilliant social media campaign to write about today I came across the story of a man using the power of social media to find his missing brother and the outpour of support and assistance the campaign has received. So here, a tale of the new ways people are harnessing the power of social media for good, or in this case, in the name of brotherly love.

Late last month Joe Sjoberg went missing in Wisconsin. According to an article in The Atlantic he was last seen by his roommate on Monday, November 29, in Madison, where the two shared a home. A graduate of Carleton College in Minnesota known for his extroversion and warm, welcoming personality, his disappearance was a shock to those who knew him, the article said. Unwilling to wait while the police conducted a missing persons search, Joe’s brother and family went to the fastest way they knew to contact people about what had happened and enlist help – social media. Their first stop was Facebook, where they created the Help Joe Sjoberg Missing group. Since it’s creation, the group has gotten over 10,000 members who are constantly checking-in for updates, providing possible leads, posting flyers and faxes to businesses and groups throughout Wisconsin and volunteering their help in any way they can to find Joe. They didn’t stop there either. The family continued posting all around the Web, pushing a flyer with Joe’s face and standardized message onto Twitter, Reddit, Digg, YouTube and Craigslist. There’s now a Facebook page as well. They even got their story covered on blogs. The virtual flyer they put out with photos and description of Joe and his car, license plate number and a link to the Facebook group and page has been passed around the Web in more places than they can count now. Here’s what the article went on to say about the response the campaign has received.
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Real-Time Search Gets Real

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Dukky

The tech community has been throwing the phrase “real-time search” around like a hot potato for at least the past year. However, most real-time search offerings simply haven’t lived up to the promise. They’ve been released to great fanfare, but have yet to be widely adopted by regular internet users.

That may change soon- Google, the 800-lb gorilla of the search engine world, just released its own real-time search offering, called (appropriately enough) “Google Realtime.” Realtime lets you search tweets, offering better results and more filtering options than Twitter’s own search feature does. For example, you can choose to limit results to a certain geographic area, and you can “rewind” the results to see what people were saying about your search topic in the past. This post from HubSpot also seems to indicate that results from other social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace will be included at some point, though right now all the results I’ve seen have been from Twitter.

Assuming it succeeds where other real-time search engines have not, what does Google’s Realtime search mean for marketers? Obviously, it provides another way to enhance the already considerable power of word-of-mouth on social networking sites. The ability to set alerts also provides an easy, free tool to tell you what people are saying about your company or brand on Twitter. As HubSpot puts it:

Businesses participating in social media will have a clear advantage in getting found online because of their automatic inclusion in real-time search results. Marketers now have a new tool to monitor online conversations about their business and understand which marketing events directly caused an increase in word-of-mouth buzz during a given time. Google real-time search is a huge boost for marketers not only in monitoring but also in demonstrating the value of social media to their business.

With real-time search, customers’ voices are only going to get louder. Give them something to talk about, and make sure it’s something positive.

The Socialization of Search and What it Means to You

Posted on March 29, 2010 by Dukky

No matter what product or service your company sells, people need to be able to find it online. Climbing to the first page of results in Google (while extremely difficult) used to be the best way to help your customers find you on the intertubes.

However, the rules are changing, and while search engine optimization is still important, it is no longer enough. Search is going social, as the major search engines try to create more relevant results by leveraging the power of social networks.

For example, both Bing and Google now index tweets. Also, with Google’s new social search feature, whenever users enter in a search term, Google displays items posted by members of their “social circle” in the results, on the first page.

People are also becoming more likely to turn to social networking sites to find information, as opposed to search engines. Brian Solis notes that “20% of social consumers today, use social networks as their primary navigation hubs, relying on contacts and trending themes to point them in the right direction.”

What does that mean to companies and brands? On the Web Strategy blog, Jeremiah Owyang and Charlene Li explain that the forthcoming integration of social and search means that it is vital to get your customers talking about you (and to make sure they are saying nice things!):

“For the first time, consumers will be able to directly impact web search results. Although companies spend thousands of marketing dollars controlling their search results by using Google’s advertising services, customers and competitors can quickly and cheaply impact search results using simple tools like Twitter.”

Brian Solis has a helpful list of 10 steps that brands can take to optimize themselves for social search. Developing a presence on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter is important, of course, as is developing procedures to monitor these sites for mentions of your brand. You need to connect with your customers and engage them directly.

But it’s not enough to simply create a Facebook page or a Twitter account. And you can’t simply talk about yourself-you have to encourage your customers to talk about you. One of the easiest ways to do that is to integrate social media sharing into your direct response campaigns.

Whether you initially connect with your customers via direct mail or email, if you provide them with a compelling offer and give them the means to share it on social networking sites, it’s possible to generate viral campaigns that can give your company more visibility in social search.

To quote Brian Solis:

“If the socialization of search and commerce is driven by any one behavior, it is that of sharing…In the share economy, currency is defined by likes, links, retweets, updates, comments, shares on Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, MySpace, et al. And, its impact only grows as Social Media becomes pervasive.”

With Dukky, you can quickly and easily create integrated campaigns that bring together direct mail, email, social media and mobile marketing. Through the use of pURLS, your offers become part of the “share economy,” with results that are trackable on our real-time dashboard. It’s a simple, yet effective way to get customers talking about your brand!