Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

Esurance proved that a less expensive pregame Super Bowl ad can actually create more buzz than an in-game spot, which cost $5 million per 30 seconds. What's more, the brand chiefly leaned on Twitter—not Facebook—to accomplish its feat. 

With the exception of #SB50 and #SuperBowl, the brand's #esurancesweepstakes hashtag was seen more than any other combination of words in Twitter conversations on Sunday evening, said Nancy Abraham, vp of integrated marketing communications for the San Francisco company. She said Twitter supplied her with that information Monday.

"And if you count retweets, we're No. 2 only behind #SB50," Abraham added. "There was no other [consumer] brand on that list."

Her company has been tweeted about 2.92 million times since its 30-second spot ran prior to this year's Big Game. The #esurancesweepstakes hashtag, in particular, has been tweeted 2.48 million times, which Abraham and her team said helped generate 1.5 billion media impressions. ...

Social media ROI is a messy business. How do you bring some order to it? There’s no getting away from it. The higher up the sales funnel, the harder and messier it is to make decisions on measuring ROI. Social media is, like any channel (if you choose to view it as one) not perfect to measure, though far from hard to get a good handle on it, and to compare channels with channels using techniques like Google’s Multichannel funnels or social reports.

It’s the scale of choices that become complex. It’s much easier to post rationalise and retrospectively connect the dots, but not easy to plan for it – otherwise why is ‘viral’ still so remarkable in social media – and why we don’t see the experts doing amazing campaigns repeatedly.

It’s always been a challenge, attributing the value of visitors through multiple channels, social media has made that more complex. Certainly when compared to lower down the funnel the touchpoints are more measured and explicit, visitor-to-goal completion is relatively simple to monitor and quantify.IAB suggests 3:1 return on social media investment...

The research revealed that, four out of five consumers said they would be more inclined to buy a brand more often in the future after being exposed to a brand’s social media presence, while 83% of consumers exposed to social media would trial a brand’s product. ...

Retailer sites, printable coupons, and retailer emails are the most commonly used digital tools by online shoppers, though they’re not the ones wielding the greatest impact on shoppers’ journeys, details Epsilon in a recent study.

The report – based on an online survey of more than 2,800 respondents – determined an impact score for each tool by averaging the percent of its users saying it has influenced them across 10 areas.Those areas range from influencing choices (e.g. “it influences my choice of stores,” “it influences my choice of brands”) to impulse buying (“I make more unplanned purchases,” “I spend more than initially planned”) and utility (e.g. “it makes shopping easier,” “it makes shopping faster”).

Interestingly, the digital tools with the highest overall impact score were retailers’ social media activity and price comparison sites, although they had relatively low penetration rates. Shopping applications, brands’ social media activity and product reviews were also among the most highly rated by their users. The influence of product reviews has also been noted in a separate recent study of e-commerce behavior, in which online shoppers cited them as important content on retailer websites and in retailers’ shopping apps....

When I give advice to CMOs about new social marketing strategies, I often hear the same initial response: But nobody wants to come to my website.

... So while the volume of brand-related content being created — across platforms, by both brands and consumers — has skyrocketed, the volume of content actually being seen has plummeted because of three irreversible trends. 

• Feed Frenzy: There are 7x as many users on social media than there were five years ago. Each of those brands and individuals is creating and sharing more content than ever before, and (thanks to content marketing) we’re also talking more about brands. But brands aren’t just competing with each other — they’re going up against everything from wedding photos to breaking news to (viral-optimized) cat videos....