THE 2017 DIGITAL MARKETING Glossary Editorial
Concepts related to digital marketing are developing in a fast pace, with new ones arriving nearly everyday. Everybody is using marketing jargon, but frankly, only a select few truly understand these terms and are capable of defining them.
Try it out for yourself: ask anyone in your vicinity to define the concept of “reach”. I can confidently bet that everyone will come up with a different definition!
For this reason we have reached out to many experts, opinion leaders and influencers of big brands such as Facebook, McDonald’s, LinkedIn and many more. For each concept, we have a definition and specific insights, so you can easily grasp each term.
I hope you will have as much fun reading this dictionary, as we had creating it! We would also like to warmly thank everyone involved! Enjoy your reading!
Charlotte Desrosiers CMO of Digimind Bots Page 4
Brand Advocacy Page 6
Buyer’s Journey Page 7
Command Center Page 9
Community Management Page 10
Content Marketing Page 11
Customer Experience Page 12
Data Visualization Page 13
Digital Reputation Page 14
Digital Transformation Page 15
Engagement Page 16
Gamification Page 17
Geo-Targeting Page 19
Influencer Marketing Page 21
Insight-Driven Marketing Page 22
Reach Page 23
Social Data Page 24
Social Media Page 26
Social Media Analytics Page 27
Social Media Intelligence Page 28
Social ROI Page 29
Social Selling Page 30
Strategic Intelligence Page 31
Word Of Mouth Marketing Page 33 Bots
Matt Collette Managing Director
What are “Bots”?
Bots are simple applications that can be deployed on social messaging apps like Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Slack, Skype and the like. They aren’t new and were used to some de- gree back in the early 2000s on MSN Messenger and other desktop messaging platforms.
However, back then, they were very simple and used to fulfill basic requests such as allowing users to check sports results or the weather. Since those early bots, we have seen some significant progress in AI and Natural Language Processing which allows bots to interact in a more intuitive manner and understand/respond to people very naturally. Gone are the days of using specific sets of commands and having to remember them all. Today’s bots can also be used to engage and facilitate a whole raft of new use cases including E-commerce, customer support, and more.
What does the rise of bots mean for mar- keters, and what should they look out for in 2017?
Consumers have also shown a greater openness to leveraging bots to help facilitate regular or repeated tasks. A recent study by DigitasLBi showed that nearly six in 10 (59%) of con- sumers have or would be willing to communicate with chatbots to either receive offers and coupons, receive recommendations or advice (37%), and/or conduct online banking (14%).
Bots are still new and consumer need to be educated about what they are and where to find them and how to use them However, while there’s been a lot of experimentation in North America, the bot space in 4 APAC is ripe for brands Be clear on the use case for your bot – what problem does it help solve and what utility does it deliver While functionally there are lots of opportunities for bots, creative/entertainment bots that drive conversation are also a great way to drive brand affinity Context is very important, one of my favourite bots is Singapore’s own Bus Uncle. It is locally relevant, delivers on a consumer need, and is fun and engaging to use.
5 Brand Advocacy
Elly Deutsch Global Social Campaign and Advocacy Manager
The definition
Social Media has rewritten how we define Brand Advocacy. In this day and age, online word- of-mouth marketing has become the best resource for us to build trust and loyalty with customers, fans, and influencers.
Brand advocacy can mean many things, but the most important of them all is how you create and foster relationships with your customers in order for them to speak favourably about your brand.
Two great examples of brand advocacy
Starbucks’ “Snap it Forward” activation on Snapchat encouraged loyal brand advocates to share a complimentary drink with a friend, family member, or even the next person in line.
Coca-Cola’s JourneyxJourney campaign followers selected brand advocates around Ameri- ca in search of the best food, events, and experiences to help drive awareness for their brand, as well as encourage fans to share memories from their own road trips.
6 Buyer’s Journey
Simon Kemp Founder and social media expert
The definition
The “Buyer’s Journey” is a series of logical, emotional, and physical processes that a person goes through on their path to purchase. The journey starts at the moment the person first en- counters a brand or a category, or when they first perceive a need, want or desire that might lead them to that brand or category.
A buyer’s journey can last anywhere from a fraction of a second through to a whole lifetime, but the journey doesn’t always result in the person purchasing the brand or category that launched their journey; they may end up buying a different brand, an alternative product or service from a different category, or even deciding not to buy anything at all.
The critical thing for marketers to remember, however, is that the journey doesn’t end with a sale; in fact, the best journeys never end, and in some cases, journeys will continue across successive generations of the same family, and cover a significant number of purchases.
Why it’s helpful
Understanding the buyer’s journey can help marketers develop more efficient and more ef- fective marketing. By understanding critical moments along the journey – what some mar- keters like to call “moments of truth” – marketers can help to influence and guide individual buyers’ progress through the different stages of the path to purchase.
7 Why it’s helpful
The specifics of the buyer’s journey are different for each category, and depend on things like the level of complexity of the product or service, the investments that buyers need to make in terms of time, money, effort, and emotion, and the perceived risks associated with making a specific choice. For many buyers, these potential risks may be hidden deciders that ultimately persuade them not to buy what might appear to be a highly compelling product.
Most buyers will move through a series of sequential attitudes and emotions relating to the product, service, offering, or category they’re contemplating. The general steps are outlined in the chart below, but you may need to adapt these for the specifics of your own brand or industry.
It’s also worth noting that people can move backwards and forwards on their journey, and sometimes they get stuck at one stage, never to move again.
Making the most of it
As with almost everything else in marketing, getting to know your audiences and customers as real people – rather than as demographics or ‘consumers’ – is the surest way to under- stand what the journey looks like for the people you care about most, and understand how you can guide those people through their journey so that you both get what you want.
By building this understanding from the outset, and then nurturing relationships over time, there’s a good chance that you can turn the journey into a never-ending adventure.
8 Command Center
Clement Teo Principal Analyst
The definition
A digital command center is an organisational construct that brings together multidisci- plinary teams like web, social, production, creatives, and media buying to run campaigns. But more than that, it is the process by which a marketing strategy is executed.
What is its role in an organisation?
A typical command center exhibits the organisation’s marketing strategy, as well as gather- ing and aggregating insights taken from various channels. It also creates a workflow for said teams to take action on the data that is gathered.
Social media is now more vital than ever to a company’s marketing strategy. Customer in- teractions are no longer limited to face to face scenarios, and a significant amount of chatter is taking place about various brands online. There is a lot of data out there that companies can leverage. This is where a digital command center can help the CMO to correlate differ- ent data sets, and map out customer profiles and journeys to formulate the ideal customer experience.
9 Community Management
Lin Liangmin Director of Marketing Communications
What is “Community Management” and why does it matter to brands? In this day and age, individuals want to connect with each other be it through experiences or relationships. It is important to build that culture amongst them, your tribe, your fans and that is key to the success of any brand. Community management is about creating that intimate experience that connects them to the brand.
Building your brand’s community
At W Singapore – Sentosa Cove, we aim to reach out to the “disruptors”. These are the people who march to their own beat, who bend the rules and enjoy it, seizing each moment in their own way. They are true originality and the ones who steal the scene. They influence and they set the trend.
If you’re looking to boost your brand’s reach with these “disruptors”, provide them with the experience you endeavour to deliver and they will communicate it for you. Choose them wisely. These people are the key to reaching out to your tribe, and the ones who will effec- tively communicate your brand’s message.
10 Content Marketing
Andrea T Edwards The Digital Conversationalist
Defining “Content Marketing” today
Content marketing is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s become a fundamental driving force of businesses.
It’s time we stepped back collectively and understood content marketing on a much deeper level. It is a philosophy and we must stop thinking of it as a tactic, or an add-on to the exist- ing marketing department.
The Evolution of Content Marketing in the Organisation
For an organisation to be truly focused on content marketing, the entire business must em- brace it from deep within the soul of the company. It must become the beating heart of the business. Every role, every function, top to bottom. The challenge is, typically, the marketing team delivers content marketing within a silo – and that’s precisely where we’re going wrong.
Marketing must enable content and own this function, but every single silo of the business needs to get on board. If sales aren’t involved, it’s almost impossible to do content marketing – because they know the customer. Beyond sales – customer service, R&D, PR/comms, ex- ecutive leadership, HR, finance, legal, business development, channel managers, CSR teams, digital media teams, advertising teams, etc, etc, etc all need to be on board.
11 Customer Experience
Maria Del Rosaio Head of Digital Experience, Social Media and PR Asia
The definition
Customer experience is the sum of every emotional reaction consumers have whenever they encounter the brand. Good or bad, experiences are what customers remember and talk about the brand. Social media has given consumers a louder and more powerful voice. A single experience broadcast online can have a huge impact on the brand’s reputation in min- utes – even seconds.
Why customer experience matters
A great customer experience is human centred, anticipatory, and consistent. In a world of choice, customer experience is a huge differentiator that defines each brand.
Thanks to social media, brands also have the opportunity and mechanism to turn a poten- tially negative experience into more positive one. Put your customer first instead of your product or service. Build a customer community that helps consumers meet their needs. Communities are a means to an end, not an end itself.
What are the 3 most important aspects? The 3 most important aspects of customer experience are: usefulness, ease of use, and emotional reaction.
• Usefulness: The customer should be able to achieve his or her goals. • Ease of use: These goals should be fulfilled easily. • Emotional reaction: The customer should experience positive emotions – pleasure, enjoy- ment, exhilaration, and even inspiration.
12 Data Visualization
Yann Guilain Associate Director
The definition
Data visualization (or “dataviz”) refers to the process of visual representation of data. This one acts as a “revealer of complexity” hidden sometimes in millions of “data”. The im- age, by its very nature, makes it possible to organize knowledge and to retain the essential: an “image is worth a thousand words”, reminds us of the old adage.
How to apply it
The encounter of several factors has allowed an explosion of data visualization practices over the last ten years: facilitated access to data first (Internet, social networks, open data ...), democratized data processing technologies (personal computers , Graphics cards and software, dedicated software solutions ...), and finally the thirst for shared knowledge in the era of the Information Society and the advent of Big Data.
Today, datavisualization is an integral part of data intelligence for digital marketing: visual- ization of targeted communities, analysis of emerging themes, consumer perceptions of a product, a brand or a campaign.
And we are only at the beginning! At Digimind for example, we make our neurons work daily to provide you with more and more data visualizations to evaluate your key criteria of digital marketing performance in a snap! Open your eyes!
13 Digital Reputation
Christophe Asselin Digital Marketing Manager
Defining “Digital Reputation”
Digital reputation comprises of a user’s perception of the brand, as well as stories written by the media. Netizens build a brand’s digital reputation based on their personal experience with it, whether through online content or face to face encounters. Channels include: Twitter, forums, Google searches, or even your friends’ reviews on Facebook.
Let’s be more specific
In a time of choice, a brand’s digital reputation can impact the buying decision. Competitors can use a brand’s weak points (as gleaned from online conversations) to their advantage.
Lyft’s latest ad campaign is a prime example of how a competitor’s digital reputation can be leveraged. With the on-going war in price and pick-up time, how could Lyft compete against one of the largest ride-sharing services in the US?
Knowing that Uber has a cold, corporate reputation among its drivers, Lyft quickly positioned themselves as a fun company with flexible policies for their drivers in their latest ad cam- paign. The result? Uber’s president, Jeff Jones wrote on LinkedIn that “Uber will do a much better job listening to drivers and serving their needs.”
14 Digital Transformation
Ryan Lim Founder and Principal Consultant
Defining “Digital Transformation”
Digital transformation refers to the organisation changing and adapting the way they do business, in order to use digital more effectively. Simply put, it is how the business overhauls itself, starting from the management level.
The first steps to take in digital transformation
The first step in digital transformation is adopting an open mindset, accepting that changes will happen while moving from a state of comfort to be future proof. Clear and concise com- munication should start from the senior management team; otherwise the momentum of a great idea can be stalled by a poor internal network.
Digital transformation also rests on the following:
Mind: Acceptance for change. Body: To take action. Attitude: To facilitate the change that is necessary for transformation.
Digital natives have to be curious and adaptable. Only then can organisations recognize the roles and responsibility required to tackle digital and social media better.
15 Engagement
Roger Graham Director of Growth and Marketing APAC
What is “Engagement”?
Social media marketing is about creating an exceptional customer experience, as well as building brand awareness online. Opening up and injecting some fun and humour in your brand voice can go a long way in connecting with your customers.
What does it take for brands to be engaging?
A successful marketer knows where and how to engage a brand’s customers. First of all, find out which social media platforms your target audience is most active in, and then decide what content performs the best on those platforms. Pay attention to which social channels perform best for your brand.
The best type of content resonates with your audience, so get to know your customers be- fore you start posting. Video is one of the best performing content on social.
And it’s not just about your conversion rates. Another important thing to look out for is the kind of conversations your customers are having online. With social media thriving around the clock, the last thing you would want is to miss an opportunity for engagement, or worse, a negative post that should be rectified early.
16 Gamification
Richard Brunois Director of Communication
Defining “Gamification”
Rendre le rébarbatif ludique, rendre la passivité interactive, ou comment générer de l’engage- ment de la part d’individus qui naturellement désertent.
How to master it
PlayStation is a leading brand in interactive entertainment and much of its communication is based on gaming. With a very active, even very responsive community, the PlayStation Voice consists of its own tones of humour, technology and innovation.
Here are 2 instances of Sony’s digital communications strategy which used gamification to the brand’s advantage.
Example 1: The PlayZONE featured an influencer to bring to life memories of various play- throughs and characters, offering a new experience similar to virtual reality.
Extrait de “PlayZONE #1 avec Monsieur Poulpe”
17 Example 2: On the French PlayStation Twitter account, followers were treated to a dash of nostalgia when the 16th anniversary of the PS2 was announced. The question, “What are your best memories on the console” also sparked many inter- actions from fans who were nostalgic for the old days of gaming.
18 Geo-targeting
Jérôme Marty Country Manager France
The definition
The mobile revolution has given rise to new data being available to advertisers and agencies: geo-localization of users in real time. This new signal, coupled with the context in which the user is located, truly enriches our understanding of consumers and increases the relevance of advanced advertising messages and their impact in the real world, at the point of sale.
So, we do not see geolocation as a simple targeting option but as the foundation of a new type of advertising: location marketing, with context.
How to use geo-targeting in a marketing campaign
When you want to launch a geo-targeted mobile marketing campaign, there are three main criteria to consider: signal accuracy, the format of the ad, and the context in which the user is located.
First, the precision of the location depends on the signal to which the application, site, mobile control or other communication platform has access. The most accurate, the GPS signal, makes it possible, for example, to know the position of a user within a few meters; the wifi signal, less precise, informs a position within a few hundred meters. It is therefore important to know what precision a partner offers before building one’s strategy.
19 Then, the format of the ad plays a paramount role. On mobile, two main categories of formats are available to you. On one hand, the so-called conventional format of banners, or interstitial video used by the ad networks monetizing the inventory of sites and apps ; one the other, the native formats integrating organically into the user experience. The advantage of networks is often their reach, that of native ads to offer more engaging formats as they are aligned with the context in which the user is. Waze illustration – Geo-targeting accuracy according to the signal Finally, the ability to understand this context is essential to define the right message. Ideally, a geo-targeting strategy should be able to take into account the mood of the user (at home, on the move, in a shop or at the time of day, for example).
At Waze, we have built our advertising offer on these three pillars: our native formats rely on GPS data to offer contextual messages while in mobility.
Actimel ad on Waze – Native format leveraging the user’s con- Many advertisers use our platform to improve the local awareness text (i.e. morning commute to the workplace) of their brand, products or offers. Here are some examples related to the news of recent months.
Alex McLaughlin Business Intelligence Analyst
The definition
Influencer marketing is a marketing technique that leverages individuals, rather than tradi- tional advertising outlets, to reach highly concentrated groups within an audience rather than an entire audience at once. These individuals, known as influencers, have the unique ability to leverage their personal connection with those consumers and lead them to conversion through individualized testimonials, personal style curation, and product demonstration.
In practice
At CMG we built our INF Network to include over 60 influencers that encompass a wide range of backgrounds and interests. We strategically leverage these tastemakers to reach com- munities in a very targeted way based on campaign goals. In practice, this means serving display ads on their personal blogs and sharing content via a variety of their owned social channels. These activities grant us the ability to increase our reach on a highly specific target audience. Influencers are also innately better than brands at creating personal and authentic content that has the ability to develop strong relationships with their audience. When influencers nat- urally incorporate products and services that they stand behind into their content, they are able to transfer their opinions into brand affinity – something our partners absolutely crave.
21 Insight-Driven Marketing
Charlotte Desrosiers CMO
The definition
Insight driven marketing aims to respond effectively to the new demands of decision-mak- ers, as part of their digital transformation. With powerful updates in social media listening technology, such as analysis and artificial intelligence, coupled with the growing expertise of analysts, data has finally become meaningful, intelligible, and actionable. Marketing depart- ments can use these insights to predict, build, refine, and evaluate their tactics and long-term strategies.
What are the 4 key advantages of it?
The basis of marketing is understanding customers. And to understand them, we have to listen to them. With insight driven marketing, brands can leap ahead of the competition by:
• Predict upcoming trends, based on subtle signals from online conversations: Marketers can discover their customers’ unspoken dreams, their competitors’ strategies, and adapt their products and service from these insights. • Build their content marketing strategy by segmenting their audiences and refining commu- nication methods for each group. • Pilot and refine their efforts in real-time: Marketers can analyse the impact of online and offline campaigns in real-time, detect influencers to active or optimize them, or even detect business opportunities and leverage them via social selling. • Evaluate their performance to achieve their goals: What better way to benchmark against one’s competitors, by comparing their own operations against another?
22 Reach
Brice Vinocour Marketing Manager
The Definition of “Reach”
“Reach” represents the number of people who have received impressions from a publication. The range may be less than the number of impressions, since a person can view multiple impressions, that is, have seen the same publication several times.
Let’s be more specific
In this digital age, it’s possible to have better targeting and personalization in advertising messages. “Reach”still remains a key metric in the analysis, or monitoring of a media cam- paign.
If tailoring content to targeted audiences is important to reach out to people with messages that are relevant to them, it is equally important to reach a broad audience to maximize the ROI of campaigns. For branding campaigns, for example, optimizing the purchase on the reach rather than clicks or actions can ensure a better return on investment.
23 Social Data
Sarah Maachi Insights Director
The definition
The term “social data” is one that every communicator and marketing professional should be aware of.
The “social” aspect refers to social media networks, where netizens exchange opinions and discuss experiences.
The “data” aspect refers to he raw data gathered from these networks. Such data is useful or even necessary for companies to decrypt and assimilate across departments, in order to make the right decisions.
Therefore, “social data” is the set of data collected on these social networks, resulting from the activity and voices of netizens.
Documenting the customer’s journey with social data
Studying data gathered from social media networks can help businesses boost their knowl- edge of the customer’s journey.
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, forums, and other channels are key media in un- derstanding the needs of customers at different stages of the journey. Stages like “interest”, “research”, “validation”, and “decision making” can be documented and enriched by data gathered from conversations and opinions expressed on public platforms.
24 How to leverage social data?
Imagine a father who wants to buy a bike for his daughter. He carries out his research on a search engine and consults the various ranges of bikes offered by retailers. He is particularly interested in the opinions left by the netizens. These reviews allow him to form an opinion but will raise a set of questions, which he posts on his personal social media networks or on forums.
Thanks to the data collected on these conversation spaces, the company is able to analyse not only the specific questions of the buyer, but also the places of conversations between Internet users, the networked organization of bike enthusiasts, etc. What is interesting here is that the company can specify each stage of the customer journey and provide concrete answers to the buyer to accompany him in his decision.
The animation of the different digital contact points of the brand will be essential to guide the customer and maintain a link, to be present in his mind. Thus the brand can create content specific to each type of questioning in order to provide answers to customers. Analysing the performance of the company’s social accounts will also be essential in determining whether messages are seen and useful and appreciated by clients. The analysis of the performance of social networks is also done thanks to social data. Because the actions of social media users, such as likes, shares, clicks, and comments are of the data resulting from an activity on the social networks. This data is valuable for any brand that wishes to evaluate itself and establish a true link with its customers.
25 Social Media
Clément Boehm Elevate Account Director
The definition
Social media refers to the world of conversational web, where Internet users exchange opin- ions, rate experiences, and even share emotions.
The power of social media
Social media has transformed the economy, as well as the way we communicate. For mar- keters, this means unique opportunities for brands to interact with customers, suppliers, candidates, investors and industry in real time.
Marketers can also harness social media to adapt their ads, break down trends and thus manage things like customer’s journey, lead generation, and sales.
The impact of social media
A vivid example of the far-reaching impact of social media can be seen during the Arab Spring, in which it played an important role in organizing protests.
The 2016 US elections is another example of how the presidential candidates mobilized so- cial media platforms to support their campaigns.
26 Social Media Analytics
Kelsey Simmons Business Intelligence Analyst
The definition of “Social Media Analytics”
Social Media Analytics is the study of the performance of social content in order to under- stand how users are interacting with and responding to specific digital media. As this eco- system is constantly in flux and varies by industry the more current the information and robust the context for comparison, the more accurate the takeaways from analysis.
Let’s be more specific
In practice, social media analytics includes collecting a wide enough set of data to be able to identify patterns in content performance. Analysis can be as simple as identifying which of a brands owned posts have received the most likes or which owned content was posted during the time period where an account saw the greatest growth in following. Viewing these top owned posts engagement metrics amongst those of a brands competitors brings context to analysis, allowing an analyst to gauge where on the scale any given collection of content falls within the broader landscape.
Competitive analysis can become as complex as manually tagging a specific topic that exists in the visual component of owned and competitive content before normalizing en- gagement metrics by each accounts following to determine which account is engaging the highest percentage of their audience on a specific type of visual. Insights from this reporting enables stakeholders to make more informed decisions when tweaking social strategies to optimize performance and choosing KPIs that will accurately track the goals of their social media efforts.
27 Social Media Intelligence
Social Intelligence Playbook for 2016
The definition
“The management and analysis of customer data from social sources, used to activate, measure, and recalibrate marketing and business programs.”
How to apply it
“Social listening is how you gather social data, but social intelligence is the action that drives marketing or business strategy from information found in social media discussion. It involves gathering, processing, and deriving insight from social media to improve the marketing cy- cle and other strategic initiatives, including product development and customer experience refinement. The savvy marketer is out creating content for customers, building communities and fan pages, staffing Twitter accounts, and writing blogs; data from these sources must be fed back to the organization to make smart business decisions.”
“Social intelligence starts with social listening: It pulls in social media, processes it, and de- livers actionable customer insight. Listening platforms serve the primary function of gaining insight from social media data, but they are just the technology that supports social intelli- gence. Because there is such rich information derived from social media data, social intelli- gence application fragments into a broad variety of functions and involves people across the enterprise. At early stages, social insights impact the PR and marketing teams, then move to teams like customer service and product development to establish more robust social intelligence. These cross-enterprise impacts occur in three main categories:
• Monitoring and Information • Marketing Optimization • Intelligence Across the enterprise”
28 Social ROI
Jim Guzman Head of Social
What is “Social ROI”?
Social ROI is about tracking and measuring the performance of your social media campaigns and activities – does it meet client objectives? Does it help build brand opinion? Does it jus- tify the time and money invested on the platform?
In the end, it’s about seeing how it contributed to the overall success of the brand.
What are the key metrics marketers should focus on?
Understanding the role of social in the marketing mix is key. Only then can marketers pinpoint which platform to activate for each campaign. Social media listening can also glean a wealth of information about a brand’s customers and online reputation, both on their owned social media channels as well as on the web. With these added insights, marketers can optimize their social strategies.
Reach: Are your content and campaigns reaching a wider audience on social?
Engagement: These days, it’s not just about the number of followers on your social media channels, but how many are actually regularly engaged by your content.
Influence: How much did your initiatives affect the mindset – or the purchase behaviour – of your audience on social?
29 Social Selling
Chris J Read CEO and Founder
Defining “Social Selling”
Social selling is all about the CEO being active on social, particularly LinkedIn.
How to utilise your personal brand
It’s about using their personal brand to promote the company by raising their business per- sona on LinkedIn, using their thought leadership and content sharing to stimulate interest and using their personal brand with the LinkedIn Sales Navigator program to gain interest from messages so that the company benefits overall.
It’s what I call the Richard Branson affect. 10m people follow him on LinkedIn. Only 1m follow Virgin Atlantic. People follow him, not the company but his personal brand has a holistically positive effect over all the Virgin companies.
30 Strategic Intelligence
Paul Vivant CEO
The definition
Strategic intelligence is a decision-making tool for the management of companies and or- ganizations. It covers the phases of framing, gathering information, analyzing, sharing and collaborating and disseminating information. Involving iterative processes and a strong col- laboration between watchmen and experts, it must rely on community animation and a pre- cise administration of watch projects. Note that the tools of visualization are more and more present to facilitate the analysis of the data coming from the watch.
The strategic intelligence gathers different types of watch (competitive intelligence, the most current, product watch, technological watch, suppliers watch, legal watch ...).
We talk about strategic intelligence when it focuses on strategic analysis to define the 2- to 10-year orientations for the Codir / Comex; As opposed to tactical intelligence, which on the contrary describes a monitoring device feeding information to the operational staff of the company, “people in the field”.
How to apply it
Competitive intelligence is often one of the major thrusts of strategic intelligence. Some an- alyzes of data, put into perspective and commented by different business experts will be valuable for strategic decision-making.
31 Thus, one of our customers in the electronics sector has collected thousands of job offers from a competitor, for several countries. Using an automatically generated comparison ma- trix, he analyzed them by type of profile and country and noted, for example, that many en- gineering profiles were recruited in Mexico. After a human analysis of the community of watchmen, the Codir was alerted of the strong probability of an increase in the development of production in this country on a new product linked to electromagnetic fields. The Codir then decided to prioritize the final development of competing products.
32 Word of Mouth Marketing
Deborah Holland Chair of the Board
Defining “Word of Mouth Marketing”
Word of mouth marketing relies on conversations, recommendations and social interactions to promote a product, service or idea. This method is more effective than traditional adver- tising in driving sales because a consumer is more likely to trust a friend, peer or respected category expert instead of information from a brand. Although it’s been around since the beginning of time, word of mouth marketing has become amplified with the advent of online social networks.
Word of mouth marketing is any business action that earns a customer recommendation – social, influencers or advocates. The aim is to delight consumers so they will gladly share their stories of exceptional service, outstanding value, superior products and/or a unique community, resulting in earned media exposure that enhances paid media and drives sales.
33 How to apply it
This communication can occur face-to-face, over the phone, online or on social media plat- forms. Endorsements include not only customer testimonials and brand mentions, but also likes, shares, tweets, photos and videos. The ease of sharing content via social media has increased the speed and reach of word of mouth stories, enabling them to become “viral,” indicating rapid market penetration.
Why it’s so powerful
The power of this marketing method has been proven by research that shows an overwhelm- ing majority of consumers rely on customer reviews when considering a purchase and their actions are influenced by their friends’ or other social media posts. Since consumers rely on this information, honesty, transparency and trust are at the core of word of mouth marketing.
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), a non-profit trade organization dedi- cated to the ethical practice of word of mouth marketing, develops standards and guidelines for best practices.
34 www.digimind.com