How Influence Works in Brand New Ways - Conversation2Commerce

ContentsSECTION 1

03 Anywhere & everywhereBy claiming new omnichannel powers and exhibiting tangible sales impact, influence now reigns supreme in the new world of digital communications

06 Influence: By the numbersA compilation of data on topics ranging from influence’s vital role during the customer journey to the impact of social media influence on online shopping trends in various countries

08 Game changersA chronological review of recent campaigns that underscore how certain brands have wielded real influence that has directly impacted consumer behavior

09 Opportunity for true integrationAs various marketing disciplines seek to break down silos, programmatic targeting is emerging as a tool that enables them to support each other and create maximum influence

SECTION 2

10 Rethinking how influence flowsA look at how earned content, which PR pros have long known brings tremendous value, can achieve its full potential

11 Earned content goes omnichannelIntroducing the Conversation2Commerce platform, which enables brands to scale influence and target it programmatically

12Turning conversation into commerceHow Conversation2Commerce works

13 Reaping the rewardsFive ways marketers can substantially benefit from the Conversation2Commerce platform

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Today’s influence has become crucial

to the bottom line

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Anywhere & everywhereInfluence stands atop the new world of digital communications. In its rise, it has shattered the traditional world order in the communications industry, claiming new omnichannel powers and remarkable sales potential

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With origins in the world of public relations, influence is bringing new respect to the indus-try and driving new interest among marketers. Influence comes from anywhere and every-where. It’s what your neighbor thinks. What the car reviewer says. What the mommy blog-ger recommends. These spark trends, cause actions, and can determine the fame and fortunes of brands around the world. This is not your father’s influence. It’s not even your big brother’s or sister’s influence. It’s totally modern. It’s digital. It’s tech-driven. And yes, it’s based around earned media and content. What’s new is that it means business, literally millions in revenue. Today’s influence has become so crucial to the bottom line that advertisers, digital experts, and media buyers are all looking at it critically. The great news is that some of the top thinkers from around the world are engaged. For the PR pro who is not used to this new-found attention, the question is how to best collaborate on joint solutions. For those who are industry insiders, this isn’t surprising. Our content has always been the most credible and authoritative.

HOW INFLUENCE WORKS IN BRAND NEW WAYS SECTION 1

Before social media – and, yes, hard as it is to believe, there was life before social media – customer opinions were certainly vital to every brand, but the avenues by which companies would get that feedback were limited to the store or the phone.

Today, consumers talk about you 24-7, 365. It’s a never- ending conversation where opinions and ideas are shared about your brand. Those conversations, which shape fellow consumers’ opinions and can directly impact their actions, take place with or without you – so you better be a part of it and be ready to act upon it.

Why? Because every single person involved in those conversations has influence. Today, customers are influ-encers with the power to change your brand’s fortunes more than ever before.

Relationships still hold the keysAbove all else, brands must understand that they no longer can control the message because consumers are increasingly skeptical of anything that feels contrived. But even with letting go, brands can maintain enough control to feel comfortable.

The key: relationships. A great way to create relation-ships with consumers is to build relationships with the right influencers. Obviously, research needs to be done to identify those key individuals, but once you do, you have an avenue to current and potential customers.

One really smart way to go about this is for a brand to hook up with an influencer outside its niche. As Stephanie McCratic, CEO of Acorn: An Influence Company, told PRWeek in it’s “The New Influencers”

feature this past February: “Some-times, when a message comes from an unexpected source, if it is con-nected to that source in a smart way, it is really strong and lasting.”

She went on to note that such influencers can truly impact a broad swath of consumers because any person who would deviate from their usual content to discuss a product outside it must really love that product.

Tell a great story; create a unique experienceOne thing a brand can still control directly is the narrative it builds about itself. With brand content, nothing trumps good stories. They are so influential because they tap emotions that stay with a consumer right up until that moment of purchase and beyond. Stories are also a gateway to what consumers really want out of brands – and will want more of in the future: experiences.

One thing a brand can still control directly is the narrative it builds about itself

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Customers are influencers with the power to change your brand’s fortunes


more powerful when told by others.Of course, a new mandate brands have to meet is the consistent development of new influencers. Savvy consumers will quickly recognize when a brand sticks with the same influencer for a long period of time. Eventually, people will tune them out, too.

And going back to relationships, a trend that will have to continue in the near and distant future: marketing disciplines will have to increasingly work together to ensure maximum brand influence.

Numerous questions remain. What kind of content delivers the most influence to drive a specific

consumer action? What role can technology play in the delivery and spread of influence? How can influence be scaled and targeted to the right consumers? How can it be measured?

The real advancement in the science of influence may come from the sophisticated re-engineering of how influence spreads.

The important new solution out-lined on later pages (beginning on p. 11) is designed to help brands over-come two key obstacles to influence: the lack of scale for the best brand stories and the difficulty in ensuring it reaches the right targets at the right place and time to drive action.

Live inside the mind of the modern consumerMillennials are an obviously crucial demographic as they now have more than $200 billion in annual buying power. This is a group that will maintain – and grow – its purchasing power for the foreseeable future. So if you want your marketing communications efforts to succeed, this is perhaps the most vital group upon which to focus.

So what impacts their buying decisions? A recent Forbes study uncovered some interesting findings:

Brands no longer sell products. They sell experiences. They offer a path to feel a certain way. They empower consumers to change their worlds. Lists of specs and stats will never accomplish that. Only stories can.

However, stories need to be relevant to each individual recipient. Stories need to be told in a manner that empowers influencers to tell them in their own words. And if brands establish relationships in the manner referenced earlier, they can ensure their stories remain true to the brand, regardless of who is telling them and how they are told.

When influence sparks, spark it againPR pros are often focused on the initial get – the story, the blog post, the customer or influencer-created content. But what happens when the campaign succeeds and results in some powerful – and influential – earned media or earned content? Most pros today resort to an amplification strategy, ensuring other influencers see and share the post.

However, amplification has become much more sophisticated than it was even just a few short years ago. This is where paid media colleagues can come in with advanced solutions – such as programmatic buying – that allow the best content to be properly scaled and targeted to drive com-merce. (For more on this, see p. 9.)

An exciting new futureA number of rising trends are destined to shape influence in new ways. Authenticity will remain a huge mandate as brands seek to influence consumers – and a key path to authenticity, at least how the public perceives it, is working with influencers to drive consumer trust. Brands will increase efforts to help position influencers in manners that will help both their own brand and the individual influencer stand out.

Taken a step further, brands will increasingly focus on amplifying influencer voices, again, understand-ing that their messages become

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62% say that if a brand engages with them on social networks, they are more likely to become loyal customers

60% are brand loyal, which means the rewards for building connections and relationships with millennials can reap benefits for decades to come

42%are interested in helping companies develop future products and services. This is an inviting opening for brands to enable their customers

A third rely mostly on blogs before they make a purchase, compared to fewer than 3% for TV news, magazines, and books

43% value authenticity over content when consuming information. Trust must be established before they even read a brand’s content


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Initial gathering of information

70% of consumers become aware of products from sources unaffiliated with a retailer (i.e. family, friends, third-party influencers, etc.)

Research/narrowing down options

67% of shoppers browse retail sites, but 61% also use search engines

Product selection

67% of consumers read product reviews from various sources outside the brand

The actual purchase (locating, buying, and taking possession)

13% of shoppers buy online and pick up at the store, but 25% indicate they will use this method going forward

70% of people prefer to learn about products through content, as opposed to traditional ads (Source: Inc., 2015)

3.2Websites that contain validated reviews convert 3.2 times more than those that don’t (Source: Reevoo, 2015)

How editorial content, such as articles, impacts consumers in each generation (Source: Nielsen, 2015)

66%of global respondents trust editorial content, such as articles (Source: Nielsen, 2015)

Influence during the customer journey

Social media influence – across the globeConsumers in various countries were asked whether online reviews, comments, and feedback influenced their online shopping behavior.

The impact of earned mediaData gleaned by various sources underscores the power earned content, such as articles, has on consumers of all generations.

Matters of trustWith online reviews being such a powerful influencer on consumers, it is more vital than ever to ensure their authenticity. In addition, data indicates that negative reviews – to a point – are not necessarily bad for brands as they enhance a general sense of authenticity:

Source: Deloitte (2015)

Source: PwC, Total Retail Survey, 2016

Influence: By the numbers

India: 66%

China: 63%

Brazil: 56%

Mexico: 55%

South Africa: 52%

United States: 40%

United Kingdom: 33%

Global: 45%

68%

Gen Z (ages 15-20)

71%of shoppers read consumer reviews before making a purchase, but 70% of US consumers have questioned the trustworthiness of reviews on the web (Source: Bazzarvoice)

66% of global consumers trust consumer opinions posted online (Source: Nielsen)

44% of US consumers would be more trusting of reviews if they saw a

trust mark and accompanying description of anti-fraud policies (Source: Bazzarvoice)

4.2 to 4.5 Average rating on items at which point purchasing peaked (Source: PowerReviews and North-western University’s Medill IMC Spiegel Digital & Database Research Center)

68%

Millennials (ages 21-34)

66%

Gen X (ages 35-49)

60%

Baby Boomers

(ages 50-64)

55%

Silent Generation (ages 65+)

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Influence: By the numbers

The following data indicates the percentage of in-store retail sales influenced by shoppers’ use of any digital device in both China and the US. Additional data reports on in-store retail sales

specifically influenced by shoppers’ use of web-enabled mobile devices, including smartphones

Digital/mobile influence by sector

Apparel

Automotive

Baby/toddler products

Electronics

Entertainment

Food/beverage

Home furnishings

Digital: 63.8%Mobile: 37.5%




Digital: 57.7%Mobile: 33%



Digital: 49%Mobile: 30%







Source: Deloitte Consulting, LLP – “Navigating the new digital divide: Addressing the evolving needs of Chinese customers” and “Navigating the new digital divide: Capitalizing on digital influence in retail” (both 2015)

2010Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”

The original Wieden+Kennedy ad in February 2010 set social and main-stream media ablaze. But it was the subsequent videos created for YouTube where the actor directly responded to personalized tweets in real time that really hit home. Sales jumped 55% in the first three months following the campaign launch.

2013Oreo “You can Still Dunk In The Dark”

Oreo scored a touchdown during the 2013 Super Bowl with some brilliant real-time marketing that was enabled by preparedness. Having already aired a TV ad during the game, Oreo set up a mission control team with executives who could approve things instantly if an opportunity arose. When the power went out in New Orleans, the brand pounced. It was a very creative tweet – deemed by many pundits the best “ad” of the game – but it was made possible because Oreo was ready to act.

2011Diesel’s “I Like Diesel” Campaign

A 2010 eMarketer report noted that 68% of consumers were more likely to buy with a positive Facebook friend referral. Enter this great – and at the time standout – initiative, where the fashion brand successfully pushed content from the real world into customers’ social streams. Diesel combined Facebook and QR codes to link consumers in their stores with their friends online.

2014Always #LikeAGirl

P&G changed the conversation with this campaign. Always uncovered the insight that more than half of girls experience a drop in confidence during puberty, and many never fully recover. Always took on a common playground expression, documented its debilitating power, and reinterpreted the phrase #LikeAGirl with fresh and inspiring meaning. A huge confidence movement around young girls blossomed over-night and organically, creating an historic shift in the conversation around the globe while also lifting the brand.

2012Lay’s “Do Us a Flavor”

This combination of crowdsourcing and Facebook is a testament to the impact direct consumer involvement can have on product marketing and development. Celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2012, Frito-Lay welcomed consumers to help create its next chip flavor, which was Cheesy Garlic Bread in that inaugural year. Year-on-year sales rose 12% and the brand has continued the annual contest ever since.

2015Burberry’s Snapchat Pre-Show

In an unprecedented move, the high-end fashion company shared its entire 2016 spring and summer line digitally on Snapchat a day before last fall’s London Fashion Week launch. Along with offering an early look at their designs – something consumers always will appreciate – the brand was able to tell a story about its collections. In an age of storytelling, this move generated major millennial buzz. And in another ode to influence: other brands now livestream their fashion shows, thus underscoring how Burberry changed the game.

Game changersWhile brand messaging is no longer solely in the hands of the companies themselves, a recent look back reveals campaigns that underscore how brands wield real influence, in many cases directly impacting consumer behavior

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8JsvwUcok0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8JsvwUcok0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jw9RSXaTFhA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OZmbBPym1k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OZmbBPym1k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjJQBjWYDTs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNdS1tIPsqY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNdS1tIPsqY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yobaN2mesU



Performance marketing is the most measurable, transparent, and accountable form of marketing to drive incremental impact and ROI faster and at scale. One aspect of this is programmatic media buying, simply defined as a way to specifically target the audience you wish to see your advertising. It is a drastic change from traditional ad buying, as brands are no longer locked into a set number of spots on specific sites. It is basically an algorithmic purchase in real time.

There is no doubt programmatic buying is the future. According to the Interactive Advertising Bureau, by 2018 programmatic spend will have grown from 28% in 2013 to more than 80% of marketing spend.

Most discussions about pro-grammatic tend to focus on the ad side, but there are numerous aspects of the process where the

strengths of marketing and PR can be brought into play to make it more effective – and influential.

Speak to your audienceThe advertising world has never lacked for creative brilliance, but it has not always focused with the same level of rigor on where the beautiful ads were placed. What was missing was data that could help us understand the precise target and where that individual was in their purchase journey.

Performance marketing enables us to leverage multiple data sets so the precise right message can be targeted programmatically to a specific individual at the right time in his or her purchase journey. All of this literally happens in seconds.

As programmatic spending has increased, ad-side professionals have come to realize the importance

of delivering relevant content to drive deeper audience engagement – something innate in PR.

In-the-moment thinkingPerhaps the greatest area where advertising can tap into the strengths of its PR and marketing brethren is the ability to turn on a dime with creative.

Oreo’s highly acclaimed “You can still dunk in the dark” tweet epitomized the ability of marcomms to instantly react to a real-world event and engage consumers with fresh, ultra-relevant content. Traditional advertising could never be so in the moment. But that’s changing.

With programmatic, brands have fundamentally shifted from buying ad space to buying a target customer wherever they are online. This literally occurs at scale in milliseconds on an almost impression-by-impression basis. This speed represents a big shift in advertising, but it is something their partners on the marcomms side have been living for years. We can show them how to prepare for such instances and be ready to offer up dynamic creative and offers at a moment’s notice.

The big newsProgrammatic is here to stay because, regardless of the discipline, the need to reach consumers on an individual level is crucial to the bottom line. And technology enables that to happen in ways never thought possible.

It’s the ultimate way to influence consumers to action. And on the succeeding pages you will be introduced to an important new offering that will enable your brand to deliver influence in a more targeted way than ever before. And this platform is designed to help brands overcome two key obstacles to influence: the lack of scale for even the best brand stories and the difficulty in ensuring that influence reaches the right targets at the right place and time.

The rise of programmatic targeting exemplifies how various disciplines can truly support each other to create maximum influence

Opportunity for true integration

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Programmatic targeting enables brands to reach individual buyers at the optimal moments


Positive earned content has great value because it is pure. In that purity, there is power

For more than a century, PR professionals have worked to earn credibility and trust by convincing reporters, third parties, and influencers to share a point of view or validate a truth. As every communicator knows, there is tremendous value in positive earned – read: not paid for – content. It is pure. And in that purity there is power.

Research shows that media coverage, influencer content, ratings, and reviews are among the most credible, believable, and influential type of content. They remain the top drivers of purchase consideration, affinity, and familiarity.

Maximum impactStill, despite its clear value to marketers, earned content has traditionally fallen short of achieving its true potential.

For a PR professional, a great story is an important achievement, but in the new world order of communications, the story can’t be seen as an end unto itself. Moreover, most earned content doesn’t scale in a predictable way, meaning there’s no built-in mechanism to ensure it is seen by a larger audience, gets viewed multiple times, or is put in front of people at the precise moment of decision-making. This deficiency prevents it from achieving the commerce returns that are most valuable to marketers.

What’s more, some marketers still struggle to provide measurable omnichannel communications plans that integrate earned,

owned, and paid content. They can measure the results of owned and paid content, but it remains difficult to link earned content to a clear and obvious increase in commerce.

Because of this, many marketers and communicators consign earned content to “air cover” – a “nice to have.” Sure, it may stimulate some

buzz, but it’s not playing a critical role in the communications mix. That simply is not acceptable in today’s marketing mix. These limitations have put the PR industry on a decades-long defensive. It’s the age-old “PR paradox.”

But when you turn to the next page, you will see there is a solution……

Earned content delivers 7 to 10 times the ROI paid media does in most media mix models. And earned content has staying power. It can be relevant days, weeks, and sometimes even years after it first appears

Rethinking how influence flows

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In response to the underutilization of influence in the marketing mix, MSLGROUP, in conjunction with Publicis Communications and Public Media, has launched an influence-to-impact performance platform that combines aspects of public relations, advertising, digital, and shopper marketing. Called Conversation2Commerce, this communications platform extracts far greater influence from earned content than could ever happen naturally or through manual hit- or-miss amplification.

Conversation2Commerce places earned content at the core of the communications mix to help realize enormous gains of mindshare and market share. Through its powerful platform, it uses performance

marketing to scale influence and target it programmatically. For the first time, earned influence can be combined with specific offers for omnichannel distribution. The result is a platform that can have a predictable and measurable impact on a client’s business.

The Conversation2Commerce platform works not only for b-to-c consumer marketing and new product launches reaching millions of people, but it’s also just as effective for highly targeted b-to-b and b-to-g initiatives. These services will be marketed under the Conversation2Credibility name.

By expanding and targeting the reach of the most important messages to the right people at the right time, the platform strongly supports reputation management, executive visibility, employee engagement, corporate social responsibility, education campaigns, issues and crisis management, and nonprofit communications, as well as consumer marketing.

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By using the latest technologies and integrated thinking, Conversation2Commerce addresses the key drawback to earned content and influence by completely re-engineering how it flows. This will allow PR professionals to make a stronger contribution to our clients’ business goals

As the barriers between the disciplines in communications continue to erode, this platform is one of the best examples of how true integrated thinking can bring new value to clients. C2C is integrated by birth: as one of the most-integrated agencies, we have worked together with our paid, shopper, advertising, and digital sister agencies inside Publicis Groupe to develop the platform”

Guillaume Herbette, CEO, MSLGROUP

New technologies and more integrated thinking are allowing a modern and dynamic version of traditional PR influence to take root. This modern-day approach to influence marketing effectively unlocks, scales, and targets the flow of influence in order to improve brand positions and grow commerce across channels”

Erin Lanuti, chief influence strategist, MSLGROUP

Earned content goes omnichannel: Introducing the Conversation2Commerce Platform

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Turning conversation into commerce

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In operation, the Conversation2Commerce platform is quite simple. It quickly converts a strong piece of earned content into an “earned content unit” – a clickable online ad built around the story’s headline.

It is accompanied by a powerful brand-owned visual. A click on the ad takes the reader back to the actual piece of earned content in its original environment, where it is perfectly positioned to exert its credible influence.

The earned content unit can be distributed programmatically to the precise person at the right time via other paid media solutions. We can then apply the same universal measurements to earned media that would be applied to paid media.

Below we provide an overview of the typical engagement process using the Conversation2Commerce platform.


IDENTIFY

CredibleInfluence

An Influence To Impact Performance Platform

AMPLIFY

PerformanceMedia, SEO and

Shopper Marketing

CREATE

Content andAdvocacy

MEASURE

Brand Relevanceand Commerce

Reaping the rewardsConversation2Commerce from MSLGROUP places earned content at the center of integrated communications campaigns, harnessing the power of this influence to drive growth in brand and commerce. Marketers benefit from the Conversation2Commerce platform in these ways:

1 Influential earned content is turned into commerce and brand liftEarned content is not yesterday’s news – it’s the fuel for tomorrow’s marketing engine. This form of influence helps guide peer recommendations that lead to a 2X sales increase compared to traditional advertising.

2 The platform is turnkeyConversation2Commerce is an influence platform that enables you to turn earned content into a commerce amplifier quickly and easily.

3 Integrated thinking is built insideThe built-in intelligence of the Conversation2Commerce platform integrates the expertise of all the people on your marketing team – your experts from PR, advertising, digital, research, analytics, shopper marketing, as well as from your agency and your own team.

4 Marketers can react opportunisticallyReal-time influence has finally hit the rocket age. Only a powerful, process like Conversation2Commerce can bring scale and impact to the influence of earned content so quickly – in hours, not days.

5 Business RESULTS and ROI from earned content can be achieved in ways that were simply not possible beforeConversation2Commerce produces a much higher ROI from your communications budget by programmatically combining specific offers and actions with influence in a manner that is predictable and measurable.

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We intend to keep our efforts in a perpetual state of beta, continually looking for new and better breakthrough solutions to connect influence to commerce”Erin Lanuti, chief influence strategist, MSLGROUP

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Introducing Conversation2Commerce

To learn more about how Conversation2Commerce can boost your brand and commerce, contact:

Erin B. LanutiChief Influence [email protected]

MSLGROUP375 Hudson StreetNew York, NY 10014+1 646 500 7600

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