Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

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How social marketing can work for retail brands

The study, entitled 'The Power of Like - Europe', examined European retail brands such as ASOS, H&M, La Redoute, Topshop and Zara, based on data and insights from comScore's Social Essentials and AdEffx research products. Among the main insights revealed by the study:

• On Facebook in the UK, France and Germany, 32% of a user's time is spent on the Homepage/News Feed - the primary location where branded content is consumed. While the News Feed is the main driver of branded exposure on Facebook relative to the brand page, only a small portion of Fans see content from a brand in a given week (across retail and other categories).
• Branded marketing messages delivered to Fans can be virally amplified to extend brand reach to Friends of Fans when Fans engage with the message (i.e. 'Like', comment, share, check-in, and so on). The brands studied have the ability to disseminate marketing messages to up to 44 Friends of Fans for every Fan the brand has on Facebook.
• Friends of Fans often have slightly different demographic profiles to the core Fan base of a brand. Understanding where the differences lie provides brands the ammunition to strategically target these demographics and help engage them as consumers, and even drive them into the physical or online stores.
• Fans and Friends of Fans of retail brands (and other categories' brands) often represent higher value customers. For example, ASOS fans were 3.6 times as likely to visit the ASOS website than non-fans, which may be expected given their stated affinity for the brand. However, Friends of Fans were 2.7 times as likely to visit the site as well, which suggests not only inherent similarities between the Fan and Friend of Fan groups but also the persuasive effect of earned media exposure on Friends of Fans.

Not only were social impressions effective at generating positive brand engagement for ASOS, but paid impressions were also effective and achieving behavioural lifts. Facebook paid ads generated 130% uplift in purchase behaviour on the ASOS website in the four weeks following ad exposure in comparison to consumers who were not exposed but had a similar affinity to ASOS (in terms of site visitation and purchase) as the test group in the four weeks prior to the advertising campaign.

According to Mike Shaw, director of marketing solutions for comScore, "With a framework for measuring the value and impact of paid and earned media campaigns, brands can gain the insights needed to optimise their social marketing efforts. While every campaign is unique and may vary in overall effectiveness, these results show how Facebook marketing can be effective in reaching consumers and influencing their actual purchase behaviour."

Have you seen The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook?

This comprehensive and practical guide to the latest ideas in customer-focused marketing hands you over 200 packed pages of strategy, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and ideas to optimise your marketing strategy, boost sales, market share, increase ROI and profit.

Learn the insider's tricks and techniques to turn every customers into a 'super spreader' for your brand. It's better than free advertising. Once you start this ball rolling, your brand can grow rapidly through word-of-mouth, advocacy, influencers, and customer loyalty. Super-charge your company's marketing strategy, build up your market share, and make more sales through repeat business and customer loyalty.

Find out what works - and what doesn't - and who's succeeded, and how they did it. See how the world's top brands keep their competitive edge against all odds.

The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook walks you step-by-step through the techniques, metrics, reporting, analysis, marketing models, technologies, tools and innovations for successful marketing strategies - both traditional and emerging - with expert guidance from thought leaders in every major market. Find out the best ways to gather, analyse, and act on customer data to increase profitability, build your brand, empower your customers, beat the competition, reduce churn, and increase customer profitability. This is a marketing book you simply can't afford to be without.

This book aims to hand you all the facts, figures and research data you need for the best decisions for a more profitable, more engaging marketing strategy. It also highlights all the facts, forecasts and trends identified by our experts from the global Marketing Factbook's vast database of market data, news, studies, research and articles, and presents you with an invaluable library of ideas and practical support you can call upon at will.

With The Customer-Focused Marketing Playbook at your side, you'll have instant access to a true goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, research and market data, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid, profitable marketing strategy.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)