At Konnect Agency, we pride ourselves on always being forward-thinking, results-driven problem solvers for the brands we represent. Recognizing that the future of marketing does not include a siloed approach to brand strategy and customer acquisition, Konnect Agency has gradually expanded its service offerings over the last several years to include 360* holistic strategies, content creation, full-scale graphics, digital ad strategy, community management, tailored marketing and brand partnership programs, earned and owned media relations, live and virtual events, and robust data-driven measurement and analytics.
Today, we are proud to share that our very own Amanda Bialek (or AB, as we like to call her around here) has been elevated to President of the agency! In this new role, she will be tasked with driving the agency further into these marketing disciplines and overseeing its evolution into a digital marketing agency that offers modern, full-funnel solutions for established and emerging brands. Say that three times fast!
Prior to this appointment, Amanda served as Konnect’s Executive Vice President where she oversaw new staff development programs and mentorship strategies, as well as client relations and overall agency strategy. She is truly one of the backbones of Konnect Agency, and the perfect person to help lead the agency into this exciting new chapter.
Amanda, we could not be happier for the future of the agency under your tried-and-true leadership. Cheers to you on this exciting day!
With love,
Your Konnect Team
TikTok Is Growing. Can Your Brand Keep Up?
There is no doubt TikTok is one of the hottest platforms in the social media landscape. With the continuous roll out of new creators and TikTok influencers, the question that frequently arises on client calls within our digital agency is how brands can crack the code to reach a broad audience and convert more of them into sales through the platform. With Instagram rolling out a variety of e-commerce capabilities and updates, can TikTok keep up and potentially become the future of e-commerce?
The platform known for short-form videos of dancing, comedy, education and more has recently cropped up with a niche and growing category of shopper focused videos. This growing category includes influencers from Instagram’s fashion, beauty and lifestyle realm looking for their slice of the TikTok pie, along with a new set of creators sharing their everyday favorites and creating more organic engagement than Instagram has ever seen.
Compared to Instagram’s platform usability with tagged brands, links to products and shared affiliate codes, TikTok’s sky-high engagement seems to generate a “must-have” mentality and “where did you get this?” comments pop up on videos containing all kinds of products and services.
Back in October, TikTok announced its partnership with e-commerce platform, Shopify. According to a TechCrunch article, “The deal aims to make it easier for Shopify’s over 1 million merchants to reach TikTok’s younger audience and drive sales. The partnership will eventually expand to include other in-app shopping features, as well…” As brands continue using social media platforms to engage consumers and drive them further down the marketing funnel, it’s critical to evaluate the platforms capabilities and weigh them against the brand’s overall goals. Our digital shopper marketing team has been keeping a close eye on the app and its potential to be a disruptive force for brand awareness and sales. With holistic brand campaigns constantly being developed to include everything from challenge hashtags, paid ads, organic influencer seeding along with fully blown out ad campaigns, there really is no one size fits all for every single brands. Some major factors we analyze on an hourly basis include what the brand’s goals are, who it’s trying to target and how the power of social media can be leveraged to make the biggest impact. And we can do it for your brand, too – so what are you waiting for? Become a client.
With the rise in organic engagement, it is a question whether brands should turn the wheels at targeting these TikTok influencers or begin their own platform of viral-worthy videos. In full transparency, hitting viral gold does not happen overnight. A brand we recently saw try to dominate the platform was Chobani and their attempt to launch a new product. The brand sought after a number of well-recognized TikTok influencers and engaged them in a paid campaign to challenge their followers to embark on the hashtag journey. Ultimately, we saw the campaign garner a total of 4.8B views and dominate an audience of adults.
The platform truly dominated by today’s youth has learned to garner millions of views per video. These younger creators have somehow managed to crack the code on starting viral worthy trends and dances that even adults have participated in, heightened through pandemic boredom. So, what exactly are the kids doing that puts them at the top of the list on lucrative partners? I believe the common denominator here is organic, holistic, and non-fluffy content. TikTok users seek the app as a means to distract themselves throughout the day, catch some giggles, and learn a thing or too. In today’s world, Instagram has been the platform stamped with a growing number of paid ads, partnerships and such with consumers on board with the transparency. On the contrary, the TikTok platform is in its fruitful stages of developing these updates and adjustments.
Learning to stand out in a crowd of binge-worthy content is key here. With videos falling in each category, it is quite hard to keep up with trending influencers and trends on the app and even harder creating an organic partnership with its many creators. Also on the rise, are brands looking to hire an entire TikTok department to dominate and reign. So as we circle back to the question as to whether brands can dominate the platform, as a public relations firm, our best practice could be to target TikTok creators and influencers and push their marketing efforts to Instagram as all TikTok creators do still reside on Instagram. This cross-over can help push new audiences, new partnerships, and new niche markets. Through influencer marketing, you can engage your audience and spread your brand to millions, and perhaps billions, of people using these apps on a smartphone.
Let Influencer Marketing Drive Your Consumers Down the Sales Funnel
If this last year taught us anything, it is that no amount of planning or budgeting can account for the unprecedented. As we kick off the new year, digital marketers must continue to adapt their social media strategies in a world grappling with a global crisis, political unrest and an unknown economic future.
Within the past year, there has been a drastic shift in how brands communicate with their customers, largely as a result of the COVID pandemic. While brick and mortar locations shuttered and traditional in-person sales declined, e-commerce thrived as consumers turned to their smart phones, computers and tablets to place their grocery orders on Instacart, order household essentials on Amazon and more. With online sales as one of the main drivers of business growth, social media marketers will need to continually refine their strategies to reach millions of consumers across an ever-increasing number of digital mediums.
For the last decade, influencer marketing has been a successful strategy to drive awareness with key audiences, build trust and create customer loyalty. As businesses continue to focus on sales growth and demand ROI on marketing spend, the influencer marketing industry continues to evolve demonstrating that influencers can contribute at every phase of the consumer decision-making process.
Awareness
Influencers are often associated with the awareness phase of the sales funnel, promoting product launches and largescale campaigns correlated to KPIS like reach and impressions. One of the biggest advantages to partnering with influencers is access to their followers. These audiences are typically made up of people who share similar demographics or interests, making them highly targetable.
A crucial component of influencer marketing is building relationships, evaluating backend analytics and selecting individuals with audiences who are aligned with your brand. Once this is established, marketers can reach their target audience directly, delivering tailored content to consumers who are actively seeking information, advice or inspiration from these influencers.
Taking into consideration that 52% of all online brand discovery still happens in public social feeds, it’s important to develop an influencer content strategy that will create the biggest impact. In addition to the well-established platforms like Facebook and YouTube, audiences on newer platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels continue to increase, indicating that the social algorithm will continue to prioritize video content in 2021.
As brands continue to face mounting pressure from their online communities to be more authentic, marketers will need to continue to reformulate their content strategies, leaning away from sales-driven content to more purposeful content with deeper meaning. Selecting influencer partners who can assist with developing this authentic content will inspire consumer trust, drive broad awareness and ultimately push consumers into the consideration phase of the funnel.
Consideration
The consideration phase is highly focused on repeated exposure. As customers are driven closer towards purchase, influencers can be activated as part of a mid-funnel strategy to generate engagement. Within this phase, there are a number of tactics that influencer marketers can execute to engage key audiences including long-term partnerships, interactive content, and retargeting.
In order to build consumer trust, consider shifting influencer programming away from one-off influencer posts and focusing in on developing ambassador programs. These multi-month programs offer consumers the chance to learn more about a product or service and envision how it could benefit them. Research has shown that people who are exposed to a product or service multiple times are much more likely to develop brand recognition and affinity.
Developing interactive content like Instagram Story polls or hosting co-branded giveaways with influencer partners is another unique way of bringing potential customers into the fold during this phase. In addition to driving followership on brand channels and encouraging user-generated content, these engagement tactics will get your audience excited about the brand or service, hopefully encouraging them to come back to learn more.
Knowing that the social media marketplace is becoming increasingly saturated, a successful influencer programming strategy will include retargeting those who recently engaged with branded influencer content. This is a key tactic in driving people down the funnel especially as 27% of internet users say they find new products and brands through paid social advertisements. Remind your prospective customers about your product or service and how it will benefit them to drive increased curiosity and awareness. Over the past year, consumer behavior has been wildly disrupted. Digital marketers must develop strategies to reinvigorate excitement about their brand or service in “the new normal.” Luckily, social media audiences are captivated like never before as they increasingly turn to social media to forge genuine connections and discover new products. Successful marketing strategies will not only look to influencers as drivers of engagement, but also as valuable brand partners who can provide insights on consumers through 1:1 interactions with their audiences and sampling opportunities.
Conversion: Swipe up… and shop!
Research shows that about 71% of consumers are more likely to make purchases based on social media referrals. While not necessarily peers, influencers are regarded as credible and trustworthy sources of information. With audiences primed for recommendations, these influencers can act as sales drivers influencing the final decision in the consumer buying process.
Activating influencers in the final phase of the funnel typically involves discount codes, digital coupons, coded swipe-up links or conversion ads. While creating unique discount codes for website sales is the most immediate way of tracking influencer ROI for sales, different tactics can be implemented to ladder up to specific brand goals. If you’re looking to increase foot traffic at a local retailer, influencers can activate their audiences to go in-store and purchase using digital coupons. If driving traffic to a website is a key priority, influencers can include coded swipe ups directing their audiences online.
When implemented correctly, influencer programming can guide consumers through an awareness-consideration-buying process ultimately producing brand loyal lifetime customers.
– Maggie Cereghino
Your Brand’s Road Forward: Digital Shopper Marketing
Much like everything else in 2020, digital shopper marketing was transformed in ways that no one could have predicted. While we already knew omnichannel digital strategies were increasing in significance, the rate at which platforms grew quickly pushed traditional shopping ecosystems to merge with digital demand in unprecedented ways. While it may seem counterintuitive, this convergence and the exponential demand for consumers’ already fractured attention spans further splintered the path to reaching shoppers. The primary impact on marketers boils down to an ever-increased focus on ensuring all traditional awareness efforts funnel into some form of e-commerce.
Much like the in-store experience had evolved to influence customers in the aisles, so has online grocery shopping evolved quickly to enable discovery and conversion to sales. We can only assume that many of the behaviors that developed out of necessity over the past year will become a habit – online grocery will swell to 21.5% market share by 2025 – and online marketing will need to meet consumers in the new channels where they are making purchase decisions.
For most of today’s shoppers, research and discovery happen across multiple channels simultaneously. If you stop to think about the last time you purchased something and how you got to the point of filling in your credit card information to place an order, you likely experienced a combination of scanning through Amazon, looking at reviews online, being served ads on mobile, coming across the product on your social media feed, visiting the brand’s website and more before you actually made the purchase. You’re not alone. The ways consumers gain information about products have shifted due to accessibility on mobile devices – 60% of online users have discovered their favorite brands while scrolling on their phones through RSS feeds, e-mails, YouTube videos, text messages or influencer posts on social media. A large percentage of mobile phone users (over 70%) will search for more information on their phone when they see a billboard or television ad. So what does all of this mean?
The ubiquity of mobile devices and social media means that online and offline shopping journeys are extremely fragmented, making it critical to adopt a full funnel strategy that drives awareness and demand across multiple channels simultaneously.
It is now more essential than ever before to employ multi-channel strategies that drive full-funnel results. Imagine the classic customer funnel and think about your customer experience to determine what your options are down the funnel. At the top of the funnel, you are casting a very wide net to capture as many leads as you possibly can. There is no knowing how viable these individuals are as loyal customers, but that will work itself out as you move down the funnel to the most qualified people at the bottom with the highest propensity to purchase your products.
Customer marketing funnels are also not linear and you must consider that no two customer journeys will be the same. A full strategy ensures you reach more shoppers across more touch points to capture all potential paths to purchase. Here is how we think about these paths in simple terms:
- Impulse Buyer – This customer will make a very quick decision to purchase something because it immediately meets a need, and making this happen requires a completely frictionless path to purchase; few of these shoppers convert to purchase immediately unless it’s too easy
- Deliberative Buyer – This customer will spend time reading reviews, seeking out influencer recommendations, and browsing blog posts to really become convinced, and then their purchase must be easy to convert at that moment they are convinced
- The Long Haul Shopper – This customer will continually research, wait for deals, and may even research in-store before deciding to make a purchase; at this point, it is important to understand what will convert this shopper and offer seamless integration of store and online experiences
A full-funnel strategy can help you capture shoppers at various stages along their path to purchase, and it is important not to focus on just one area of the path to maximize the breadth of experiences. If you focus only on down-funnel conversion tactics, you are likely bidding on a more expensive audience, and you are failing to reach those shoppers who already know you well because they started at the upper funnel stages. Likewise, when you focus only on awareness, you miss bringing people down the funnel so they become a paying customer. We may not be able to predict the steps shoppers take before buying a product, but putting together a full-funnel approach is a good framework for engagement and helps you catch customers where they are. When we talk about the stages of our funnel, we typically break it down as follows:
Awareness
This is the point where you educate audiences who may not know your brand and you may pique their interest; measured by impressions and reach your goal is to reach as many people as possible with tactics such as:
- Targeted earned digital media placements (supporting SEO)
- Paid content for a full share of voice in digital media outlets
- Online/in-app display ads and social media advertising to drive awareness
- Community building on social media channels
- Events and surprise-and-delight moments
Consideration
This is where people start to think repeatedly about your brand because you stand out; they spend more time interacting and maybe even start making comparisons to other brands so now you are measured by clicks to the website and engagements; it is important to:
- Stand out with social media content – invest in dynamic content such as video and original graphics
- Be consistent with e-mail marketing, blog content, and third-party reviews, i.e. ratings from influencers
- Refine social media ad targeting to drive traffic to the product website, build awareness of where the product is available via geo-targeting, and build further interaction with content
- Remarketing to your website visitors and lookalike audiences helps ensure they get closer to a decision
Conversion
Now, you can really encourage action because you have enough data about your target customer as they’ve worked their way down the funnel to be able to reach them through advertising, promotions and other actions measured by total conversions and return on ad spend (ROAS)
- Social media and display ad retargeting with crystal clear call to actions will impact lift in stores or drive direct-to-consumer sales
- Influencers become affiliate partners and support sales
- Make sure your products are available to buy before you pay to promote a product and check to ensure your product’s online availability is free of too many steps toward purchase
Full-funnel strategies do not have to be elaborate to be effective. Data-driven programming that supports your customer’s path to purchase requires completing a round of the above tactics, taking the time to evaluate the customer journey, and launching your next marketing effort based on what you’ve learned. Understanding who your customer is and what is important to them will help you connect to your audience and make the most of your marketing budget.
We recommend this approach not only because it helps you build your brand, but because we see more success when our clients hone in on various stages versus a single area. You can start at the top of the funnel or move throughout the funnel with smaller steps, but research suggests that by starting with awareness, your more targeted conversion efforts will be more effective.
Client Announcements
Food & Beverage
Project 7
Project 7 is launching new low-sugar Sour Apple Rings and Sour Gummy Worms to its assortment of whimsical low sugar and low carb candies this month.
Franchise
Noodles & Company
Effective immediately and based off the CDC’s guidance, Noodles & Company is offering four hours of paid time off for its team members to get the COVID-19 vaccinations when they become available.
Lifestyle
LELO
Is it hot in here or is it just your horoscope? LELO launched custom 2021 SexScopes for each zodiac sign with The AstroTwins.
Regalo
Regalo launched two new products: Infant Changing Pad and My Crib Portable Bassinet, both available on regalo-baby.com.
Zesty Paws
Zesty Paws’ newest line of CBD products to aid your pup with its Cognitive and Mobility needs. Available now on ZestyPaws.com Pamper your pets with 20% off sitewide on ZestyPaws.com from now until February 20th.
Keep on Pivoting
Back in the day, and by that, I mean the time before 2020; this was the time of year for making resolutions and setting intentions. As we begin a new year, and turn to 2021 with hopeful yet cautious eyes, the intention I want to set is one of clarity. As we have seen, people don’t do well with uncertainty. And neither do intentions. For a goal or stated intent to work, you have to be clear and then take deliberate and meaningful action.
As we focus on our business, the goal is clear; to continue to adapt our approach and service offerings to help our brand partners rethink business models, reach consumers in new ways, and help build lasting brand legacies. As I reflect on 2020, and how we began to put this intention into practice, I am filled with hope and excitement to continue the journey of adaptability and evolution.
As a full-funnel marketing and communications agency, we have front row seats to the remarkably quick change of consumer behaviors and the need to nimbly meet people where they are. Simply put, our industry has evolved and we have been proud to be involved in much of the shift in how agencies and brands operate together to meet these new (and ever-changing) demands. Below are just a few of the areas that we believe will continue to be indelible parts of a brand’s communications and business strategy:
- Digital, digital and more digital. It is no longer enough to have a website with a store locator, a presence on Amazon and a social account that gets updated occasionally. A brand’s digital footprint must be well planned out and strategically curated to give customers the least amount of friction to engaging with and purchasing your product. Brand discovery only begins with Google search results or landing on your Instagram page. The entire footprint of your brand online from availability via online retailers to your ability to handle your own fulfilment and shipping via your website, and the added value to the consumer in the form of blog posts, informational videos, recipes, etc. is all a crucial part of getting your customer to trial and then loyalty. Digital presence is no longer an afterthought or something you dabble in. It must be committed, consistent, persuasive and hassle free.
- Pivoting is the buzzword we all need to take to heart. Gone are the days of fixed long term plans when what we have learned this year is that we have to run businesses and lives that are utterly flexible, changeable and easy to adjust to – no matter what. The more flexible the planning – and the more options – the better. This past year, our Konnect team worked with many businesses as they adapted quickly from retail only to developing digital commerce presence. Companies who re-assessed what they needed to do in order to not just survive but thrive by investing in multi-channel marketing, diversifying product offering, and realizing that every plan A needs a plan B and maybe even a plan C. With flexibility and willingness to pivot, we saw many brands succeed beyond expectations and even find new avenues for growth.
- Lead with positive thinking. Sure, the world around us is making it tough and the current economic outlook is anything but sunny – but focusing on the negative isn’t going to serve us well. We all know that some of the most successful companies have come out of the most difficult and challenging times, and they did so by choosing to innovate, find new opportunities and embrace changes we may have once thought impossible. At the end of the day, it is the people who choose to think and act with positivity even when reality is quite harsh that end up finding a way forward and coming out ahead.
I hope that as you start this New Year of 2021, clear intentions made with positive thinking will guide your way, you’ll be prepared for whatever the world throws at you, and you’ll know that we are here as your partner in what’s ahead.
Happy New Year,
Sabina Gault
