Micro-influencers make the Instaworld go ‘round. They are the army of social media users who don’t have millions of followers – or even hundreds of thousands of followers – but they know how to communicate with and get their followers to take action. And that’s what’s important.

In this post, I want to break down for you who micro-influencers are in 2019, the value they bring to brands and marketers, and specifically how you can best leverage the power of micro-influencers in your next campaign.

Remind Me Again… What is a Micro-Influencer?

Okay. Okay. Okay.

Dr. Jonah Berger defines influencers as: Individuals who work in their category or are truly knowledgeable, passionate and authentic and are seen as a trusted source when it comes to recommendations for what to buy.

That’s a pretty comprehensive definition, I think. But just as there are levels of influence there are tiers of influencers. Influencer subcategories (like unfluencer, nano-influencer, micro-influencer, macro-influencer and mega-influencer) are defined primarily by the size of the influencer’s audience.

For several years, marketers agreed (for the most part) that social media users become micro-influencers when they grow their followings to at least 3,000 users. But with the growth of the nano-influencer, the definition of micro-influencer has changed a bit.

Today, nano-influencers are those with followings between 1,000 and 10,000 followers. Micro-influencers now have between 10,000 and 50,000 (to 100,000) followers. But it really does depend on who you ask and when you ask them.

For most brands and marketers, the most important thing to know about micro-influencers is that they typically have tens of thousands of followers as well as good, consistent engagement ratios. That’s the important part.

The Micro-Influencer vs Joe Blow

Before you roll your eyes and say “That’s not enough followers”, I want to make sure brands and marketers are giving proper credence to these numbers.

I saw a stat just today on Work Macro that said the average Instagram user has 150 followers (jaw drop!). According to Brandwatch, the average Facebook user has 338 followers and Twitter users average 707 followers. Jeff Bullas lists the average number of LinkedIn connections as 930 per user.

Now, I think the Instagram one’s skewed a bit because a lot of Facebook users have Instagram accounts that Facebook automatically created for them and many of these accounts have gone unclaimed (though I was surprised to see my octogenarian uncle Charles claimed his IG account and posts regularly – he’s the exception, not the rule.).

So, that number on Instagram may be a little higher for active users. Still, if you look at the average number of followers the typical social media user has across the other three major platforms, you can place a pretty safe bet that the average Instagram user (including Uncle Charles) has less than 1,000 followers.

I said all of that to say this:

Legitimately achieving the status of micro-influencer is an accomplishment that required a substantial investment of time, money and other resources from the influencer.

For all the ra-ra, very few social media users achieve the designation of macro- or mega-influencer. Only 1.6 percent of Instagram users have between 500,000 and 1 million followers. Greater perspective – the total number of Instagram users with more than 50,000 followers account for just 8 percent of the all Instagram users.

So, while our constant chatter about influencer marketing may make it seem like every mom you meet is an Instafamous mommy blogger, it’s just marketing.

The Benefits of Partnering with a Micro-Infuencer

Coming out the gate, a lot of brands and marketers gravitated toward the biggest influencers they could afford for their campaigns. Makes sense – if you want to reach the most people with your message you have to go wide. And targeting went by the wayside.

But marketers quickly figured out that even the most eloquent influencer campaign will fail if it’s targeting all the wrong folks.

So, the goal became finding ways to make influencer campaigns more effective at drumming up ongoing engagement.

There are a few things about micro-influencers that can really shape an influencer marketing campaign so it has more impact.

Micro-Influencers Have More Targeted Audiences

Micro-influencers tend to create content consistently about the same topic, whether that topic happens to be meatless recipes, special effects makeup, or being a #girlmom x4.

In fact, one of the key recommendations for anyone starting an Instagram account with the intention of growing (and possibly monetizing) their audience is to focus on a specific topic or vertical so followers know what to expect from you.

Ugh. What if I want to talk about other stuff?

Well, that’s cool, too. It’s not really about putting you in a box, BUT think about how and why you follow accounts on social media: You typically won’t follow an account with no profile picture, or no posts, or random images of women and seascapes or whatever. You follow accounts that make sense to you.

In social [media] situations, users want to understand the VALUE an account delivers BEFORE they will follow it. So, for micro-influencers (just like for small businesses), specializing in one thing helps you get really good at storytelling in that vertical AND helps people get what you’re about. Bottom line: You need to be relatable.

As influencers become more well-known and attract more followers, we’ve seen it where they’ll start exploring other topics (lifestyle influencers). But in general, people follow other people on Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook to get a specific type of content.

For instance, I like @Zurifx because it’s fun to scroll through her pics. But most of the accounts I follow are either about business or about being a mom. That’s my language. Still, this is pretty cool.

There are cross-sections like that within the audience of every single influencer – people who think that one thing an influencer does is pretty cool, even if they are generally interested in something altogether different. I’m not super into special effects makeup, but I’m fascinated by Zurifx is able to create with it.

My thing is more topics that directly relate to moms of school-aged kids like home decor, healthy snacks for kids, working from home, successfully momming… those are the types of accounts that appeal to me. I’m also partial to hustle culture and marketing info. But here’s the thing…

Were a situation to arise in which I need this kind of makeup, Zurifx’s page would be my go-to for sourcing ideas, tips for creating different looks, and product recommendations.

Micro-Influencers Tend to Have Higher Engagement Ratios

Micro-Influencers with smaller follower numbers typically have higher engagement ratios than larger influencers who may have hundreds of thousands of followers. The primary reason for this is just what we talked about before – niche content.

Niche content draws a niche following of people who talk about the same things, are excited by the same things, and who can create dialogs within the community around a single post.

This post from @keto.nation_ generated more than 3500 Likes and 250+ comments about keto-friendly ice creams. But if you look at the type of comments made, you’ll probably get a better understanding of what I mean by followers creating meaningful dialog around a single post.

The larger an influencer’s following get, the more diverse the audience becomes. I’m not even talking about influencers who buy followers and how weird those audiences turn out to be. But for someone who has put in the work or someone who’s taking their existing following to Instagram or one of the other social media platforms, the larger that audience is, the more diverse and less targeted the audience will be.

Micro-Influencers Cost Less

One of the most obvious advantages to partnering with micro-influencers instead of larger influencers is the cost. A micro-influencer will typically charge less for the same type of content than macro and mega influencers.

Note: I made that distinction because different content types demand different rates – YouTube is going to be more produced and thus more expensive than Instagram Stories, for instance. And video will typically cost more than pictures.

Micro-Influencers Are UGC Machines

One of the most valuable products of any influencer campaign is user-generated content. We find that MOST of our clients include UGC as one of their campaign goals. When that’s the case, we will typically recommend using micro-influencers to give brands a wide variety of UGC from lots of different influencers. That variety is important, especially if brands want UGC to reuse across their own branded channels.

Why micro-influencers and not macro-influencers for UGC campaigns? Cost and output. For the amount of money brands would invest partnering with a single macro-influencer who would produce one or two pieces of content for the campaign, they can often use that same amount to bring in two, five, or even ten micro-influencers for the cost of a single macro-influencer.

It’s Easier to Get Content Rights

One of the HUGE things that a lot of brands don’t consider enough is getting the rights to their paid content. Now, Emily recently wrote a post on UGC rights and how important it is (and tough it can be) to get the rights needed to reuse your sponsored content on your own social media channels.

You may be surprised by the requirements and restrictions some macro-influencers will tell you about reusing content you’ve paid them to create. With micro-influencers, you are far more likely to be able to negotiate the right to use sponsored content across your own branded channels as well as in your PPC campaigns WITHOUT having to keep shelling out royalties to the influencer.

How to Vet Micro-Influencers

Finding the right influencer for your campaign is really about identifying the influencers who are most likely to deliver positive campaign results.

So, yeah… it includes stuff like making sure your influencer has good engagement and talks about the right stuff. But it also includes stuff like making sure the influencer you choose isn’t buying likes or blog traffic.

Of course, we’ve talked about this topic in a couple of different posts. Our Co-founder, Lauren deals with stuff like fraud detection, fake blog traffic, and fake engagement in the post she wrote How to Vet Potential Blogger and Influencer Partners.

So, let’s reserve this section for pointing out some of the qualities and assets your micro-influencer SHOULD have.

Influencer Is Posting Regularly

Like anyone, influencers get busy. Sometimes they take time off or will, for whatever reason, take a break from posting consistently. It’s not unusual to come across an influencer you like and discover she’s only been posting twice a month for the last few months. Happens.

But you want to make sure to partner with an influencer who is active on the platform where your campaign will be running. Remember… algorithms show posts from a platform’s users based on continued engagement. When people stop engaging with an account, it reduces the chances an influencer’s new posts will show up in everybody’s feed.

Engagement Ratio Tops 2 Percent

Look for influencers who maintain an average engagement ratio of at least two percent. For larger influencers, 1.5 percent is pretty standard.

I’ll be the first to admit, Instagram engagement isn’t what it used to be two or three years ago. As more and more users flock to the platform and Facebook pushes more to require brands to run paid ads to get the reach they need, it becomes less and less likely that droves of people will see branded posts.

But engagement is an important metric of actual influence because it gauges the responsiveness of both the influencer and his/her audience.

Brand Affinity Aligns with Your Target Demo

An influencer’s conversation on Instagram, Facebook, and other social platforms will tell you a lot about not just what the influencer likes, but also about the type of audience that your campaign will end up in front of.

So, you have to take into consideration not just which vertical an influencer occupies, but also which brands an influencer likes, which brands the influencer talks about, and which brands the influencer actually buys.

Take, for example, the screenshot below. The influencer on the left is hip and well-dressed, but her style of dress is edgier and will clearly appeal to a different demographic than the influencer on the right, who prefers a more professional style.

Successful Past Collaborations with Other Brands

While this isn’t essential, it can be a great way to gauge their suitability and professionalism. We recommend checking their feeds to see what posts they have marked with #ad or #sponsored and then review the content they created for these other brands. Is it the type of content you’d want representing your brand?

Positive Audience Sentiment

Earlier in this post I noted that people follow other people on social media for a specific type of content. One of my favorite micro-influencers on Instagram is @getupwithnards. I even had a picture of her on my pantry (where I keep all the carbs and foodstuffs) when I was trying to cut back my sugar and drop a little weight. Love her pictures and her advice.

I also follow

Best Campaigns for Micro-Influencers

I like this little graphic here because it highlights some of the most common goals for influencer campaigns. It also lets you know that influencer marketing isn’t just a one-trick pony designed ONLY to help you hype your brand.

Targeted Awareness Campaigns

I will say that in general, if you need to cover lots of ground (like get your product in front of a few million people), going with a few macro-influencers would probably be more effective than choosing to work with a dozen micro-influencers.

But if your goal is to hyper-target multiple different demographics with personalized messages, going with micro-influencers who have follower counts in the tens of thousands.

For instance, let’s say you’re launching a budgeting app and you’re trying to increase downloads.

To get in front of older social media users, you may partner with two or three mature micro-influencers over the age of 40 to grab the attention of Gen Xers and at least one blogger over the age of 50 to reach Boomers.

You could partner with an influencer like Lola Celotti (@lolacelotti) whose feed communicates warmth, confidence, and a bit of a carefree vibe. She seems familiar, like someone most people would probably feel like they know.

And then there are over-50 style influencers like Caroline Labouchere (on Instagram @carolinelabouchere), an over-50 model, runner, and speaker whose accounts are designed to inspire.

Both types of influencer would effectively target older social media users. And the brand message for our hypothetical budgeting app may be something like, “Everything you want to know about your finances in one click”.

Well, that same app would be useful for young adults just starting out and those in their early 20s. So, for that same campaign to appeal to younger app users, a brand could partner with a phD student who is also an influencer and a speaker, or maybe a young scientist who is also a style influencer. Someone who is young, relatable, aspirational and BUSY would be the perfect person to position the app as a way to “Connect. Automate. And live your life.”

I came across Sarah Habibi on Instagram while I was seeing what the #phDstudent hashtag had to offer. She’s on Instagram as @science.bae… which is enough to make me click all by itself.

But she’s also funny, verbose (she writes loooonnnng captions), stylish, and embarks on some pretty cool adventures. Plus, she’s a speaker. It’s just all wins here.

So, there’s one campaign, sure. But in this case, using micro-influencers for this particular brand awareness campaign allows for targeting very different groups within your core demographic of financial app users.

Micro-influencers really help when it comes to zeroing in on a specific audience and crafting messages that resonate with that group of people.

Seasonal Campaigns

Micro-influencers are good at spreading the word about sales. So, using them to promote different products available during seasonal campaigns can be a powerful sales driver. Choose micro-influencers on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter so your promotion shows up in audience feeds. Don’t forget to boost the most successful posts.

UGC Campaigns

Micro-influencers are great for getting tons of quality user-generated content when your goal is to build a library of social media content, marketing collateral and creative to use in paid ads.

Of course, you’ll get a lot more content AND DIFFERENT TYPES OF CONTENT by working with a virtual army of micro-influencers (as opposed to spending the same amount of money on two or three macro-influencers) to create content for YOUR brand that integrates the nuances of THEIR brand.

Let’s Wrap This Up

Can you believe it’s been seven years since influencer marketing became a thing? Of course, influencer marketing has a rich history and it existed years and years before we made a habit of posting pictures of ourselves taking pictures of… well, ourselves. But this current incarnation of influencer marketing – the social media-based one – is still relatively new, despite it feeling like we’ve been doing it forever.

Planning effective campaigns all boils down to goals-driven strategies. Working with micro-influencers is super-effective way to deploy strategies that will help you accomplish your marketing goals.

The Luxury Industry’s Classic Marketing Strategy is Getting a Digital Upgrade

The luxury industry is really interesting to watch right now. Luxury goods are in an upswing as demand for premium and super high-end luxury apparel, accessories and experiences increases. Targeting younger consumers is proving to be a tough for luxury brands whose entire ethos of exclusivity revolves around the idea of scarcity.

A few weeks ago, we talked about specific campaigns luxury brands like FarFetch and Mercedes-Benz were running. In this series of posts, I want to take a good, long look at what luxury brands are doing and how they’re using social media (finally) to reposition themselves to cultivate lifelong relationships with Millennial and Gen Z customers.

Here’s the Problem with Scarcity-Driven Luxury Marketing… When Everything’s ALWAYS Available

Okay. Let’s state the obvious here: Pretending to be scarce is hard when people can access you via social ALL THE TIME.

The challenge many luxury brands face when rolling out social media campaigns is maintaining exclusivity – the prestige that enables high-end brands to charge premium prices for premium goods and services.

Social media has given us all unprecedented access to one another. Almost everyone (and almost everything) is accessible around the clock. So, it stands to reason that luxury brands – whose reputations are built on the idea of scarcity and exclusivity – have been slow to adopt social media marketing as a core digital strategy. But that’s changing.

Okay… let’s start with the talking-head stuff. Excuse me while I grab my Mont Blanc pen, my laser pointer, and my oversized Cazals to assume my smarty pants identity…

A-hem…

Seventy-three percent of luxury brands say maintaining exclusivity on social media is a HUGE challenge. Nevertheless, as Millennials and Generation Z age up, it’s becoming more important for legacy luxury brands (think Gucci and Tapestry/Coach) to really invest in cultivating relationships with this demographic lifelong loyal customers. And the ability of luxury brands to grab the attention of younger adults hinges on their ability to effectively leverage social media.

Visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are powerful tools luxe brands can use to boost brand awareness, build a loyal following, and get eyes on new products.

I’ve broken this series up into three different parts.

• In Part 1, I’ll do a quick break-down of the luxury market to identify the trends that are causing high-end brands to expand their marketing repertoire in an effort to court that all-important 18-34 market.

• In Part 2, I want to talk about how luxury brands are addressing two major challenges – accessibility and culture – to join the rest of us (and their target market) on social WHILE STILL remaining exclusive and elite. This one will be all about strategy, so make sure you check this one out. The challenges they face that I want to talk about are…

  • Culture – aligning brand values with buyer values (because buyer values have changed)

  • Accessibility – getting young eyes on legacy brands

• In Part 3, I want to take a look at how well-known luxury brands are redefining luxury to include premium products as we talk about affordability. (It gets a little weird with some brands, so this will be a fun one to look at). We’re going to talk about the elephant in the room – why a lot of luxury brands simply don’t seem all that elite anymore.

Overview of the Luxury Goods Industry

In 2018, the value of the luxury market (which includes luxury goods and experiences) was estimated to be more than $1.35 trillion globally. In recent years, there has been growth across multiple segments, but personal luxury goods such as beauty products, fragrances, apparel, handbags, shoes, and jewelry outpaced the other sectors in the luxury market, growing by six percent, and in so doing exceeding growth across all sectors by a full percentage point.

In our business (influencer marketing), the word “luxury” almost always refers to personal goods, but of course, you know luxury isn’t just made up of handbags. It also includes drinks, luggage, vehicles and other modes of transportation (air and sea), and experiences (I’ll talk more about that later in this article). Sales in each segment have been creeping up.

Luxury Market Leaders

Exclusivity or not, I would bet you’re familiar with the gold-dusted cream of the luxury brand crop. LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton tops the list as the world’s most valuable luxury products group. The company houses a portfolio of high-end luxury brands including Louis Vuitton, Moët, Hennessey, Fendi, Marc Jacobs, and TAG Heuer. Not an exhaustive list.

Deloitte’s Global Powers of Luxury Goods 2018 assessed the top 100 luxury brands around the world, each of which generated a minimum of $211 million a year in revenue. LVMH, for example, reported record sales of more than $53 billion in 2018 alone. Other top 10 luxury companies include brands you’ll probably recognize as well:

• The Estee Lauder Companies (brands include M.A.C., Clinique, Aveda, Estee Lauder)

• Compagnie Financiere Richemont SA (Cartier, Van Cleef & Arpels, Montblanc)

• Luxottica Group SpA (Ray-Ban, Oakley, Persol, Oliver Peoples, Vogue Eyewear)

• Kering SA (Gucci, Bottenga, Saint Laurent, Balenciaga, Sergio Rossi)

• L’Oreal Luxe (Lancome, Urban Decay, Helena Rubinstein)

• The Swatch Group Ltd (Omega Longines, Harry Winston)

• Ralph Lauren Corporation (Ralph Lauren, Polo Ralph Lauren, Club Monaco, Purple Label)

• PVH Corp. (Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger)

• Chow Tai Fook Jewellery Group Limited (Chow Tai Fook, CHOW TAI FOOK T MARK, Hearts on Fire)

Three Trends Fueling the Growth of the Luxury Market

There are a couple of interesting things happening in the luxury market that are driving growth. Hang on for another few minutes with this statistical dryness… I’ll take my big glasses off in a few more minutes.

Historically, Americans have been the largest consumers of luxury goods, and that’s still the case. But as markets in Asia, the Middle East and Africa develop a more voracious appetite for the luxe life, American shoppers are no longer the only target buyer of prestige products.

The continued growth of the luxury goods market can largely be attributed to booming affluence in Asia and the Middle East. China has the fastest growing population of luxury consumers in the world, and it is the fastest-growing market for luxury fashion.

Another important trend driving growth in the luxury sector is the demand for premium goods. Consultancy Asia describes lower-cost, high-end products like Lacoste, Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein as emergent growth drivers for the luxury market. You probably noticed these brands on the above list of the biggest luxury brands in the world. Brands like Calvin Klein (now an underwear company… even though I SLAYED in CK sheath dresses!!!) make mid-priced premium apparel and accessories, and these are brands that are popular among younger buyers who, unlike previous generations, are okay mixing and matching luxury brands, premium brands, and fast fashion to create stylish looks.

You can find outfits that fall into this category on Instagram under #highlowfashion.

Similar to the mix-and-match shopping habit is what some are calling “premium mediocre products”, referring to accessories like t-shirts, baseball caps, sneakers, socks, and headbands branded with logos and word marks from luxury brands.

You knew we had to go here, but it’s true – Millennials in Asia, the Middle East and parts of Africa are driving consistent growth in the luxury market, in part because they aren’t afraid to mix it up.

In China, Millennials account for 30 percent of luxury goods sales. That number is expected to grow to 40 percent by 2025.

The Two Distinct Conversations Around Fixing the Luxury Goods Sector

A few years ago, the conversation around luxury goods was strictly on contingency planning for slipping sales. Luxury buyers were aging up and the primary discourse was on ways to engage Millennials since they weren’t rushing into stores to buy luxury for luxury’s sake like their Gen X and Boomer parents had done.

The unofficial consensus was luxury brands needed a way to start the process of building relationships with young adult buyers (and even very young buyers with whom brands could foster brand awareness that turns into years-long brand loyalty). Young buyers can become lifelong customers if brands could find an in.

A good way to do this is by finding ways to personalize the shopping experience specifically for luxury buyers… That meant upskilling sales associates to be seen as knowledgeable curators who were likable and personable enough to forge meaningful bonds with shoppers. And it meant finding smart ways to incorporate technology into the shopping experience.

Of course, the operative word in any conversation about luxury branding is exclusivity. Luxury brands had to find a way to address the lingering issue of maintaining exclusivity while marketing to a broader audience, and there were really only two ways to do it:

1. Cut back on the availability of luxury goods to remind people that luxury often meant scarce and hard to find… OR

2. Redefine “luxury” as something altogether different.

I have a tangent that directly plays into this…

In college, I studied Music Business. One of the required courses in my senior year (or junior year… it all kind of runs together) was a Marketing course focused specifically on music marketing. At the time, that course was being taught by the man who was the VP of Marketing for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra / Max Fisher Music Center. I think he was the VP… it was a C-level position, for sure.

Well, in the very first class, our instructor told us that “The Max” faced a very critical problem – their core customers (DSO patrons) were aging up and literally dying off.

Like, literally.

Selah.

No judgments because I’m still pretty awesome now, like I was back then… but as an orchestra geek I actually went to quite a few symphony performances in high school and college, and it was true that I was usually one of the youngest people in the audience… by decades, sometimes.

The Max Fisher Music Center was facing challenges that are similar to those of the luxury market, just on a much smaller scale:

1. The core customer was aging up.

2. The organization needed ideas for reaching younger audiences.

3. These audiences had to be music snobs and supporters of the arts in their own right to maintain the exclusivity of the DSO’s brand as an elite arts organization

4. The organization needed to recruit young (and younger) fans to build its current customer base, AND create lifelong supporters.

So, our senior projects revolved around creating events targeting people who gave not a single eff about the symphony, but who were music snobs in other genres like jazz and funk, and artsy in other disciplines like spoken word and sculpting.

These events would enable the organization to create more income streams so its existence wasn’t strictly dependent upon DSO ticket sales for classical programming.

Throughout the semester, every student called the actual booking managers of the artists we wanted in our hypothetical shows. We priced insurance. We created the marketing collateral. We put together pro forma budgets for each show that made financial sense and turned a tidy profit.

(Now that I think about it, that should have been a paid internship).

I thought it would be dope to bring in Ed Motta and Incognito (they were surprisingly easy to reach by phone and email) for a performance at The Max and have one or two local bands open for them.

That was, by far, my favorite school project EVER. I actually did go on to do an internship with the marketing department at the DSO.

Tangent over.

***

Here’s the deal: When faced with the decision to make luxury more elite or change the luxe culture altogether, many brands are choosing the former while a number of brands are doing what the Max Fisher has had to do and make moves into rebranding for a younger audience.

I have a couple of really good examples of how these two strategies are playing out in real life for luxe brands…

Elitism and Scarcity Approach: Coach Focuses on Brand Safety to Return to Luxury Status

It was just five years ago that Coach made the decision to remove its iconic “C” branding from its handbags to minimize the negative impact of the luxury handbag market being seemingly replete with Coach bags.

In 2008, Coach handbags accounted for 35 percent of the market for handbags and accessories. By 2014, that number had dwindled to 23 percent. In response, Coach pulled inventory from more than 250 department stores, did away with discount pricing, and strategically shut down Coach stores all over the globe to make the luxury bags a harder to get. The company’s goal was to reclaim control of the Coach brand and reposition it to once again be seen as a luxury item.

Source: Coach.com

After Coach, Inc. changed its name to Tapestry, Inc. in 2017, the company’s iconic branded handbags made a triumphant return. Tapestry, Inc. moved toward actively wooing Millennial and Gen Z buyers by taking to social media, adding a clothing line, focusing more on Millennial men, and even adding Selena Gomez as a brand ambassador, which later turned into a co-branded Coach x Selena Gomez line of handbags.

If you have come across Balenciaga’s Instagram account recently, you probably wouldn’t immediately equate the brand with luxury gowns, but actually Balencia started out as a dressmaker.

Today, Balenciaga is at the forefront of the luxury streetwear movement…

…. and at the helm of a huge shift in the luxury apparel market.

Bro… those are 3D jackets with hips BUILT IN!! As Chadwick Boseman has so famously said, “It’s great but… I’m dead.”

In 2015, 33 year-old Millennial designer Demna Gvasalia succeeded Alexander Wang as the Creative Director of Balenciaga, bringing with him the uniquely offbeat design style for which he’d become famous as the head designer of Vetements.

Source: Balenciaga’s Winter 19 Show

Since Gvasalia’s arrival, Balenciaga runways have hosted oversized outerwear, ironic tees (tucked into unflattering mom jeans, no less), and street-cast models, all of which breathed “young” life into Balenciaga and gave an already avant-garde luxury brand street credibility.

Source: NextShark.com

Today, Balenciaga is one of the luxury brands that actually sells as much (or more) in premium streetwear products like t-shirts and sneakers as they do in more traditional luxury products.

Truth be told, it was my teenage daughter who first informed me (after I mentioned while researching this post that I think the triple sole sneaker looks comfy) that, “Bro… them Balenciagas is lit, bro, fye…”

(Side note: Fye means she approves, they’re hot. ??? )

(Side SIDE note… there are ALOT of mentions of Balenciagas in popular music. A LOT.)

If It Ain’t Broke… There’s Still Time to Fix It

We already talked (quite a bit) about the spending habits of Millennials and Gen Z. One of the big takeaways from just about every conversation about Millennials and money is probably the fact that Millennials spend on what they value, and they have a different set of values than their parents and grandparents, at least as it relates to how and why they spend their money.

For luxury brands, the way Millennials spend changes the dynamic of the brand-to-consumer conversation. Therein lies the core of the challenge luxury brands face with younger buyers – reaching them where they are, and in their language. So, luxury brands are switching up their strategies. Luxury is getting a face lift.

I came across an interesting article on Hypebeast about the trend of luxury fashion houses changing, and in some cases drastically simplifying their logos.

First, let me just say it’s not unusual for new Creative Directors to take fashion houses in a completely different direction that includes changes to the logo.

In 2012, Hedi Slimane rebranded Yves Saint Laurent (YSL) as Saint Laurent Paris (SLP).

Calvin Klein’s word mark went to all caps in 2017. Burberry followed suit last summer.

By fall, Instagram was abuzz with the announcement that #CelineByHediSlimane (yes, the same Hedi Slimane) had arrived at Céline, and coincident with his arrival, another controversial rebranding which turned Céline into Celine. Slimane also completely wiped the brand’s Instagram account.

Whaaaaaa…?

To scroll through a catalog of luxury logos today, one could easily make the connection that a lot of the trendiest labels now have similar logos – simple sans serif word marks that really don’t distinguish one brand from the next.

But these are also word marks that now work well on social media, shoes, handbags, watches, headbands, backpacks, scarves, t-shirts, and a host of other premium and luxury apparel and accessory items.

Let’s Pause Here

Despite the contrasting strategies of Tapestry, Inc and Balenciaga, the end game is the same – to get Millennials and Gen Zers buying products online and in stores. And every luxury brand is working toward finding on-brand solutions for the same challenge – even if that means rebranding altogether.

In our next installment of the Luxury Series, let’s take a closer look at the strategies luxury brands are using to grab the attention of younger buyers.

10 Ways to Improve Visibility and Engagement During Your Next Super Bowl Marketing Campaign

It’s time to plan your Super Bowl influencer marketing campaigns. We are weeks away from Super Bowl LIII, which means social media is about to become one big, loud conversation about food, style, and football (because that’s what the Super Bowl is about on social).

The Super Bowl is one of America’s biggest holidays. Money magazine puts per-person spending for the Super Bowl smack-dab between Halloween and the Fourth of July. It is the second biggest eating holiday of the year, generating $14.1 billion in consumer spending. Surprisingly, the number of women tuning in to the Super Bowl is increasing. Women now account for 43 percent of Super Bowl viewers.

The Super Bowl is About Expectations

In a previous post, I talked a bit about why the Super Bowl is such a big deal. It all boils down to expectation. The Super Bowl is one of the few times we gather as a nation to celebrate greatness. Some of the greatest athletes in the world compete in this annual championship match to see who gets to walk away with the Vince Lombardi Trophy.

Of the 111 million viewers who tuned in to the Fox network to watch Super Bowl LI in 2017, fewer than half (43 percent) were actually there to watch the game. Twenty-four percent tuned for the legendary Super Bowl commercials, 15 percent showed up just to hang out with their friends who were watching the game, and 12 percent tuned in to watch Lady Gaga’s halftime show.

The idea that Americans watch the Super Bowl strictly for the football isn’t what’s reflected in the numbers. Heck, I watched Super Bowl LI and I only know three NFL players… and two of them weren’t even in the Super Bowl.  I and millions of other Americans (and about 40 million people who aren’t in the U.S.) watch the Super Bowl because it’s a fabulous, festive event that we hold every year on the first Sunday in February. It’s a winter holiday that celebrates excellence, tradition, and winning. What’s more American than that?

Game Day Marketing

For marketers, the opportunity to have the attention of more than 100 million viewers is golden. This may be the one time a year when people aren’t grabbing their phones and going to the bathroom when the commercials come on.

Big brands spent more than $385 million buying advertising time from Fox during Super Bowl LI, and $414 million on ads for Super Bowl LII. That number does not include production costs, which average more than $1 million per spot. Nor does it include pre-game promotion expenses.

Mary Scott, President of New York marketing agency, United Entertainment Group says she advises her clients to reserve 25 percent of the cost of their commercial slot on pre-game marketing.

Imagine that. In order for big brands to optimize the reach of their $5 million Super Bowl ads (which seems to be the unofficial cap for a 30-second spot), they need to create commercials on SOCIAL MEDIA (!!!) to make sure people actually pay attention to their television commercials.

They need news shows to give their viewers a sneak peek at the Super Bowl ad.

They need to release their ad to YouTube days before it airs on network television to prime the audience and get people interested in the darned thing.

They need to launch a parallel social media campaign that supports the TV spot and tracks audience response.

That’s because even with the Super Bowl ad, big brands often measure conversions the same way you do – with social engagement.

Likes, comments, branded hashtags, and custom links that let you know when someone has gone beyond liking your sponsored post and taken the next step to move further down into your sales funnel are important tools for measuring the ROI on the $5 million investment. And they will be important tools for you as well.

Marketers who rely on social media to reach their audience have a distinct advantage come Super Bowl time. More than 78 percent of Super Bowl watchers also engaged on social during Super Bowl 50. On Game Day, 60 million Facebook users generated 200 million posts, likes, and comments, while 38 million Instagram users generated 150 million posts, likes, and comments. User spent 350,000 combined hours watching Super Bowl LI ads on YouTube.

According to the Burston-Marstellar Super Bowl Survey, 60 percent of viewers and 87 percent of constant social media users (people who are either on social or checking their devices at least once an hour) say that in addition to the Super Bowl commercials, they are interested in finding all the extra Super Bowl content brands create and put on social.

They want to see commercials. Scratch that. They want to see awesome, light-hearted, inspiring, hilarious, clever commercials – content that makes them think, feel, and react.

Women make up the majority of online conversations about Super Bowl commercials. Among people 18 to 34 years old, women are doing 57 percent of the talking online about Super Bowl ads. Among users 35 to 54 years of age, women do 61 percent of the talking.

So our two big takeaways about Super Bowl marketing efforts is to create content specifically for social media that targets or includes women.

Ten Strategies That Will Give Your Super Bowl SMM Campaign Legs

Influence marketing is rarely about disrupting the status quo. Leave that to the startups. It’s more about bringing great ideas into existing conversations. But finding creative ways to join a conversation is where most brands (and people) need help. So, we want to provide you with a catalog of strategies you can use to make your influencer marketing campaign successful.

1. Use More Video

Most people prefer video to text. When done right, video is fast, engaging, and high in value. Current estimates say video accounts for more than 50 percent of all consumer Internet traffic right now. By 2020, video will account for 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic.

Within the context of social media, video generates 1200 percent more shares than text and images combined. Across the board – from the baby crib to the C-suite – video is THE medium of choice for consuming content.

Take a look at the screenshot below of a post from Amazon of a snack stadium. The post, which is an Echo promotion, is actually a video. Not much happens in the video, but that’s not the point. The video got 1000 percent more views than the post got Likes – 28,810 views compared to 2,633 Likes.

Unfortunately, a lot of marketers waste great opportunities to impact their audience by going the humdrum product placement route. The problem is, short of getting an endorsement of your product from a pop star, reality TV star, or other super influencer, a picture of someone just holding your product – however fancy your packaging may be – rarely moves anyone to follow you or buy. Videos expedite the purchase process.

2. Skip the Product Picture

People don’t mind seeing posts about products. They prefer them, in fact. Product posts consistently outperform both lifestyle posts and posts from celebrities. Sixty-five percent of the top-performing posts on Instagram feature products. But an unstyled picture of your product showing up in someone’s Instagram feed isn’t what they want.

The best way to craft a powerful, high-impact Instagram marketing campaign is to think about the story you want to tell. Whose eye do you want to catch? And how can you talk about your product in a way that’s visually engaging? Compare the two Instagram stories below.

Method is a line of biodegradable, non-toxic cleaning and personal care products. I’ve seen Method products at Target (my favorite neighborhood spot for getting globally-inspired home goods). Below is a screenshot of a section of Method’s Instagram page.

Compare that to the snippet below from Clorox’s Instagram page. To be fair, it looks like Method beat most of its competitors to the punch with Instagram. And I think Clorox is still figuring it out (call us!), but even with the content Clorox has already posted, there is a striking difference between Clorox’s “this is real life” theme on its page and Method’s “life in a slightly more perfect world” page (my designation, not theirs).

Instagram is about visual storytelling. And your product is certainly part of that story, but it shouldn’t be the entire story. Create a story around your product.

3. Or Make the Product Placement Absolutely Beautiful

There are brands that feature nothing but their products on Instagram and their pages get fantastic engagement. It’s rare, but sometimes the products themselves make absolutely stunning images. Enter Compartés  Chocolates.

The screen shot above is from the company’s Instagram account. Every single image on the Compartés page is of their product. But their products are so strikingly beautiful and the photos so well-styled, the pictures legitimately look like art.

I cross-referenced this page with the images on Godiva’s page to ensure I’m not just having a chocolate geek-out. I am a card-carrying member of Godiva’s rewards program. So I can tell you for sure I love Godiva, and I’ve never even tasted Compartés chocolate. Godiva’s page is pretty, but it elicits a completely different emotional response in me.

Compartés has figured out how to inspire awe, or the very least a good, heartfelt, “Wow.” Within seconds of being on the company’s branded Instagram page, I had already pulled up the store’s California address and moved on to their e-comm site to check out the shipping situation.

Then I asked myself, “When was the last time I took a trip to L.A. anyway?”, as if finding an excuse to fly 2,173.9 miles for a chocolate bar is acceptable, regardless of the amount of time that has passed. The point is: I now follow Compartés. I’ve priced their product, browsed the catalog and will likely place an order soon. Because their product pictures were simply breathtaking.

4. Or Make Your Product the Story

Mattel’s Barbie is the perfect example for this tactic. You may know a bit of Barbie’s story. She hangs out at the beach with her boyfriend, Ken. She has a niece that comes over to the beach house (or to Barbie’s dream house) when she’s taking time off from her job as a veterinarian and/or school teacher. But Barbie’s Instagram story is far more interesting.

I found Barbie’s Instagram page because there was this picture of her holding a Compartés chocolate bar and a drink on Compartés Chocolates’ page. When I saw the copyright stamp on the image, I realized the picture must have come from Barbie’s camp.

At 59 years young, Barbie has been the top-selling doll for decades. In 2016, Barbie manufacturer, Mattel rebounded from four steady years of declining doll sales by adding a more ethnically and culturally diverse selection of Barbie dolls to their lineup. The result was a seven percent boost in sales in 2016 and a return to billion-dollar sales in 2017.

There are actually two Barbie pages. The page for Barbie (@barbie) features Barbie in toyland. She is specifically positioned as a toy in these pictures. Some of the pictures include children playing with Barbie. This is the place to go to learn of news from Mattel about new products, discounts, and contests. The posts in this account generate between .5 percent and 1 percent engagement. The screenshot below is of the @barbie Instagram page, and features Barbie as a doll.

Here is that same doll as the star of her own curated Instagram story (@Barbiestyle). The Barbie Style account puts Barbie, Ken, and their [doll] friends in seemingly realistic situations, like going out for coffee, taking Yoga, decorating the house, checking her tablet, and of course posting pictures of her outfits. The picture below features Barbie on the red carpet with dolls of U.S. Olympian @IbtihajMuhammad and model @theashleygraham.

Barbie’s followers engage with her lifestyle content at @BarbieStyle 3 to 5 times more than they engage with her product account.

And with good reason. Barbie slays. No question.

5. Or Make It Ultra-Targeted

I am a music snob. Classically trained violinist, jazz bassist and vocalist. I love music, but I sort of pride myself on listening to fantastic music. I don’t do terrestrial radio. So, when I am in the mood for music, looking for something to do, or looking to connect with other people like me,  I and my community of music snobs will immediately begin filtering out the riff raff by searching by tags like:

#livemusic

#livemusicrocks

#funknight

#staxrecords

#shostakovich

And other awesome, elitist tags.

Well, a great way for brands to get in front of the right audience is to deploy the use of elitist tags like those. Craft beer drinkers pride themselves on drinking craft beer. Vintage lovers and upcyclers have team spirit as well. Narrow your audience by using hashtags that only a knowing subset of your followers will actually use… and get more engagement. You can tailor your posts, and even refine your account (or create a second account) that specifically targets a smaller segment of your wider target audience.

6. Collaborate with Creative Influencers

Seek out the counsel of influencers who are already on Instagram doing something fantastic and unusual. More often, brands look for influencers who have the largest audience that includes their target demographic. But if the influencer’s authority doesn’t reach over into your niche, or their presentation is not powerful enough to prompt a view or double-tap, your influencer marketing campaign can disappear into a feed full of everyday posts.

That’s not what you want.

Partnering with an influencer like BaristArt© creator Michael Breach who has 102k followers may give your campaign a better chance at reaching more people than an influencer with 10 times more followers. You can check out some of Michael’s work @baristart, or check out the screenshot I took of his Instagram page below. Creativity gets eyes. The unusual gets shared. That’s what you want.

7. Gear Your Marketing Toward the Day After

It’s been 11 months since Super Bowl LII and the branded hashtags that promoted the event are still showing up in newly-created content. Heck, Lady Gaga showed up under newer Super Bowl branded tags for Super Bowl LI for more than a year.

The day after the Super Bowl may as well have been renamed Gaga Day because she absolutely dominated social media conversations about Super Bowl LI. What will people be talking about the day after Super Bowl LIII? And how can you craft a campaign that is a natural part of that conversation?

8. Create Sales and Use Discount Codes

Crafting promotions and using discount codes that are good the day before, the day of, and the day after the Super Bowl can help build goodwill with your target audience. Discount codes and tracking links are also good way to see your audience’s behavior, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of your funnel.

Ideally, you want your campaign to piggyback on the one thing on everyone’s mind – the Super Bowl.  Work with an infuencer who can help you brainstorm ideas that will strengthen your brand, increase brand awareness, and appeal to your target audience.

9. Create a Highlight Reel of Your YouTube Video

In one of our holiday posts, I talked about makeup artist and mega-influencer Patrick Starrr. Patrick has created a virtual library of makeup tutorials on YouTube.

Smartly, one of the ways Patrick generates tons of video views on Instagram (that leads to tons of traffic to his YouTube channel) is by creating full-length makeup tutorials on YouTube and publishing a sort of Cliff’s Notes version of the video to Instagram. He captions these types of posts with a link to where the full-length video lives on YouTube.

Super Bowl advertisers do the same sort of thing. Procter & Gamble crafted an amusing 30-second spot to promote Mr. Clean for Super Bowl LI. The company also released an extended cut of the commercial that was published to Mr. Clean’s YouTube channel. Adage.com describes the commercial this way: “The spot shows a woman turned on by a sexy animated version of Mr. Clean…”

A few days before the commercial aired during the Super Bowl LI, Ellen Degeneres aired a mash-up of the commercials with the movie trailer for the latest Fifty Shades movie and called her version starring Mr. Clean “Fifty Shades Cleaner.”

The picture of the snack stadium you saw earlier in the piece is actually a video clip from Amazon’s 60-second Super Bowl LI spot promoting the Echo.  In the screen shot, you see Alec Baldwin and rapper Missy Elliott looking on as former Dolphins quarterback Dan Marino enjoys Baldwin’s snack stadium.

Product highlight reels are an effective way to grab 10 to 30 seconds of your target audience’s attention on Instagram. A good video – one that is relevant, engaging, and entertaining – gives viewers a compelling reason to find you elsewhere on the web. And that’s what you want.

Here’s a tip about Instagram behavior… Great photos get more likes than great videos. But great videos get more comments than great photos. Great videos also get more views than likes. Determining which action is the most important depends solely on your marketing strategy. So, it’s important for you to clearly identify your goals, as well as the metrics you’re going to use to determine whether you met your goals.

Also, consider posting later in the evening. Videos posted to Instagram at 9PM get 34 percent more engagement, according to Sprout Social.

10. Geo-target your campaigns

There are two aspects to geo-targeting your campaigns – location tagging your own posts and zeroing in on the location of your target customers.

According to Sprout Social, posts with location get 79 percent more engagement than those without. For brands, there are a couple of real benefits to adding your location to your campaigns.

Brick-and-mortar establishments get the benefit of being able to tell potential customers where they are. When Instagrammers Explore by location, you want your product, brand, and company to show up in search results.  For e-commerce brands, adding a location tag can help establish the accessibility (read, humanness) of your product or company.

Understanding where your customers live will give you better insight into who they are and how to market to them.

Great example: I recently picked up a copy of David Ogilvy’s iconic book, Ogilvy on Advertising and was stunned to find there were quite a few pictures of topless women in the black-and-white ads Ogilvy printed in his book. The book is brilliant. Ogilvy was brilliant. But the ads of the topless women were intended for European audiences because brands market differently to Europeans than they do to Americans. I’m American, so as wonderful as the advice in the book is, I keep this book off the coffee table. And no, I would not appreciate any company that uses a topless woman to promote its product.

Crafting a campaign to target a specific demographic can help you get better reach and more valuable engagement beyond just likes with your marketing campaign.

The Wrap Up

During the Super Bowl, there was very little conscientious influencer marketing done by brands. Most of the content tagged with one of the Super Bowl tags (stuff like #ATLSB53 #sb52 #superbowl2017 #superbowlLII #superbowl53) are user-generated posts about audience experiences, the players, and the music. That means an opportunity exists for savvy brands to get in there and grab that audience.

Food Box Subscription Serivces: Industry Overview and Analysis of 4 Leading Companies

It’s the New Year… and this time of the year is about looking forward and finding ways to improve your quality of life. It means preparing to dominate your list of goals just a liiiittle bit more in the year to come. For those with #healthgoals, it means tightening up on diet and exercise… and meal kit subscriptions are a great way to save time when time is money.

For the 40 percent of Americans who will partake in the annual tradition of setting New Year’s Resolutions, food is big on the list. Most people have some variation of healthier living high atop their list of goals, whether that’s eating better, exercising, or finding a more satisfying work-life balance. In fact, #healthgoals took the number two spot as the most popular New Year’s Resolution for 2018, right behind saving money.

There’s some good news on the healthy living front. Convenience food no longer has to mean fatty burgers or microwave meals. Food subscription services are a popular alternative to both the grocery store and the drive-thru. Now anyone, even those of us who are knee-deep into full-on 7 PM to 2 AM hustle-like-you-mean-it lifestyles, can get fresh, healthy, high-quality food delivered direct to our doorsteps, with everything needed to put together amazing meals for the solo diner or a family.

Awesome bonus: Most food subscription boxes come with easy-to-follow recipe cards.

In this post, we’re taking a look at the food subscription box industry (aka meal subscriptions, meal kit delivery, food boxes) – the stats, the figures, the facts. And we’re checking out examples of the smart marketing tactics food subscription services have used to boost awareness and enlist subscribers.

The Online Meal Kit Delivery Industry In a Nutshell

There are dozens of food subscription services on the market and dozens of dozens of box subscription companies that specialize in delivering everything from shave kits to perfume to gaming gear.

FYI, there are three different variations of subscription services – replenishment, access, and curation.

Replenishment services focus on keeping you well-stocked with the important, everyday items like razors like Dollar Shave Club and 1800CONTACTS.

Access services give users access to their services each month like Netflix, Amazon Prime etc.

Curation services give users new and exciting items or experiences each month like Birchbox or Loot Crate.

Food boxes generally fall into the curation category, although some may work on a replenishment model as well.

At the end of 2017, the five most-trafficked box subscription services shipped products across multiple verticals, including beauty, food, apparel, and personal hygiene.

Look at how the following charts show the differences between the subscription box retailers that are visited most, versus the subscription box retailers with the most unique visitors.

Source: Statista

Source: Statista

MARKET SIZE

Subscription meal boxes, in particular, are quickly becoming the new fast food… only without the guilt and requisite gym membership. In 2015, meal kit delivery sales alone reached $1 billion. Impressive, until you read enthusiastic predictions that push annual revenue for the direct-to-door meal kit delivery market to $10 billion by  2020 (that’s, like, a year away).

Take a look at the three meal kit services in the chart above, Blue Apron, HelloFresh, and Home Chef. Together, they’re getting more than 7 million monthly visitors) to their sites. That’s a full third of the total web users visiting any box subscription site.

According to Statista, 27 percent of Internet users purchased restaurant and meal kits in 2016 to take advantage of the convenience of getting boxes of pre-measured ingredients with recipes in tow to prepare restaurant-quality meals at home. Meal kits typically cost 30 percent less than what it would cost to have the same meal out.

Food boxes are attractive because they deliver a varied menu of meal options to a wide range of target customers. Of course, as with anything else online, subscribers can also order specific types of meals, including:

• Organic (non-GMO)

• Veggie-centric

• Paleo

• Low-carb

• Specialty Diets

• Farm-to-Table home meal prep

So, while a company like Purple Carrot specializes in helping subscribers prepare plant-based meal kits, Green Chef offers organic paleo meals. Other services still offer subscribers a little of everything. The average price per meal kit hovers right around $10 per person, give or take a buck or two (and depending on the company, niche(!!), and amount of food a subscriber orders).

Source: Statista

TARGET CUSTOMER

Packaged Facts lists age as THE MOST important factor in identifying shoppers who are most likely to subscribe to fresh meal kit subscription services. Subscribers tend to be partnered parents between the ages of 25 and 44 years old who live in urban environments, have mid-range incomes, advanced degrees, and school-aged children still living at home. Interestingly, while women are more likely to own a subscription service, men are more likely to subscribe to multiple services each month.

Meal kit subscribers are typically people who are comfortable shopping online. In fact, most of them have purchased something online in the seven days leading up to their purchase of a meal kit.

A Growing Market Endures Growing Pains

Source: Subscription Boxes in 2018 – Hitwise

We had to be careful digging up stats about this industry because between 2017 and 2018, the meal kit delivery market as a whole fell a bit from grace, and several issues continue to affect meal kit delivery companies.

STANDING OUT CROWDED MARKET

While having a box of fresh meal ingredients is a relatively new trend, these types of meal kit subscriptions actually fall under the grocery store sector. So, yes the direct competitors in this space are other existing web-based food box subscription services, but these companies are increasingly having to compete against (or partner with) grocery store chains like Kroger and other retailers that are moving into the meal kit market.

In 2018, Walmart announced it would be rolling out its own meal kits to 2,000 store locations. As well, a growing number of grocery store chains are slowly but surely making the transition into online grocery sales.

The Motley Fool estimates there are more than 150 food subscription box companies in the U.S. alone, and only 10  percent of American consumers have actually tried a meal kit delivery service. For companies that aren’t yet household names, they need a strategy to stand out or they will be forced to compete on price to win business over the other unknown companies. It’s a veritable race to the bottom.

LOWERING THE COST OF DELIVERY

When Chef’d unexpectedly shut down in July 2018, it laid off employees and halted operations effective immediately. Chef’d was one of the first subscription food box services in the market to sell food meal kits to both home delivery subscribers and grocery stores. Chef’d also allowed subscribers to select meal kits from a menu of thousands of options. Its sudden shutdown rocked the meal kit delivery market, which was also in the midst of sorting out the rapid decline in growth of the market’s leading company, Blue Apron.

Brittain Ladd wrote a piece for Forbes.com addressing the ongoing challenges with meal kit delivery companies. In it, Ladd wrote, “The Achilles heel of meal-kit companies is that the business has exceptionally high customer acquisition costs, high operational and supply-chain costs, high logistics costs and low customer retention.”

Meal kit delivery companies have been scrambling to find better ways to manage supply and streamline the process of fulfilling hundreds of thousands of customers orders that need to be immediately packaged and shipped. Flaws in the system are an expensive fix, but the cost of not fixing these flaws is usually happy customers.

Blue Apron has been able to lift profits and reduce the cost of goods sold by laying off four percent of its workforce and bringing in executives who have supply chain management expertise.

As for Chef’d, a few days after announcing the closure, Chef’d was purchased by True Food Innovations. Despite the acquisition, which presumably saved the Chef’d brand from oblivion, the brand remains silent, without even an update on social media since the mid-summer shutdown.

RETAINING CUSTOMERS

Blue Apron cited customer retention as a major problem affecting the company’s bottom line. In the second quarter, the company fulfilled 3.1 million orders and had 717,000 customers at the end of June. But that’s 24 percent fewer customers than it serviced in June 2017. According to The Motley Fool, the drop is due, at least in part, to a reduction in the company’s marketing spend in 2017.

Here’s the chink in the supply chain: In order to amortize the cost of packaging and shipping fresh meal kits, companies really would prefer long-term commitments from customers. Customers, on the other hand, aren’t particularly committed to the idea of commitment when it comes to meal kit subscriptions.

According to PYMNTS.com, only nine percent of people who have subscribed to meal kit services have done so for six months or more. Twenty-six percent of subscribers used the service a month, and 39 percent used the service only once. More than half of subscribers (57.1 percent) say they cancel their subscriptions because they weren’t getting enough value for their money. So, they go and try out other food subscription boxes.

Marketing Campaigns for Food Box Subscription Companies

If you notice, two of the above three challenges can be tied to marketing efforts. So, what are food subscription boxes doing to attract customers in such a crowded market? Let’s take a look at some of the big names in the industry, and what they’re doing to navigate the meal kit industry’s notorious growing pains.

PLATED

Plated is an easily customizable food subscription service that delivers ingredients and recipes for you to cook up a storm in the kitchen every night. The plan is available for two, three or four servings each night, and subscribers can order food for two, three, or four nights a week.

On the website, Plated uploads new recipe selections each week that you can choose from for your own box, allowing you to try new meals every week, and discover new foods regularly. You can also choose when and where you get your box delivered, and change it every week if you need to.

Plated entered into an incredibly crowded market, with new meal boxes like this these appearing left, right, and center. The company first came to the attention of the media when they appeared on TV show Shark Tank. While Plated didn’t secure an investment from one of the Sharks, the company’s sales began to climb from to the coverage. To keep that growth going, Plated needed to focus on its marketing strategy, and that’s exactly what it did.

They decided to build an in-store presence for customers. The majority of meal kit subscriptions are run entirely online, and while that works for many customers, others still prefer the kind of face-to-face feeling of buying a physical product in-store. This is why Plated decided to place boxes in select stores to help broaden their market.

The company also launched a new commercial earlier this year that focused on creating dishes that were “Perfectly Plated”. It highlighted that their ingredients were fresh, their seasonings spectacular, and everything is measured out to make your cooking experience easier. While Plated may not have been highlighting anything that was incredibly different from other brands, Planted built on the reputation it had already earned.

Plated has a solid social media strategy in place . The company doesn’t have the biggest following in the industry, it is active and responsive across social channels. Plated uses social to provide followers with meal inspiration and help them make the connection between good food and an improved quality of life.

By investing in different streams of marketing, Plated has managed to secure its brand in the minds of many across the country.

OMAHA STEAKS

Possibly the longest running food subscription service is the family-run Omaha Steaks. Operating for more than 100 years now, these guys know how to source amazing meat for their customers. But, in a changing world where the food subscription market is blowing up so rapidly, how is this legacy company managing to stay afloat?

As a company, Omaha Steaks has always been right at the forefront of technological advances. When it first started trading, social media didn’t exist and SEO wasn’t a thing. The company’s biggest worry was keeping all that high-quality meat fresh. Throughout the years, Omaha Steaks has added direct mail, fax-ordering, in-store capabilities, e-commerce sites, and social media.

Omaha Steaks launched its own app and has a sizable following on Facebook (389.9K) to appeal to the platform’s older demographic (compared to the 13K followers the company has on Instagram). The Facebook store is set up so customers can buy directly through the social platform.

Omaha Steaks has also rolled out multiple deals on Groupon to entice new customers in. But, that hasn’t slowed down its direct mail marketing one bit. This is one where they cannot be built by anyone else – and they use it to keep existing customers sweet, and bring in new users.

You’ll also see an incredibly loyal customer case for this brand. They’ve been around for so many years, you would hope this would be the case, but they never rest on their laurels. Instead, they are always thinking of new ways to reward the loyalty they receive – and that is what makes them really stand out from the crowd. Especially with the amount of new brand shitting the market, knowing that this is one that they can trust really helps customers to keep investing their money.

SIMPLY COOK

( SimplyCook )

One box that’s a little different from the others we’ve mentioned is Simply Cook. This box doesn’t deliver any fresh food to its customers, instead, it sends a selection of spices along with inventive recipes on how to use them. All their recipes are simple and easy to follow, but you’re left to source the majority of ingredients yourself.

So, how could they possibly compete against other boxes who supply everything but the kitchen sink? For one, they are much more affordable, with the UK boxes priced at just £3 a week. You may not be getting all the ingredients, but you are getting the recipes and the extra spices and sauces that are usually a little harder to find.

This is a box for those who love the idea of a food subscription box but aren’t yet convinced they want to drop that kind of money on their weekly food shop. All their recipes only require between four to six fresh ingredients, so you won’t be wandering the aisles looking for what you need. And the finished product serves between 2-4 people, just like the other similar boxes.

( Twitter )

They play on the fact that most people would love to cook more homemade food and inventive meals, but in reality, spend less time in the kitchen than ever before. Every inch of their marketing oozes with this approach, from the name “Simply Cook”, to the clean and simple website design. Simply Cook is another brand that has also spread its wings and dropped in-store products. In a team up with a big name supermarket, they created mini versions of their boxes for customer to purchase right then and there, along with the rest of their groceries.

And, thanks to the holiday season, they’ve even launched a special gift style box for Christmas. They ran a competition on Twitter to help promote this and gave away some boxes for free. All you had to do was follow their account and re-tweet the post in order to be in with a chance to win.

PURPLE CARROT

This holiday season, plant-based meal kit service Purple Carrot (on Instagram @purplecarrottxo) is promoting its 12 Days of Gifting. Each day, the company tells followers a benefit of gifting someone a Purple Carrot subscription and sweetens the pot with a bonus giveaway of a $100 gift card for a complementary online retailer – Farm Girl Flowers (on Instagram @farmgirlflowers). #plantlove

This post, in particular, is for Day 10. The caption lays out the process (with a link) for gifting a Purple Carrot subscription along with steps you need to take to enter the drawing to win the gift card. Smartly, the process requires entrants to tag a floral loving friend in the comments section, first to spark interest in Purple Carrot, and second to fortify the partnership between Purple Carrot and Farm Girl Flowers by broadening the San Francisco-based florist’s Instagram audience.

As well, there are two variations of this promotion, featuring two different images that have the same caption. That way, Purple Carrot can draw the attention of foodies who may happen across the image of the food because they follow one of the 12 vegetarian-theme hashtags included in the caption. Again, smart.

How Meal Subscription Companies Can Win

While food subscription services like the ones above continue to rise and expand, they’ll have to work even harder to stand out from the crowd. Making their boxes individual by offering slightly different services to their competitors will certainly make it easier. But, what else can they do to help secure success?

DIFFERENTIATE

What’s the real difference between your offering and your competitor’s offering – one that actually means something to your customers? For example, Purple Carrot (who is actually one of our clients – we ran influencer campaigns for Purple Carrot and got tons of UGC with some pretty cool outcomes), being the 100 percent plant-based meal kit brand is an automatic differentiator in a crowded market of chicken dinners. That alone, helps the company to continue growing. According to Purple Carrot CEO Andy Levitt, the company has “the strongest customer retention data in the industry.”

CONSIDER PARTNERSHIPS

While the convenience of having food delivered to your door is one of the main selling points of these subscription boxes, having some form of product available in stores is a great addition to a marketing strategy. The challenge is finding a partner that won’t force you to drive your prices down just to get on store shelves.

You’ll be able to attract and bring in new customers who prefer traditional supermarket shopping. By seeing your product in store during their grocery shop, it doesn’t seem as foreign an idea to them than simply ordering online.

You’ll also be allowing customers to try out your product before purchasing a regular subscription. Many of us already own subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon, Spotify and the local gym (most of which probably started with trial subscriptions).

CONSIDER AFFILIATE PROGRAMS

Affiliate programs like Groupon and Pinchme are a powerful source of both traffic and customer acquisition for subscription box services. Hitwise credits free sample site Pinchme.com with netting Graze a 10 percent boost in clicks.

BUILD ON SOCIAL MEDIA

For the most part, food subscription boxes are marketed to Millennials. If you’re not investing in social media, then you’re really missing a trick. With the amount of time this generation spends online, you’ll need to have a solid presence there, as well as something a little different.

Many of these brands have run competitions on their social media sites, which is always a great way to boost your stats and spread the word a little further about your product. Encouraging customers to share pictures of their finished meals – especially on Instagram – will also help to promote your brand to the perfect target market, the food obsessed.

BOOST RETENTION WITH EMAIL

More than overall retail, using email for continuous engagement with customers is especially useful in the subscription box space, according to Hitwise.

KEEP THINGS MOBILE-FRIENDLY

Remember your audience, and make sure they can easily navigate your site from their phones. Not just access it, but navigate – find what they’re looking for and make selections and purchases fast and easy.

Hitwise’s Subscription Boxes in 2018 report (which you can download here) identified mobile as the source for 65 percent of the traffic to subscription box sites, and 57 percent of the traffic to meal kit sites.

FOCUS ON VALUE

The big difference between these products is that the customer needs to keep returning month after month. So, these brands have to work extra hard to garner some real brand loyalty from their users. This goes well beyond just having a good product. Offering up incentives to stay with them, rewards for bringing in friends, and special VIP competitions are just some of the extra things they need to be doing.

5 Social Marketing Strategies Brands Like Ikea, Ace Hardware and Chalk Ink Are Using to Get Their Products in Front of Buyers

If there’s no place like home, then there aren’t many activities quite as satisfying as personalizing your living space to make it feel like home. For that, you’re going to embark on at least one of three activities – home improvement, decorating your home, or furnishing your home. And you need look no further than your own social media feed for design ideas and products to help you get the job done.

Ahead of the New Year / Spring Cleaning season, here are 5 effective social media strategies top home decor and home improvement brands are using to boost brand awareness, get products in front of buyers and get foot traffic in stores.

Home Improvement and Home Design Are a BIG Deal… Everywhere

Home Decor

Home decor and DIY / home improvement aren’t just big business, they’re a big deal. In the US, shoppers spent $122 billion on home decor in 2016. US home improvement retailers expect to generate more than $409 billion in sales by 2019, and the global home decor market could reach $664 billion by 2020.

As disposable income continues to grow in Middle Eastern and Asian countries, the demand for home goods grows as well. In fact, the Asian market is the fastest-growing home goods market in the world. Worldwide home decor sales are on track to grow by 4.2 percent year-over-year for the five-year period from 2015 to 2020.

In the months between the New Year and Spring Cleaning Season (which 38 percent of those surveyed start in March), Americans will spend an average of $165 on home decorating according to the Offers.com Home Decor Survey 2018.

The list of top brands shoppers name as their go-to for home decor is made up of retailers who are great at balancing trends and quality with affordability.

And yes… you may read articles about how American Millennials aren’t buying houses as quickly as their parents and grandparents did at their age, but they are buying homes, eventually.

Home Improvement

On the home improvement/design project side, Millennials are DIYing like nobody’s business. Nearly 7 in 10 Millennials are handling home improvement projects themselves and relying on home improvement retailers like Ace Hardware, The Home Depot and Lowe’s to tackle renovations.

Source: Zillow

According to The Zillow Group Report on Housing Trends, Millennials are taking on these home improvement projects… but 66 percent of the time it’s just to add their own personal touch to a space, not really to FIX fix anything. That’s true across the board – across demographics and all over the country.

The Empire Today Home Improvement Survey 2017 reflected the same outcome – most people are embarking on renovation projects to pretty-up their spaces.  Coincidentally, painting is the most common home improvement endeavor undertaken by homeowners.

Social Media’s Influencing How People Spend on Home Design

Social media is directly influencing how people spend on home decor and home improvement projects. Twenty-eight percent of homeowners have made at least one purchase for their home in the last 12 months based on what they saw in a friend’s social media feed.

While Boomers and older Gen Xers get the majority of their design information and inspiration from magazines and television shows like HGTV and This Old House, according to SoFi, 44 percent of homeowners between the ages of 18 and 44, and 29 percent of homeowners over the age of 45 rely on social networks like Pinterest and Instagram to get inspiration for these kinds of design projects. You would be hard-pressed to come up with a brand in the home improvement/home decor space that didn’t have a presence on Instagram, Pinterest or both.

Pinterest Totally Dominates the Social Media + Home Decor World

In summer 2017, Pinterest reported there were 11 billion home decor pins on the platform and 2.3 billion home decor searches and saves per year. Pinterest alone reaches 40 percent of the people who have made home furnishing purchases within the last six months, and users say Pinterest is THE MOST influential platform for home decor and home design inspiration.

User-wise, Pinterest doesn’t have as many monthly active users as Facebook or Instagram. At the end of September 2018, the platform had 250 million monthly active users. But unlike Faebook and Instagram, 93% of Pinners use the platform to plan for or make purchases. Sixty percent of Pinners have used Pinterest to actually MAKE purchasing decisions for home decor.

Home decor is one of the three most popular search categories on Pinterest as well as one of the top shopping categories that lead to purchases.

Part of the platform’s charm is that it’s always tugging on me with cool ideas. A few days ago, the December Trends email landed in my inbox with insights into what’s hot on Pinterest, much of it focused on home decor. Out of the six topics covered in The Top Trends for December 2018, three of them were specifically about home decor.

Dark green living rooms are making a comeback…

People are also into smoke and cardboard art…

Open closets are a thing…

The above is a screenshot of a portion of the trends report email I got. When I clicked on the hyperlink for “open closets”, the next page featured a collection of pins tagged open closet.

There’s a Promoted Pin from Interior Define. Other pins include images from brands like Pottery Barn, Ikea, Wayfair, eBay, and Etsy.

And E-Commerce is Driving Sales of Home Goods

In addition to sourcing ideas only, most people are actually buying both furniture and home decor items online, often in lieu of going into store locations. Furniture and home furnishings make up 12.9 percent of total retail e-commerce sales in the U.S. So, for every $10 spent at any store online, $1.29 of that amount was spent on something for the house.

Why would anybody want to shop online for a comfy chair they can’t test out in the store? Simple answer – shopping online provides consumers with access to more products and more product variations. Shoppers can visit online stores for web-based retailers like Wayfair that don’t have physical stores as well ass physical stores that may not have nearby locations. Shoppers can also see a wider variety of items that they can have shipped to local retailers and even see the individual store inventory for specific products.

For instance, in Walmart.com’s marketplace, you are as likely to see items shipped by Overstock.com and Wayfair as you are to see those shipped by Walmart.

Walmart is working to expand both the e-commerce side of its business and home decor, launching brands like Allswell Home (on Instagram @allswellhome), a luxe mattress and bedding line. On December 6th, Walmart announced it was acquiring online home decor retailer Art.com, adding to Walmart’s growing portfolio of digital brands like Moosejaw, Hayneedle, and Jet.com.

According to Walmart stakeholders, part of the reason for the acquisition is to help Walmart target the younger, tech-savvy  audience that doesn’t make it into Walmart’s store locations. The acquisition will also enable Walmart to leverage Art.com’s augmented reality technology.

Even for retailers like At Home which doesn’t have a shopping cart feature, an online presence simplifies the shopping process. I like to use At Home’s search feature to find stuff I like, then check to see if the product I see online is available in any of the locations near me.

5 Cool Social Media Strategies We’ve Seen DIY and Home Decor Brands Use

#1 Running print campaigns

This is an area we don’t talk about a whole lot, but many businesses can benefit from having both an online and an offline marketing strategy in place.

I talked a bit earlier in this post about magazines and television still being an important part of the inspiration process for consumers over the age of 45. So, running an offline campaign alongside your online efforts can help you reach your goals faster. I have two examples here…

CHALK INK

Chalk Ink first landed on my radar as I flipped through the July / August 2018 issue of House Beautiful. The company had a full-page ad in that issue…

When I saw it, I immediately snapped a picture of it as a mental note to check Chalk Ink’s marketing on other platforms – i.e., see what kind of fun content was showing up on Instagram. I originally assumed Chalk Ink would be targeting moms with school-aged kids. I couldn’t immediately think of another use for Chalkboard paint or chalk marketers. I totally forgot about Instagrammers in particular using chalkboards and letter boards to create and post textual messages. Chalkboard messages have been reappropriated from the coffeehouse culture of using script or calligraphy to write messages and menus on chalkboards.

So, yeah… Chalk Ink is active on Instagram (@chalk.ink).

As I scrolled through the company’s Instagram feed, I spotted a post announcing another print ad in Entrepreneur Magazine.

I didn’t notice an immediate connection between what they were posting on social and the ads that were running in national magazines. Which brings me to my next example…

#2 Running symbiotic online and offline campaigns together

TOMORROW HYBRID MATTRESSES

I also came across a print ad for Tomorrow Hybrid Mattresses, which looked a lot like Instagram fodder to me.

That immediately made me search the company’s Instagram feed for the same image, which I found. Variations of this image can also be found on the brand’s website.

Source: Instagram

Tomorrow (which is a Serta brand) consistently runs influencer campaigns like this one with influencer Tal Lee (on Instagram @tallee).

There are also tons of posts featuring professional athletes… like this Instagram post from NBA shooting guard Jacob Evans III (on Instagram @j.n.e.iii)

Or this Instagram post featuring professional NFL linebacker Alec Ogletree (on Instagram @misterogletree52)…

And this one with NBA point guard Elfrid Payton (New Orleans Pelicans; on Instagram @elfrid)

#3 Become a resource for #goals

WAYFAIR

Once upon a time, Wayfair was dozens and dozens of individual drop shipping ecomm sites until its founder got the brilliant idea to make Wayfair one awesome marketplace for the coolest-looking furniture on earth. The brand runs multiple branded accounts on Instagram and Pinterest. Smartly, Wayfair creates a lot of content designed to help shoppers source inspiration.

Becoming a source of inspiration offers a couple of cool benefits. First, becoming creating valuable content that includes looks, trends, and design ideas gives you more opportunities for your customers and prospects to engage with your brand.

Second, the analytics such as bookmarks, repins, Likes, comments and regrams will give you insights into which ideas and trends your customers are most interested in seeing more of, so you know which products (plural) they are more likely to save, “cart “, and buy.

Wayfair’s Wayfair Professional account on Instagram features both design ideas for home offices and commercial spaces, as well as actual designed spaces the company has created, like this Instagram post of the reception area of Brit + Co (@britandco).

The Wayfair US Pinterest account includes 15 boards one of which is the Style Inspiration board, comprised of more than 2200 pins. This board alone has more than 363K Pinterest followers. What’s cool about this board is it isn’t your run-of-the-mill chair-and-table pics. Wayfair’s inspiration section includes trendy ideas for cartography-inspired decor, as well as ideas for design ideas for vintage, cottage, southwestern and even speakeasy style decor.

#4 Being a regular person, so to speak

IKEA

Ikea is an absolute MASTER at understanding that there’s more going on in a buyer’s world than just shopping for furniture. Ikea does a great job at tapping into what’s going on in popular culture and reappropriating it to fit the brand.

Ikea’s now Ikonic (see what I did there?) back-to-college video series entitled “Oddly Ikea” featured a 25-minute ASMR video that tiptoed through a series of products (and gently-spoken product information) as part of a dorm room design inspiration piece. Coincidentally, the image below is from that ASMR video, paused on a screenshot of someone tapping their fingers against a 200-thread count sheet set… to “hear every thread”.

But beyond the curiously enjoyable ASMR video last year, Ikea is also great at drumming up design inspiration, both in-store and online. Ikea’s Pinterest account is 45 boards, most of them are design inspo boards.

Another smart move – Ikea has stepped outside the home to include inspiration boards for things like the office, food, holidays and even weddings.

#5 Creating DIY and How-To Content

Fun fact: For people who plan to do home renovations and improvement in the coming year, 52 percent expect there will be a 50/50 split between what they intend to do themselves and what they intend to hire a professional to do. So brands that are able to create content that walks DIYers through simple (and even more advanced) techniques for doing things like building a table or maintaining a garden can get a spike in their sales by teaching. .

ACE HARDWARE

If there’s one home improvement brand that has the How-To content thing down to a science, it’s Ace Hardware. Your local Ace Hardware isn’t a giant superstore. If you have one near you, it probably looks like the local hardware store – easy to navigate, no chance of getting lost, and accessible inventory that you can reach… or grab a step stool to get when absolutely necessary.

Ace Hardware has found a way to get eyes on its products and on its brand through a series of super-useful home dwellers videos. Sure, you can learn how to build a table, but you can also learn how to fix broken Christmas lights, how to keep mice out of your house when it gets cold, and the proper way to divide perennials.

Ace skipped the typical product reviews and went one step further to show the utility of its products. For instance, Ace has a series of videos of cool recipes for the Traeger Grill. Not just ribs, but corn casserole, S’mores cones, root beer pulled pork, jerkey, and smoked deviled eggs.

Ace’s YouTube channel has more than 17K subscribers. But get this – the channels has racked up 16.8 million video views.

Ace Hardware generates content ideas like every one of its retailer-owned stores is populated by real people who actually live in real houses. It makes sense that Ace Hardware is the top-ranking home improvement store chain in the United States for customer satisfaction.

Ace’s tagline forever has been “Ace is the place with the helpful hardware folks.” the company’s social media strategy supports that mission. So, it’s content isn’t really design inspiration so much as helping people solve real issues. Super smart.

Even on Pinterest, there is as much DIY content as there is inspiration or product info content.

Wrapping it -Up

We are making the transition from year-end to the New Year, and as home owners and apartment dwellers are collecting ideas for the next big home design purchase, brands can begin incorporating these super effective digital marketing strategies into their 2019 arsenal.

Of course, if you need help with your next big marketing push, our platform is all about the data and simplifies what could otherwise be an extremely onerous process of rolling out a highly-targeted, effective influencer marketing campaign. We can help. Just call.

Social media marketing is one of THE MOST EFFECTIVE ways to reach buyers during the holiday shopping season. So, we hand-crafted this infographic to lay out for you, move-by-move, a ho-ho-holiday social media marketing strategy that will get eyes on your product and clicks to your page.

An 11-Step Plan to Incorporate Social Media Marketing into Your Holiday Strategy

OKAY, GUYS… WE’RE DOWN TO THE WIRE HERE!

Christmas is officially 11 days away, and if you’re still trying to pull in those last minute sales, we’ve got a strategy you can use to get ‘er done.

It’s 100 percent true that consumers are starting their holiday shopping earlier each year. I actually picked up a holiday gift over the summer that’s been stored in my closet. Since then, we’ve been storing gifts all over the house… but there are STILL 12 people on my shopping list.

I’m not alone. By mid-December, more than half of consumers have already completed their shopping. Then… there are the rest of us, still eyeballing retargeted ads that pop up on Facebook and news sites all over the web. Still saving Pins and Instagram posts that will go with us into the stores over the next week or so.

Cool Takeaways from This Year’s Holiday Strategy

Holiday marketing isn’t just for the holiday. According to marketers, the #1 BENEFIT of social marketing in 2017 was increased exposure. Thirty-seven percent of shoppers defer to social media before making a purchase, and 81 percent of buyers say social media influenced their purchase, at least to some degree.

Yeah, but what about ad blockers? People don’t like ads!

True… but they make room for the unintrusive way ads and sponsored content shows up on social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest. It’s worth noting that Instagram is the preferred platform for product discover, whereas Pinterest is the platform pinners use to plan purchases.

In fact, 42 percent of Millennials and 50 percent of GenZers say social media is THE MOST RELEVANT channel for ads. Millennial women surveyed by Bustle say they EXPECT to see brands represented on social media. Gen Zers say sponsored content that is the result of a partnership between a brand and their favorite social media influencers is an acceptable way for brands to approach them.

No kidding.

So, if you’re still grappling with whether or not you should incorporate social media marketing into this last-minute holiday push, the answer is absolutely.

Without further ado, here is the step-by-step guide to holiday social media marketing.

And that wraps up this year’s holiday infographic + last-minute marketing strategy. We hope you found it super useful!

Here’s a little snippet of code for you to use when embedding this merry little piece of content on your own blog (if you feel so inclined)… which we hope you do.

</p><br /><div style=”clear:both”><a href=”https://www.theshelf.com/the-blog/holiday-marketing-infographic”><img src=”https://s3.amazonaws.com/theshelf-email-marketing-images/blog_graphics/holiday-2018-infographic/holiday_infographic_from_the_shelf.png” title=”Step-by-Step Guide to Holiday Marketing” border=”0″ /></a></div><br /><div>Courtesy of: <a style=”text-decoration:underline; color:#11d3c8;” href=”https://www.theshelf.com/the-blog/holiday-marketing-infographic”>The Shelf</a></div><br /><p>

The 8 Things About Millennial Women and Millennial Moms You May Be Missing

By far, the most coveted demographic for those selling consumer goods has to be Millennial women. This magical segment of the global population has been responsible for sweeping changes in how we tell stories, how we use family photos, how we use digital, what a founder looks like and even how we think of motherhood. Magical is the right word, right?

They are primed to be the most financially independent generation of women in history. They are the most educated cohort of women in history. They are the most ethnically diverse generation in American history (67 percent of Millennial Moms are multi-cultural, according to research from Carat; they and their children are part of the two most ethnically diverse generations currently living in the US). And they are a vocal bunch.

On the heels on Gen X women, many of whom rebelled against societal norms, Millennial women are using the shattered pieces left by the generation that brought us Grunge and Gangsta Rap to build a modern woman who is progressive, active and powerful… whether she thinks she has it all or not.

Full disclosure: I just watched gangsta rap pioneer Ice Cube in Fist Fight (#teacherfight) last night, so the concept of Gangsta Rap doing the middle age thing is like, “Whaaaa…?”

As part of our What Makes Them Buy series, we looked at Millennial Men and Baby Boomers already. In this post, we’re going to look at two more distinct segments of the Millennial population – Millennial Women and Millennial Moms – and talk about the traits brands need to know about them to roll out targeted, authentic, effective influencer campaigns.

Trait #1: Millennial Women Are Hustlers

We’re going to go ahead and give Gary Vaynerchuk his due propers for making a hard-core value like work ethic trendy again by calling it hustling. The hustle culture is nothing new. A few years ago, hustling was used almost exclusively to refer to urban dwellers who created multiple streams of income for themselves by finding opportunities and capitalizing on them.

Of course now, conversations around hustle culture are social media fodder. And Millennial women are hustlers.

• Millennial women are driving the $20 billion resale apparel market that’s making sites like Poshmark and ThredUP a household name.

• Millennial women and minorities are launching new businesses at a faster rate than any other segment of the population.

• According to Worldbank.org, young women in the Middle East and some North African countries are outpacing men with regard to launching and heading up organizations. Young women are 60 percent more likely than men to dream up innovative solutions, and it’s 30 percent more likely for their innovations will have international reach compared to men.

• Young women also lead the charge for social change, venturing into social entrepreneurship and even rolling out programs in conflict-affected areas… fearlessly.

• And outside of business, 48 percent of Millennial women surveyed by Bustle say they volunteer, while 63 percent say they plan to volunteer in the future.

Trait #2: Millennial Women Plan Their Purchases

Millennial women plan their purchases. They will spend more than intended if they find a product that better suits their needs. Still, one characteristic that is consistent throughout their holiday prep is planning.

This is a big one, especially this time of year because you really have to get those influencer strategies rolled out well ahead of when your customer will be buying, if your customer is a Millennial woman.

For all the fabulous living being depicted in Instagram feeds, by and large, Millennial women are a frugal bunch, in large part because of the current economic climate. Consider this:

Generally speaking, Millennials have more debt and less wealth than their parents did at the same age. Millennials are, however, making more money than their parents did at their age. One of the main culprits driving the disparity between the net wealth of Millennials and the net wealth of their parents at the same age is student loan debt. Student debt has taken a heavy financial toll on this generation, causing them to delay wealth-building activities like buying their first home.

These are some of the factors which contribute to the tendency for Millennial women to be more mindful about their spending, saving and financial well-being. It also helps fuel their drive to hustle.

Source: From @21Ninety on Instagram

Here’s another thing about the planning: Millennials prioritize differently than did their parents. Unlike previous generations that had cut-and-dry lists of what grown-ups should buy (house, car, then vacations and luxuries… in that order)… Millennials instead plan their purchases to suit their lifestyles. They cut back drastically on non-essential items (which can INCLUDE an actual house or car) so that they can spend freely on items they believe will have the greatest impact on their emotional well-being and social lives.

Whereas Boomers would place a priority on buying a home, a car and getting their financial houses in order, Millennials are far more likely than previous generations to get their financial houses in order by renting instead of buying and participating in the sharing economy instead of buying (or leasing) a car.

Doing this frees them up to, say spend the money from a recent raise at work taking more trips abroad, or boosting their budget for dining out (or ordering in).

Trait #3: Millennial Moms Rely on Social Media to Inspire Planned Purchases

Millennial women use social media to source ideas for gifts, holiday travel, and entertaining for the holidays. Often, final purchasing decisions are made after months of collecting ideas and bookmarking images spotted on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and even blogs.

According to Popsugar 34 percent of moms between the ages of 18 and 34 get gift inspiration for their kids from lifestyle blogs, and 43 percent of Millennial women go to Pinterest to get food and drink inspiration for holiday entertaining.

What may be of interest to marketers is that Millennial women expect brands to use social as a way to introduce products. Eighty-one percent of Millennial women surveyed by Bustle say social media is the best way to reach them, and 57 percent expect to see sponsored content from brands – that’s an important part of product discovery.

As well, Millennial women have preferences when it comes to the type of sponsored content and advertisements they see. Fifty-seven percent of readers chose humor and social good as their preferred themes for branded content. Thirty-six percent preferred cause-related spots, followed by motivational spots (33 percent) and real-life scenarios (30 percent). We’ll talk more about why these are the top categories of ad content in the next section.

Nevertheless, Millennial women rely on visual content to help them gather information and opinions more efficiently and evaluate purchases. You know the old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”? Yeah, well… That’s because it takes 4 minutes to read 1,000 words and it takes less than 100 milliseconds to process an image.

Trait #4: For Millennial Moms, Adulting and Momming Are Part of Their Identities, Not Just Something They Do

More than a million Millennial women become moms each year. In 2016, there were 17.3 million Millennial moms, according to Pew Research. Today, I would estimate that number to be between 19.5 million and 20 million Millennial moms.

With nearly 90 percent of new mothers being Millennials who are members of the world’s first “Always-On Generation”, you can image motherhood is crucial to their identities. In fact, with so many “social” eyes watching, being a perfect mom is a goal to which many Millennial Moms aspire.

Research from BabyCentre’s well-known 2015 State of Modern Motherhood report said 64 percent of Millennial women feel enormous pressure to be the perfect mom.

In the previous section, I talked about the types of sponsored content Millennial women prefer to see. Millennial women favor inspirational or funny ads, content that shows a person (or better a brand) doing good in the world. But Millennial women also want to see ads with regular women doing regular things and having real-life challenges. Millennial women aren’t looking for perfection, even though some may feel that’s what the world expects of them. Whereas Millennial men respond to ads of regular men doing amazing things, Millennial women are okay with taking a break from amazing just to see someone else finding ways to deal with an over-packed schedule, work pressures, and the perpetual dance to juggle all of life’s social, familial and professional obligations.

Like Gen X and Boomer moms, most Millennial Moms work out of necessity. Only 35 percent of Millennial Moms call themselves homemakers. Interestingly, about the same percentage of Millennial Moms are the primary breadwinners in their households, and a third of those are either unmarried, or not co-habitating with a partner. In a world where two-thirds of Millennial Moms MUST work, 21 percent of Millennial Dads are now stay-at-home dads.

Trait #5: Millennial Women Are More Confident About Money

Unlike mothers of generations before them, Millennial Moms are, by and large, more confident with and more savvy about finances and products that protect their family’s financial well-being. Forbes recently reported that Millennial women are poised to become some of the most financially independent women in history. Not only that, but Millennial women are also some of THE MOST educated women in history.

Millennial women are more likely than men to have finished at least a bachelor’s degree, and 29 percent of Millennial wives between the ages of 25 and 34 earn more than their husbands.

For many Millennial women, money equates to independence, power, success and happiness.The majority of Millennial women (like, 7 in 10) are going into the workforce and marrying later than did women of previous generations.

Source: Mental Floss

They’re focusing on growing their careers and building financial stability ahead of walking down the aisle. So, by the time they marry, many Millennial women have already successfully managed their own households, budgets, bills, income and even investments.

Granted, Millennial women are thrifty spenders. They heavily research and prepare for purchases well ahead of making them. Not only that, but they are also couponers. Seventy-four percent of these consumers compare prices online and 55 percent download coupons from couponing sites.

Source: https://insights.popsugar.com/6-10-Millennial-Women-Plan-Apparel-Holiday-Purchases-44106878

Trait #6: Millennial Moms Are Willing to Pay Extra for Convenience

Life is busy. For Millennial moms, the work to balance life as a spouse, partner, parent, professional, influencer and agent for social change comes with a hefty price – time. As a result, Millennial moms – more than any previous generation of moms – are willing to pay a premium for convenience.

We’ve talked about their earning power and their education. We talked about how they’re starting families later than did women of previous generations. We talked about how thrifty and money-conscious Millennial women are. Now, bundle all of those insights together and digest this: Millennial moms will pay extra if you can make their lives a little easier.

According to Trybe:

• 83 percent of Millennial Moms shop online to hunt for the best price, as opposed to going from store to store

• 79 percent of Millennial Moms use e-commerce to get a better selection of products

• 62 percent of Millennial Moms shop online because of the good shipping options

The work-life balance for Millennial Moms is an ongoing struggle. So, it makes sense that 25 percent of Millennial Moms are willing to pay at least $50 a month to have someone step in and help them keep their home lives organized, and to keep their family from partaking in the one in five family meals that are now being eaten in a car.

Millennial Moms are also far more likely to have necessities like diapers and beauty products delivered to their homes rather than spend hours shopping for them in-store.

Trait #7: Millennial Women Are Loyal to Brands Who Are Loyal to Good

Millennial women aren’t brand loyal, not in the traditional sense. I remember my mom buying the same brands with every shopping trip, even down to the type of breakfast cereal she bought. All raisin bran were not created equal. Some, she thought, outranked others based strictly on the manufacturer. My grandma was the same way.

I agree that not all raisin bran are created equal. But I don’t base that idea on the logo at the top of the box, because I know formulas change. I base it on things like the presence of GMOs, sugar content, number of ingredients I mistake for another language, and whether or not a particular mixture of whole grain goodness makes my kids go nuts after they eat it.

Millennial moms are loyal to quality – whether it’s the quality of the product or the quality of the brand itself. By that I mean, Millennials in general are willing to pay a premium for a better quality product. They are also willing to pay a premium to buy from a brand that incorporates social good as one of its core values.

Fifty-one percent of Millennial women expect brands to give back to society, and 34 percent said they would be willing to spend more money on products that are environmentally-friendly. To give you an idea of what kinds of social good matter most to Millennial women, the Women 2020 report (which you can download here) identified six key areas Millennials women think are the primary issues facing women today.

Trait #8: When Millennial Moms Talk (and they do a lot of talking), the World Listens

Millennial Moms are social creatures indeed, significantly more social than Gen X Moms. For them, social media is more than just a place to chat about current events. It’s where Millennial moms show their communities who they are and what they’re about.

Eighty-five percent of Millennial women post pictures of their past experiences to social media and 80 percent post in real time. Seventy-two percent of Millennial women share from other sites to social media. This includes opinions about products.

Millennial Moms are totally okay with offering their opinions online about products – any products at all. They talk openly about clothes, cosmetics, motherhood, brands, retailers, experience-based services, even financial products.

What’s more, in addition to giving advice, 46 percent of Millennial Moms look to the recommendations of their network when it comes time for making decisions on acquiring goods and services, or making purchases.

While Millennial Moms favor Facebook (with an average of 500 Facebook friends) and Instagram, the average Millennial Mom has at least three social media accounts, according to a Weber Shandwick study.

Millennial Moms prefer smartphones to laptops. More than half of the Millennial Moms surveyed said they spend most or all of their time online on their phones, and spend more than 17 hours on social networks every week. That’s 30 percent more time than the average mom spends on social sites.

The Finish Line

Millennial women are an interesting and an influential bunch. More than any other demographic, they are actively spearheading societal and economic changes that impact how brands reach and engage them. This post was the tip of a very large iceberg, but it should definitely provide you with insights that can guide your marketing efforts this holiday season.

Of course, if you’re ready to roll out your influencer marketing campaign, we’re the best in the business. Give us a call to schedule a demo.

8 Defining Traits About Millennial Men That’ll Help You Target Your Marketing Efforts to Convert More Sales

Millennial men. How do you get ‘em? How do you move Millennial males to Click, Like, Engage, Opt-in, and Buy in your next digital marketing campaign? For the past few years, younger Millennials have garnered a reputation for being difficult to target, but the crop of spenders born between about 1980 to around 1997 (WHY ARE WE STILL SO FUZZY ON THIS?) aren’t as hard to read as marketers make out.

So… in our trademark irreverent way, I’m going to tell you in this post how to find, get in front of and woo Millennial males by telling you some of the shopping habits we’ve seen showing up repeatedly in the data.

Let’s do this.

Yeah, They’re Different, But…

It’s true that targeting Millennial men is different from targeting Gen X and Boomers (at least until Millennial men start having kids). But that’s not really because Millennial men are weird. It actually has more to do with their levels of exposure.

In this post, I want to identify eight important traits of Millennial men that you can leverage this holiday season during your campaigns. And when the shopping frenzy comes to an end, you can lean on these same traits to refine your marketing strategies during the Super Bowl and on into March Madness.

Saddle up.

Trait #1: Millennial Men Have Access to Tons of Information

Millennial men are digital beings. Not in a Ghost in the Shell kind of way. But most Millennial men probably cram to remember a time when they didn’t have the Internet at home, at school or both. In 1997 when the youngest Millennial babies were being born, only 18 percent of U.S. households had Internet access.

Three years later, the percentage of U.S. homes with the Internet had more than doubled, reaching 41.5 percent. 2001 was the tipping point; half of American households had the Internet. That means by the time the youngest Millennials entered kindergarten, most of their friends had the Internet at home.

Source: U.S. Census

Millennial men are used to having access to copious amounts of information. They are self-educated now… which means the role of the marketer has shifted from that of an informant to more of an adviser, ironing out the nuances between products and services that may look the same at first glance.

The way marketers approached Boomer and Gen X men when they were in their 20s and 30s probably won’t work on Millennial men because they can literally Google what you’re saying as you’re saying it.

And Google’s faster than your wordy pitch.

To deliver more than just information you need to focus more on delivering insights and communicating the experience consumers will have with your product.

The influencer who comes to mind for me is Lewis Hilsenteger from the popular YouTube channel Unbox Therapy, currently boasting 12.5 million subscribers and 2.3 billion video views. Hilsenteger showcases and reviews all sorts of cool technology and broadcasts his reviews to social.

Source: Unbox Therapy

Trait #2: Millennial Men Are the Most Educated Generation of Men in History

If that sounds like a killer stat, that’s because it is.

According to “15 Facts About Millennials,” a report released by the US Council of Economic Advisers (you can view and download that report here), Millennials are the most educated generation in US history.

In 2013, 47 percent of 25 to 34 year-olds had a post-secondary degree (Associates, Bachelor’s, or Graduate degree). Another 18 percent had attended college without earning a degree.

The way to a Millennial man’s heart (and wallet) isn’t through gimmicks and celebrity endorsements. They’re too smart for that, and we have seen too much as a society to believe the words of a celebrity whose only connection with a brand is the contract he signed to promote that brand.

Except for Matthew David McConaughey, who sort of looks like he put out word that he needed a car and the Lincoln folks began building cars just for him.

“That’s a big bull…” Oscar winning actor Matthew McConaughey vs an 1800-pound bull – my favorite of his Lincoln commercials .

Only 1% of Millennials say they are moved by ads from brands. Instead, they make their buying decisions based on independent research, online reviews, and user-generated content.

Like Millennial women, Millennial men favor authenticity over ads, social proof over self-proclamations, and the recommendation of a friend (even an online friend) over a million-dollar Super Bowl spot.

That said, a Millennial man will likely respond to the same types of content his grandpa did – ads that are funny and clever, and ads that turn regular guys into heroes by putting them in extreme circumstances. (I’m sure this explains how Captain America has made his way down through the generations over the last 77 years.)

Trait #3: Millennial Men Earn Less Than Boomers

Millennial men earn 20 percent less than their Boomer dads did at the same stage in life, despite being more educated. When compared with their parents, some Millennials are earning only slightly more with college degrees than Boomers did without degrees.

Source: 15 Economic Facts About Millennials

The average college educated Millennial has more debt in the form of student loans than did their parents at the same age. Plus:

• Millennials are less likely to have jobs while attending college

• Millennials have experienced slower wage growth than Gen Xers and Boomers.

• Millennials aren’t buying homes at the rates their parents did. They are renting longer and living in multigenerational homes.

• In 2016, one in three Millennials lived in multigenerational households, more than any other generation. Men between the ages of 25 and 34 are more likely than women the same age to live in multigenerational homes.

• Percentage wise, there are as many Americans living in multigenerational homes now (20 percent) as there were in the years following the Great Depression (21 percent). In stark contrast, in 1980, when Boomers were in their 20s and 30s, only 12 percent of them lived in multigenerational homes.

Source: Pew Research

But don’t cry for Millennials just yet. While Millennials are earning less than their parents did at their age, a recent survey found that Millennials are also more likely to plan their spending than Gen Xers and Boomers.

In fact, older Millennials and younger Gen Xers were the primary participants in the life design movement that Tim Ferriss kicked off with his New York Times best-selling book, The 4-Hour Workweek a decade ago, a lifestyle centered around the idea of living richly by spending money and time on the things that matter most to you.

CEO and author of I Will Teach You to Be Rich, Ramit Sethi starts off his Personal Finance class at CreativeLive.com this way: “I don’t know… Is anyone else tired of 65 year-old guys telling us we can’t spend money on lattes?”

Life design is about investing in the things you want and restricting the resources you put into the things you don’t want. For some Millennials that could mean downsizing your living situation after getting a much-deserved raise and spending more on international travel. It could mean renting a house instead of buying a home, or using rideshare services instead of buying a car and using the money you save to explore other passions or fulfill other indulgences, like eating out, or subscription meal services.

Most of us probably can’t imagine our parents being okay with that. Heck, when I called to wish my uncle a happy birthday a few years ago, one of his first questions was about my living situation.

“Do you live in an apartment?” he asked.

“I live in a condo, Unc,” I answered.

“Do you rent or do you own?”

Classic Boomer line of questioning, right?

When it comes to things like renting vs buying or saving vacations for retirement, Millennials are the anti-Boomer. But Millennials do spend on the things that matter to them.

In 2017, Millennials led in holiday travel and holiday shopping despite being less likely than previous generations to stretch their budgets with credit cards.  By and large, they would rather pay in cash than to rack up high-interest credit card debt, and with less disposable income, that takes planning.

According to Charles Schwab, 34 percent of Millennials have a written financial plan compared to 21 percent of Gen Xers and 18 percent of Boomers.

That said, you need to play the long game. Millennials are planners and researchers with more than enough information at their fingertips to learn what they want to know about new products and services.

Trait #4: Millennial Men Do Shop… More Than Their Dads and Grandpas Ever Did

Millennials represent a quarter of the US population and have more than $200 billion in annual buying power. In addition, they hold considerable influence over how their Boomer parents spend money (that’s another $500B to spend indirectly).

So, Millennial men have money, and they spend it. Millennial men are willing to shell out more money for a product if it will last longer than a similar product of lesser quality. This is especially true of Millennial dads, who tend not to be coupon-clippers, even during the early years of building a family.

By and large, 66 percent of Millennial dads prefer quality products that they think are the best for their families, as opposed to what’s most convenient or the least expensive.

Millennial men buy clothes more often than did men one generation ago, picking up new apparel items at least twice a month. They also tend to be early adopters of new technologies and products.

Millennial men spend an average of $2,200 a year in retail, directing their spending toward home improvement, apparel, digital, electronics, and mass merchandisers, and they tend to shop alone.

Source: CNBC

Trait #5: Millennial Men Defer to Social Media for Purchasing Decisions

About 70 percent of Millennial men use social media, according to Nielson Newswire. They use blogs, online news websites, and social networking sites to make purchase decisions.

As well, 45 percent Millennial dads typically use search to get answers to questions on everything from the best baby products to the best cities for families. This they do in lieu of getting advice from their own dads.

Far more than Boomer dads, Millennial dads are kicking in on one-on-one time with the kids, shopping decisions and housework. As most Millennial families are two-income households (sort of goes back to what I talked about in Trait #3), the changing role of fathers in the home is just too big for marketers to ignore.

Millennial dads dedicate 28 percent of their time online to dad-dedicated content and 60 percent of Millennial fathers say they’re better dads because of the resources they’re able to find online.

There’s an opportunity here, of course. Most brands target moms with respect to things like grocery shopping, household items, and child rearing. Many Millennial dads are feeling like there’s not enough brand-owned content online that’s specifically for fathers. Remember how I said men like seeing themselves as the hero in ads? Well, dads do, too. And typically, dads are positioned in TV ads and other content as add-ons, like a cool Texan uncle who smells like leather and tells great stories (sorry, I was in Dallas over the weekend).

Millennial dads are looking for brands that produce quality products and that are listening and responsive. If you can accomplish that, you’ll get Millennial dads on your team.

There’s one important thing I’m not mentioning here, though.

Ad blockers.

Omnicron Media Group estimated nearly 30 percent of internet users are using ad blockers, and high-income Millennials are the biggest user of ad blocking software.

According to an Elite Daily Millennial Consumer Study, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest have the most sway over the spending habits of Millennials. Brands that can build ongoing relationships with trusted social influencers have the best chance of reaching Millennials.

Trait #6: Millennial Men Also Leverage Social for Bragging Rights

Bragging rights, I get. I’ve seen more than my fair share of calf muscles, black and white gym photos and shirtless guys in sunglasses. I’m in Atlanta, so I’ve also come across the occasional gold Bentley.

(Why, dude? Why?)

That’s what comes to mind when I think of Millennial men using social media to brag.

BUT – and I’m totally stunned by this one – according to Allianz Global Assistance USA 2018 Vacation Confidence Index Millennial men are more likely than any other group to post vacation and travel photos for the sole purpose of making people envious.

I know, right?

The study reports that 36 percent of Millennials ages 18 – 34 have engaged in social media deception – curating their social media feed with pictures that make their travels look better than they actually were. Millennials in general are twice as likely as Gen Xers and seven times more likely than Boomers to practice social media deception.

AND there is a direct correlation between trusting what you see in your social media feed and the likelihood of indulging in deceptive social media practices themselves.

Trait #7: Millennial Men Expect More Out of Brands

Millennials hold brands to a higher social standard than previous generations. They expect the retailers and service providers to be helpful at every stage of the sales process, and responsive after a sale is complete. They also expect brands to take on the responsibility to do good out in the community. When they find brands who are crushing it in business and in the community, Millennials tend to stick with them.

The Elite Daily study I mentioned earlier confirms that 62 percent of Millennials demonstrated more loyalty to brands that engaged with their customers on social networks. In fact, half of the Millennials surveyed consider themselves brand-loyal. Millennials, as a whole, are more loyal to brands than Gen Xers and Boomers, in part because of the level of social proof and transparency social media offers.

Trait #8: Millennial Men Spend a Significant Amount of Time Online

Where have all the cowboys gone? Well, if the cowboy was born between 1980 and 2000, here’s where Nielsen.com says you can find him:

• Millennial men 18 to 34 years old make up 30% of the TV market

• Millennial men spend an average of 23 hours a week watching traditional television.

• African American Millennial men watch 3 hours of video online per week.

• Hispanic Millennial men watch 2 hours of online video per week.

• Asian American Millennial men watch nearly 4 hours of online video per week

• 88% of Millennial men listen to the radio for an average of 11 hours a week.

• 38% of Millennial men use Twitter

• 55% of US Millennials ages 18 to 29 are using Instagram

Let’s Wrap It Up

Here’s some good news for you: As Millennial men get older, they do begin to adopt some of the more traditional habits of men in their late twenties and thirties, habits we’ve seen before… habits we know how to market to. So, it turns out Millennial men are not as “mysterious and inscrutable” (quote from Señor Chang on an episode of Community) as marketers once thought.

What is new to brands and marketers is the way in which Millennial men make their buying decisions. They are not swayed by the most bedazzled ad or the celebrity endorsement. Millennial men focus on the brand itself and choose whether to buy products from that brand based on input from their online community, user-generated content about the brand itself, and their own thoughtful deliberation.