The first day of Customer Expo 2018 featured a presentation from Saloni Janveja, Executive Marketing Director of Social, Innovation, and Direct to Customer Insurance for Ally Financial. Janveja explained how listening to customers is a key business strategy within her company, a strategy others should note of, she argues.
She began by showing the audience a video promotion from an Australian marketing campaign that partnered the Snickers brand with Seven-Eleven convenience stores. The campaign let Australians know that Snickers employed a “hungerithm,” a system of gathering data from social media posts that lowered the price of Snickers bars each day at Seven Eleven stores based on the mood of posts. This strategy led to an increase in sales and broad engagement with social media. The point was, as Janveja put it, that “social can be used in creative ways to drive traffic.”
She then pointed out that the typical individual in 1970 saw about 500 ads per day. In 2018, the average person sees 5,000 per day. “People are inundated with ads,” she said, “which presents unique challenges for brands.” Cutting through has never been more difficult.
Businesses need to understand the everchanging social media landscape. One aspect of that is, as Janveja notes, that “it’s all pay to play now. Organic outreach is dead.” She observed further that a growing concern for data and privacy protection on social platforms has decreased consumers’ trust in companies on social media. Brands must, therefore, find creative ways to build trust.
Janveja then discussed the importance of being mindful of the “internet minute,” what happens on the Web over the course of 60 seconds. She displayed a graphic representation of an internet minute and stated that, “18 million text messages are sent; 174,000 people are scrolling Instagram; 481,000 tweets are sent; 2.4 million Snaps are created; 3.7 million Google searches [occur]; and 38 million WhatsApp messages [are sent].” She emphasized that this is activity happens each minute on the internet, every hour, every day.
The takeaway from this is that “because there’s so much going on, customers demand quick responses.” Janveja stated that half of today’s consumers expect companies to respond to them within 60 minutes, while a third expect a response in 30 minutes or less.
Ally Financial responded to this trend by hiring a community manager for its social media. This way, customers who post a question on social media at 6 PM on Friday will not have to wait until 9 AM on Monday for a response.
Janveja further observed that chatbots have recently increased in prominence and predicted that they will become even more of an asset for brands in the future. These chatbots guarantee immediate responses for all customers on social media and in the high-speed, high-volume reality of the internet, constant and fast engagement is necessary.