Kimberly-Clark Connects Social Media to In-Store Sales

8/14/2013
As consumer goods companies gain their footing as marketers in a digital world, they are starting to ask the right questions: Who are my biggest brand advocates? And, where are consumers spending time communicating about my brand online?

Finding answers to those questions remains a challenge, but Kimberly-Clark Corporation (www.kimberly-clark.com) has a leg up thanks to a well-defined digital marketing strategy that incorporates insights from digital couponing technology.

Kimberly-Clark’s Baby and Childcare brands are developing price promotions for the digital world to help moms (who are always armed with smartphones, tablets, computers, etc.) interact and build relationships with its brands.

“Consumers don’t interact with us in analog and digital separately, and we cannot market that way. Understanding a consumer’s social influence is a very important next step in building that relationship,” says Dan Kersten, consumer promotion manager for Kimberly-Clark. “It changes the conversation from a brand just speaking at a consumer to a brand engaging a consumer, and providing them the capabilities and incentives to engage with their circle of influence on behalf of our brands.”

The company equips moms with tools to more easily share coupons and offers, helping her to build her “social credit” with friends, family and acquaintances. Using a channel-agnostic tool, RevTrax’s OpenShare (www.revtrax.com), the company can issue social coupons via any digital channel and give consumers the ability to share coupons by clicking “share” or by simply sharing a link or URL.

“Despite hand-waving by a multitude of technology providers, digital coupon technology simply has not benefitted from the type of innovation we’re seeing across the broader digital and social landscape,” says Kersten. “RevTrax is the rare exception and fits squarely within our strategy to leverage digital and social to not just drive in-store brand sales, but to have insight into how promotions are working and why.”

Kimberly-Clark tracks sharing of its coupons or offers across channels and through generations down to the program level. It can see which customers have the biggest reach and what the corresponding spend is per person and per channel.



“This gives us more learning to take to our Shopper Marketing teams, as well as where to focus our efforts in future plans,” says Kersten.

A recent Triple Clean Wipes OpenShare rewards program gave consumers the option to either get a coupon or share the promotion for a higher value coupon. They saw the following results:
  • 27% of views came from shares (free media)
  • 17% off all prints came from shares
  • Facebook was the biggest channel for shares with 53.2%, followed by e-mail with 40.5% and Twitter with 6.3%
  • Second generation shares were 33% higher in e-mail than on Facebook?

Kimberly-Clark will continue to use the rewards program to add free media to its offers, build out its CRM database, and continually collect data to better serve up relevant offers based on individual consumer needs and wants.  





FAST FACTS

Building Brand Advocates

Kimberly-Clark is able to identify moms that most often share its coupons via social channels and e-mails them directly with information about new products and/or offers.

Retail Credibility
Using RevTrax’s OpenShare, Kimberly-Clark can understand a digital consumer’s influence with specific retailers and arm its Shopper Marketing teams with information about where they shop and where their friends shop.

How it Works
Kimberly-Clark’s digital marketing strategy uses an omnichannel platform to socialize digital promotions, identify high-value consumers and track revenue lift at the offline point of sale.

Share and You Shall Receive
Kimberly-Clark realized encouraging results from its campaigns that give digital consumers the option to either get a coupon or share the promotion for an even higher value coupon.
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