(Company Name) Brand
The name of the Company chosen for this paper is L’Oréal Australia. The company engages in procurement, retail and wholesale of skin and hair care, cosmetic and perfume products in Australia. The report will be about to show how the company undertakes its online marketing through social media. The topics to be discussed include the company brand, growth analysis, portfolio examples, and compliance.
The company’s brand awareness in the marketplace remains strong in Australia. It is distributes products via hair salons, department stores, and perfumeries, mass-markets, medi-spas, drug stores, free-standing stores, e-commerce websites, travel retail and convenience stores. The Company uses more social advertising campaigns based on sophisticated automation and audience management thus building a strong brand on social platforms. The company has since proved that investment in right tools and strategy creates an extremely successful digital campaign thus brand reputation than the rivals (Agnihotri et al., 2016).
The company has established a position at the forefront of latest media for its branded content-online. For L’Oréal Australia, its branded online content has presented a means to effectively connect consumers to its brands. This has since helped the company to achieve its goals of adding one billion new customers by year 2020. Digital remains of the 4 pillars of the strategy L’Oréal is aiming to double its customer base. Over 35 local websites are being operated by the company across its 27 brands, with several additional social media destinations (Alexander, 2014).
It has a very large portfolio of digital media assets alongside an extremely exciting challenge to lead the game in digital beauty industry. The brand awareness has in the past been achieved through employment of beauty advisers in stores who talk with clients directly, but it has since realized that this traditional strategy is never scalable. To get around the challenge of helping consumers navigate the beauty complexity and how to do this at scale, the company has since launched new platforms locally and globally developed to deliver on its promise of offering beauty for everyone, the mantra for the L’Oréal Australia. The company’s digital brand approach is to have branded content anchored around entertainment with the sole intention of being an information provider to edge its rivals (Barreda et al., 2015).
In comparison, L’Oréal’s awareness and reputations appears to have edged out its rival. This is because, whereas most of its competitors appears to be using branded content as more of entertainment, L’Oréal has realized that branded content is all about value to consumers and never about creating entertainment, but more of assisting the education process for consumers (Godey et al., 2016). Thus, the Company believes that it is actually vital for them to be there for consumers and remain integral part of the journey for consumers to find the right product. This is where L’Oréal Australia is seeing the branded content playing a big role unlike its rival thus giving it an edge. For example, the Company uses M: Edition, locally developed sites for its Maybelline New York brand (White, 2016).
Growth Analysis
The intention has been to provide women with the desired inspiration from catwalks as well as streets of New York and packaged with required tips and information from over twenty local beauty bloggers and vloggers, and from brand ambassadors (Hudson et al., 2015). This has edged out its rivals since it provides consumers the ability to ask questions, and the site remains currently being visited by over seventy-thousand Australian every month, thus making it the number one local online make up destination. Another site used to edge competitors by L’Oréal Australia is known as Get-the-look launched to capture trending “looks” from red carpet events globally and bring them to an Australian audience. This has seen competitors having difficult moments since Melbourne-based journalist contributed ten to twelve articles every day, and Get-the-look became the launch-partner for Twitter Amplify in January 2014 Australia (Cawsey & Rowley, 2016).
This platform has boosted the company’s brand awareness and reputation against its rivals because it helps consumers dream about becoming beautiful as they can, and subsequently offering them with the required tips, right down to which its product remains the right one for them. The company is more concerned by the more amplifying topics which are relevant to customers around trending looks and subsequently coming into product angle as second phase. This makes customer feel they are valued and hence creating better brand reputation (Van Looy, 2016).
L’Oréal Australia has various opportunities to boost its brand awareness and reputation as opposed to its competitors. The company has the opportunity to grow its brand awareness by going back to the future with content marketing agenda (Gamboa & Gonçalves, 2014). Indeed, the company has realized that branded content marketing remains the key to adding new customers by 2020. Unlike previously that it revolutionized advertising by staging live radio shows which attracted upwards of a considerable number of new customers, these only served to promote its message about personal hygiene, but further became the mainstay of product marketing (Corcoglioniti et al., 2017).
The Company has an opportunity to grow its brand awareness and reputation by establishing its position at the forefront of recent media for branded content-online. Since L’Oréal Paris has amped up brand awareness with new digital partnership, L’Oréal Australia can borrow a leaf from this strategy to grow its brand awareness and reputation. By partnering with digital agency Lion & Lion and Agile marketing software Kenshoo, L’Oréal Paris boosted its digital marketing strategy and brand awareness efforts. This offers L’Oréal Australia an opportunity to implement an integrated social advertising program on Facebook which helped the L’Oréal Paris. This would be aimed at driving customers to a range of retail outlets which sell the products. This opportunity will be effective as the company can have the proven efficient services of Lion & Lion that managed a cost-effective deployment of video ads on Facebook to target consumers that were more probably to convert and buy the products via use of Kenshoo’s Infinity suite. The strategy will pay off as it did to L’Oréal Paris where it saw click-through rates (CTR) rising by 118% and the number of actions surging 140 compared to previous month. This demonstrated a strong boost in brand awareness as well as engagement to significantly over deliver on all the KPIs.
Using online social media reach larger existing audiences / communities or ones currently not being reached. An audience or community, from a marketing perspective, is the target audience. This is the intended audience or even the readership of a marketing message, publication, and advertising. Thus, an audience or community is “the specific group of consumers within the predetermined target market, identified as the recipient or target of a given message or advertisement (Beverungen, Böhm & Land, 2015).
There are three main steps that must be considered to ensure that online social media reach larger current audience or communities or ones presently not being reached. This can be called building social media community (Jin, Liu & Austin, 2014). For this to happen, there has to be an engaged social media community which is integral to the success online. This is the main reason businesses join social networks (De Albuquerque et al., 2015). The social community for a business is never solely composed of prospective buyers; but also full of potential advocates-individuals who shall spread the message past the business reach to their individual networks. Thus, the business must have a social media community that is supportive as well as long-lasting to reach a large audience. Thus, the business can only achieve this by making connections with them beyond mere advertising (Tsimonis & Dimitriadis, 2014).
The first stage is for the business to build a foundation for social media community to attract and keep followers. For a business to ensure there is rallying (engaging, sharing, and promoting content) around a shared interest, a social presence has to be built worth rallied around by having a two-way communication for personalized interactions. The second stage is to grow your social media community to build a targeted audience of engaged social media influencers and users (Moro, Rita & Vala, 2016). This is achieved through engaging in strategic conversation, connecting with offline community and being generous. The last stage is to leverage social media community to achieve business goals. Leveraging will be achieved through collection of feedback, crowdsourcing content, and amplifying your news (Neill & Moody, 2015).
There is a need to protect against declines or risks to the current audiences or communities of the company, because of issues/crisis situations. This is achieved by collecting feedbacks by finding a better audience from which to gather it. This feedback helps in shaping social media and broader business strategies to move forward without decline. Also, crowdsourcing content since user-generated content remains one of the greatest gain of having a social media community. This will be a proactive strategy to mitigate any risk as they will be talking about their own issues and get solutions before they degenerate and cause declines.
The channels choosing for the social media marketing are Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. The main reason is that this social communities have the largest number of audience and hence the campaigns will have much coverage per time. The timing frequency will be on a daily basis for a period of two weeks.
The L’Oréal Australia must comply with the Spam and Privacy Act in its attempts to undertake any commercial message. The Spam Act 2003 prohibits the company from sending unsolicited commercial electronic messages called spam- with an Australian link. Thus, the company must ensure that no commercial electronic message will originate or commissioned in Australia, or originate abroad but sent to the address accessed in Australia. The Company must ensure that it complies with the ACMA which is the body mandated to enforce Spam Act 2003.
The Act covers emails, multimedia messages (MMS) mobile phone text messages, instant messaging (iM) and other forms of electronic messages of the commercial nature. Also, the company must comply with requirement of “Do Not Call Register” that deals with voice or tax telemarketing. The company must also comply with Criminal Code Act 1995 by preventing any unauthorized access and modification of data through a carriage service, possession of data with an intent to commit computer offence or even production, distribution or obtaining of data with intent of committing computer offence. Thus, L’Oréal Australia will have challenges trying to balance the compliance with these laws and legislation and their need to reach the largest audience. They might event get penalize in case they feel to comply which will be a loss to the company.
Conclusion
The purpose of the report was to showcase how L’Oréal Australia undertakes to build its brand awareness and reputation through social media post to edge its rivals. The paper has covered such areas as brand awareness and reputation creation, growth analysis of using social media to reach large audience, compliance when dealing with commercial electronic messages, and the examples of portfolios uses by L’Oréal Australia to create its brand awareness and reputation. It is apparent that L’Oréal Australia has outperformed its rival and has established stronger digital branded content to remain a strong brand in Australia than its competitors.
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