Nike's Social Media Strategy
In Chapter 14, the story of Jason Korman and Stormhoek, the winery he founded, caught my attention. In this blog, I want to talk about Nike’s social media strategy and why social media is so important.
Nike is an American sportswear manufacturing multinational company. Its business scope includes the design, development, production, global marketing and sales of footwear, clothing, equipment, clothing accessories and services. The company's headquarters are located in Beaverton, Portland, Oregon. It is the world's largest supplier of sports shoes and sportswear, and a very large manufacturer of sports goods.
I believe you must have seen a push about Nike while browsing Instagram. This world-renowned sports brand has 85 million fans on INS and has consistently ranked among the top 20 in the INS fan list. Every year, Nike needs to communicate with more than 1 million fans on about 200 social media accounts on different platforms.
Nike is one of the world's largest brands. Nike insists on providing one-to-one private service for every online fan. They will patiently answer consumer questions, not answering questions in general and perfunctory. Wes. Warfield, Nike’s Director of Social Media Operations, said, “Although we represent the Nike brand rather than a private person, we will still talk to each fan in a way that is close to the people and down-to-earth. Because Nike asks on different social media platforms. There are 200 accounts, so we need to ensure that the tone of each account is consistent. This requires our employees to accept in-depth learning. "Nike employees need to truly understand the Nike brand, and they must be familiar with the following aspects.
1. Who are we?
2. What are we doing?
3. Why do we work?
4. What do we stand for?
5. What is our brand voice?
6. How do our products change people's lives?
In order to face different emergencies, Nike has prepared a series of instruction manuals and case studies for its employees. These information can help Nike finally establish a unified and lasting brand tone. Please note that the "instruction manual" is not a cold "regulation". Wes compares this kind of coaching to the team's assistant coach, who can control the team's work. And each employee is more like a player on the field, they can play freely under the guidance of the coach, and strive to win the game.
Nike's social media marketing during the COVID-19 pandemic left a deep impression on me. In the epidemic environment, maintaining social distancing and staying at home are the mainstream social initiatives. For fitness people, exercising at home has become their only choice.
Nike was the first brand to advocate on social media that people should keep exercising even when they stay at home. Nike expects to convey the brand concept: strength, sportsmanship, ability, never stop.
Nike's latest brand slogan is as impactful as their famous slogan "Just Do it", in line with its consistent independent and invincible style. The post has #playinside and #playfortheworld tags, echoing Play inside, play for the world in the picture, calling on users to upload photos of themselves exercising at home and put relevant tags together to fight for global health.
Why this time Nike’s social media marketing has aroused people’s heated discussion, because the value conveyed by the hashtag #playinside is: sportsmanship, strength, and victory. Nike took advantage of the core brand value and linked it to the current environment to encourage audience participation and interaction, which had a positive impact.
But why is social media so important to companies?
At the World Cup in South Africa, the average monthly active users of Facebook and Twitter were 500 million and 200 million, respectively. At the World Cup in Brazil, this set of data has risen to 1.28 billion and 255 million. In addition, the average daily share of Instagram pictures is 60 million, and the average monthly number of active users exceeds 200 million.
These data all illustrate the power of social media at this stage.
The four traditional media of newspapers, magazines, radio and television have developed so far that they have a very rich advertising expression. However, in today's increasingly prosperous networked social media, the limitations of traditional media have become increasingly prominent. Newspapers and magazines have greatly reduced their content expressiveness due to factors such as layout and paper quality. If you want to expand the scale of content, the cost of occupying a large page is too high. The cost of TV commercials that need to be played repeatedly to impress viewers even more makes advertisers full of doubts. After all, the cost-effectiveness of return on investment rights is not high. Without sufficient funds, large-scale TV commercials are no longer the first choice for today's sports companies to do brand marketing.
Sports marketing's requirements for timeliness and flexibility are so high that Nike, the global sports goods brand giant, has devoted more and more energy to social media marketing in recent years. Please try to recall the Nike commercials you saw on TV recently. If you can't remember, don't be surprised. Although its marketing budget reached a record US$2.4 billion in 2011, its advertising expenses on television and print media in the United States have dropped by 40% in the first three years starting in 2010.
According to data from the advertising era of the survey company, Nike’s non-traditional marketing budget in 2010 reached 800 million U.S. dollars, and its proportion of the total marketing budget ranked first among American advertisers. In the past two years, the proportion of social media marketing in Nike's marketing expenditure and the amount of funds have further increased. In addition to Nike, almost all well-known sporting goods companies have joined the battlefield of social media marketing. So, what are the characteristics of social media that make it so important that it has become one of the main battlefields of sports marketing today?
First, the user base is huge and the growth rate is considerable
Today, the number of global social media monthly active users has exceeded 2 billion. By this year, the number of active Internet users has exceeded 3 billion (equivalent to 45% of the total number of Internet users in the world); nearly 2.1 billion people have social media accounts; 3.65 billion mobile device users have connected to the Internet through smartphones and tablets; 1.7 billion people have active social media accounts.
The current number of Facebook users is close to 1.4 billion, and 47% of all Internet users use Facebook. 4.5 billion "likes" are generated on Facebook every day. Nearly 70% of Facebook's revenue comes from mobile advertising. The number of videos uploaded directly to Facebook by users now exceeds that of YouTube. And Twitter also has 284 million active users, with 500 million tweets per day.
Second, social media has greatly shortened the distance between brands and consumers
As a sporting goods company, how to narrow the distance between itself and consumers is always an important issue. From this perspective, the fan economy created by companies signing famous athletes is also a means by which companies desire to disintermediate. And social media makes this direct communication easier and more intuitive.
Third, social media is highly targeted
Unlike traditional media’s wide-spreading network, social media platforms make the brand’s marketing targets more concentrated. The increased initiative of individual users allows them to choose the brands they are willing to follow based on their interests and tastes, and companies can also make their marketing methods more effective on potential target customers, which is undoubtedly a win-win realization.
Fourth, different from traditional TV media that need to continuously increase their broadcast frequency, which incurs a large amount of advertising costs, social media is very important for brands because individual users’ active communication of brand marketing content is represented by forwarding/sharing. Second spread
Fifth, the marketing effects of social media can be more intuitively evaluated by companies
Intuitive data such as shares, clicks, and likes are more favored by companies than marketing feedback from other traditional channels. Enterprises can also evaluate and summarize each item more conveniently and analyze market demand more effectively.
Sixth, social media can provide service content for some sports communities
For example, if you contact your own brand immediately after a hot match, you can attract consumers' attention to the greatest extent.
So do you have any examples of other companies' strategies for social media marketing?
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG3rTPVBOKI
Hey Haoran,
ReplyDeleteI loved the detailed overview of Nike's marketing campaign. You can definitely see that marketing is one of their strong points as a business - Nike took advantage of that during COVID with motivation to keep people going. Their investment in marketing is impressive and honestly more companies should follow their lead. You can tell by their ads they put lots of effort into them and really do a great job of diverse representation. They are at the head of their industry but could do more in terms of transparency around their unethical manufacturing - if they did perhaps they could create a more positive groundswell too. Great work!
Hi, Haoran, you mentioned that Nike said, "Although we represent brands rather than individuals, we will still talk with every fan in a down-to-earth way". This reminds me of the brand I chose, Starbucks. Last week, I saw an angry audience leave a message to Starbucks saying that she was not satisfied with a new product she ordered. Starbucks quickly apologized to her and proposed a solution. At that time, I thought Starbucks had good intentions, and it already regarded itself as an individual interacting with the audience. Another audience mentioned their own anniversary and Starbucks' anniversary, and Starbucks responded warmly to her. All this makes me feel that brands need not only traditional marketing methods, but also new marketing methods, such as this. This Starbucks makes me want to spend it very much.
ReplyDeleteIn addition, I think Nike is still keeping up with current events. Instead of crushing it, the epidemic has enabled him to find a better way to interact with the audience on social media and publicize his brand concept, which makes me admire this brand very much.
Hi Haoran，
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing, I really like the example you used Nike. You mentioned that "Nike insists on providing one-to-one private service for every online fan. They will patiently answer consumer questions, rather than general and perfunctory answers." I think this is Nike becoming one of the world's brands. An indispensable kind of marketing. Not any brand can do this. From Nike’s example, we can see that the groundswell of social media is huge. Social media has rescued many brands during the epidemic, and at the same time, it has also brought brands closer to consumers.