Digital marketing is a growing global trend. In 2014, companies spent 25% of their total marketing budgets on digital platforms, and that figure is projected to increase to 75% within the next five years. It’s not just smaller companies who are trying to reach consumers in unique ways. Large corporations that are household names, too.
Take Nestle for example. The monolithic producer of chocolate is reeling from the shortage of chocolate consumption globally. According to Euromonitor, the chocolate market in the U.S.– the world’s largest– peaked in 2005 and has been on a steady decline for the past decade.
Each year, chocolate production decreases three percent. While this may look like a small number, it can represent millions of dollars in lost revenue for Nestle. Consequently, the company is switching gears and looking for new
ways to reach their clientele.
It turns out that partnering up with the social media giant Facebook may be the answer. Nestle is using the application Facebook at Work, Facebook’s enterprise network that allows businesses to post comments and update users on new ad campaigns.
Using Facebook at Work is one way for Nestle to offer around the clock service to customers on the social media platform. In addition to the optimized customer service, the chocolate giant is able to experiment with new digital marketing techniques and receive live feedback.
The partnership between Facebook and Nestle has created specific brand campaigns only for the eyes of Facebook users. Nestle is able to utilize Facebook’s immense consumer reach and target campaigns for different users
, for example utilizing a high-resolution version of an add meant for western markets, and another that used less data for consumers in India with smaller data plans.
“This has been a journey for us in evolving the creative skill set for new environments,” Nestle’s global head of marketing Tom Buday said to Ad Week. We don’t want creative development to become an engineering exercise because it’s not a perfect science. But properly harnessing the data that we do have available to us is an incredibly powerful thing.”