A decade ago, social media was seen by many as a waste of an organization’s time and resources. Not so anymore. Today, more and more companies recognize the power of authentic engagement with social media and many are adopting new social business models to create a competitive advantage.
Godrej Group, the 122-year-old Mumbai-based conglomerate that pioneered in locks business, was looking for ways to better engage with employees and customers and improve collaboration.
The challenge began to surface when the $4.1 billion Group with diversified sectors such as consumer goods, real estate, appliances and agriculture, announced its 2020 vision aiming to be 10 times the size of what it was in 2010, as articulated by its Chairman Adi Godrej.
As Pankaj Parihar, Vice President and Head of Digital Marketing for Godrej Group’s Consumer Product Group observes, “For Godrej, achieving the 2020 vision has necessitated a transformational shift in customer engagement.”
Overcoming Barriers
Godrej found a solution in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform for marketers that allows them to create and manage marketing.
The Marketing Cloud incorporates integrated solutions for customer journey management, email, mobile, social media, web personalization, advertising, content creation, content management and data analysis. The software includes predictive analytics to help make decisions such as, what channel would be preferable for a given message. Earlier the ‘social’ piece was missing from Godrej’s basket.
With over 1.1 billion customers globally – Godrej realized the power of social engagement to reach its valuable customers effectively.
Read more: Adoption of Social Business Models Growing
In the summer of 2019, Godrej Group selected Salesforce Customer Success Platform to track what customers are saying and what content they are consuming not just about its own brands or product categories but more generally. This helps it to gain a better understanding of its target demographic groups and define a social and content strategy to connect with them online.
For example, one of these demographic groups is mothers with young children. The company knew it couldn’t effectively engage these mothers with content solely about hair color or insecticides, so apart from other offline insights, it uses Salesforce to identify topics they’re engaging with online. Where those topics are relevant to Godrej Group’s products or expertise, there’s an opportunity to connect.
Supported by Social Studio from the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Godrej is now listening to its customers, analyzing conversations, and responding in a whole new way.
“We can now capture insights to define our digital strategy and engage our customers with content we know they want to read,” says Parihar.
Real-Time Insights and Response
Godrej Group’s proactive approach to online engagement is a huge leap forward for a company which relied heavily on TV to reach customers in the past. With that approach, it could not get deep enough insight into its online customers’ interests and what was said about its brands.
Social Studio has resolved both challenges. It helps Godrej Group to gather insights for proactive communications while monitoring conversations about its brand in real-time. As Parihar said, “We now know if customers are talking about us on Facebook, Twitter, or blog sites and what they are saying.”
“We can quickly escalate issues to the right department and respond within 24 hours or less. In the past, we had no easy way to track these conversations and it could take us a few days to respond,” he adds.
Social Studios for Engagement
The Godrej Group is now using Social Studio across 15 different brands in India and Indonesia and is considering a rollout in Africa by the end of this year. It’s experienced double-digit growth in online customer engagement and user session times are increasing. A 20% growth in organic traffic is further proof that the topical content informed by social listening is having the desired effect.
Through its implementation partner, Mirum, the Godrej Group is also using Social Studio to gather insights about new market categories and inform its broader marketing strategy.
“Our collaboration with Mirum and use of Salesforce has been critical to improving our customer insight and crisis management capabilities. Mirum is also helping us to assess new market opportunities as we work to achieve our 2020 vision,” says Parihar.
“Godrej is a truly a global conglomerate and needed a platform that would help them manage their complex requirements,” says Mihir Karkare, Co-Founder and Executive Vice President of Mirum.
He informs that Salesforce provided that platform while Mirum partnered with Godrej in a flexible and scalable manner to achieve their key objectives in just a few months.
According to PWC’s global consumer insights survey for 2019, half of consumers (58%) say that social media directly influences their purchasing decisions. To take advantage of this behavior, brands need to turn to newer practices such as social listening and real time insights to woo consumers.
Other research firms too, realize that harnessing the power of social business model is essential for enterprises that want to engage with their employees, suppliers and customers and keep them happy. But Esteban Herrera, partner and global leader of ISG Research believes that the social business model doesn’t happen by accident.
“It requires an organizational commitment to leveraging social networking principles to create efficient, state-of-the-art collaboration, modern client interactions, and retention solutions embedded within digital marketing channels,” he said.
“From that perspective, the combination of Salesforce and Mirum coupled with our in-house expertise, is a huge leap in customer engagement and moves us closer to our goal,” Parihar signs off.
