The ASOS Case Study: Social Media Marketing Excellence

ASOS is an online fashion retailer operating in the United Kingdom. It has become the number one destination for millions of young adults in their twenties. The company has enjoyed strong sales growth year on year since it was established in 2000. ASOSwon the marketing excellence award in the social media category organized by the marketing society. 

 

This blog post will examine how ASOS has leveraged the McKinsey Value Levers using social technology tools to achieve its corporate goals and objectives. It has developed its social media strategy around three ambitious objectives: boost sales, deepen brand engagement and encourage advocacy. A huge percentage of its client-base are females in their twenties. Based on this, ASOS key insight inspired the development of an interactive social media strategy – which focuses on the significance of dressing up its age twenty –something female clients when getting prepared for a party. This has led to a significant growth in engagement levels and sales for ASOS.

 

ASOS use influencers to bolster its social marketing effort by inspiring organic brand advocacy among its most ardent customers. During ASOS’s first experiment on using influencers for its social marketing, it recruited about 769 active brand advocates that are high-reach, high-value customers from among 3,000 applicants to the program. Within 3 months, the effort generated more than 7,500 positive brand mentions that reached more than 12 million people within these influencers’ networks. All these led to a 600% rise in spontaneous quotes and 800% growth in website traffic referral. It can been seen that ASOS as successfully used McKinseyvalue Levers six and ten – generate and foster sales leads and use social technology to match talent to tasks.

By gaining customer insights from its social media efforts, ASOS decided to create specific social activations designed based on insights gained from customer behavior. It created a theme called ‘best night ever’ which has three key social activations on the most popular social technology platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Youtube and Instagram. These three social activations are; Win Your ‘Best Night Ever’, Be Inspired for Your ‘Best Night Ever’ and Celebrate Your ‘Best Night Ever’. The celebrity videos created within these social activations generated over one million views within the first two weeks. The twitter hashtag for the ‘Best Night Ever’ has the most used hashtag across the campaign period versus competitors’ brand names and hashtags- beating TopShop ‘Whosthatgirl’ hashtag. In addition, ASOS organize games on twitter to engage its customers and generate sales. Its denim pair’s game on Twitter has led to increase in hourly sales of 774% during the gaming periods. The latest game had an eight fold impact on the direct sales generated from Twitter for its duration. The development of this social activations and games has led to ASOS deriving customer insights and also generating and fostering sales leads – which are Mckinsey Value levers four and six.

Late last year, the company took its social marketing strategy a step further by launching its UK sales full-price Christmas party wear collection and promotional sales to clear stock, using the power of social commerce to its full advantage. While retail giants such as Walmart and Tesco have left their Google+ account, ASOS is taking full advantage of every opportunity at its disposal by posting one or two updates every day and uses unique content rather than repurposing its old updates. Based on its consistent use of social technology platforms, ASOS has been able to generate over 7,500 pieces of content and 200 blog posts. This shows ASOS’s use of the McKinsey value levers five and seven – use social technologies for marketing communication and social commerce.

ASOS is a true inspiration for retailers online that aspire to use social technology tools to achieve their corporate objectives. The McKinsey Value Levers identified above are just a few of the value levers used by ASOS to execute its enterprise 2.0 strategy.

What fascinates you about what you have read on the social brilliance of ASOS? Share your ideas and thoughts below in the comment area.

Reference

          McKinsey (2013). The social economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies.