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Marketing

What Fits Your Business?

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I work as a department manager for Lowe’s Home Improvement and I’ve always been impressed with Lowe’s unique and inspiring approach to media marketing. They utilize social media platforms usually ignored by businesses such as Pinterest and Vine.

This morning I listened to an interview with Brad Walters, who is the Director of Social Media and Emerging Technologies at Lowe’s Home Improvement, by Rick Mulready. In this interview, Walters focuses on an important topic:
“choosing a social media channel that aligns best with your business and focusing on that one channel.”

Twitter does not ultimately align best with the Lowe’s business for any purpose other than consistently answering customers concerns and questions. Lowe’s wants to consistently inspire their customers with new ideas, often visual ideas, that will not only improve brand loyalty but will also increase sales. Lowe’s has over 3.5 million followers on Pinterest, which dominates their Twitter followers. Lowe’s does not need to maximize their presence on Twitter in order to increase sales because Twitter is just one of the many platforms that ties into Lowe’s overall media marketing strategy.

Mulready discusses Lowe’s spring 2013 campaign and discussed the process of not only getting their target market involved, but also discussed how the social media campaign helped the company gain information on who their customers were and what those customers were expecting from the company. This is an area in which Twitter exceeded, as mentioned earlier, by creating a platform for customers to ask their questions on, thus providing Lowe’s with the marketing information that they needed.

Lowe’s then took that information provided by Twitter and used it to design the Improve With Lowe’s mobile app, utilized Facebook notifications, created YouTube and Vine videos to answer customers how-to questions and Pinterest boards to offer visual inspiration. The Improve With Lowe’s app takes customer’s local information, such as the city they live in, and uses that information to offer home improvement reminders based on local season and weather.

Twitter allows companies to share information quickly and may encourage a conversation with customers, but it may not be the best platform for all companies, especially small business companies. Other companies should adopt Lowe’s strategy of finding out what the customer’s need from their company and using the correct platform to serve that need. If a company needs to offer up-to-date, instant information and immediate response to customer feedback, then they certainly should utilize Twitter as an important marketing tool. However, companies should not ignore other social media platforms in favor of only Twitter, because Twitter itself may not offer the enrichment and depth that an IMC campaign requires.

Lowe’s is focusing at the moment on Pinterest as one of its main marketing platforms, along with Facebook, in order to meet the immediate needs of their customers. More companies are adapting Pinterest for marketing and discovering just how Pinterest can drive both inspiration and sales. During his interview with Mulready, Waters says that, “I don’t think that for us (Lowe’s) we wouldn’t be able to re-purpose Pinterest as another catalog…It is not the way that people who are using Pinterest are utilizing that platform.” 

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