Mobile Operator Case Study – A comparison between traditional viral campaigns and Xtract’s community marketing intelligence approach
Customer
A central European mobile operator, with 4 million mobile subscribers.
Challenge
Achieve profitable growth in a saturated market with falling prices fuelled by strong competition.
A key part of the marketing activities of the company is to launch new services that will not only increase ARPU but also drive market share.
* The speed of deployment and uptake of new services within the customer base is essential as it has a critical effect on cash flow and capital structure.
* Ability to launch more rapidly than the competitors to gain market share.
* Reduce marketing costs, more efficient use of marketing budget, deliver better ROI.
Solution
A viral marketing campaign was planned for a new ring back tone’ service launch. In a viral campaign the message is intended to move from a customer to another using the word of mouth. Xtract knows that, within any community, the more influential the person that advocates to others, the more likely the adoption of that service will be.
Xtract decided to prove this by choosing as initial targets, or “seeds”, the most influential people in a particular community – the Alpha Users™. To do this, we compared the results of viral marketing in two equally sized groups:
Group 1 – was selected using the operator’s own segmentation model.
Group 2 – was selected using Xtract’s community intelligence tools that learn from the social interactions of people to discover the community influencing capacity of a particular person, Alpha User scoring.
The campaign was launched and its direct and indirect effect was then analyzed separately. The indirect effect looked at the people that were not targeted but influenced by the campaign.
Results
Xtract’s Alpha User based campaign war twice (2X) as viral in getting the new users of the ring back tones as operator’s traditional viral campaign. This is a proof that the Alpha Users are highly valuable when launching a new service.
