Interview with Ahmad Kammoun: The Axe Middle East Social Media Case Study

Ahmad Kammoun is the Creative Director at Saracen Advertising, responsible for idea creation and strategy of social media marketing for various brands, including AXE Middle East. Axe Middle East started its social media marketing with a Facebook page on June 27, 2011. Efforts were focused on the entire of Middle East, but earlier this February, they adopted a more specific approach for Saudi Arabia, lead by Ahmad.

Ahmad stated that Axe found more interactivity with its audience online, through social networks, since its clientele is highly mobile & cyber. Being a “fun” brand, it found a cost-effective way to humanize and personify the brand for its target audience.

Axe’s goals from using social media for the Saudi market are:

• To increase brand awareness,
• To engage and interact with its target audience,
• To support its traditional marketing campaigns,
• To increase its sales by diversifying its clientele.

The brand defined its target audience as: Saudi men between the ages of 18 and 35, single and married, interested in learning about attracting women, tech savvy, and care more about having an attitude rather than just looks.

To achieve these goals, Ahmad kept focus on Facebook as its young adult male-dominated network makes it ideal. It is important to note, that the Facebook Page is managed by different admins for the various countries in the Middle East, but Facebook’s feature of allowing Pages to target specific countries with each post makes it possible to keep content and fans’ engagement separate for each market. His approach is to keep Facebook fans engaged with continuous campaigns that vary between traditional campaigns driving traffic to Facebook or inviting Facebook fans to take part, online campaigns that extend to offline activities, and sometimes separate online & traditional campaigns that don’t have the same message. Ahmad believes that a mix between traditional and Facebook campaigns works best for its audience to see the brand’s “face”, and get them to interact with it, giving 80% for online activities and taking 20% of it offline as to keep costs low while still keeping in touch with the audience.

Ahmad’s content strategy for the brand is to create his own content, rather than depend on sharing third-party content. The approach is to focus on the fans’ interests, such as college days, cars, football, etc. 

For example, when Eurocup 2012 was running, the page’s content focused on teams, games and scores, such as in image below, where Axe Middle East asked its Saudi fans to vote for the football team they support in Eurocup. The question resulted in 150 votes.

  Axe Middle East engages its fans with Questions. 

Ahmad also tried to maintain the level of engagement by launching photo contests; however, it wasn’t very successful so he rectified the tactic by “taking it offline” and inviting fans to visit Axe booths where they can have snapshots of themselves and get a free Axe deodorant in return, which salvaged the situation.

He also successfully used the fact that photo posts has higher engagement according to Facebook insights, and created mini-game posts such as “Spot the differences (between 2 photos)”, and puzzle photos that increased the virality of the post by asking fans to “share” them if they find the answers. The image below is an example of a post that got 23 shares.

 Axe Middle East Increases Virality with Photo Puzzles.

Another example of highly-engaging posts are challenge posts, where fans were challenged to post 20 comments without being interrupted by another comment, and it resulted in over 400 comments.

Nonetheless, Ahmad primarily believes that the best tactic to drive engagement is creating and using “apps”. In the beginning of March, The Axometer App was launched, where fans can play online or join an Axe booth at malls to play, and measure their level of awesomeness and ability to attract women. Even without prizes, the campaign resulted  in an organic increase of 19’000 fans in a month and a half. Therefore, he plans to have 6 apps per year, that are supported with offline campaigns.

He also included Twitter in the social media mix, starting June; however, it didn’t get as much success even when he tried to convert Facebook fans to become Twitter followers and offered incentives. He believes it did not work because Facebook users and Twitter users speak different “lingos” and therefore, the majority of those who prefer Facebook, do not understand Twitter. He realizes that mere experimentation and engagement does not work on Twitter, and that a separate customized strategy should be developed to succeed on this network.

The main challenge that Ahmad faced the social media marketing of the brand is the cultural limitation in Saudi Arabia. Globally, the brand’s essence is “the mating game” that revolves around helping guys attract and hook up with hot women through using Axe deodorant. This called for re-adjusting the brand’s essence to respect the local culture while still trying to maintain harmony with the global brand image.

Another challenge that Ahmad faced are the seasonal drops in engagement, for example, during exam times where the majority of the young fans spend less time on Facebook. Ahmad tried to overcome the drop by sharing content focused on aiding fans in the occasion such as studying tips. 

Ahmad knew that the key to strategy success is continuous measurement. He used Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to set targets for 2 important Facebook metrics: Fans’ growth rate, and engagement rate. He tracked those KPIs using Facebook Insights solely, with no aid of third-party measurement tools. The effectiveness of the apps was measured through analytics provided within the apps that measure what features were used most and what weren’t, which provides guidelines for the future apps. Lastly,  consumer insights and reflect on sales were used to measure the success in increasing sales (brand goal) by having promoters at offline activities gather data from/about customers.  

This post is part of my MBA thesis, titled "Leveraging Social Media Marketing in Food and FMCG Industry in Saudi Arabia". To stay updated with the rest of the thesis, subscribe to my blog!

Preview of: Leveraging Social Media Marketing in Food & FMCG Industry in Saudi Arabia

After a long research, which you would have probably heard me complain about keeping me up all night for a month, it's finally done!

I'm still working on editing and perfecting the thesis, but to not keep you any longer, I published a preview of the abstract and table of content.

Although the thesis, as the title implies, focuses on social media marketing for Food and FMCG brands in Saudi Arabia, it provides a universal framework for building a social media strategy for most brands in any market.

The thesis also includes references to various links and resources that form a great reading list necessary for you in building your own customized strategy and understanding of social media marketing and communications.

And of course I'll be here to answer your questions or welcome your feedback, so go ahead and start by going through the preview below and leaving me a comment afterwards. 

Don't forget to subscribe to my blog to stay updated once I start publishing the full thesis! 

Preview of: Leveraging Social Media Marketing in Food & FMCG Industry in Saudi Arabia from Manal Assaad

Lessons of Engagement on Facebook Pages

A Facebook Page for your brand is almost always an obvious must-have in your social media platforms. Despite the contrary belief, or what some so-called online marketers would try to sell you, having a facebook page is not about the number of fans you have… it’s about attracting your true target audience and engaging them in effort to achieve your business goals.

Your target audience is easily your customers, potential customers, or any entities you’d like to get a message to. Reaching your target audience and getting them to “like” your page & be active on it are also a result of engaging the fans. Think of it as a cycle: You get fans, you engage them, the message reach other potential fans that, then, become fans to participate in the engagement. 

For the purposes of clarification, engagement in terms of Facebook is wall posts, comments and likes in the literary sense. In a much more comprehensive sense, engagement is the collection of fan feedback that carries a value, be it negative, positive or neutral. In my personal and professional opinion, I’d classify the types of engagement per value (according to their attributes in the right table), from lowest to highest, as: 

Now that we’ve got introductions out of the way, we can get straight to the points:

Personalize Engagement.

It might be common sense to be social in your engagement with the fans since you are on a social network, but personalizing it is a whole different level. Teach the fans to communicate with the brand through a person, not an admin! Talking to an admin is formal & eerie, no matter how social that admin is, because at the end of the day, the fans are talking to someone who they have absolutely no idea of. Therefore, it makes it harder to build a closer relationship with them & get their trust. Yes it is that dramatic. By giving your admin a name and personality, you paint a picture of him/her in the minds of the fans that allow them to cross intimacy barriers. The character communicating with the fans needs not be a match of the person who is really managing it. You can be a female college student who is managing a brand page that requires you to speak as a businessman because that’s whom your target audience will relate to. That’s why, if you work in an agency that handles social media for different clients & brands, you need to be trained to understand each brand fully & mimic different personalities and speak a language that is inviting to the fans of each page. 

Creating a personality for the admin of a page might not be an easy task if the target audience varies in gender, age and demographics; but even in the worst cases, there will be a set of common characteristics between them and that is what makes them all fans of your page. Find those common characteristics & inject them in the page’s personality. If it helps, you can even create more than a persona to manage the page, and be sure to make that clear to the fans by including the name of each persona with its related post. For example, let’s say you are running a brand magazine page with posts about men fashion and women fashion. You might want to create male and female personas and announce it to the fans that, for example, John is the expert on men fashion & is the one behind the related posts, and Jane is the female fashion expert handling those postings. Signing the name of the different people behind each post is common recommended practice for pages that are handled by a team of admins for real. 

In some cases, the strategy of having a personalized page or different personas per page might not be recommended, so if you’re unsure whether it fits your brand or not, drop me a line below & I’ll help you with that! 

Don’t Get TOO Personal.

 I don’t mean to confuse you or contradict with the first lesson, but there are limits that you need to keep so you can maintain successful engagement. While you want to humanize the brand and personalize communication, you do not want to dissociate the admin from the brand. While you want to get close to your fans & create a bond with them, you do not want to creep them out by getting too personal because at the end of the day, you are representing a brand & a company that is legally accountable if it infringes on the privacy of its fans or acts inappropriately. So for example, it would be okay for you to pass a general comment asking the fans about the well-being of their families, but you do not want to dig deep into their network & friends’ updates to ask a fan about how her niece’s surgery went. Sure you might be asking that from the kindness of your heart, but to the fan, you would just seem like a stalker hiding anonymously behind a brand name, or even a company that is invading her social/personal turf.  

Another lesson in not getting too personal is to avoid letting your own personal issues slide into the admin’s character/brand spokesperson. There might be fans who are offensive, stupid, intolerable, and annoying, but keep in mind that you are representing a brand at all times, and to a brand, respect is due to everyone with no discrimination. So do not comment when you are feeling emotional: agitated, pissed off, depressed, or even too excited where you might say things in a rush that would hold the brand accountable. No matter how cool or personal you want to portray the admin’s persona, always keep a respectful tone because no brand is in the business of insulting people or alienating them! Learn to handle negative comments diplomatically as a role model would; you will have to be a perfect communicator all the time, if you feel any less than perfect then step away from the page & come back when you do.

This concludes my first two lessons and surely there are more to come. If there is anything specific that you’d like to ask about or you would like a review of your own Facebook page, leave a comment below.