IndiaSocial Case Challenge – edition 2
Category: Best use of Platform
Winner of Position #3
Title: Kaya Skin Clinic
Share a little about your organisation
Kaya Skin Clinic is a chain of premium cosmetic dermatology clinics which caters to a niche target group. We have over 100 clinics across India, Middle East and Bangladesh
Executive Summary
Kaya Skin Clinic is a chain of premium cosmetic dermatology clinics which caters to a niche target group (TG). A large section of this TG spends a lot of time online, compared to traditional forms of media. This group of people also relies heavily on word of mouth and peer reviews before choosing a brand and making a decision to undertake a specific service. When it comes to choosing a skincare service, ‘trust’ plays a very important role in the decision making process. Kaya Skin Clinic decided to leverage the social media space with the objectives of engaging with our target audience by educating and alongside building awareness and trust for the brand.
Nature of the programme/ activity/ campaign
Social Media Campaign
Duration of the said programme/ activity/ campaign. Start date-end date
August 2010-February 2011 6 months
Background
Kaya Skin Clinic is a chain of premium cosmetic dermatology clinics which caters to a niche target group (TG). A large section of this TG spends a lot of time online, compared to traditional forms of media. This group of people also relies heavily on word of mouth and peer reviews before choosing a brand and making a decision to undertake a specific service. When it comes to choosing a skincare service, ‘trust’ plays a very important role in the decision making process. Kaya Skin Clinic decided to leverage the social media space with the objectives of engaging with our target audience by educating and alongside building awareness and trust for the brand.
Objectives
One of our key objectives is to grow the cosmetic dermatology market in India where Kaya is a clear market leader. People need to be educated on the benefits of scientific skincare services and solutions that are available at Kaya. For Kaya, digital and social media are an important part of the marketing strategy. Having established a base level brand awareness using traditional media, Kaya heavily invests in the digital medium to reach out to its target audience.
Strategy and Planning
Kaya has been an early adopter of social media tools with a blog, customer forum, Twitter presence and Facebook page. We believe that social media marketing is effective if a brand avoids using the platform to deliver a sales pitch. The key to success here is not to sell, but to build relationships with people and encourage conversations around the brand. Our primary aim is user engagement. We want our customers to know that they can reach us whenever they want and that we pay heed to their inputs. We care about what they think and social media helps us build relationships with them.
Stakeholders
We believe that for any social media strategy, our current as well as potential customers are really the most relevant stakeholder to engage. Our social media strategy has been built around this belief. We’ve used our various social media touchpoints to educate, build awareness, share advice, answer queries, gather feedback and improve our processes, resolve issues and offer high-quality customer service. We’ve also had some cases where irate customers have been vocal on their blogs or Twitter and we’ve successfully reached out to them, taken care of their grievances and turned them from complainants to evangelists. Our openness and willingness to admit our mistakes on a public forum has established a high level of trust and preference among savvy users of social media.
Choice of channel/s
The key channels we would like to stress on are-
Facebook: The facebook page is our key social media property, which integrates all our other platforms in the online space. We utilize this space to connect with our fan base and engage with them. We communicate with them on this page and regularly share advice on skin care, answer their queries and ask for their feedback to better our processes. We conduct contests and polls from time to time to keep them engaged and to give them a chance to win products and services at Kaya Skin Clinics. In less than 6 months we have grown from 900 fans in August 2010 to 38000+ fans in February 2011, i.e. a 4000+ % growth! Besides the number of fans, some of the metrics we take into consideration are the quality of engagement, number of fans who actually experience our services, positive conversations, conversions, etc. We have also used Facebook as a tool to convert fans into actual customers and as a revenue generating tool through unique experiments. We created an exclusive SMS shortcode for our social media audience and initiated an exciting contest for our fans through which they could win services & products from Kaya everyday, by simply texting a message to 54646. As soon as they messaged us, they received a call from our customer service team, offering them a complimentary skin consultation at a preferred clinic in India. With this activity, we actually got our fans to visit our clinics and experience our services. It also enabled us to collect a database of our highly active fans on Facebook. What’s more- we also incentivized some lucky fans with Kaya products every week for participating in our contests.
Twitter: We use twitter to share skin care tips with our followers. We also use it to “listen” to conversations about Kaya and learn from them. We regularly reply to all queries and comments and make sure our followers have up to date information about everything. On a more positive note, there are also a large number of @kayaskinclinics mentions with exciting and optimistic messages about how a follower had a great experience at Kaya. As we regularly tweet about tips, promotions, contests, surveys, etc, we follow best practices to tweet with hash tags.
Blog: Kaya has an team of 200 + dermatologists. The blog is a space where they share their expertise and tips on skin care. We have recently launched this property and have experienced an encouraging response.
Youtube: This is our multimedia property where we share all our TV commercials, media coverage, video clips, etc. E. Social Media Suite: http://social.kayaclinic.com/ This is a one stop suite, for all our online properties. Our fans can access all our properties by visiting this giza page.
Implementation
Integrating social media with on-ground marketing/strategies: This is one of the most critical parts of our Social Media strategy. It was important for us to leverage the existing network of 81 Kaya Clinics and the hundreds of customers they serve each week, to convert foot falls into followers on social media and convert those followers back in to foot-falls every week and every month.
We’ve achieved this because Kaya’s social media presence is robust and continues to grow from strength to strength without a single Dollar spent on advertising. We integrated links to our social media pages on all our in-clinic collaterals like Kaya paper bags, envelopes and promotional material which is displayed at the clinics. In February 2011, Kaya ran a 360 degree communication campaign to celebrate Valentines Day, wherein we integrated the radio ad campaign with our social media properties. The premise of the campaign was that “Kaya Skin Clinic loves your skin as much as you do and we want you to look your best this Valentines Day and through the month of February”. The radio spot was based on the theme of you talking to your skin- saying that you love your skin as its gorgeous and it makes you feel confident and beautiful.
The radio campaign was integrated with Kaya’s social media properties, where Facebook Fans and Twitter Followers were asked to share “love-notes to their skin” with us and the best ones were actually featured on Radio. This built a lot of buzz and excitement on the page with notes pouring in from fans, with exciting gifts and dinner dates on offer, from Kaya. We also asked our fans to share their funny Valentines Day stories and share their love stories with us and gave away chocolates, soft toys and Kaya products with them!
Impact and Outcome
Impact – Outcome Our goal was to provide a platform for our customers to voice their opinion while building the brand through customer relations. Our fans have done as we had hoped and have expressed grievances as well as compliments as well as some great feedback! We believe that our customers are our brand ambassadors. They experience our brand and their feedback is most important. It is our ongoing effort to understand our customer needs and listen to what they are saying. We look at all feedback as an opportunity to improve our products and services.
Kaya Skin Clinic Insights & Metrics:
- Overview: We started with a humble fan base of less than 1000. The interactions were initially low, we wanted to transform Kaya Skin Clinic to something more approachable, friendly and a brand which offers value for money.
- Our Target Audience: Mostly women, age group 16-40 years.
- Main Platform: Facebook Support Platforms: Twitter, Blog YouTube Other Activities: Q & A and Forum Interactions
- Every Fan Counts: We began with tackling something very basic- #1: To respond to each and every fan and address all the queries within a short span of time. This clearly meant that we were sending out ‘I am here, I am approachable and I am here to give you the best skin solutions by our expert dermatologists’. Not a single query was ignored, this meant two things- 1. Repeat visitors 2. Loyal visitors 3. Reliability 4. Word of Mouth on the social space. As a result, the no. of active users per month on our facebook fanpage is really high- over 60%. We have active followers not only from India but also from Bangladesh, UAE, US, UK and more countries across the globe. KLOUT (a social media tool which measures level of engagement) identifies Kaya as one of the most interactive brands on Facebook and Twitter. #2: Creating Custom Tabs: We created a holistic welcome tab which covers all the verticals of Kaya Skin Clinic. It also has a FAQ list which has been created after going through more than 500+ fan wall queries. There is also a section where fans can ask their skin concerns incase it is something more complicated and not covered in the FAQ. #3: Contests: We did various types of thematic/festive contests where fans were given away Kaya Services and Prizes. Diwali Picture Contest where we garnered more than 100+ people participating in the contest and over 150+ entries. #4: SMS Short Code: We started a SMS Contest where fans can avail a complimentary skincription- this was done so that we could build a separate Facebook fan database. Also we added 3 layers to it : 1. Get an assured complimentary service called ‘Skincription’ 2. Stand a chance to win a Kaya product (Three winners announced every week) 3. Be the first one to receive the latest offers, discounts, contests about Kaya. #5: Collaborating with Influencers: We contacted a popular fashion Blogger, RJ, Fashionista, Social Bee- Miss Malini and asked her to run a contest on her Fashion blog and fan page. This gave us a very good response in terms of entries as well as the buzz. According to Klout Score, Kaya Skin Clinic scores very well in terms of level of engagement with users on Facebook and Twitter. As per the score analysis, Kaya is constantly trying out news ways to interact and network. Kaya Skin Clinic is one of the most active brands on the social media space among other players in the market in the same genre. Kaya has gained trust from all our fans and followers and has become their skin consultant online!
Learnings
We have tried to make effective use of social media by being an accessible, approachable and very responsive brand. We encourage conversations by not talking “at” our followers… instead by talking “with” them. We initiate relevant conversations with our fans, encouraging them to join in and share it with their friends, leading to greater engagement with the brand. Very importantly, we don’t treat our social media conversations any different from in-person conversations. We respond to every email, tweet, comment and query that is directed at us. We believe in recognizing each and every member of our audience and making them feel important as they are our brand advocates.
What next
At present Kaya has a loyal following across social media platforms. The brand scores very well in terms of level of engagement with users on Facebook and Twitter. We will be constantly trying out news ways to interact and network with the online target audience
Testimonials
Impact magazine (issue dated June 05, Page 18) Kaya Skin Clinic has effectively used social media platforms to leverage the existing network of 81 Kaya Clinics and hundreds of customers they serve every week, to convert footfalls into followers on social media and convert those followers back into footfalls every week and every month
External Agencies: Any partners who helped you with strategy
Our Social Media Agency- Ignitee
External Agencies: Any partners who helped you with implementation
Our Social Media Agency- Ignitee
Suitable Tittle
Kaya Skin Clinic- Going Below The Surface
Factsheet
Name of the Company: Kaya Skin Clinic
Category: Consumer Services
Case Submitted By: Aditi Chada
Website: www.kayaclinic.com
