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How Amway Transformed Its Social Enterprise and Boosted Campaign Revenue by 500%
The Amway Social Cloud unites influencer marketing and ecommerce to set up the company’s brands and business owners for success
About Amway
Founded in 1959, Amway manages a global portfolio of health, beauty, and home care brands sold in more than 100 countries and territories.
Since 1959, when Rich DeVos and Jay Van Andel envisioned and launched a business fueled by the power of relationships, Amway’s community of independent Amway Business Owners (“ABOs”) has been working to build profitable brands and businesses from those relationships. And with $8.8 billion in annual sales across a growing portfolio of brands represented in more than 100 countries, it’s clear that the company’s social approach to commerce has been a success.
Yet as Amway sought to evolve its business for the digital era, the company found itself struggling to define, own, and drive its social media strategy and programs. After an extensive evaluation of possible technology partners, Amway partnered with Hootsuite to simplify and standardize its social ecosystem, understand global social activity and performance, and drive its social strategy and vision forward.
We needed a partner that did not simply offer technology solutions, but truly understood the strategic and change management efforts necessary to transform Amway’s investment in the social space. Nearly two years in and we couldn’t feel more strongly that we have the right partner at the table.
Michael Edwards
Vice President, Global Digital Services & Channel Strategy AMWAY
$45M
global campaign revenue (a 500% increase from previous trend collections)
96%
of ABOs active on new platform after pilot program
100,000+
uses of hashtags #ArtistryStudio, #passionista, and #WearItShareIt
What they did
Amway envisioned an ambitious social strategy that would support the launch of a new line of beauty products for younger consumers. The company needed a social media management platform to help it achieve the language and social network coverage, global engagement support, and performance measurement and reporting needed to make the campaign a success.
Working with Hootsuite, the team at Amway developed a plan for a “connected ecosystem” approach that would allow stakeholders across marketing, communications, legal, and other departments to seamlessly access technology platforms, managed services, and training resources—accelerating Amway’s enterprise social transformation and empowering ABOs to harness the power of social media while remaining on-brand and compliant with company and industry regulations.
How they did it
Built on the Hootsuite Enterprise platform, the Amway Social Cloud integrates Hootsuite for social media management, Brandwatch for social listening, and ZeroFOX for social risk mitigation. In less than a year, the platform was successfully deployed across all global markets active on the supported social media networks, allowing Amway to centralize the tactical execution of its social media activities.
Amway now uses Hootsuite to manage more than 200 social media accounts—representing all Amway-owned and supported social properties—for global and local visibility and management. This includes publishing, scheduling, content curation, community engagement, team collaboration, and more.
Together with the social listening and risk management capabilities powered by Brandwatch and ZeroFOX, the Amway Social Cloud has enabled the company to manage its global brand on social, launch a successful social selling program for its influencers and advocates, and attribute the performance of its social tactics and campaigns in driving business results—both company-wide and at the level of individual ABOs.
Setting up business owners for social selling success with custom training and services
Amway’s top priority for its next major campaign was to create a social-first experience—both for the company’s existing digital-native ABOs and to attract new ABOs to the business.
Working closely with Hootsuite’s professional services team and industry experts, the team drafted new standards and a global training curriculum to guide ABOs in posting on social media, taking into account the range of abilities and willingness to use social media.
With multiple regions and languages to support, content for the Amway Digital Lab training platform needed to be both globally relevant and easy to modify for local market requirements. With expert help from Hootsuite, the team developed in-person and video-based training consisting of 40 videos, job aids, and quizzes, all specifically designed to make it easy for regional teams to localize videos and other materials as needed.
Rolling out training and services across regions also helped the team identify additional opportunities to drive successful adoption. A pilot program in Russia gamified the curriculum, creating a track for ABOs to allow them to move from level to level with rewards upon completion—and when the program completed, an impressive 96% of ABOs remained active on the platform.
I’m thrilled that Amway partnered with Hootsuite because of their educational expertise in the social space and the flexibility of working with their team. We were able to mix great social-selling content from Hootsuite Academy with our Amway-specific requirements to provide an informative and engaging program for global ABOs.
Abigail Hoekzema
Senior Marketing Specialist AMWAY
Tapping the power of “passionistas” to launch a new global brand on social
Inspired by travel, art, food, fashion, and hotspot cities around the world, Amway’s new Artistry Studio brand of cosmetics and body products was designed to introduce a new generation to Amway’s products and business. Every aspect of the brand was designed with social in mind—from featuring the Instagram-friendly work of urban artists to cultivating a global social community of influencers that Amway calls “passionistas”.
Launching a global, social-first brand experience like Artistry Studio was an incredibly huge effort for Amway. As we continue to lead with social when going to market, we need to understand what is working and what is not working. Hootsuite is a big part of the process in effectively figuring that out.
Kelsey Schultz
Lead for Beauty Social Media AMWAY
To ensure a successful social campaign, Amway developed
an extensive ecosystem of resources:
Product packaging made for social: Each Artistry Studio Edition features a world city and collaborates with local artists to bring the vibe of the edition’s city to life. The final result is a unique piece of art on each product’s packaging, resulting in a product too cool not to share on social.
An Instagram strategy built around curating great content: To curate Artistry Studio’s activity around the world and feature a mix of content from Amway’s ABOs and other beauty influencers around the world, the brand launched the @ArtistryStudioOfficial Instagram account and new hashtags #ArtistryStudio, #passionista, and #WearItShareIt.
A virtual beauty experience: The Artistry Virtual Beauty App allows potential customers to virtually “try on” makeup looks and share them to social.
A global community of passionate influencers: The brand selected social and beauty savvy ABOs and to be the first influencers for Artistry Studio. More than 150 passionistas from nine different countries were specially onboarded and trained to help create social buzz for Artistry Studio and their own Amway businesses, with rewards and recognition for their social expertise.
The team’s extensive preparation paid off. Within six months, @ArtistryStudioOfficial racked up more than 52,000 followers on Instagram. The campaign attracted 45,000 buyers in seven core markets—3x the number achieved the previous year. And global campaign revenue topped $45 million—an impressive 5x higher than previous trend collections.
Connecting the dots between social selling and ecommerce with attribution and measurement
To track the success of the campaign, Amway needed the ability to attribute business results to social media activity—both overall and at the level of individual ABOs.
The team knew that social would be an effective tool to inspire purchases, with potential customers receiving personalized recommendations from like-minded peers on social channels. But tracking the last step to purchase—when customers leave social networks to convert on websites—was a challenge Amway needed to overcome, especially with each ABO selling products from an individual, personalized retail website.
Using Adobe Analytics integrated with Hootsuite Impact, Amway brought together website conversion data and social post data to create a complete picture of each ABO’s performance on social.
This integrated data enabled ABOs to review the performance of their social content and modify their strategy based on the results they were seeing. It also allowed Amway to directly link social selling and advocacy to top-line revenue growth—to the point where the company specifically attributed its sales growth increase to social selling in its annual report.
Amway attributes sales growth to significant investments in digital tools and mobile experiences as well as product innovations that have helped ABOs attract and retain more customers. This includes enabling more ecommerce and social selling, connecting additional products with digital experiences, and personalizing more nutrition and beauty products.
Amway Global
Amway Reports Sales of $8.8 Billion USD in 2018
Protecting and securing Amway’s global brand on social
As Amway worked to enable its global distributor base on social media, it also increased investment in compliance technology.
Powered by Brandwatch, Amway’s global social listening platform monitors active queries and channels across 30 supported languages for brand mentions and other relevant activity. With integrated security and compliance solutions from ZeroFOX, Amway is able to ensure that its brand, executives, and social media presence remain protected from malicious activity.
The listening platform monitors all key brands and requests takedowns of social content and accounts that are either non-compliant with Amway’s social guidelines or are impersonating accounts.
The results
With a highly successful campaign rolled out, a global community of passionate influencers, and a social technology platform that strikes an ideal balance between enablement and performance management, Amway’s enterprise transformation proves that it’s never too late to discover—and redefine—what’s possible to achieve on social.
Working with smart technology partners, Amway has developed social training and enablement materials that can be easily localized to suit the needs of its global distributors. And with the right measurement in place, the company is well positioned to learn, iterate, and compound its successes.
About Hootsuite Enterprise
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Along with our channel and agency partners, we help organizations build deeper relationships with customers, stay connected to the needs of the market, grow revenue, and draw meaningful insights from social media data. Innovating since day one, we continue to help organizations pioneer the social media landscape and accelerate their success through product training, group training and tailored organizational training, as well as security and compliance services.
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