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Content is king.
You may say that to yourself, and to Google, which still holds content at a high stead. But is it only content that can pull the audience and make miracles happen? What about content saturation, which is faced by marketers in almost every niche out there? What are the odds that your long-term content strategy won’t contain quality content that ends up entering the black hole of saturated content because finding an unsaturated niche and constantly producing high-quality content non-stop can get tiring after a while?
The problem is real. Very real.
So, how do you make sure that your target audience finds your brand, interact and engage with it sans churning out content almost daily and yet, don’t know whether it will work or not? Let’s find out with the help of the following instances:
Provide Authentic Experiences
Finding leads online is still the easier scheme of things. What you do next is what matters the most and providing authentic experiences to your users is one of the crucial issues that you need to tackle heads on.
UGC or User-Generated Content is a goldmine for providing an authentic experience to existing and potential customers. A lot of brands are going this way and taking user engagement to a new level altogether. This includes short clippings, positive feedback sent by fans, images, contest entries and so on and so forth. The best part is that this type of content encourages users to feature your products/services with or without giving them an incentive and that does the trick of reaching out to a wider audience. The best instance of UGC is perhaps demonstrated by GoPro, which receives an enormous amount of content sent by its loyal customers.
Next, you can take your audience behind the scenes as a part of your digital marketing initiative be it showing what you do in the office, celebrating milestones, volunteering or simply goofing around. This shows the brand’s human side and helps the audience connect with it on a more personal level as exemplified by GE, which hosted the From the Factory Floor series on Tumblr and gave users a spectacular view of their manufacturing process. It also ran a series on YouTube called In The Wild that took them to the places where innovation takes place.
Broadcast Live
HBO found a unique way to announce the premiere date of its hit show Game of Thrones’ seventh season. It launched a Facebook Live event wherein users had to watch a block of ice concealing the premiere date melt. Viewers had to type FIRE and summon flamethrower to accelerate the melting process. It’s another story though that the stream was taken down due to technical glitches. This doesn’t have to be the case always as you can make the most of a live broadcast on several social media channels, including podcasts on topics where you want to establish yourself as a thought leader. LinkedIn, for instance, is a great platform where you can release podcasts that can become popular over time and this way, you can make the users consume content without having to create them on a daily basis!
While you can mostly bank upon Live Broadcast, you need to do something to ensure that people are watching it at the time of streaming it. For this, you need to make consistent efforts and constantly announce the date and exact time of the live stream. You can also leave them a considerable number of Easter eggs to keep the excitement and curiosity levels going. Say, for instance, you can drop hints about the type of information the broadcast will contain and cross promote it on various blogs, newsletters, social media posts etc.
Guerilla Marketing
Guerilla marketing is advertising (mainly outdoor) that has an element of surprise to it. Oftentimes, this technique can get quite pricey, but if you know how to work your way around it, there’ll be no looking back. There are several ingenious ways you can take a shot at guerilla marketing and it needn’t cost you a bomb most of the time!
A few years ago, ride-sharing company Uber offered a service wherein an ice cream truck would drop by their current location for $20. The offer was valid in 33 cities and 10 countries, where customers stood a chance to receive up to 6 ice cream treats along with branded T-shirts and sunglasses. The firm ran the promotional campaign mainly in three markets, where it was yet to launch its services – Houston, Portland, and Miami. What’s more, the firm also came up with a 1-minute YouTube video to promote the event.
Anything along these lines can be a game-changer and if it’s done right, there will be no looking back at all for your brand!
Set Up a Pop-Up Store
Pop-up stores are temporarily set up retail or event spaces that can help you reach customers in the high-traffic areas. This can cost more than a simple banner, but then, these can help you gain maximum attention that you always wanted from the target audience. And if you’re a retailer looking forward to extending your brand and introduce a new product/concept, there’s nothing better than to set up pop-up stores.
For instance, in 2012, furniture giant IKEA opened up several pop-up rooms that were made from cardboard. This was to promote its new catalog. All the activities carried out in these makeshift rooms were then live-streamed.
The result?
This campaign got more than 35,000 fan engagements on Facebook.
Another case in point is that of M&M’S World, a pop-up store in New York City’s SoHo district that opened July 17, 2015. The aim of the candy firm was to distribute coupons for driving more brand awareness and get more visits to the store. Guests who were already following M&M’S World on Instagram also stood a chance to bag special discount at check-out.
Diesel worked with Rival School Pictures and creative agencies Publicis New York and Publicis Italy and went on to secure prime real estate on Canal Street. They used the space to open a fake store Thursday selling duplicate merchandise. It even misspelled its name “Deisel” to lend authenticity to what was supposed to be fake. The moment the brand revealed that the fraud store was a hoax and it, in fact, contains real products, customers made a beeline for it the next morning.
The reason behind the tremendous popularity of pop-ups is that these offer specialized experience top the shoppers topped with convenience and also, fun. Basically, customers will expect more and expect different from it than online content or a regular store. Hence, all you’ve to do is select a pop-up model that works for you and then, measure the success of the marketing stunt.
Conclusion
So what if your content isn’t giving you the mileage? So what if there’s acute content saturation in your niche? You can always bank upon these extra, but useful techniques to ensure brand visibility and be assured that these are going to work in the near future too! What’s your take on these tactics? Do share your views on how you would like to differ and create new and meaningful ways to take on competition other than constantly creating great content. Cheers!
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