Some companies jump onto the social media bandwagon with enthusiasm… running campaigns, promoting their brands etc, only to find their pages resembling virtual ghost towns after the fervor fizzles out. The featured content is soon outdated or is slowly dying.
Producing creative promotional content requires considerable time and effort; we say the returns are worth the hard work. The recent content marketing explosion got the research team at Thismoment to study and understand why quality content is believed to be imperative to a brand’s success online.
- Among the top goals of content marketing is creating brand awareness (Content Marketing Institute); we believe this is one space marketers will focus on during the campaign creation process.
- The scope of content marketing is more than PR and advertising. A big part of it involves keeping campaigns alive by focusing on industry-specific topics.
- Too many marketing messages and repetitive content are major reasons brands are unfollowed on Facebook. It’s not about how often you post; it’s about how interesting and relevant the content is.
Going Easy on the Sales Talk
Although the aim of campaigns is to ‘promote’ something, today’s digital audiences are not receptive to content that resembles a sales pitch.
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Driving Interactions: Campaigns that sound too pushy leave no room for interactions. Interactions pave the way for engagement; therefore, following the ‘less sales-like and more interactive/engaging’ formula while building marketing content is advisable.
- Contests Can Keep it Interesting: The recent Sprite-Uncontainable Game YouTube campaign (powered by Thismoment’s DEC platform) is an excellent example of how contests can make campaigns interesting. The campaign’s content was designed like a fun and engaging contest, simultaneously promoting Sprite’s ‘sporty’ image, without directly doing so.
Overcoming Challenges
eMarketer’s research shows that creating original content was the biggest challenge marketers faced. Although most marketers know that content is king, many aren’t sure what kind of content they should be creating. Here are some suggestions to make this a less daunting task:
- Defining Campaign Goals: Defining your campaign’s objectives definitely makes the content creation process a lot simpler. Once the goals are established, marketers can move on to the next step of producing content.
- Listen First, Create Later: Marketers churning out content regularly can sometimes run out of ideas. In situations like these, it’s all about knowing where to look. This is where social media monitoring tools like Brand Monitor help. By listening to conversations, marketers can understand trends, get new ideas and generate some interesting promotional content.
The Power of Story Telling
Smart marketers keep the sales talk to minimum and subtly disguise promotions in the form of captivating narratives and stories. Here’s how it’s done:
Mazda’s (Canada) Defy Convention Campaign: The YouTube Campaign (powered by Thismoment’s DEC platform) was launched to promote Mazda’s new 2013 CX-5. Instead of focusing on the car’s improved performance, this campaign is in the form of a narrative featuring surfer Logan Landry who defies convention. There are two factors that make it stand-out:
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While the focus remains on Landry, the CX-5 is subtly endorsed with shots of the car appearing at regular intervals without any promotional messages. Landry, for instance, is shown taking his surf-board from the car, highlighting how spacious it is.
- The campaign generates content with a UGC contest that calls for personal stories of achievement.
Conclusion
A social campaign’s shelf-life is largely dictated by its content. While most businesses today have a social media page with some content thrown in, campaigns sometimes fall short of expectations due to lack of foundation in the form of goals. Creating promotional content isn’t simple; yet, it’s not rocket-science either. Less sales talk, more storytelling, engagement and listening with a dash of contests thrown in is the perfect recipe for dishing out compelling content.
- Shama Ahmed
Thismoment
