How To Rejuvenate Your Brand Via Social Media

Social media has been all the rage for many years now and has evolved well beyond the days when Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard buddies were rating girls back in college.  Even in it’s inception, what started out as Facemash, a “hot or not” photo lineup, was not without controversy, and the site was shut down within a few short days after launch by the Harvard administration.

Still Mr. Zuckerberg persisted, and using the knowledge that he gained from his first failed attempt, Mark updated his original concept to create “The Facebook” which spread to three more colleges. The creator and partners of Facebook moved from Boston to Palo Alto and opened their online doors to High School students and the rest is history.

The leap that Mark and his friends took from Facemash to Facebook, opened up their site to many new avenues, rather than interacting within their own small group. The important thing about this platform is recognizing that it is not a one way street, but rather a vast online superhighway.

But how do we reach all the users traveling on this enormous roadway? How do we get them to see our brand’s billboards and exit on our ramp? Take a look at how this trio of industry giants took a successful drive down this internet boulevard and across many different platforms:

LAYS ON FACEBOOK: Do us a flavor

Frito Lay took a huge online gamble starting back in 2012 when they launched their “Do us a flavor” campaign on social media and it paid off big. They challenged Americans to create a new flavor for their potato chip and offered a one million dollar cash prize (or 1% of the net sales) for the winning taste. Using a Facebook app and SMS (Short Message Service) to reach consumers, they received almost four million flavor suggestions and later over a million votes.

The winner (Karen Weber-Mendham, a librarian from Wisconsin) was announced in 2013, Lays went in for a double-dip in 2014 and watch for a third launch in 2015. This award-winning campaign was successful and effective for a variety of reasons, most notably it told consumers that their opinions matter and gave them a voice in product development.

CHIPOTLE ON YOUTUBE: The Scarecrow

The fast-food chain Chipotle teamed up with award winning design firm Moonbot Studios to create an animated short film that was accompanied by a free mobile game app to promote their “Food With Integrity” motto that highlights the importance of sustainable farming.  Both the film and game helped authenticate their brand and increase consumer awareness surrounding the plight of animal confinement, the use of synthetic growth hormones and toxic pesticides.

Their short film reached 6.5 million views on YouTube in the first two weeks after its premiere and downloads of the game featuring the star scarecrow topped 500,000 downloads in six weeks. The Scarecrow continues to air on YouTube reaching almost 14 million viewers and the game is still being played on countless mobile devices. Each time these venues are engaged, Chipotle promotes both their brand, consumer awareness for their cause and invites customers to dine with better food choices at their restaurants.

STARBUCKS - Rules them all

Starbucks is so effective using social media, it is hard to choose just one platform where they are capitalizing on connecting with consumers as they currently rank number one with followers in four out of five of the top social platforms (and six out of the top twelve). They are dominating the social scene by engaging with their caffeine infused audience. Here are a just few of their successful strategies:

●      BOGO - Their “Buy One Get One” free posts on Facebook get extraordinary engagement and shares

●      SHARING - Aboard Pinterest, Twitter and Instagram, they invite users to share and post their Starbucks moments

●      CHARITY - They consistently tie-in with trending charitable organizations and promote their contributions to their customers

While we may not have millions of dollars to give away or an award winning design team at our disposal, there are still a valuable lessons to be learned, especially from Starbucks. To effectively reach consumers on their ubiquitous screens aboard social media platforms, we need to connect with them on more pleasant, emotional and thought provoking levels.

Content VS. Clickbait: Creating Content While Getting Clicks

We’ve known for a long time that content marketing has a clickbait problem. You’ve been seeing the problem first hand for years, maybe you’ve even contributed to it. Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. There’s no shame in it, it’s just the way the industry has been going for a while now.

Content promotion, and the clicks it grants you, is key to running a successful content marketing effort. But the real truth is that content promotion doesn’t get much farther than clickbait these days.

Content marketing is addicted to clicks

Web advertising payment structures have created a content economy that rewards clicks over all other kinds of engagement. On some level, everyone involved is aware of this. Content strategies are focused almost exclusively on getting clicks, and much less concerned with whether or not the people actually stick around to read the content.

So do they stick around and read the content? Unfortunately, the answer appears to be no. Time went into detail on this, asserting that the average reader only stays on a given piece of content for about fifteen seconds before bouncing. Think back… does this sound like you? (if you’re still reading this, you might not fit into this statistic)

So how can you promote your content while also encouraging engagement for longer than that dreaded fifteen seconds? Remember these three rules:

Don’t surprise anyone

At its root, clickbait is a bit like false advertising. Just like that “one weird trick” isn’t actually going to help you lose 40 pounds overnight, clickbait makes promises that the content pretty obviously does not deliver, causing the bounce.

To get your bounce rate down, make sure that you’re not overselling with your headlines. Make sure that your title is, while interesting and intriguing, doesn’t write a check that your content can’t cash. Make sure you images are all properly sized to keep pageloads quick (an image resizer can help with this). You’ll find that making your titles truer to your content increases your engagement, lowers your bounce, and brings more high-quality traffic to your site.

Write for engagement

It can be tempting to blow your great ideas in the first few paragraphs of your content. But really good content follows a natural storytelling arc, one that saves some of the good stuff for the end, to reward engagement. Take your cues from real journalists and writers here, and structure your content in a way that rewards engagement with the entire piece, not just the headline.

Build—and maintain—user trust

Whatever you do, once you’ve started down this road, you can’t give up on it even for a moment. It’s easy to lose your readers’ trust, and that’s what is going to drive engagement. If people see you as a source of high quality content, they will trust you to stay interesting, and invest some real attention into your content.

If you stop rewarding their engagement, say by providing them with a few pieces of low quality content in a row, you will quickly lose their trust, and they’ll start going somewhere else. Don’t squander your good name just for a few clicks. It’s not worth spending brand trust to get a bunch of cheap traffic that won’t convert at all, a fact that is worth keeping in mind.

Developing A Mobile Content Strategy: What You Need To Know

The world is becoming increasingly “mobile.” From the popularity of mobile phones comes an increased ease of travel, shopping, chatting -- pretty much anything you can think of. With that in mind, marketers are coming up with more ways to reach people based on contemporary lifestyle and consumer behavior.

Due to the ever-growing accessibility of new technology like smartphones and tablets, people are becoming more reliant on technology to aid in the completion of many everyday tasks. With the improvements in location services, and the increase in overall applications for mobile devices, the average consumer relies more on mobile technology to help them with shopping, directions, information, and the like, meaning that marketing with mobile is only becoming increasingly important.

In order to begin developing a mobile content strategy, begin considering the modern consumer and how you can be available to them in the moment. Adding compatibility with mobile devices allows your audience access anywhere -- which is what they expect and are quickly becoming used to.

In addition to formatting your content to be mobile-friendly, consider paid advertising options as well. Mobile advertisements target users while they’re on the go, complementing actions they’re already performing in comprehensible, straight to the point messages.

As you integrate mobile content into your marketing strategy, be mindful of the different avenues available to you, be it self-promotion or pure advertisement. Marketing with mobile means promoting your brand through the appropriate channels to reach demographics, with both published and paid-for content.

Before launching your mobile marketing strategy, you should formulate goals for your mobile content, and ways to adhere to branding. Some recognizable ways to keep on track include minding your mobile presence, as well as your content’s performance feedback:

 Presence: It’s first and foremost important to establish a presence on mobile. Your business’s homepage presence should be optimized for mobile,

○      Homepage: Your homepage should have a mobile version. This version should be pared down to the basics for usability purposes and to accommodate the smaller bandwidth of mobile devices.

○      Social Media: Your brand should definitely have established social media network partnerships. These are accessible through mobile devices with built-in app support.

Data: The expectations and high use rates of mobile users mean that there’s a wealth of information available on your consumer profile. Due to the prevalence of apps and location services, there’s more information out there than ever before about what people are doing, where they’re going, and what they’re interested in while they’re in different places.

This data is useful both for direct marketing, as in sending out targeted advertisements when people are in different areas, and in indirect initiatives which focus on aggrandizing your brands based on conclusions culled from data sets and trends. Many applications for mobile offer paid sponsorships and advertising options which will use algorithm probability to inject your content directly into the functions of a mobile user who may be interested in your service.

Mobile content is a group of variable messages that can be found anywhere during mobile use, and at any time. Using mobile content for marketing means applying creativity to brand strategy and being visible in a variety of places, while employing a thorough knowledge of customer behavior in order to directly target your intended audience.

Getting Marketing Technology to Play With Content On The Cheap

If I were to say that I remember the days of tag team wresting, I would be aging myself greatly, or maybe I could just refer to the musical group Tag Team in the nineties, with their one-hit-wonder, “Whoomp, There It Is!”

In any event, just like a successful wrestling duo or orchestrating a hit song, getting a marketing plan to play nicely with a content strategy can be challenging, but there are some tips to getting them both on the same page. Content marketing is still extremely effective since statistics for 2015 show that 72% of marketers believe that branded online content is more effective than traditional print media ads and 69% say that is is superior to direct mail or public relations.

Come Together, Right Now

Some recommend mind mapping when it comes to organizing any campaign regardless of type or purpose and this is certainly an excellent place to start. Although this practice dates back to around the third century B.C., there has been many advancements in using this powerful tool since the ancient days of Porphyry of Tyros who is believed to be the first to use mind mapping to form his ideas and thus making following along easier for others.

Creating a mind map will literally put marketing technology and a content strategy on the same page. Technology you say, with pen and paper? Yes, technology, since you can use a number of different low-cost and free mind mapping sites online.

Imagery Investment

In a recent Forbes article, “The Only 6 Content Marketing Tips You’ll Need for 2015,” the author recommends investing in imagery and visual content. The same statistics as cited above also predict that by 2017, online videos will make up for 70% of all consumer traffic on the internet. But you don’t have to spend an arm and a leg on an expensive, studio-quality piece, as long as it is genuine, interesting or unique.

Testing, Testing

After Forbes recommends imagery, the article states that 2015 will be the year that people will be testing everything, including their content marketing strategies. The most popular form of this examination is through A/B testing, where one example is pitted directly against another and measured for success. There are also a variety of low-cost and free A/B testing sites available on the internet.

 Strong on the Social Scene

According to Chris Delany, founder of SEMGeeks, a popular digital marketing agency, “The top social media platforms being used by marketers are LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Use for both SlideShare and Google+ has increased, but marketers are still most likely to put their time and dollars into the top three social media channels because of their potential for engaged, targeted audiences.”

If you’re not already on Facebook, you should definitely have a presence there and be promoting your brand and business on this platform. Once comfortable there, branch out to the others, especially LinkedIn, since it is the leader in B2B marketing on social media. As you already know, content marketing on all these avenues are free to explore.

Using marketing technology, along with your content marketing strategy to play nicely together, can be as carefree as a day at the beach as a young child. So use your proverbial bucket and shovel to make the best content sandcastle on the internet shoreline.