Connecting with the consumer is the overarching goal of every marketing campaign. How a brand connects with the general public determines its growth potential and can push a brand on the verge of success into a brand on the rise.
With that said, how does a brand or company connect with the public? What are the best methods of connecting to your audience in a meaningful way? The answer to both is consistent, varied, and unique content. You want to be visible almost everywhere, but you never want to appear annoying and obtrusive.
The best way to do this is to make marketing content that doesn’t appear to be marketing content. Studies show that consumers love and value choices but don’t want to be presented with too many.
This is where your seemingly omniscient presence will prove to be of some value. By being seemingly everywhere, you make your brand seem as though it is the only logical choice. With that said, you need content to make that happen so here are the twelve best forms of content to promote social engagement with your brand.
UGC (User Generated Content)
UGC is a great way to connect to your audience. What it pretty much is content that a consumer makes using or with your brand or product. By publishing and sharing UGC, you show other consumers that you are in tune with not only them but how they utilize your product.
It is a great tool for connection and best of all, once you publish one example of UGC, there are often more to follow. These pieces of content can be published in a wide variety of places, but the most visible of them is social media. Well placed UGC can help launch a social media platform.
UGC example:
Apple utilizes UGC very well. Their Instagram page is chock full of pictures that their customers take and send to them. They are accompanied by the “Shot-On-iPhone” text. This campaign is a
direct response to consumers’ concerns that iPhone cameras don’t perform well in low light.
They requested that amateur and professional photographers send them their best iPhone pictures and then used those pictures to make commercials, and YouTube content advertising their camera quality. They not only published UGC but they then used it to promote their brand in a meaningful and useful way.
Podcasts
Podcasts are a medium growing in popularity. Misicoomph states that “right now, there are more than 700,000 active podcasts and more than 29 million podcast episodes”. They are an on-demand audio file that is usually produced in a series format. They are rapidly replacing radio as the preferred audio to gain information and news. They have been around for a long time but as of late, they have gained traction and become very popular.
As you gain more listeners, the audience to which you can market your brand to increased and expounded. While you might have a hard time getting people to listen to your podcast because they can’t be shared in their original form to most social platforms, this can easily be overcome.
If you share a link to the location of the podcast or make it into a video, then it becomes a viable sharable entity.
Podcast example
“The Sauce” by McDonald’s is an example of a brand using podcasts to connect with their audience. A large brand such as McDonald’s limited growth potential because of the sheer visibility that has. You can see a McDonald’s restaurant on almost every street corner in most large cities.
That means that a large portion of their marketing efforts are directed towards customers that visit them infrequently and those that have stopped coming to their restaurant altogether. They use their podcast to achieve this. The podcast follows the “investigative” format that has become the cornerstone of many popular podcasts. They then use this to improve public relations and make their products look more appealing to the masses. Check out our article on why you should transcribe your Podcast to text.
eBooks
eBooks are a great way to offer a service to your clients and show them how invested you are in their success. Typically, your eBook would be educational in some fashion, but it can deviate from that, eBooks are a very versatile medium.
You can use your social media pages as well as your website to promote your eBook which will in turn, promote your brand and garner brand recognition and attention. While eBooks can be made by average people, if you want to make your eBook really stand out outsourcing to a professional is a good idea.
eBook example
Apple with its Swift Resources is a great example of a series of eBooks that promote a company. Swift is the programming language used to create most apps found on iPhones. Apple offers tools to learn the programming language which benefits the company.
By making it easy to learn to make apps for iPhones, they increase their brand exposure to the public. It makes the public feel as though the Apple App Store is full of ordinary people that make apps instead of large companies. It puts the ability to design and create apps into the consumer and thereby makes them feel more invested in the additions to the ecosystem.
Infographics
Infographics are a great way to catch the audience. MIT states 90% of information sent to the brain is visual. Pearson also mentions that 65% of people are visual learners. Infographics are the lifeblood of any marketing done on Pinterest and any other image sharing site. Typically, they are bright and colorful and inform the audience of something meaningful.
You can use these to educate your consumers about your product, your company, or any other topic that would garner the interest of others. They are easy to make and typically cheap to produce. If you really feel the need to, you can outsource. However, you get them, they are a very sharable piece of content.
Infographic example
Strathmore Minerals Cooperation does a great job of using infographics to inform the general public. They use color and drawings to illustrate the importance of their work. This infographic offers quality information is a format that is easy to digest. It also sheds the best possible light on their company, it makes their company seem like an integral part of the world energy crisis.
They seemingly provide a service that is used to make the air in our skies cleaner and the oceans safer. This is an exquisite use of an infographic to make a point.
Client testimonials
Client Testimonials are an extremely versatile medium of media. 92% of consumers read online reviews and testimonials when considering a purchase. They can also be shared in a wide variety of ways. They also make potential consumers feel more comfortable about purchasing these services or products. This translates to more money for your brand.
These testimonies can be used in a variety of ways. They can be used in a comedic manner that makes people associate your brand with happiness tor in a heartwarming way that gives your brand weight and importance.
Regardless of the way in which they are used, testimonials promote engagement and bring higher ROI. They are also very easily placed. You can place a client testimony in either the written, auditory or visual mediums. This allows you to place them virtually anywhere.
Client testimonial example
Codecademy uses client testimonials to the fullest. Their business centralizes around the fact that anyone can learn to program or code. The prospect of doing so seems very daunting and paying for something that scares them isn’t something that the average consumer is willing to do.
In order to mitigate the fear that most people when faced with the prospect of coding, Codecademy uses client testimonials. These testimonials show consumers that even the least tech-savvy of us can learn to program and code at a high level.
Surveys
Surveys serve two purposes:
- Collecting information
- Exposing your brand to a wider audience
By implementing an engaging survey, you can accomplish a lot. The thing to remember when creating a survey is the fact that you don’t want it to feel as if you are probing for information.
It is important to disguise your survey by making seem as if the survey is attempting to accomplish some other goal than the one that you intend to use it for. This doesn’t mean that is it is a good idea to mislead the customer, rather you want to gain information in a covert manner.
Survey example
Buzzfeed does a great job of this. If you look at Buzzfeed’s website and app, its chocked full of surveys. These surveys seem like they are not important, but they are extremely important to Buzzfeed’s success. Buzzfeed has gained notoriety for its surveys and it has become a mainstay in their business.
In addition to becoming a marketing tool, Buzzfeed is also able to optimize the articles that they put out based on the answers to the surveys they put out. Buzzfeed has maximized the effectiveness of their surveys and used them to take their brand to the next level.
Custom gifs
The GIF is a newer medium of media. While it is new, it has quickly been an easily sharable entity that has quickly taken over the cell phones. GIFs are especially useful when marketing to an adolescent audience as they are the highest user of Gifs.
They can also be used to educate people in a quick, easily digestible manner. One of the main attractions to GIF’s is how easy it is to make them. You can do it in a matter of seconds, and they can then be used for tons of marketing applications.
Gif example
Coca Cola used a gif to gain traction on Tumbler. They got around 80,000 notes on Tumblr and this directly translated to sales. This GIF put Coke on the radar of people who usually don’t drink it. This visibility made consumers who aw the GIF more likely to buy a Coke product after seeing it. Even if it wasn’t a Coca Cola, the company owns so many of the drinks found around Coke at hat the likelihood of money going into their pocket was high.
Competitions
Competitions are a great way to generate popularity. People love the prospect of winning. It is sewn into the chemistry of our minds. With that said, as a marketer, you can capitalize on this. By creating a contest that offers a great reward, you can get people to flock to your social media and website.
You can maximize this by making it a condition to enter the contest. By making the contest only available to those who agree to follow you can gain massive amounts of followers in a short amount of time. This kind of exposure allows your brand to be introduced to entirely new demographics.
Competition example
GoPro used a long-term contest to catapult themselves into the vernacular. Every day for 5 years, Go-Pro gave away cash prizes to a fan, who sent in footage using a GoPro.
This helped GoPro gain popularity that it needed in order to become mainstream in the manner it is today. Today, Go-proing is a term that is used by people everywhere. This is primarily due to the marketing campaign embarked on for a solid 5 years.
Social media stories
Social media stories are a great way to connect to a wide audience. Social media stories
are viewed by thousands every day and are the primary mode of communication for some brands. They can use them to not only garner popularity but to also communicate with the consumer base. This allows them to make more informed decisions and formulate ideas that cater to their audience This form of media is also useful for reaching a younger audience because the younger generations use social media heavily.
Social media story example
Converse is a great example of a company that is using its social media stories to promote themselves.Converse routinely posts to its story about various Converse related topics.
Whenever something significant happens for the brand, fans can see it transpire in real time on the Instagram page.
This allows the fans of the brand to feel as though they are in the “inner circle” of the brand. This connection leads to more purchases and a higher probability that the consumer will tell their friends about the brand.
Explainer Videos
Explainer videos are a superb way to offer information in a fast and easy to digest package.
A video is a great way to present information to a consumer. You can tell them all about your brand and get them excited about what you have in store all in a big way. You can fit a surprising amount of information into a ninety-second clip. Click here to see just how effective explainer videos can be!
This form of media doesn’t require an exorbitant amount of resources either. You really only need a computer and a camera to create a video. If you want the video to be of higher quality, you can hire a videographer. While you will definitely need to pay them, you will receive ROI when the dollars you spent on marketing translate to sales.
Explainer example
Slack has a great example of an explainer video. It’s promotional in nature but it also offers information as to what the company does and how it interacts with the world around it. It was colorful, informative, and concise.
While the video that we used as an example seems to have a higher budget, you can still make things work on a shoestring budget. Look for commercials for local businesses and you can see exactly how you can make every dollar stretch. There is no shortage of ideas when it comes to the Explainer Video, the only thing that can limit you is a lack of creativity.
Helpful Tips
Tips are a great way to catch the audience’s attention and have them coming back for
more. Tips are short, informative, pieces of advice that you can give your consumers. It shows good will and a will for them to succeed in life. This goodwill translates to a feeling of security when the consumer thinks about your brand. They feel as though you have their best interests in mind, so they are more likely to want to do business with you. Tips should never feel long or convoluted and should always offer some useful and necessary information.
Helpful tips example
Lowes utilizes tips in a very unique way. In their commercials, they offer a tip and offer a comedic dramatization as to what could happen if you don’t follow their words. This not only builds trust with the audience but also leaves an imprint in the minds of the audience for the audience to refer to at a later date. It is memorable and long-lasting tool to make your brand stand out amongst the sea of other products on the market.
In conclusion
There are many forms of media that can be used to maximize your ROI as well as promote growth and development of a brand. While no method is foolproof there are definitely some methods that are superior to others in certain situations. That being said, the most important thing is to ensure that your brand gets out there and is visible for all to see.
If you would like more information on repurposing content to use in your marketing campaign then contact Designrr today. Designrr can help turn your content into something more engaging to capture more leads for your business to improve your ROI.
