Use your brand influence to cultivate conversation
By Rebecca Factor & Calista Vantarakis on April 15th, 2018
In 2018 and beyond, brands and marketers will need to be more creative in the ways they communicate and engage with customers.
At Edge we’ve found the brands who use influence effectively in their branded conversations, are fostering engaged online communities.
Here are our tips to get your customers engaged in conversations that can lead to positive sales outcomes:
Be more cutting edge, be less predictable
Content that is creative stands-out and reverberates across online communities.
- Thinking more creatively led HBF to build award winning multi-platform content – Direct Advice for Dads.
- It had 474,000 video views, its associated Facebook page had over 93,000 post engagements; and the site’s branded content was also amplified across traditional editorial media. This is no easy feat.
Cultivate your savvy online community
Customers, consumers, and fans are more accessible than ever. But brands need to be aware they are communities who are sophisticated and savvy.
To help build a thriving community for your brand or product, create engaging conversations at every consumer touch point. Don’t’ just wait until point of sale to engage.
- Shopify has found some good tools to apply here focusing on “Monitoring”, “Engaging”, “Moderating”, and “Measuring”.
- And in Marketing Mag, they’ve highlighted how bots are proving to be a helpful tool for connecting members within an online community, and a useful moderating tool.
Two-way chats remain supreme
There is a shift we are seeing across brand interactions from talking at the world to content that is making the world talk.
Influencing based conversations are where brands will need to focus their energies from now on. Just look to the countless social-influencers taking up Instagram feeds on an hourly basis.
- Recently a Norwegian based transport group had most of Europe talking about “The Truck Driver’s Mother”.
- It generated 32 million social media hits, was viewed more than 5.1 million times, and had thousands of shares and comments.
Embrace the age of customer research and reviews
It’s important that brands think about their overall customer experience and how it can sway consumers if they are to stay ahead.
Brands should be acutely aware that positive and negative reviews online influence customer buying decisions.
With customers generating products reviews and ratings at the click of a button, the overall customer experience will be what keeps a brand relevant in the future.
People expect to be rewarded – incentives can be used to get people talking
At Edge we’ve found rewards are an effective tool to stimulate engaging conversations with customers.
- Movie rewards rate well with consumers and can get your customers talking.
Working with Heineken to leverage their relationship with the Bond franchise, we developed a Spectre Movie Deal rewards solution.
Heineken customers were offered a bonus movie ticket, which generated strong consumer interest and product sales.
And for Lion (Heineken), our redemption insurance built into the solution, meant a stress-free, no risk promotion.
Edge can help create an engaging rewards-based solution to excite your online communities. Get in contact with us on LinkedIn
Rebecca Factor & Calista Vantarakis
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