Author Archives: Danielle

Votigo Integrates Vine

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Vine is Twitter’s newest app, allowing fans to record and share six-second long videos to Facebook, Twitter, and Vine.  The time limit encourages users to be creative and to tell a story in only six seconds.  Vine’s looping format can enhance emotion or amplify your message as viewers see the video clip on repeat.

The new video app is a creative way to gather user-generated content.  Vine describes these new video posts as “little windows into the people, settings, ideas and objects that make up your life.” These short video clips are a great opportunity for you to find out more about your fans and how they engage with your brand.

Vine recently released a feature that allows users to embed other users’ Vine videos on their own websites and Twitter pages, allowing the videos to be shared with multiple audiences.  This sharing feature is a great way for a company’s marketing message to reach a larger audience.  Vine is an innovative way for fans to become engaged and involved on social media and Votigo sees its amazing potential.

Yum! Brands worked with Votigo to create a promotion that would incorporate Vine as a way to enter and win. Fans can enter KFC’s Li’l Playground Makeover contest for a chance to win a makeover for their local community playground. Fans can tell Yum! Brands why their playground deserves a makeover by entering a photo or short story on Facebook, a video using Twitter/Vine, or an Instagram photo with #KFCPlaygrounds.  Each choice gives users a creative outlet to share their stories via pictures, videos, and text. Yum! Brands encourages fans to share their entries by enabling users to vote on their favorite submissions.

For more information on how you can incorporate Vine into your promotions contact us today!

 

 

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Great Ways to Customize your Marketing Campaigns

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Customizing your campaigns allows you to connect with your customers on a deeper level. It is a good idea to tailor your campaign to your own company, products, and creativity.  One great way to customize your marketing campaigns and excite your fans is to offer prizes that are targeted to what your fans like, want, and need.  These prizes should also be congruent with your company and your marketing goals.

Another way to customize your marketing campaigns is to leverage social applications to further engage users.  These social apps can include:

  • Galleries for fan photos and videos, which allow users to look through other fan entries and see how other people are using your brand and products and engaging with your company.  This is a great way to create a community among your fans and incorporate user-generated content into your marketing efforts.
  • Signup forms, which allow you to gather contact information from everyone who engages with your campaign.  This is a great way to generate leads and new customers.
  • Surveys, which are a great way to find out more information about your fans and how they interact with your company, brand, or products.
  • Facebook apps, which allows you to customize your Facebook page with Facebook apps that encourage interaction or serve a marketing purpose and speak to your audience.
  • Marketing Pages, which allow you to display marketing messages or promotional graphics in a Facebook app. You can add a hyperlink to the images to direct users to your website.

It is important to customize the conversation you are having with your fans on social media and with the social conversation manager app it is simple to stay connected and to schedule posts and updates to your social media channels.  Scheduled posts are a great way to customize your campaign and create a specific timetable for your content.  You can also tailor your content by targeting your messages to specific locations and managing your global presence with language targeting.

These applications are a great way to individualize your promotions and marketing efforts. For more information on how to customize your campaigns contact us today!

 

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Start Thinking About Summer Themed Promotions

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We know, we know…  Summer is still a few months away but the weather is changing and the anticipation is rising.  Now is a perfect time to begin thinking about summer themed promotions and to introduce your fans to products geared for the summer season.  Tailor your product or service to the summer season and create a fun promotion that encourages them to use your brand.  Take advantage of what is top of mind for your fans and incorporate these ideas into your prizes. This could be a free beach getaway, fun and practical ways to stay cool, summer concerts and barbeques, and summer clothing.

It is a great idea to use the many summer holidays as a theme for your campaign.  There are many different audiences you can target when focusing on specific holidays or events.  One event that has a large target audience is graduation and the end of the school year.  Students anticipate the summer holiday all year and it is a perfect opportunity to capture their attention with a fun contest or sweepstakes.  Father’s Day is another holiday that provides a great opportunity for a promotion.  These promotions can incorporate photo or video contests that capture a father-son or father-daughter moment and can include great gifts and products for Dad to enjoy. The 4th of July is also another holiday that has a huge audience. The 4th of July is a holiday that incorporates events such as fireworks, barbeques, and parades.  These events are great opportunities to focus your promotion on.

Get your audience involved with summer themed photo or video contests that encourage them to document how they are enjoying the sun.  For more information on fun ways to engage fans contact us today!

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The End is Just the Beginning

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Just because your promotion has ended doesn’t mean you can drop the ball; there is still plenty of work to be done.  It is important to follow through with your promotion and continue to connect with your fans.  Your promotion has most likely established new or stronger relationships with your fans and it is important to act on these relationships.

One way to celebrate your fans is to send out an email to all of the participants and offer them a reward for engaging with your brand. This could be in the form of a coupon or a discount code, a preview of an upcoming product, etc.  It is also important to celebrate the winner of your promotion by announcing their win on your social media channels and displaying their entry in a gallery, a blog post, or your personal website.

Your next step should be to follow up and study the results of your promotion.  Measure your success by measuring the Return on Investment (ROI).  This way you will understand the impact of your social media marketing efforts.  Identify any trends to understand how your audience interacts with your business. Find out what resonates well with your audience and what information was disappointing and unexpected.  The research process is equally as important in this stage as it is in the planning stage.  All of these results can help you to optimize your social marketing campaigns in the future.

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March Madness Promotion

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March Madness is here and now is the time to run a march madness promotion that will capitalize on its popularity and on the excitement the tournament brings. When the NCAA tournament begins, brands will be ready to take advantage of the hype in a similar way that they did during Super Bowl season.

The greatest advantage marketers have during the March Madness season is the engagement of the fans.  Most fans include college students and alumni who heavily support their teams.  Millions of Americans enthusiastically fill out tournament brackets and stay up to date on every game.  The big difference between March Madness and the Super Bowl is that the NCAA basketball tournament begins with 64 teams in the run to become champion, verses the two football teams competing for champion in the Super Bowl.  Because the men’s basketball tournament runs for so long, there is a greater period of time for brands to engage fans in fun promotions.

One idea is to engage fans with a photo contest that prompts them to dress up or to decorate their space in honor of their favorite team. It is a good idea to give away prizes that tie in basketball with your company or brand.  Encourage fans to visit your company website to take part in a bracket contest. Give away prizes to those who pick the most games correctly.  Take advantage of the excitement that is generated around March Madness and join the conversation that your fans have already started.

For more information on how to run a contest or sweepstakes contact us today

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Maintaining Momentum for your Campaign

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Interacting with consumers and fans in ongoing dialogue is what social media marketing revolves around.  When launching a campaign this dialogue remains a priority from beginning to end and is essentially what will keep the campaign going.  One of the big challenges when running a campaign on social media is that it is easy to start the conversation and just as easy to stop it.  Running a successful campaign relies on maintaining momentum; but how do you do this successfully?

Here are 5 tips to help your campaign maintain momentum:

  1. Design for participation- Make sure that your promotion is designed to fully engage your fans and to encourage them to actively participate with your brand. Photo and video contests are a great way to ensure creative engagement.
  2. Get Personal- Create personal conversations with fans that enter your contest by tweeting to them, posting to their Facebook page, or by writing about their entry in your blog.  This social media communication shows your fans you notice and appreciate their entry and engagement.
  3. Constantly update your fans- Post updates about the promotion on your social media channels and personal website.  In order for fans to stay engaged they need to have all the facts. This can include sharing key milestones such as finalists being selected, just reached 100 or 10,000 entries, or even fun facts about the brand.  Post quality content about your campaign and your brand on a consistent basis.
  4. Announce daily giveaways and winners- by posting the winners on your social media channels you are encouraging your fans to continue to visit your social media pages and check in with the brand.
  5. Schedule posts- set up posts ahead of time and schedule when you would like them to go live.  This is a great way to ensure that all of the information gets posted and that the posts are spread out.

It is important to keep your fans interested in your promotion and in extension, your brand.  By incorporating these ideas into your marketing strategy you will create a continuous conversation that is rewarding for both you and your fans.

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Building Excitement Before You Launch Your Promotion

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There are many steps to take when creating a promotion.  One important step to highlight is engineering the success of your campaign from the very beginning by getting the word out and building excitement before the promotion launches.  A promotion does not go viral on its own, the strategy goes further than just creating the promotion and letting your fans do all of the work.

In order to generate maximum awareness of your promotion it is a great idea to plan a media strategy.  Planning posts across social media channels is a great place to start.  These posts should be easily shareable so fans can spread the message on their own social media. They should be an exciting announcement of your upcoming promotion offering all of the essential information and should include an incentive for your fans to become involved.   One great idea is to offer extra opportunities to enter the promotion and win prizes that coincide with their sharing activity.  For example, offer an extra entry into the contest if your fans share the promotional message with five friends.  This is a great way to get your fans to spread the message before the promotion begins and to get them engaged and excited.  If your message reaches enough people at the beginning it will eventually begin to spread itself.  The most important thing to remember is to make your announcement post exciting and worth sharing.  Using imagery can be useful in this step.

Another great way to spread the message is to send out an email to all of your fans and customers who have an email subscription.  This email should be similar to your social media posts in that they include the important information on the contest and where to find it when it launches.  This email can also include links to your website announcement and here they can share the message on social media.

A press release is another great way to reach a large audience and get the message out about your upcoming promotion.  It is also a great way to display all of the information about the promotion and talk about how the promotion relates to your brand and products.  Search advertising, display ads, and Facebook ads are all great ways to spread the message about your promotion as well.

After posting about the upcoming promotion on your social media channels and spreading the message via email and a press release, you can go a step further and find bloggers or other brands who will write about your promotion and your story on their own blogs and websites.  If you have made your story and your promotion exciting and shareable than the promotion will be easy to find when the time comes for the official launch.  It is up to you to make the initial efforts to create awareness.  You can reach new fans and followers by utilizing ads and reaching out to influential people in your community who can help spread the word. Remember, any touch point you have with a fan or potential fan is an opportunity to promote your contest or sweepstakes.

 

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Video Contests

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A great way to engage your customers and fans is to run a user-generated video contest.  An online video contest will encourage your fans to create videos about your brand and products, giving your brand tons of great new video content that can virally spread brand awareness and increase your Facebook audience.  By inviting fans to create video content about your brand you will strengthen the consumer’s connection to your brand and inspire their creativity.  The consumer will feel involved in the process of generating content and will see his/her own work being displayed.  Branded video contests create a positive association with your brand that can be helpful when launching new products and generating awareness.

It is important to motivate users to share with friends and inspire interactive viewing, commenting, and sharing.  A great way to do this is to create a video gallery where fans can view, share, and vote on their favorite videos.

It is also important to consider that creating a video is time consuming and requires a good amount of effort from your fans.  With this in mind it is a good idea to allow an appropriate amount of time for fans to upload entries.  There is often a last minute flood of entries because fans will take their time to come up with an idea and then execute the video.  In order to ensure that these last minute entries are a part of the viewing, sharing, and voting process, you can allow a separate voting period after the contest has stopped receiving entries.

Video contests have the ability to be offered cross-channel on Facebook, a microsite, your own website, and on Youtube. They have become a great way to establish a relationship with your fans while collecting content and information about your fans and consumers.  For more information about video contests contact us today!

 

 

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How to Use Social Media for Business

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Social media has changed the way the world communicates, creating real time interconnectivity between people, businesses, and geographies. As social media continues to grow in popularity, brands are looking for ways to increase their fan base and leverage their social presence to increase sales and brand affinity.

Here are 5 ways to leverage social media for business so that you can maximize your social marketing efforts.

1. Drive Conversations: 

Social media is a powerful tool for engaging your customers and fans in a conversation. Open up two-way communication between your business and your consumers to provide a way to stay connected with your fans and to introduce your brand to those who are less familiar. Interact with your fans and reply to what they have to say. By engaging in conversation, you’ll gain exposure on social channels and increase credibility by getting your customers to refer your brand or talk about their experience with your company.

Everyone has experienced the amazing ability that word-of-mouth has to spread a message instantly and to a large amount of people. Social media does exactly that. It acts as a catalyst of word-of-mouth, making it easy for your fans to recommend your brand to their peers. Social media is a vehicle that allows and encourages your customers to connect and interact with each other, sharing details about your company and products. Statistics show that 53% of active social networkers follow a brand on social media, and 60% of those who use digital methods to research about the products they intend to buy, learned about it on social media sites. Get your fans talking about your brand and you’ll be rewarded with better brand awareness and sales.

2. Get to know your audience better:

Not only is social media a great tool for allowing your audience to get to know you, it is also a way for you to get to know them. Social media can be used as a way to gather consumer research. Many of your fans are using social media as a way to show the world who they are. Observe what information your fans put out there and use that information to get to know them and their expectations in regards to your brand or products. Consumer research can be used in every aspect of your marketing efforts; it is imperative to know who you are marketing to and what they anticipate. By listening to your fans, you’ll have a better understanding of how to be successful marketing to them.

3. Provide customer service:

Before the boom of social media, customers would have to write a letter or call the company’s customer service line if they were unhappy with a product or service. Today, with the growth and pervasiveness of social media, these customer service complaints can be resolved online almost instantly. Customers can access the Internet everywhere and at anytime, therefore making it easier to communicate and receive responses to their questions in a more efficient manner.

Immediate response through social media is the kind of service customers are beginning to expect and demand. This is an example of how social media marketing can help increase brand loyalty and customer retention. If you provide excellent customer service, your customers will be more likely to buy from you in the future.

4. Educate and inspire:

To help build a relationship with your fans, you need to offer them something compelling – an incentive to engage with you. Creating and sharing great content that is relevant to your brand can help build a sense of trust with your audience and keep people interested in following your brand. People are often looking towards brands for information. Determine what type of content your audience responds to by trying out different types of content and experimenting. Think about how your brand fits into your audiences’ lifestyle and try to create and share content that your fans will be excited about. If you are able to educate or inspire your fans, you’ll build affinity, trust, and most importantly keep them interested and engaged with your brand on social media.

When in the process of creating interesting content the most important thing to be thinking about is your target audience. When creating content it is not only about writing, it is important to read what is out there already and what has been getting your audience’s attention. Find out what your audience finds interesting and adapt this so that it works in conjunction with your brand or business.

Another way to create content that is interesting to your audience is to create content that answers their questions. This can help your customer service as well, because you’ll be providing answers to commonly asked questions without having to address each customer individually.

An added benefit of creating great content is that it can help your SEO efforts and drive traffic to your website. By conducting keyword research and determining what your customers are searching for, you can better understand what they are looking for and tailor your content to their needs.

5. Run a promotion:

Promotions such as contests and sweepstakes are a fun and simple way to engage your fans and customers, allowing them to interact with your company. Promotions help create buzz and excitement around your brand, generating awareness and exposure.

When choosing what type of promotion to run, such as a photo or video contest versus a sweepstakes, you should analyze which type of promotion better suits your goals. For example, a photo or video contest is a fun way to get your fans involved and engaged, however this type of promotion requires more time and effort from your customers and fans. This means that while you are engaging fans with your brand or business, you may also receive fewer entries. It is a good idea to invite users to stay involved by allowing them to vote on the best entry. Sweepstakes, on the other hand, have a lower barrier to entry with the only requirement being to enter your email. This allows for more fans to be inclined to enter, but also means there is less engagement.

Both forms of promotions are beneficial in different ways; it depends on what end goal is more important to your marketing efforts. It is possible to run a sweepstakes and a photo contest simultaneously, but you must make sure to do so in a beneficial and smart way. You want to make sure that the two promotions vary enough so that they are not repetitive. An example of this would be to run a weekly trivia sweepstakes with a question and winner of the week, alongside a shorter photo contest.

For your promotion to be a successful marketing tool, it is important to offer prizes that relate to your brand, business, or products. It is often a good idea to offer your own products as the prize; this is a cost effective way to ensure that your customers will try your products and build excitement around your brand. If you are a travel company for example, you could run an effective promotion that offers a free vacation or a free stay at a resort.

Social media continues to grow and evolve. With this in mind, the role social media plays in marketing will continue to transform the relationship between brands or businesses and their audiences. The great thing about social media marketing is that as a marketer you have the ability to transform how social media is utilized. The ideas outlined in this guide can act as a starting point for you to develop a social marketing strategy and plan.

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Create A Social Media Marketing Plan

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It is worthwhile to create a social media marketing plan to determine your goals and objectives when marketing on social media. Your goals may include expanding your audience, creating engaging content, increasing your brand visibility, or increasing sales.  Whatever your goals may be it is critical to establish a timeline for executing your social promotions and achieving your goals.

Research is an important step in the planning process.  Once you have established your marketing goals, take the time to define your target audience and then find out where they hang out.  What type of social media does your audience gravitate to and what kind of information and content are they responding to. It is also a good idea to research what your fans and customers are saying about your competitors, as well as the dialogue that may already be going on about your own brand or business. It is important to know how your brand or business is perceived in the social media world in order to make improvements and tailor your marketing strategy to fit their needs.

After the research process you should have an even better idea of what your goals should be and how you can make these goals a reality.  At this stage it is important to communicate with those who will be involved in the social media marketing efforts. Designate a team of people who will be accountable for carrying out the promotion.  Make sure everyone in the company has clear line of site to the goals of the campaign and understands their responsibility in achieving these goals.

Once you have done your research and established measurable goals for marketing on social media, it is time to choose which media channels to utilize.  Choose wisely, more is not always better.  It is more important to choose the channels where your target audience is and the ones that will coincide best with your marketing goals.  Remember, being constantly active and timely on social media is one of the most important ways to market successfully.  This becomes more difficult as you add additional channels to your marketing plan.  It is neither practical nor efficient to try to participate in all of them.  So find where your target audience is, choose the best social media channels for your brand or business, and then start the ongoing conversation that is happening now on social media.

 

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