The last year has been tough and we’ve needed to adapt. We’re all biting at the bit ready for the doors to open so we can go out into the world again. As marketers, we’re facing budget cuts, staffing cuts and we still need to perform and hit our KPI’s. We need to make every moment at work and every pound we spend count, bringing positive returns.
Make your digital marketing work harder
18th February 2021
Use your social tiles to maximise your marketing outreach
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Unsurprisingly social media activity skyrocketed in the last half of 2020. In Q3 and Q4 we saw a meteoric increase in global social media advertising spend of 56% and 50.3% respectively compared to the same period in 2019. With around half the world’s population on social media, you have a lot of people at your fingertips.
As a digital marketer, it has become an even more important tool in our toolbox.
There’s a huge benefit to social media that you cannot capitalise on in other channels. It simultaneously builds brand awareness, extends your brand reach and encourages engagement. In an era when we’re time and cash poor, it’s the holy grail. I am, of course, talking about User Generated Content (UGC).
Why not motivate an army of people to extend the reach of your hard work, especially when you can be encouraging them to share branded content.
Seamlessly social sharing with BrandStencil
In Q2 last year we launched our ‘Social Share’ function within the Brandstencil brand management platform. We’re always working on ways to streamline processes, enabling increased productivity, and this was one of many developments that we had in the pipeline.
This function allows our clients to kiss goodbye to awkwardly downloading files only to have to upload them again to their social networks. They simply share artwork and/or assets in all their glory, at the click of a button saving precious time and improving responsiveness.
The Alzheimer’s Society was the first to debut this feature for their ‘I’m a dementia friend’ campaign to great effect. A digital badge was awarded to those who had participated in an online Dementia Friends course.
Participants had previously been given a physical badge, however, the Alzheimer’s Society quickly adapted to the new normal. They created a digital badge for Dementia friends to share on social networks, with great success. It inspired supporter engagement, helped others to sign up for the course and promoted branded UGC. As a marketer, you got to love that.
You can read more about Alzheimer's Society's campaign success here.
Buzz hits the spot
If you are looking for a simple way to engage with your supporters, you can turbocharge your next campaign using our social poster app, Buzz. Buzz is a simple embed that can be used anywhere. Slip it into a campaign landing page or as part of a microsite, it’s an easy way to encourage people to engage with your brand, tell their own stories and create & sharing your branded material.
Chrons and Colitis UK effectively used this brand tool in their ‘It takes guts’ campaign. It was part of a wider campaign to open up the conversation about IBD. They used Buzz to give people living with IBD a voice and to encourage them to speak out. This Buzz campaign, to date, has resulted in over 1200 assets created and nearly 600 social shares. That’s a lot of audience engagement and branded content shared across the socialsphere.
This is an example of campaign results after the Alzheimer’s Society used Buzz in one of their campaigns;
“We were delighted with the response to our Dementia Awareness Week post-it note maker. It helped us to reach new audiences on social media as part of the campaign and doubled our target KPI.”
The power of community
The statistics around the performance of Social Media for usage, demographics, buyer behaviour etc are impressive, however, this is not another one of those blog posts. There are plenty of those.
Enhance the power of community spirit and you’ll see positive results without breaking a sweat or the bank. Studies show that 57% of consumers will stay loyal to your brand if they have a sense of a human-like connection.
Post what they’ll engage with, don’t just sell to them. Give them value-added and a variety of content types. Focus on building a lifestyle for your brand. Be generous, engage your social media community by asking the audience questions and listen.
Healthwatch ran a campaign last year, #BecauseWeAllCare, asking their supporters to share their experiences of the NHS. They used the BrandStencil brand management platform to provide supporters with social media tiles, encouraging the conversation with great results.
We are social creatures who love creating connections. When we can’t go out there and create them in the real world we’re likely to seek them out online.