If the world of social media is just one giant party, then companies should probably know this: Your customers are talking about you behind your back.
Your brand is no longer defined by what you say to your customers, but by what your customers say about you. While traditional marketing channels help businesses maintain a certain degree of control, social media empowers customers to weigh in and define your brand completely independent of what your marketing team says or does.
So what should you do? Empower them to keep talking and create engaging conversation starters, of course.
Empowering your existing customers to create and share content with their social networks has the capacity to positively influence SEO rankings, purchasing decisions, brand loyalty, and brand awareness—all of which lead to new, more effective channels of customer acquisition.
To inspire you, here are three campaigns from brands that understand their audiences and know what it takes to get the gears of user-generated content moving forward:
1. Tourism Queensland Offers the “Best Job in the World”
Do you have a sense of adventure, a passion for fine wines, and a love of the great outdoors? Are you interested in making about $105,000 (USD) a year to explore coral reefs? If you answered yes to any of these questions, then I have the job for you!
Back in 2009, Tourism Queensland launched an incredibly effective campaign offering a job as a caretaker for the islands of the Great Barrier Reef for six months. All you had to do was submit a short video application and pray you made it to the next round. The campaign solicited more than 35,000 user-generated videos from across the world, resulting in a huge publicity boost for Queensland that drove more tourists to the country and deposited more cash into local businesses’ bank accounts.
2. Hotelsbycity.net Gets Customers Jumping Online
Before the current wave of social media marketing crashed onto the advertising community, back in 2009 the innovative marketing team at hotelsbycity.net saw an opportunity to capitalize on their customers’ willingness to engage with the brand—and with incredible success.
It’s an easy ask: Stay in a hotel and have someone take a picture of you jumping on a bed; then post the photo to a dedicated webpage called Bed Jump. The campaign resulted in a huge publicity boost for the company and its affiliate hotels, and it was really fun to boot.
3. Ford’s Social Media Fiesta
In February, Ford launched its latest Fiesta Movement campaign to promote its 2014 Fiesta by choosing a team of 100 online influencers (a.k.a, “Fiesta Agents”) to create advertising materials—without any interference by the company.
Basically, Ford gives each of its Agents a car and a camera to go out and create whatever type of content their influencers find valuable—videos, blogs, pictures, it makes no difference as long as the content promotes the Ford Fiesta.
The campaign is novel in that it empowers a select group of customers to create the content, as opposed to opening up the campaign to their entire customer base. We won’t see the payoff until the end of 2013, but it’s certainly on the right track.
So what’s the takeaway? Customers like feeling as though they’re a part of the brand, and time and again they’ve proven they are more than willing to create and share content about their lives. All it takes is a little innovation to get users sharing.
What types of content are your users generating? Has it been effective for your brand? Let us know!
Image Courtesy of Zeus Promo