The most efficient way to deliver high fidelity personalization in your daily email, and drive over 11x return on spend (works seamlessly with your existing email service provider).
Infinitely expand your brands photography with Curator™ AI. Generate new product photography that’s indistinguishable from the originals, and combines multiple products together.
Create, manage, deploy, and target an unlimited number of personalized messages. Deliver any of the messages from your pool through a single image URL and link embedded within email, SMS, mobile, or on your website.
Zembula connects with any enterprise data source. If you don’t see a specific data source here or have a custom data source, we will always connect it for free.
The most efficient way to deliver high fidelity personalization in your daily email, and drive over 11x return on spend (works seamlessly with your existing email service provider).
Infinitely expand your brands photography with Curator™ AI. Generate new product photography that’s indistinguishable from the originals, and combines multiple products together.
Create, manage, deploy, and target an unlimited number of personalized messages. Deliver any of the messages from your pool through a single image URL and link embedded within email, SMS, mobile, or on your website.
Integrations
Connect with 100+ integrations
Zembula connects with any enterprise data source. If you don’t see a specific data source here or have a custom data source, we will always connect it for free.
Participation Marketing: A Brands New Secret Weapon?
Storytelling has become increasingly important for brands. Not that it’s a new concept, in fact brands have been telling stories since the dawn of marketing. But, in recent years, a much deeper focus on telling a story through a brand has emerged. Brands want to be able to really connect with their potential customers on a deeply emotional, personal, and psychological level.
One relatively new and unique way many brands are starting to embrace the concept of storytelling is by embracing participation marketing.
Read along to learn some of the basics of what participation marketing is, and some of the best practices for incorporating it into your own marketing strategy.
Participation Marketing: The Basics
At it’s most basic, participation marketing brings the brand, the brand’s employees, customers, and industry influencers all into the conversation together. It helps to forge the bond between the brand and it’s customers.
But, behind that bond there is a bit of science.
Data has shown that consumers are far more likely to trust their friends and family more than a brand when it comes to helping to make the buying decision.
This comes into play online. When a consumer sees their friends or family talking about a brand they love, giving a five star review, or sharing a photo on Instagram that builds trust.. And trust is crucial to building long term relationships.
What is also interesting is that the same holds true for a brand’s employees. When consumers are able to interact with them online, and when they are featured in marketing campaigns, it also elicits a positive response from consumers. Employees are often seen by consumers as “experts” when it comes to a brand and that builds trust.
So, it’s pretty easy to see why so many brands are looking to embrace participation marketing, especially when it comes to getting their employees involved. Having that active participation between a brand and consumers is a really good way to set your brand apart.
Now that you’ve seen a bit about what participation marketing is, let’s take a look at a few best practices for you to follow.
Participation Marketing: Best Practices
Alright, so you want to start exploring the possibilities of using participating marketing in some of your campaigns, but you aren’t sure how to go about doing it.
After all, one of the “negatives” associated with this type of marketing is it can be quite difficult to do in a way that is truly effective and really speaks to consumers.
So, here we’ll cover a few tips and highlight some examples of brands that have been able to really embrace this type of marketing and make it work.
Set Goals
Yes, seems pretty obvious, but it is incredibly important to have a goal when you start your strategy. What is it? Having your customers perform an action? Having your employees feel like they have a sense of purpose and agency? Creating a feeling of trust that you can build on over time? Know what it is and keep that in mind throughout the process.
Know Your Story
Don’t forget, a huge part of participation marketing is embracing and showcasing storytelling. So hand in hand with having goals is knowing what your storyline and story board is going to be. Your brand needs to be able to weave the story of your product or service with the story provided by your customers and employees.
Collaboration
One way a brand can get into trouble when it comes to participating marketing is not collaborating with the participants (usually employees or consumers) enough. Remember, this is about storytelling and them telling their story as it relates to your brand. If it feels too directed then your not going to get that positive emotional impact from the consumers that are trying to be reached.
Participation Marketing in Action
There are a number of brands right now that have fully embraced participation marketing and are seeing the results in terms of increased brand loyalty, and even viral campaigns.
Here, we’ll take a look at a couple examples of brands that have run a few successful campaigns.
ALS Foundation
One of the biggest examples of participation marketing that swept the nation (and raised millions of dollars in the process) was the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge of 2014.
ALS asked people to donate to their foundation by dumping a bucket of ice water on their heads and calling out other friends to do it via video, or donate money to the cause. It was hard to go anywhere and not see videos all over social media and traditional media talking about this event, which was completely performed by consumers.
Just by having a campaign that involved regular people, ALS was able to raise over $114 million in 8 weeks, over 4 times the amount of money that was raised in 2013. This money has been credited with helping fund some recent research breakthrouhs as well.
Coca-Cola
Even with the push towards more healthy foods, soft drink brand Coca-Cola is still thriving. One of the big reasons why is they have developed a number of marketing strategies that really target the emotions of their customers.
With their more recent Share a Coke campaign, the brand looked to involve their consumers directly in marketing. Instead of having the traditional labels on each bottle or can of Coke, they instead took over 250 common names and terms of endearment and put those on the label instead.
The brand then asked consumers to use a hashtag #shareacoke to spread the word.
The results spoke for themselves. This campaign, when it started in 2014 was credited with a massive increase in sales (which had been in decline for years). Since then, the campaign has returned with even more names (1,000 alone in just the United States) and is bigger than ever with many new worldwide campaigns.
Final Thoughts
These are just a few examples of how participation marketing is being embraced today. Sometimes, just getting consumers and employees involved in a more organic way can create an incredible viral buzz that brings a campaign to the next level.
Next time you’re going to try out a new marketing campaign, consider working directly with those who might be your greatest advocates, your consumers and employees. More often than not, you’re going to be able to build something really interesting that directly connects with your potential consumers than a traditional campaign.
There’s no doubt by now you’ve not only seen but probably have used GIFs in your life. Maybe you’ve even used them yourself online, posting a funny reaction on Twitter, or sending one of those cute baby animal shots to a friend via email.
GIFs are great. They are entertaining and can be used to easily convey a message in an often funny or emotional way.
So, it shouldn’t come as a big surprise brands and marketers are starting to embrace GIFs as well. In fact, data from Twitter shows that in 2015, over 100 million GIFs were shared in Tweets. Other social media sharing sites like Facebook and Tumblr weren’t far behind.
To be clear, though, GIFs weren’t just included because they were fun, nope marketers are a lot smarter than that, GIFs are also good for increasing engagement and click rates as well, the holy grail of marketing!
Convinced yet?
A lot of brands and marketers are, using GIFs as part of their marketing strategy in everything from emails to landing pages. Here, we’re going to cover a few examples that highlight just how important the rise of GIFs in marketing has been over the last year or so (plus how it will likely continue in the future).
Email Campaigns
Dell Computers was one of the first big brands to embrace the GIF in an email marketing campaign in 2014. The goal was to highlight their new laptop which featured a hinge that turned it from a conventional laptop into a tablet.
Clearly, something like that is somewhat difficult to describe without seeing. Hence, the GIF.
According to Marketing Sherpa, which did a nice case study on this particular email campaign, Dell was focused on making a quick and simple GIF that showed just how cool their new laptop was in less than a second.
The results speak for themselves. Compared to the previous quarter, Dell saw:
6% increase in open rate
42% increase in click rate
103% increase in conversion rate
109% increase in revenue
Not too shabby, right?
Social Media
Brands jumped on the GIF bandwagon on social media relatively early. Part of the reason why a GIF can work so effectively is that they can quickly tell a story that grabs the viewer right from the get-go.
As Joe Puglisi, who is the Senior Creative Strategist at Buzzfeed, said in 2014:
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a GIF is worth 10,000. GIFs are a mini-vehicle for storytelling, capturing emotions, and communicating them in a concise way that words and pictures alone cannot.
So, while Dell used their GIF as education, to quickly and visually highlight a product feature, other brands are also embracing storytelling.
One brand that has gone all in on GIFs across their Twitter accounts is Major Leauge Baseball. They’ve found a way to be able to distill a 3 hour game into super quick moments that can still tell a story.
Not only does the main @MLB Twitter account highlight lots of GIFs, but the league even has a GIF-specific @MLBGIFs account as well, which is nothing but GIFs.
To how you can incorporate more Simpson’s quotes in your life (let’s face it, who doesn’t want that?):
These all showcase just how varied the use of GIFs can be. Your brand doesn’t have to just have them be totally funny all the time. GIFs can be used to drive home a fact, or highlight directions. As you might have seen in this post, during the Rio Summer Olympics, a number of newspapers around the world embraced GIFs in their reporting of the games.
There’s another big benefit to the GIF too.
As you can see from this image from QuickSprout, blog posts with animated graphics are shared far more on social media than corresponding posts that don’t have them.
So just simply dropping a GIF into your blog post (one that makese sense obviously) might just be a very easy way to dramatically improve reader engagement.
Landing Pages
Yup, GIFs are even being used on landing pages by some brands who are really trying to think out of the box.
We know one thing that is incredibly important to marketers is engagement, and not just passive engagement, but active engagement, having someone complete an action.
That is hard to do, especially on a landing page, when a potential customer pops onto the page, looks at it for 2 seconds and then moves on to something else.
But, when something creative is used that increases curiosity or gets people interested in what’s coming next, consumers are more likely to keep reading, which increases their chance of taking action.
That’s where the GIF can come into play.
Campaign Monitor used a GIF on it’s landing page to highlight just how easy it is for customers to create and build their own email campaigns.
Using a GIF this way helps them remove a standard objection from potential customers, those who think building their own emails or newsletters for their brand is too hard to do on their own.
The simple GIF highlights the drag and drop features, showing just how easy it can be, very smart marketing for just about a second or two of animation.
Final Thoughts
So, do you realize just how many ways you can use a GIF in your brand’s marketing? Way cooler than sharing cat photos (though those are pretty cool too), right?
Being a little bit creative and using or creating GIFs that highlight your content, educate your customer, or simply tell a quick and easy story can have a pretty dramatic positive effect over the long run.
As consumers get bombarded with so much information online, using GIFs is a great way to highlight a quick emotional connection and keep those flagging attention rates going strong all at the same time.
Have you been able to feature GIFs in your marketing strategy?
