Grabbing the attention of brands
As marketers and advertisers, we all know that customer insights are crucial, second only to the brand itself. Social business platforms around the world have made millions by keeping this in mind – but things are changing. Customer insights are indeed fundamental to all businesses; however, a mass market approach is certain to make way for a new form of micro-marketing – a consumer driven, increasingly personalised and relevant approach. Users are increasingly infuriated with being bombarded by promotions based on information collected through their browsing and viewing habits, which may not be entirely relevant.
Facebook, Google and other social media platforms make money by selling brands’ data about how consumers interact with their platforms. The data is analysed into insightful information that highlights sales opportunities or problems in a supply or manufacturing chain, allowing a brand to then react; but brands are fed-up with paying to be tenants on social media platforms. They’ve spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds, creating a great Facebook page with millions of likes, but posts still need to be boosted each time with additional cost, unless they want to achieve organic reach which is as low as 5% of their fan base.
So what if brands were proactive in targeting customers? What if they were in charge of their own customer data targeting customers directly? What if they could bypass third party social platforms?
Content and community marketing 101
Let’s take it back to the basics; to quote Dan Blank, Founder of WeGrowMedia, “Content Marketing is engaging with your community around an idea, instead of a product. What it is, is to try and serve the community first and sharing information, ideas and experiences that benefit others without directly asking for anything in return. What it isn’t is just a veil in front of a sales’ pitch.”
Content marketing loses all value without a community to engage with; it can only be successful through engagement of the natural communities that form around brands’ products and services. To put it simply, marketing is how you get people through the door, but community is how you keep them and treat them once they’re in. The way in which brands will treat the first five community members is essential, as it will set the culture and example for the next five million.
Community-building
The idea of building a community is not new but it’s definitely a powerful one that needs investing in. The power of communities lies within the growing significance of peer-to-peer recommendations; consumers value each other’s opinions when it comes down to purchasing decisions. For brands, insight from communities can be invaluable, as it can inform better business decisions and lead to any future sales prospects. Social communities around brands and products help a brand analyse their customers’ likes and dislikes, predict their future preferences and purchases based on their existing data and assess customers’ preferences. GRABR is a new digital platform, which connects brands and consumers with their passions. When GRABR was set-up, we had the long-term vision of eventually linking users that have an interest in different fields, from wine to books and everything in between.
Engaging with community members helps businesses create lasting, valuable relationships and allows them to turn customers into brand advocates who can echo that brand’s message, amplify its reach and, solidify loyalty and credibility. A strong community is not just excellent for sourcing and refining content ideas; it can also help spread the message to a much wider audience than an organisation could reach on its own, and can help solve some of the most pressing content research challenges organisations face.
What’s in it for me?
When it comes to communities, there are clear benefits to brands, but what’s in it for users? The first step towards building a community is to address that very question. Brands need to curate the customer experience and help users discover new content of interest by connecting them with people with similar preferences. Pinterest, Tumblr and Fancy are a few of the sites that do a fantastic job on engaging the user, and we have actually used them as an inspiration when building GRABR.
Consumers are choosing to engage only with content that is personally relevant to them, they don’t want intrusive adverts, but they do want personalised recommendations. Content is the key factor that will incentivise and fuel any interactions, so the content strategy needs to always come back to the user and the how beneficial it will be to them.
For example, the GRAR platform also allows games companies and brands to become ‘merchants’ on the platform by building their own games collections and earning revenue from the sale of games within their collection.
How big is your data?
The more data that brands can collect, the more informed and customer-oriented their business decisions will be. Big data, following content marketing, is unsurprisingly the most important marketing trend of 2015, according to a Smart Insights survey. Data, especially metadata, is every marketer’s secret source of power; metadata around a specific product is the base of further interactions with customers meaning that they can get related content based on this data.
To put this into context, many users on gamesGRABR create collections called Games I Want or My Favourite Wishlist, so we can use our insights platform and can literally search for collections that contain the word “want” as the headline and we then send relevant advertising and promotions to these users. As an example, we recently looked at how many people had Halo in their collection called Games I Want. We sourced a limited amount of Halo T-shirts, offering these users a 50% discount; needless to say that we sold out in minutes, because we have sent an email directly to the person that liked Halo and gave them a good discount on something they have shown an interest in; and that’s something brands could never do with Facebook as they can’t get the users’ details or intent to purchase.
Join the new era of marketing
Identifying, building and nurturing relationships with current and prospective buyers as well as industry influencers means a lot more than just building up social media following and driving more traffic to a website. It’s not about SEO content, blogs, internet banner ads, Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and email marketing any more. It’s about giving customers, a very enjoyable and engaging experience. It’s about creating a platform where users can join a community of like-minded people who are familiar with the brand and want to interact with others or create their own content.
Brands need to find alternative ways of working, through a platform of their own; they need to regain control of customers’ data so that they can re-target promotions to people that have intent to purchase. At the end of the day, it’s a ‘win-win’ situation for both parties, as customers also get content and products that are customised to them and their interests.
