It’s well established that traditional ad units simply don’t work in social media channels. The ever-enduring question is: what will work to engage the target audience? If your brand can live up to these three tenants, chances are you’ve got a winner.
1) Make it Personal
Most ads, regardless of their richness, don’t work because they belong to the brand and not the person. Now these ad units can be modified to be an expression of the user. By enabling people to add their own pictures, items, colors, and personality to an ad unit, it no longer feels like it belongs to the brand.
Once the ad has been personalized, the person has at the very least spent more time with your message than any traditional ad unit. What’s more, he has the motivation to save and register that information, helping build the brand database and create even richer data to help inform future decisions on what kinds of content people want to see.
But to the users, the unit is now theirs. It is an online representation of their personality. This personalization is what turns ads into social objects. As a reflection of their own perceptions, needs, and hierarchy within their peer group, the brand authenticates and empowers the individual within the social context instead of interrupting it.
Can you say, “Add Photo?”
Sure, anyone can. But making those two little words a reality can lead some brands down costly, convoluted paths that end up being exactly the opposite of what their goal is: to nimbly execute campaigns that allow people to express themselves in the context of the brand.
REI tapped the Sprout platform to quickly and efficiently make creating a person’s own snowboarding showcase a simple three-step process: including photos, videos and music. REI knows that the key to effective widget adoption and distribution is to give someone the tools to express themselves – within a slick, professional interface. By making their audience look better, the REI logo gets passed along as well. Sprout was the key to making it happen on time and on budget.
The Facebook applications that Sprout creates for brands allow end users to add photos in an even easier way. Fully integrated into the Facebook platform, Sprout applications can access a user’s content to display Facebook photos and friend’s profile pictures. Users simply select the photo(s) they would like to display and they’re on their way to a customized ad.
2) Make it Portable
Now that your audience is engaged and have created media they can call their own, what can they do with it? Today’s social media landscape is as fragmented as it is pervasive. While we hear all the time about Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter, you can’t forget about the growing audiences on Tagged, Flixster, and the myriad niche networks where active influencers are constantly looking for easy ways to express themselves across their own small publishing network.
Brands today need technology that not only targets their messaging across publishing networks, but allows for the second-tier of distribution where the user will want to share that content. This is where the value of the user experience really kicks in on a technical level. How easy is it for users to take this content wherever they want to go? The fewer leaps you can make someone take after they’ve customized the content will directly affect how easy it is to share.
This part of the experience can’t be underestimated. Portability is the second vital part of turning personal branded messages into social objects. The ease with which people can share information directly affects the strength of their online social relationships. Brands must be able to deliver on helping people make connections through the content – wherever they may be. Especially if you’re basing the buy around a campaign, the ability to share, then customize, and reshare again has to be with an ease and speed faster than your flight.
This is exactly why Sprout has partnered with Gigya for the widest possible range of distribution options for users. First, Sprout creates unique pages for every customized application, making it easy for people to bookmark and come back to: creating a person’s own, “home base” for the content they’ve just created.
Then, to take it wherever people want to show off their application, Sprout offers more than 25 different social platforms for embedding the app. From Facebook to Livedoor, and everything in-between: redistributing branded content is only a click away.
In addition, Sprout works with brands to create engaging campaigns on Facebook that take advantage of the viral platform features. For example, if an end user uses the application and exports a personalized ad to his profile page, that activity is recorded in the activity feed. Friends see it and want to make their own.
Supercharging Your Display Buys
No doubt you’ve heard of the concept behind “big seed” viral marketing. When you have existing Flash-based network display buys, using Sprout turns every unit into portable, personal launch pads into users’ social graphs.
This transforms your buy into a big social seed, with every view an opportunity to increase your reach for helping users promote content with Rich applications as well as pinging their friends with that activity in their own activity streams.
Are metrics like GRP, reach, and frequency important to your overall planning? Then you owe it to your brand to learn more about how Sprout seamlessly brings display content into Google today, and DoubleClick & Platform A very soon. There’s an entire second ad network you could be engaging with the same spend.
3) Make it Measurable
The old model of metrics meant wait time. Mostly for ad networks to pull metrics back from publishers, aggregate, and then supply to brands. But if you’re following along with personal, portable content, now you’ve quickly established your own campaign-based publishing network; and you need to be able to pull back success metrics starting day two.
When you choose a technology company to supply the interactivity and portability layer, metrics that are meaningful to your organization from within the units aren’t a luxury: they’re a must.
Quick, robust metrics are vital for more than seeing if you’ve hit your ROI goals. If you’ve chosen wisely on the distribution platform, you can see where and when people are engaging in the content.
This means brands can optimize the content in the applications across the network and make them more in-line with how people want to use them, and to affect the brand’s prominence in those areas as well. The best part is being able to report not only how the unit was viewed, but also how you were able to optimize the unit over the course of the campaign to optimize engagement.
Sprout makes garnering actionable metrics easy, with two layers of integrated metrics built expressly for your insight based on our deep marketing experience. The internal engine helps you understand campaign activity within your Sprouts, giving you insight on more granular actions like individual clicks.
The second layer is tight integration with Google Analytics for Flash, showing exactly how people are navigating the user experience path to your desired goals. And when you need to tweak the campaign for optimal results on the fly, the Sprout suite makes it easy to take insights directly into better experiences, and faster ROI.
Winning Campaigns Are About People
With all the time and money pressures surrounding today’s marketing environment, it more important than ever to plan inside the buy with people in mind at every step.
What can people do to express themselves through the content? How easy is it for them to share it wherever they want to? How quickly can you see what they’re responding to? How quickly can you turn those findings into better content to drive even more engagement within the context of the brand?
Social media affords great opportunities for brands to lend authenticity, and facilitate online relationships with the similar skill sets you’ve been employing for display. By reorganizing around these simple questions, you’ll be quickly on your way to all kinds of new benchmarks, and win-win scenarios for the relationships of your audience and the goals of your brand in the space.
Turn the people in your target audience into actively engaged brand advocates today with a free trial of the Sprout Studio, or contact our friendly staff for a complimentary consultation. We’ll turn your vision into social success: faster and more efficiently than you thought possible.
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