As competition amongst brands intensifies, companies have to innovate and differentiate themselves by delivering customer-centric campaigns that keep people coming back for more. Delivering a standout customer experience is all about creating an emotional connection between brand and customer.
So how do you encourage existing fans and potential customers to like, share, comment on and contribute to your narrative? Go ahead and get inspired by some brand engagement ideas from the pros.
- A Warm Welcoming From Kate Spade
- Social Media Savvy: Refinery29
- Wayfair Pioneered Instagram’s Integrated Shopping Tool
- Make It Topical: Oreo’s 100th Birthday
A Warm Welcoming From Kate Spade
In today’s increasingly digital world, we’re constantly bombarded with prompts to sign up for and subscribe to all sorts. So when someone takes the time to sign up for your brand’s email communications intentionally, it's a pretty big deal.
Kate Spade created a wonderfully simple but effective welcome email. A "Thank You" in big, bold lettering on a bright envelope graphic recreates the feeling of receiving an actual letter in the mail from the luxury fashion giant.
(The 15% off discount code is pretty great too.)
Social Media Savvy: Refinery29
Social media is the most powerful form of digital persuasion. Engaged consumers use platforms like Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to interact with brands which ultimately influences their purchasing decision.
A whopping 49% of millennials and 85% of Gen Z use social media to vet products before they make that all-important decision. So it’s more crucial than ever to maintain a consistent brand image with engaging content and experiences.
Combine social media, a brand that knows its target audience and a fun, curated art installation and you get Refinery29’s pop-up installation. A hybrid of experiential marketing and user-generated content, the installation features 29 rooms with custom exhibits from local artists. It was designed to be an immersive multi-series gallery with vivid colours and imagery, surprise showcases and even cocktails.
One of the main goals of the travelling pop-up was for attendees to take selfies in front of each exhibit which is much too enticing for today’s smartphone-obsessed culture to resist. User-generated content is a goldmine for social posts and testimonials.
In addition to featuring local artists and promoting causes important to them, 29Rooms was affectionately called an ‘adult playground’. Visitors interacted with and experienced artwork directly and hands-on with childlike wonder and curiosity.
Wayfair Pioneered Instagram’s Integrated Shopping Tool
Have you mastered Instagram’s integrated shopping features yet? Home decor company Wayfair was quick to adopt this new form of commerce and their Insta feed quickly became a thing of beauty.
Rather than placing paid ads on the app and crossing their fingers for a click, Wayfair transformed its checkout process by capitalising on the update. With just a few taps, users can purchase the automatically tagged products featured in the photos. A frictionless process the likes of which had never been seen previously.
Wayfair’s ability to integrate this new feature into its social media strategy resulted in a three-fold increase in traffic coming to their site.
Wayfair is a great example of brands harnessing the power of social media. This speaks to the need for brands to experiment with new technologies and retail capabilities, as well as creating optimised content for each specific social channel.
Make It Topical: Oreo’s 100th Birthday
By tying a campaign to a current event, brands establish relevance. Take Oreo's ‘Daily Twist’ that was created in celebration of its 100th birthday. Oreo set out to prove it was as relevant as ever, especially among millennials.
Scouring pop culture for the top headlines, the biscuit brand created a new piece of share-worthy content every day for 100 days. The covering topics ranged from Gay Pride to the Mars Rover landing and took full advantage of the brand’s 30 million Facebook fans.
Each day of the campaign brought its own clever way to introduce the Oreo into a conversation that would go beyond Facebook.
For the 100th day finale, Oreo invited its fans to submit and vote on their own ideas, promoting loyalty. Through this intensive real-time poll approach, Oreo ensured its daily relevance. It resulted in an impressive 150% increase in Google searches, 280% increase in Facebook shares and a spectacular 510% increase in retweets. The results speak for themselves.
At its core, brand engagement is about creating as many engaging channels and touchpoints as you can for the customer. Intrigued and valued customers are more likely to pay more, promote more and become loyal ambassadors of your brand. So why not give them brand engagement and activations worth supporting?
Use Our Campaign Budget Calculator to Maximise Brand Engagement
To keep up with the latest trends, you need to constantly optimise campaigns and events to see what worked and what didn’t. Budgeting works the same way. To get the most bang for your buck, you can use our handy little budget calculator so you can justify concrete ROIs and your future branding budgets.
It’s user-friendly and gives you solid figures to take away. Click the link below to get access.
