Marketing on social media is about creating a buzz around a brand that feels generated from the bottom up, in other words, as organic and grass-roots driven as possible.
However, the issue with social media is that it can feel very momentary: a scroll of the screen or a click and your message has gone. How then, can marketing campaigns add greater tangibility to their social media activity?
Chris Rigby of Invogue Incentives suggests a solution.
Promotional Products and Social Sharing
“As with any form of marketing you need to consider what your audience is looking for and then ask yourself what will help them want to share your content. What if you could offer them something tangible?”
One suggestion is to create a competition to win promotional items and use social media channels to let people know about it.
“Competitions are very shareable, especially if you promote the right kind of promotional gifts as prizes designed to appeal to your target audience. You can even include sharing as a condition of competition entry.”
The other advantage of using promotional products this way is that it can an extremely cost-effective marketing channel.
“The social sharing does the heavy lifting for you. What matters at your end is the strategy. This is what is crucial.
“You cannot guarantee viral sharing, but a sound understanding of your audience and how they perceive your brand and what you promote, will put you on the right track”
Also, the promotional products themselves need not be expensive. Think in terms of branded clothing such as t-shirts, or goodie bags.
The Lasting Impact of Promotional Items
The British Promotional Merchandise Association (BPMA), reports that 87% of people surveyed have said they keep a promotional item for at least a year. 66% claim to be able to recall who supplied them with promotional products that are a year old.
“That level of recall is something for social media marketers to seriously consider.”
“Using social media as a cross-promotional platform give marketers the opportunity to combine a long-established tactic, the promotional competition, with a thoroughly contemporary social media strategy”
“Promotional gifts offer the opportunity of leverage with your target audience. Plus they can help you discover more about that audience and what appeals to them about your brand.”
Simplicity is the Key
Using social media with promotional products does not need to be a complex process.
“A successful social media strategy could be to encourage people to follow and share your messages in order to win something. It’s a simple, but effective, form of incentivisation.”
Furthermore, encouraging the winners of these items to then share pictures of themselves with what they have won is a way of extending your social media campaign.
“Both the competition and its results are potentially highly shareable. Add to this the high retention value of promotional items, and the adaptability of this strategy for any number of brands, and you’re onto a winner.”
Discover how you could add promotional products to your social media marketing by calling Invogue Incentives on 01772 751175 or visiting invogue.co.uk.
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