FUEL YOUR SOCIAL MARKETING ENGINE

A Guide to Creating Content to Engage Todays Social Customer

INTRODUCTION

Social media has fundamentally changed how consumers discover new products and services, and the way they evaluate and make purchase decisions. Its shifted control of the conversation away from brands to consumers, causing word of mouth to spread wider and faster than ever before. This viral power which can potentially work against brandscan also be an engine that drives competitive advantage. Developing high-impact content that engages consumers is key to fueling that engine. But achieving this on a daily basis isnt easy; we constantly hear marketers say that cultivating a fresh, steady churn of social content is one of their greatest challenges. We designed this report to help. In it, well share best practices and tips on building a content strategy, driving consumer engagement through day-today messaging and large-scale promotions, and delivering content at scale. Youll learn how to apply these tactics to get maximum value from your content and build your social brand. The Wildfire by Google Team

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ENGAGE CONSUMERS WITH COMPELLING CONTENT

Content is the fuel of your social marketing engine. Without compelling content that engages consumers on a consistent basis, your social marketing wont deliver results. But developing fresh, engaging content, day after day is one of social marketings greatest challenges. Brands that succeed at consistently delivering engaging content begin with a well-planned content strategy and apply best practices in content development.

CONTENT & Engagement

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CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

Content Strategy
Here are several guidelines to keep in mind as you plan your content strategy. Align content with your marketing objectives Content should support your marketing objectives. For example, if your goal is to build brand awareness beyond your existing fans and followers, your content strategy needs to reflect it. Youll want to create brandrelevant content that has a high likelihood of being shared, such as an entertaining video. By contrast, if your objective is to generate immediate revenue from your existing social audience, your content strategy should focus on creating compelling offers that drive consumers to sales transactions. Work from a well-defined plan and editorial calendar Its a basic notion, but the ability to create and publish content at scale requires advanced planning and coordination with your overall marketing plan. Use an editorial calendar that coordinates your content plan with your marketing campaigns, as well as relevant industry events and seasonal trends. While a plan is essential for efficiently publishing social content at scale, successful content strategies are also flexible enough to adapt to unanticipated events and opportunities. In general, the 80/20 rule will apply: 80% of your content will be planned, 20% developed in response to unplanned events. Take a cross-network approach A simple way to get more mileage out of your content is to leverage it across the different networks you maintain a brand presence on. For example, if youre running a YouTube video contest, post user-generated video submissions on your Facebook page that drive users to your Brand Channel. Doing so helps drive overall engagement, and links campaigns together with components unique to each network.

Develop an editorial calendar that coordinates your content plan with your marketing campaigns, industry events and seasonal trends.

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CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

Tip
Experiment with different targeting parametersage, language, geography and so onto evaluate how your content resonates with particular audience segments.

just 16% of its fans.1 So while publishing a steady stream of content is a necessary part of engagement strategy, it is not sufficient. Organic reach alone will not get the message out. Brands can reach and engage a larger percentage of users by running paid social ads. Social ads drive engagement by tapping into the viral characteristics of social sites and broadcasting brand messages: ads generate Likes and shares, which increase visibility in the news feed. And since more than a quarter of social network users are likely to pay attention to a social ad posted by a friend,2 that news feed visibility has the potential to be quite impactful. Continuously experiment and test Content is an area where continuous experimentation and testing pays off. In social media, you can quickly test content elements to see what works best at driving engagement and action: headlines, messages, photos, offers, calls to action, and so on. You can test which day of the week and what time of day work best for posting content; you can also test by social channel, geography, language, and audience segment. Experimentation should be a standard part of your approach to social, with systems in place to set up and track your tests.

Understand what motivates your target consumers Marketers typically build personas or profiles of their target consumers describing who those consumers are, what they do, their interests and desires. In social media, interactions with a brand are often public in nature, so understanding how the social context influences behavior is an important aspect of the consumer social persona. For instance, content that activates consumers desire to display positive personal traits (e.g., intelligence, wit, compassion, etc.) can be very effective in driving engagement and sharing. Promote your content as paid media Many marketers arent aware that an active social presence doesnt guarantee them visibility in their fans and followers news feeds. In fact, most of a brands social audience never sees its page posts. According to one study, a brands posts on Facebook typically reach

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CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

Developing Compelling Content

So how do you go about developing compelling, engaging content? Based on our experience working with thousands of brands, weve found that successful social marketing requires developing two types of content for your social properties: basic messaging (dayto-day posts regarding brand news, time-sensitive offers and other content relevant at a particular moment in time) and larger-scale social promotions that build momentum and buzz around brand initiatives and special events. Brands that drive engagement most successfully have developed a steady rhythm around publishing both types of content.

drive engagement
with large-scale promotions and day-to-day messaging?

How can you

Take a look at these tips and best practices

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CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

Promotional Campaigns
Promotional campaigns are a tried and tested method for engaging consumers and driving business results. Wildfire has helped brands run more than 250,000 social media campaigns. The most popular types of promotional campaigns used in social media are:

Sweepstakes
Similar to a lottery, where the prize winner(s) is/are chosen randomly.

SKYY Vodka
SKYY Vodka used a sweepstakes to build buzz around the launch of its new product, Dragon Fruit Infusion, and gain new Facebook fans.

To increase your sweepstakes visibility and entry rate, utilize all of your social channels. For instance, if youre running a sweepstakes on Facebook, cross-promote it on your Twitter page.

Trivia
Multiple choice question that allows consumers to measure their aptitude regarding a particular topic.

Best Western
Best Western encourages users to share their knowledge of American landmarks for a chance to win a Best Western Travel Card.

Users are more likely to share their interactions with your content when doing so reflects their style, personality or aptitude. To inspire your fans and followers to share your trivia campaign, be sure that its content allows users to express themselves.

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CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

Quiz
Consumers self-categorize themselves based on their responses to a set of questions.

Tough Mudder
Premier obstacle course series Tough Mudder builds awareness about its cause by prompting users to take its Mudder Ready Quiz and determine their level of toughness.

Design your quiz with the user in mind: Is the topic catchy? Is it too long? Do the questions and answers make sense? Always consider how participants will react to your content by putting yourself in their shoes.

Coupon
Opportunity to claim coupons (vouchers or codes) that consumers can print or redeem electronically.

Original Joes
To boost engagement and drive in-store visits, restaurant and bar franchise Original Joes offered users who Liked its Facebook page a free order of chicken wings, redeemable at any of its locations.

A simple way to gain additional followers or generate new marketing leads is to place a reveal page or gate in front of your coupon content. Doing so requires users to Follow or Like your brand page, or provide information through a signup form to gain access to your coupon.

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CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

Giveaway
Signup form to get on the list for a brand-sponsored giveaway.

Blowfish Shoes
Shoe designer and retailer Blowfish Shoes designed a Shoe A Day Giveaway on Facebook to increase sales and boost web traffic. Every day for a calendar year, the brand gave away a pair of shoes to a new customer and announced the winners on its YouTube Brand Channel on a weekly basis.

Giveaways provide an excellent opportunity to showcase your brands products and services. Seize that opportunity and offer campaign participants prizes relevant to your business, and that help them learn about what you offer.

Contests (Video, Photo, or Essay)

Consumers submit an essay, photo or video to win a prize. Winners can be determined by a judge or by popular vote, or a combination of the two.

Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau

Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau ran its Perfect Moments in Hawaii photo contest to grow its Facebook fan base and encourage users to travel to Hawaii. Contestants submitted two photos a photo of what theyd like to escape, and a photo of what they would be doing in Hawaii if they could escapefor a chance to win a Hawaiian vacation.

Build buzz around your contest by featuring your fans and followers submissions photos, videos or essays on your social properties throughout the campaign. Doing so encourages user sharing, and contestants will appreciate the recognition you give to their content.

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CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

Align Promotions and Incentives to Objectives

Consumers participate in promotional campaigns for two reasons: entertainment value and/or economic value. Accordingly, your promotions value proposition needs to account for those motivators and your promotion should align with your business objective. In general, the more effort and information youre asking for, the higher the value must be of the reward youre offering as incentive. For example, if youre a retailer aiming to gather email addresses for your weekly newsletter, include a well-designed signup form and offer your merchandise to incentivize participation.

Choose the Appropriate Campaign Type Based on Objectives

A recent study of 10,000 social media campaigns showed significant differences in the number of entries various campaign types received, compared to how often consumers shared their interactions in campaigns with others. Coupons, giveaways, and sweepstakes were the top three campaign types that drove the most entries; however, the top three campaign types that drove the most sharing were pick-your-favorites, quizzes, and trivia contests.4 Its important to keep in mind, however, that there is no standard formula for successful content. While its helpful to know which types of campaigns generally work best based on industry averages, the typical experience may not apply to your specific situation. As with all aspects of social marketing, you should continuously test different types of campaigns to see which work best for your brand.

22% of consumers who participate in a social promotion on Facebook publish a post about the campaign to their news feed
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What are you trying to achieve with your promotion?

Identify your campaigns principal goal and choose a promotion format that will help you achieve it.
C AM PAI GN GOALS Maximize Entries Maximize Consumer Engagement

Promotion Formats Sweepstakes Giveaway

(Photo, Video, Essay)

(acquire followers & fans)

(social sharing)

Drive Sales

Contest

Quiz Trivia Pick Your Favorites Coupon

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CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

Promotional Campaigns: 4 Best Practices to Drive Engagement

Based on an examination of content from different campaign types, here are four best practices for creating social media campaigns that drive consumer engagement, participation, and sharing.

1. Play up the personality

Consumers are more likely to share their interaction with a brands campaign through social media when the campaign reflects their style, aptitude, or personality. Accordingly, when planning your social marketing campaign, consider shaping the content and campaign experience to allow consumers to express themselves. If the campaign involves a voting element, for example, ask consumers to vote on something that expresses an opinion theyd feel motivated to publicly share. Make sure to also include a mechanism for sharing their voting outcome to their social graphvia a news feed message or otherwise.

TurboTax Canada
TurboTax Canadas trivia campaign generated thousands of entries because it allowed users to demonstrate knowledge about a subject of interest to them.

2. Consider Whats in it for me? from the consumers perspective

Social media users dont want to be a source of spam to their friends. Keep this in mind as you consider potential interactions that consumers could have with your campaign content, and you will have a good idea of whats inherently shareable and what isnt. When creating content, take your consumers point of view and ask: If I posted about my interaction with this content, what would be in it for me? What would be in it for my friends?

timberland
Outdoor outfitter Timberlands Get Your Hortiscope quiz is an example of a social campaign that passes the share test. A user is inclined to share the results of Timberlands quiz because: (a) she gets to display results to her friends that prove she is trustworthy and practical, which is consistent with her own self-image; (b) she thinks her friends might also find the quiz entertaining; or (c) she wants to publicly align herself with a cause that users can rally around.

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CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

3. Incentivize engagement and sharing behavior

Think creatively about how you can incentivize consumers to engage with and share your content. Using game mechanics is one technique that can work well to incentivize sharing behavior for certain consumer audiences.

mountain dew
Mountain Dew successful Dew Crew campaign included an intricate but easyto-follow game element that rewarded consumers for sharing and posting.

Users are 3x more likely to share the results of a quiz with their networks than their participation in a sweepstakes or video contest.
4. Deploy a mix of content and campaign types
A well-rounded social media marketing strategy includes a steady stream of varied content designed to influence a range of user interactions. Successful brands approach content creation from multiple anglessome might be aimed at achieving high participation rates and other at driving high sharing activity. Brands that excel at social marketing tend to publish more content than average, with a variety of content to support different business objectives. And they use paid media to amplify their owned content further, reaching new consumers outside of their existing social audience.
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benefit cosmetics UK
Benefit Cosmetics UK develops a constant stream of content to encourage and influence a range of user interactions. It maintains 10 custom content applications on its Facebook page alone: each offers a different interactive experience and unique opportunity for users to engage. Fans can rate and review products, read and submit beauty tips, interact with signup for giveaways, watch how-to videos and more.

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CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

Messaging: 6 Best Practices for Engaging Day-to-Day Messaging

Messages are the workhorse of day-to-day social marketing. These six best practices consistently work to drive consumer engagement.

1. Tap into consumer passions and interests

You know who your consumers are and what theyre passionate about, so play to those interests as they relate to your brand. If youre a fashion brand, talk about design and style. If youre a food brand, ask about favorite recipes and food trends.

Cadbury
UK-based Cadbury indulges its chocolate-loving Google+ audience with exclusive on-air Hangouts featuring company leaders and chocolate experts. During these face-to-face interactions, Cadburys followers are allowed to pose questions and provide product reviews and feedback.

2. Ask simple, closed questions

Consumers are busy. Account for their limited time and attention by developing messages that are easy to interact with. Unless the potential reward is significant, open-ended questions that require time and effort to write an answer will generate low engagement levels. Nothing is easier than responding to a simple closed question with a Yes or No answeror some variation thereof. The possibilities are endless: if youre a travel brand, for example, ask people to state which type of vacation they like best, Ski or Beach (Paris or Rome, etc.).

ideeli
Members-only online retailer ideeli frequently asks its Facebook fans to weigh in on fashion tips and trends with simple answers: Agree or Disagree, Like or Dislike. Users can quickly engage by responding with one-word answers.

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CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

3. Tell consumers to take action

Ending a post with an instruction such as +1 if you agree or simply Like this post generally increases the number of post endorsements, which means your message will be viewed by more consumers. In other words, if you ask people to take a specific action, and if it is easy for them to do so, youll typically see higher levels of response compared to when you do not ask for an action. Be sure to include an explicit request to act at the end of your posts wherever appropriate.

dunkin donuts
Dunkin Donuts stimulates user interactions by including a clear requestShare this post in its messaging to fans.

4. Offer exclusive content only available through your social channels

Give consumers reason to keep engaging with your brand in social media by making them feel special: provide information and offers that are available only through your social channels. For many consumers, access to exclusive offers is the #1 reason to follow a brand on social media. Messages that promote special dealssuch as coupons, giveaways, and sweepstakesgenerate high levels of engagement.

new york giants

To build social buzz around their appearance in Super Bowl XLVI, the New York Giants published a custom Facebook page that hosted exclusive video such as training and locker room footagefilmed by team defensive end Dave Tollefson. In the week leading up to the Super Bowl, the Giants unlocked a new Tolly Cam video every time the pages fan meter registered 10,000 new fans.

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CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

5. Invite one-on-one interactions

Interacting with consumers in a one-to-one mannerby responding to consumers posts and addressing consumers by nameis a simple, powerful way to encourage engagement. By gesturing that you are listening and receptive to consumer comments and feedback, you can favorably influence users who may not actively interact with your brand on social channels. So rather than sitting back and waiting to respond, proactively create opportunities to engage consumers in one-to-one interactions: Solicit their views on topics relevant to your brand and their interests. Invite consumers to submit ideas or suggestions. Ask them questions designed to spark dialogue and commentary. Caveat: you must be prepared to respond to consumers input; otherwise, you risk annoying them by appearing to ignore their feedback.

Valpak
Direct mail and online coupon marketer Valpak maintains an ongoing dialogue with users across its social channels: the brand regularly recognizes Facebook fans who have participated in its social campaigns, and thanks Twitter followers for sharing its content.

6. Humanize your brand

Social media is a people-centered, conversational space. Its a perfect channel for putting a human face to your brandto be personal, friendly, and authentic. A highly effective way to humanize your brand is by posting content that gives behind the scenes glimpses of your company and the people who work there. It appeals to consumers curiosity about the inner workings of the brands they like. And giving consumers a peek behind the curtain typically generates enthusiastic engagement.

Jersey Mikes
Local giving and community support are core values to submarine sandwich franchise Jersey Mikes business. The brand routinely showcases these values on its social properties through seasonally-relevant campaigns. During December, Jersey Mikes used its Calendar of Kindness to reveal ways to spread holiday cheer in the community each day of the month.

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CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

Content at Scale
Successful social marketing involves creating and publishing content at a pace and volume greater than most brands are accustomed to. For many larger brands, social marketing spans multiple business units, product lines, regions, and social propertiesthe average global corporation manages 178 businessrelated social media properties6so figuring out how best to organize marketing resources to support social at scale has been a challenge. Brands overcome that challenge by adopting an organizational structure and internal processes that equip their marketing teams to handle the large volume of conversations, increasingly complex workflow, and rapidly evolving landscape that social media involves. For marketers, this means implementing the hub and spoke organizational approach, and developing company-wide policies around social media training programs, day-today workflow and triage procedures, and employee use of social media. The most successful social marketers will go beyond these principles and employ additional means to help scale their efforts. Weve outlined several of these best practices below.

The average global corporation manages 178 business-related social media properties.
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Use keyword filters and alerts

To efficiently monitor and prioritize responses to incoming messages in social channels, use keyword filters to flag high-sensitivity subjects such as profanity, product names, competitors, and terms like customer service and support that might indicate a negative customer experience. Configuring real-time alerts to be sent to designated reviewers, based on the specific keywords, helps ensure prompt responses.

Use templates
The use of templates can greatly reduce time and effort required for creating content. Templates can be created in-house or by your agency and other third parties. Whenever possible, try to templatize the creation of new content: rather than build it as a one-off piece, consider how your content can be adapted in the future, and design it with that in mind.

Automate the approval process

In order to meet the need for speedi.e., provide prompt responses to consumer postsand guard against content thats inconsistent with brand standards, effective social marketers automate the approval process. Configure your social marketing system with rules and workflow that trigger automatic alerts to approvers when content is ready for review

content CHECKLIST
Have you created an editorial plan and calendar? Does your calendar reflect relevant company, industry, and seasonal events? Have you identified content for key milestones on your calendar? Have you tied your content to your marketing objectives? How are you factoring social advertising into your content strategy? Do you have a content testing strategy in place?

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CONTENT & ENGAGEMENT

Sources cited
1. Bannon, Deirdre, State of the Media: The Social Media Report 2012, http:// www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports-downloads/2012/state-of-the-mediathe-social-media-report-2012.html Bannon, Deirdre, State of the Media: The Social Media Report 2012, http:// www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/reports-downloads/2012/state-of-the-mediathe-social-media-report-2012.html Wildfire, 5 Best Practices for Increasing Earned Media, http://lp.wildfireapp.com/rs/wildfire/images/Wildfire_Report_Maximize_Earned_ Media_with_Social.pdf Wildfire, 5 Best Practices for Increasing Earned Media, http://lp.wildfireapp.com/rs/wildfire/images/Wildfire_Report_Maximize_Earned_ Media_with_Social.pdf Wildfire, 5 Best Practices for Increasing Earned Media, http://lp.wildfireapp.com/rs/wildfire/images/Wildfire_Report_Maximize_Earned_ Media_with_Social.pdf Owyang, Jeremiah, A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation, http://www.slideshare.net/jeremiah_owyang/smms-report-010412finaldraft# Owyang, Jeremiah, A Strategy for Managing Social Media Proliferation, http://www.slideshare.net/jeremiah_owyang/smms-report-010412finaldraft#

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