In this day and age, where Internet has become an indispensable part of our daily life, companies nowadays have huge advantages of using social media as a method to attract more customers. However, social media has created a fierce competition between organizations and in order for retain the competitive advantages, firms need to adopt & adapt new technologies and implement those as part of their marketing strategy. In this blog, i'll discuss about live streaming videos as a tool in social media marketing.
As many people know, videos has been part of social media users' experiences everyday and in business, firms also using videos as part of their marketing strategy (commercials, interviews etc.). In 2015, the rise of Meerkat & Periscope has created a new form of social media marketing. The idea of using live stream videos in business has help the firms to interact more with their customers. For instance, many celebrities interact with their fan through Facebook live everyday, talking about their daily life activities so as enhance their relationships with the fans. In business, organizations also use live-stream as a method to interact with viewers and using the contents as a method to convert viewers into customers.
Spotify, one of the biggest music streaming platforms is a good example of how firms can use live-stream as a way to convert viewers into their subscribers. They're one of the first company to use Meerkat in order to promote their live stream contents.
Furthermore, another aspect that make live stream videos better than normal videos is that the "fresh" contents and clearly better in interactions with customers. A good example of how "fresh" content always better than a old, or just setup one is Football. The thing about football is that the viewers prefer to watch the match live in order to discuss with friends/ family/ colleagues and that's how similar in the case of streaming. In music industries, music producers usually live stream the contents of their upcoming songs to viewers in order to attract their attentions & buy their songs when they came out.
Yes, this one is also related to another Marvel's movie, which is called "Deadpool". In this blog, i'll talk about how brilliant the marketing department for this movie has done to promote it.
This movie is about a famous anti-hero model in Marvel's comics, the unique characteristics of this character is about how he always try to communicate with comic viewers, or known as "Breaking the 4th wall". Furthermore, unlike other characters in Marvel comics/movies, this character is also known for making stupid jokes all the time and thus that's how the marketing department approach to the idea of the character to came up with their campaigns.
One example of their marketing strategy is featuring the most famous quote from the movie "Spider-man" : "With great power comes great responsibility", this strategy targeted loyal Marvel fans, especially those who've read the comics & known about Spider-man.
Another example about their brilliant strategy is this one,
From the first look of it, if you're not someone who know about the character or the name, you'd think this is a romantic movie about a young couple or something. The special thing about this is that the marketing team know about the release date of the movie, which is close to Valentine's day, which is 14th of February every year so they decided to make one as a method to attract couples' attention to go and see the movie.
There are other examples about the promoting strategies about this movie but i'll stop talking about them for now. The above examples show how the marketing company has done to promote this movie and how this movie became one of the most successful movie so far from Marvel.
Old Spice, one of the most famous male grooming products brand in America, are known for their innovative or sometimes, crazy commercial videos.
Among their commercial videos, the ones that feature Terry Crew usually generate the highest number of views in comparison to other videos. Their use of celebrity endorsement strategy is indeed effective as Terry Crews is known for his crazy-acting role in his movies ( e,g White Chicks, Expendables etc.) and people love the guy for that aspect of his. Old Spice usual commercial videos featuring Isaiah Mustafa as a calm, manly role model for their videos. With Terry Crews, their commercial videos switched 180 degree from their usual ones, from calm, manliness into crazy, explosive & fun, creating a whole new look for the company and thus, attracted more viewers on the Internet, as well as Terry Crews's loyal fans as one of their potential customers.
Here are some of the old commercial videos from Old Spice, featuring Terry Crews:
Back in 2015, John Lewis department stores company came up with an advertising during Christmas, which is called "Man on the Moon"
The video itself is not about anything related to the company except for the brand name at the end of the video. However, the video message is about old people's loneliness and many people who watched video also think about the same. The video has reached more than 24 million views on YouTube and got 112,042 likes. The interesting bits about this campaign is that John Lewis company know how to grab people emotions, especially during special occasions such as Christmas. Furthermore, they even add up a "continue the story" links guiding to their website to promote their #manonthemoon theme merchandises in which I'm pretty sure some people would definitely buy one of those as a way to support the message. This strategy not only increase the company public image as a good will company that care about people but also a viral video can attract lots of viewers, creating awareness about the company's brand name and generating a large number of potential customers.
Some first words: Sorry about the small size videos, i don't really know how to make them bigger as i'm not really good with this platform.
As you may know from my first blog for this social media marketing project, i'm a huge fan of video games in general and Blizzard is one of my most favorite gaming company due to the quality of their games and how they always surprise their customers with new contents & cinematic trailers for current & upcoming games.
Back in 2015, Blizzard announced Overwatch, their latest project for an FPS game and has attracted lots of attention from gamers around the world and the company sure know how to satisfy their customers.
The video above is their first cinematic trailer for the game to market their product and the video generated more than 7.5 million views on YouTube in May 2016. As you can see, the quality of the trailer is top-notch and the budget cost for a CG trailer usually cost about 500k to one million USD depending on the quality and video length.
However, Blizzard marketing did not stop there. After announcing the trailer, the company invited players, especially pro-gamers and streamers to promote their game by encouraging them to stream the game on Twitch, which is an ideal way since Twitch is the biggest game-streaming platforms yet. Moreover, they also came up with several animated short videos about the game's characters and those videos also generated a lot of positive feed backs from reviewers and gamers around the world.
Here are some examples of those videos:
To sum up, Blizzard marketing departments has done a great job attracting viewers' attention and thus creating an opportunities for the company to earn more potential customers with these trailers & animated shorts
Back in 2011, when Snapchat were just a small university project from Evan Spiegel with his co-founders, he didn't think that this platform would surpass far more than his expectation. And now, Snapchat has become one of the most trending social media platform since the rising of Instagram. Unlike Instagram with their pictures, the key things that made Snapchat become one of the most popular social media channel is their short video platform.The concept is pretty much the same with Vine but the videos duration is longer (about 10 to 14 seconds per video). Nowadays, many people using this platform to share their everyday stories through those short videos, even celebrities. Big organizations also saw their chance and grab this social media channel as a method to interact with customers and promoting their products. By taking the advantages of the short videos duration, companies need to come up with an interesting story to entertain the users of this platform.
Take RedBull as an example, they are known as one of the most successful company for using effective marketing strategies. In 2015, RedBull let Mack McMorris, a snowboarder and X games champion to take over their Snapchat account and sharing his personal lifestyles on it. This strategy let the Snapchat users to interact with sport athletes, making them feel closer to the players. By doing this, RedBull can increase their customers base through reaching athletes' loyal fan base.
Most people already know about how big brand companies build up their social media affections by choosing the right words and the right topic. However, there are some exception about how big companies still failed at doing so. An example for this is the embarrassing tweet from MTV Australia in January 2016.
As you can see, Golden Globes is one of the biggest nominations event for artists around the world (actors; directors; singers etc.) and there are millions of people who watch this event every year. MTV is one of the most-established brand within the music industry and somehow, the MTV Australia managed to screwed up themselves by tweeting this racism tweet. The tweet has been deleted shorty after the receiving massive rage-comments from viewers and MTV has stated an apology to viewers. The event definitely has left a huge stain on their brand name and this is why when companies become well-known, they need to be careful in choosing their words in public, especially on social media in this day and age where you only need 1 button to share stuffs with others.
About a couple of weeks ago, while surfing the Internet, i stumbled across this advertisement video from Audi on YouTube. You can see it down below
The advertisement was really interesting, at least for me since i'm a big fan of Marvel comics & movie. The whole video was tremendously success, with more than 20 million views after one month, exceed the average number of views on their YouTube account by 2000 percent, making it become the most successful advertising video from Audi so far.
About the strategy: Audi knew people were hyping about the new Avengers movie and grab their chance to run their business by partnering up with Marvel to produce the advertising. Furthermore, the video have some of the actual cut-scene of the movie, making it even more attractive to people who were expecting for the movie to come.
Many people must have heard the word "Vine" at least once or twice. Vine is clips social media channel in which people can share their 6-seconds video clips about anything.The channel was established back in June 2012 and acquired by Twitter in October of the same year. As far as i know, the most famous use of this platform is funny clips and there are people whose popularity's skyrocketed thanks to creative contents on their videos. One example that i can show you is King Bach, who currently holding #1 spot for being the most successful viner in the history so far.
Back when he started doing Vine, most of his videos back then were about jokes of being a black guy, adult jokes.. et cetera. His contents was definitely funny and it's also a message from him to people who are still concern about racism in modern days. He also posted the full version for his funny videos on Facebook and his number of followers on Facebook has reached for more than 7 million people. According to him, the idea of Vine was definitely creative since 6 seconds is very short for a video and it forced him on a task of how to create a funny video in just 6 secs. Now, the guy has step one step forward from being a solely viner and currently working on a TV show.
Firstly, I'm really sorry about the image quality but this one is from an article on Yahoo news, which is about a KFC twitter campaign that has been put down just an hour after the company uploaded it on their Twitter account.
As you can see in this campaign picture, the whole image is just like a cut-scene from a porn movie, which can cause a huge misunderstanding to viewers. Even though #NSFW was there but for a company with such famous brand name like KFC, the whole campaign is just not appropriate. Furthermore, with younger generations nowadays are more familiar with technology than previous ones, along with a large proportion of KFC customers based are children & teenagers, the idea of promoting something "porn-alike" is hardly effective, if not considered "offensive" in many case.
For more info: https://au.news.yahoo.com/a/31360998/kfcs-something-hot-and-spicy-twitter-ad-campaign-pulled-within-an-hour/
Some people may have heard the name Vat19 before and for those
who don’t know, they are a company that specialize in selling product gifts. If you
visit their website, you can see that they have a wide range of products that
can be used as a gift for or just simply using for fun (see the picture down below)
However,
what I want to talk today is not about the products functionality but about their
company social media marketing. On their main website, they put one YouTube video
for each of their product in order to demonstrate on how to use the product and
the content of their videos is very creative sometimes. Back when I watching
some videos on YouTube, I stumbled across one of their video about a beer boot
glass, which is a simple product but what they did on the commercial video is
weird but very interesting. I will not talk in details about the video but you
can see it by yourself.
As you can see, they know exactly on how to attract the viewers’ attention by
making their videos fun, creative, interesting and even ridiculous sometimes
which generate a lot of views (around 500k to more than 1 million views per
video). This method not only helping them to build up a viewer base but also
bringing potential customers to the table. Considering about how people find
their videos interesting then decide to subscribe to their channels, following
their videos then maybe viewers find themselves hooking up with one of their
items, leading to purchase decision then I guess the efforts the company put in
those videos are totally worth it.
If you are one of those who concern about sports then i am sure you have seen at least one of the Red Bull sponsoring sport teams or promotional videos from the company which they invited professional athletes to perform their skills in those videos. As for myself, i am someone who like video games and have seen many e-sports events for more than 5 years. Red Bull has been sponsoring for professional gamers and teams since 2008 and i have to say they did an excellent job at doing this because e-sports has blown up in popularity in many countries around the world, especially in America and they saw this as an opportunity to promote their brand name by partnering with famous e-sports teams/ players to promote their brand logo on the team t-shirts; streams; gaming forums or even hosting some gaming tournaments to attract viewers’ attention.
One interesting fact : Twitch TV, the most famous streaming channel for gamers around the world has 764.7 million views per month, which is an insane number of views. I myself am also one of the Twitch TV viewer who visit the site regularly and I have to say that i have seen the Red Bull logo on so many streams. Some example for this is the ads during the break time between games on a tournament stream or a Red Bull cooler on players’ stream.
