I have been blogging for over eight years now. And post visits are high; the best social media campaigns’ engagement ideas are not in my humble opinion. Imagine writing a tutorial-style blog post.
You explain a series of important steps. You edit until your instructions sound dynamic. You tighten your text.
But you’re still worried. Because your post isn’t exactly sparkling. It’s just a simple how-to.
How can you make a description of 5 or 12 different steps engaging and fun? How can you stop people from yawning when they get to step 3?
Related post: Social Media Platforms … The Magic Every Content Marketer Needs
Turning solid information into engaging content may feel like a struggle, but it doesn’t have to be so hard.
You need to know a few simple tricks to keep your readers engaged and interested.
Let’s explore some post-engagement techniques that should help …
Best Social Media Campaigns … ask Why
The first trick to making boring tutorials sizzle is to tell your reader why he’ll benefit from reading your post.
In your opening paragraph, you sketch a pain-free or sunny destination. Tell your reader that by following your advice he can learn a skill he desperately wants to master. Or tell him how he’ll become happier, richer, or more relaxed by reading your post.
In my post about guest blogging, for instance, I promised to teach you a technique for driving traffic to your blog; and in this tutorial about sales copy, I tell you that your web pages can become as seductive as Apple’s website.
A dry subject becomes easier to digest when you know why it’s good for you.
Best Social Media Campaigns Ever … ask questions
One of the simplest ways to draw your readers in is to ask them a question within your introduction. You don’t have to do this within the first sentence of your blog post, but you should try to do it within your first paragraph.
Let your personality shine
No one wants to be part of a dry conversation. By adding in some humor or emotions, you will keep the conversation entertaining. Just sprinkle a few of these elements throughout your post.
Seeing how something works in practice is far more interesting.
Last week, I shared snippets about my guest blogging experience. In my post about seductive web copy, I entice you with mouth-watering examples of Apple’s copy.
The secret to making your examples fascinating is to keep them ultra-short. Only share the details that are critical to illustrating your tutorial.
Keep your pace high and move to the next step.
Social media campaign ideas … create a story
Do you remember how your kindergarten and elementary school teachers used to engage with you? They used to tell you stories to get your attention and keep it. If you can mix storytelling within your introductory paragraph, you’ll get more people to read your blog post.
Help readers visualize an abstract concept by relating it to something concrete, something they know. In my post about guest blogging, for instance, I referred to the idea of launching a cycling magazine several times.
To use metaphors in your how-to blog post, think about a topic you’re passionate about, such as sports, cooking, or parenting. Pick one theme and look for connections.
Be careful. Switching themes in one post confuse your readers. So pick one theme, e.g. cooking, and make brief comparisons with it throughout your post.
Those two words may seem simple, but they are powerful. Without them, it’s hard to create the illusion of a conversation. Just think about it.
I don’t know your name, so how can I create a conversation with you if I don’t use the words “you” and “I” while talking to you? It’s nearly impossible.
Highlight problems
When you paint a rose-tinted picture of your how-to, you might still lull your readers slowly to sleep.
You can wake them up by including a few problems.
Problems are like speed bumps – they slow your reader down. They start paying attention again because everyone is keen to avoid glitches, hassle, and mistakes.
Explain what you’ve done wrong or which step you found scary. When you describe the problems, you’ve encountered, and how you’ve overcome them, your tutorial immediately becomes more useful and engaging.
Which are the most common mistakes you’d like to warn your readers about? And help them avoid?
Keep your paragraphs short
Don’t you hate it when you’re having a conversation with someone, and they don’t let you get a word in? It’s like you’re not even having a conversation… By making your paragraphs 1 to 6 sentences long, you will create an illusion of a conversation. Just look at the introduction in this blog post – the paragraphs are really short.
An image is worth 1000 words
Liven up your text with images. Images are a great way to help encourage a conversation, especially an image you use at the beginning of your post. I know when I’ve used funny pictures like this in the past, I got tons of emails from you and saw a higher time-on-page.
As a writer, I feel my words should be sufficient to explain my thoughts and ideas. But simple pictures can make a stronger connection. I recently discovered this:
Darwin first explored the idea of natural selection by drawing a tree. Jack Kerouac wrote his first novel by drawing his concept out as a mandala. J.R.R. Tolkien couldn’t write without first drawing maps and portraits of his characters. Even J.K. Rowling just said that the first thing she did when she started to write her latest novel was to draw a map of the town in which it took place. ~ Dan Roam
And Kevin Cheng suggests in his book See What I Mean:
So long as you can draw a stick figure, you’re well on your way to being able to create simple stories that explain your ideas better than any well-crafted words could.
Are we, as writers, too focused on the power of words?
Use transitions
You’ll probably cover multiple subtopics within your blog post, just like you would in a regular conversation. Make sure the transitions are smooth. Using headings isn’t enough. You need to use sentences to create transitions.
There are no dull products, only dull writers. ~ David Ogilvy
No topic is dull.
No tutorial should be drab.
Learning new things is exciting. Acquiring new skills is invigorating.
Think about your reader and inspire him with your post. Share your knowledge. Entertain him with your humor.
Make him smile and ignite his enthusiasm.
The bottom line
Blogging is a conversation between you and your readers. If you can’t converse with them, you are just talking to them. And as you already know, people prefer conversations…
The next time you write a blog post, consider creating a conversation. Don’t do it just within your introduction, but continue it through your whole post, just like I have done with this one.
Are you devoting enough energy innovating your social media strategy?
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.
More reading on social media lessons from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Social networking is not about farming followers, it’s a way of cultivating relationships. Over the past decade or so there have been tons of awesome successful social media campaigns to stimulate learning. Here are three of the best we have found to illustrate what lessons that follow.
More examples: Social Media Campaigns to Stimulate Learning
Social Media and Starbucks Marketing?
When choosing to learn from others social media strategies, it is always helpful to choose one of the top dogs in social media.
Meet Starbucks. They have been successfully executing their social media marketing plan since the first days of social media and social commerce. For over 5 years, and their strategies have played a significant role in their growth.
An introduction to Starbucks is unnecessary.
With more than 18,000 retail locations in 60 countries, the coffeehouse is the picture of success.
Starbucks rode the baby boomer trend in the 1990s, the swelling ranks of mid-age professionals that created the need for a third place, ‘ an affordable luxury’ where people could share and enjoy a cup of coffee with friends and colleagues, away from work and home.
In our opinion, the company has inserted itself into the American urban landscape more quickly and craftily than any retail company in history. It has forever changed the way companies market themselves to customers. Here is how we feel they have been so successful:
Successful social media campaigns … market segmentation
The company has stayed with the upper-scale of the coffee market, competing on comfort rather than convenience, which are the case with its closest competitors, McDonald’s and Dunkin Donuts.
Execution
The company continues to focus on its original product bundle that includes good coffee, quality service, and a nice environment to hang around. They keep their attention on paying attention to the details of great execution and service.
Social media
One of the earliest adopters of the use of social media for marketing and social commerce, Starbucks has certainly taken a leadership position. Their social media strategy is built around their company website and 6 additional social platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, G+, YouTube, and My Starbucks Ideas. We will review Starbuck’s social media strategy in detail below.
Successful social media campaigns ideas … adaptation and innovation
Starbuck’s business crowdsourcing, via its My Starbucks Idea website, has been a huge success. Why may you ask? Because they have combined the concepts of change, experimentation, social media, customer engagement, and market research and made the results key components of both their brand as well as their marketing strategy. Have you given My Starbucks Idea a try? What did you think?
Starbucks has clearly embraced the digital realm. With a strong presence on multiple social networks, the brand has set a high bar when it comes to being social and engaging its customers. They are at or near the top of nearly every major brand ranking in social media.
Starbucks’ ability to wear so many hats corporate success, “local” favorite, and Internet sensation warrants strategic examination.
Why is Starbucks such a social media marketing success story? There are seven key reasons their social media strategy is a successful difference maker for their marketing campaign:
Here is our take on why:
Customer relationships
Instead of solely focusing efforts on accumulating new customers, it cultivates its current relationships. This ensures more fans/followers in the long run, as well as the continued existence of brand advocates. This holds true across the board: In-store experiences are highly valued, along with online engagement, emphasizing the importance of customer service.
Best social media campaigns ever … going to its customers
When Starbucks takes a photo, it shares it on Instagram, posts it to Facebook, tweets it on Twitter, and pins it on Pinterest. It clearly goes to where all its customers like to hang out. Cross-promotion is more valuable as the world becomes more digitally focused.
Each network provides an opportunity to reach a new audience, and integrating your strategy on each is crucial to increasing visibility and promoting the brand.
Customer engagement
They believe in letting customer engagement and conversation occur as naturally as possible. They listen carefully, observe, and apply new ideas from what they learn.
Encourages sharing
Happy customers are eager to share good experiences and offers. For example, the Starbucks frequent promotions like “buy 1 get 1″ garner an extraordinary amount of engagement on social media through comments, “likes,” and shares.
My Starbucks Ideas
The My Starbucks Idea website, where Starbucks does its business crowdsourcing, has been actively engaging customers for over 4 years now. It encourages customers to submit ideas for better products, improving the customer experience, and defining new community involvement, among other categories. Clearly, Starbucks has seen and believes what Peter Drucker has to say about business adaptability.
Customers can submit, view, and discuss submitted ideas along with employees from various Starbucks departments ‘Idea Partners’. The company regularly polls its customers for their favorite products and has a leaderboard to track which customers are the most active in submitting ideas, comments, and poll participation.
The site is at once a crowdsourcing tool, a market research method that brings customer priorities to light, an online community, and an effective internet marketing tool.
Experience customization
Starbucks provides its unique experience through programs such as My Starbucks Rewards, personalized “signature” drinks, and localized store experiences. Their social sites, in particular, Pinterest and Instagram, encourage users to share their Starbucks moments’ whether it be the return of a favorite holiday drink or just an artsy coffee cup shot.
Taking a stand
Giving consumers a charitable reason to buy that steaming cup is beneficial for all. The takeaway from Starbucks is to know your customer and tie that in with what matters in the world … so, pay attention to how your brand can fit into trending topics.
Starbucks reflects a mission
Its mission is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit” one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.” They believe lifting customers up will lead to more customer loyalty. It’s ‘The Way I See It’ quote campaign is a perfect example.
Lots of ideas here that can be easily replicated … which ones do you feel could benefit your business?
How could you improve the Starbucks Coffee Social Media campaign concept for your business?
Starbucks is one of many businesses we can learn from. Please post your comments below, offering questions or your own great examples of social marketing strategies.
Do you like to read the best social media educational blogs? There are quite a few great ones out there. The very best out there, BY FAR, is the one Neil Patel puts out. You’ll find lots of great tips, examples, and actual results from his businesses in his blog. His material in Quick Sprout is also excellent.
Social media case studies … the Google use of a story
Facts don’t persuade, feelings do. And creative stories are the best way to get at those feelings.
Have you seen the Google Reunion video where a story of long lost friends is told? The video was made by Google India, and the point, of course, is to promote Google Search. But it also reaches a new level of what can be done with the value of creative stories.
The story is this: a man in Delhi tells his granddaughter about his childhood friend, Yusuf. He hasn’t seen Yusuf since the Partition of India in 1947, when India and Pakistan became separate countries and the two friends were forced to separate. The man’s granddaughter arranges for the two to meet again.
The story is simple and direct. It’s beautiful and honest, and true. The photography is spectacular. The music adds to the very good acting…
Do you use stories in your customer engagement … or perhaps in marketing messages? Good stories are a great way to develop the identity, personalize and build your customer base. Good stories:
Immediately focus on engagement, experiences, and emotion – central tenets that are attractive to customers.
The narrative makes your message relevant and memorable through personalization.
Stories are a great means for sharing and interpreting experiences, and great experiences have this innate ability to change the way in which we view our world.
A lot of us are trying to figure out how to improve the use of storytelling as part of our marketing. Very few of us do it well. There are several things to be learned from this excellent video:
Emotional connection
This video is about as emotional as it gets. Stories like this provide a chance to experience a variety of emotions without the risk of those emotions themselves. Emotions like wonder, fear, courage, or love can be tested out in the minds of those as they listen to a story. You may remember the feelings of emotions which can trigger memories or create resolve as a result of hearing such stories. The experience of hearing stories can awaken portions of emotional lives that may have lain dormant or have not yet been explored.
Be dynamic with your stories like Google. Nothing is more important to narrative content than imagination, so give vivid descriptions and use emotional hooks and humor to get people fully engaged. This story definitely engages us, doesn’t it? Be creative, not only with words and images but also with the methods you use to convey them. Like the music as well as the messages.
Understanding others
Well-told stories can help us to learn about other cultures, ideas and ways of thinking. They can provide opportunities to know how past generations responded to challenges. They can also let us know how new generations are encountering and dealing with similar opportunities or the new challenges they face.
This video has some of each and then some. In the background is the partition of India, a painful episode in the history of India and Pakistan. These aren’t just two old friends who haven’t seen each other in a long time. This is a creative story that builds on some big forces: politics, religion, geography, nationalism.
If you really listen to your customers, like Google has, you can leverage their stories to drive your creativity. By analyzing their stories of how your products and services fit into their lives, you can gain valuable insight into their needs and desires, which can be hugely beneficial to other aspects of your business. Like product design and development and ongoing marketing strategy. The reunion has done that well don’t you think?
Growing intimacy
People are thirsty to know that they are seen and heard in our over-stimulated society. The rampant growth of “reality” TV shows certainly proves this. When personal and life stories are shared, there’s a chance to know that “I am not alone.” The two old friends certainly don’t want to be alone any longer.
Remember, stories, when properly written, pull people into a dialogue. It’s about engagement and interaction. The audience is just as active a participant as the storyteller. In contrast, many companies and brands still relentlessly push messages to their employees and into the marketplace—without meaningful context or relevancy.
The brand can be central in the story
It’s obvious that this video is promoting Google. But the use of Google is woven into the narrative in a way that feels natural. It’s not intrusive or forced. It works very effectively. Especially when it is not about Google but about Google customers. Simply about how people use Google products.
The messages
There are two messages in the video that are being driven home by Google. The first is that the work Google does is making a difference. It is making the world a better place by its search engine. But it’s not about technology. It’s about what people do with the technology. How they apply it to solve their problems.
The second message, while a definite subset of the first, is as important. That being the old world was one where people were driven apart. But there is a change in the old world where technology is ushering in a new world. A new world where people are brought together in a way that would not have existed a decade ago.
As a storyteller, I know my audience is experiencing one of the above benefits as they listen to my serious or funny stories. I see their breathing change, their attention focus and their foreheads wrinkle or relax. So much is happening in our shared experience.
There are no shortcuts when it comes to crafting a quality narrative. It takes a ton of creativity as well as time, patience, planning, and polishing to give your brand’s story sparkle and make it shine. We recommend you dive into using creative stories!
Next time you are building a marketing campaign, use a great story built from these lessons.
KLM social media design examples
When choosing to learn from others’ social media marketing campaign strategies, it is always helpful to choose the best of the best. Those that are most innovative and very eager to try lots of new and different ideas. And not afraid of a failure or two. KLM Airlines marketing certainly deserves to be this camp. Real social media marketing innovators. They frequently come up when marketers are discussing the best in social media marketing.
They have been successfully executing their social media marketing plan for over 4 years, and their strategies have played a key role in their marketing and customer engagement.
If you’re not familiar with KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, known by its initials KLM, is the flag carrier airline of the Netherlands. With headquarters is in Amsterdam, KLM operates scheduled passenger and cargo services to more than 90 destinations worldwide. It is the oldest airline in the world, still operating under its original name (Founded in 1919).
Their social media strategy is built around their company website and 6 additional social platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, Google+, their blog, and recent additions of Foursquare and Pinterest.
Over the past four years, they have launched a number of social campaigns – some big, some small. They had a few failures along with great successes. Let’s examine some of their more noteworthy campaigns.
KLM Surprise
Remember how great it felt the first time you got a social response from a brand you love or business you deal with? All the goodwill generated by their speedy response? Well, KLM decided to run an experiment with its social community, for people who check in via foursquare for flights or tweet about waiting to board the next KLM service, and they called it “KLM Surprise”. The aim of this campaign was to bring random surprises and happiness to the boring wait for flights.
Here is a video KLM made on this campaign.
KLM’s social campaign involved a team of people identifying KLM passengers currently waiting for flights (and hanging out on twitter), before researching each person’s social profile to find out a little more about their personality and destination. Given that information, they matched passengers to a surprise gift that they’d give before each person boarded their flight. The aim was to add a little surprise to create happy customers who have plenty of time on their hands to tweet their network about a great KLM experience at the airport. That’s a very cool social experiment.
The KLM meet and seat campaign.
Meet and seat
The meet and seat campaign objective was to offer passengers a choice of seat-mates by accessing each other’s Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. If passengers so chose to participate, their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles were linked to their check-in information which was shared with other passengers also choosing the service.
Of course, passengers don’t have to link up their profiles if they’re not interested but what if they play along and end up with someone who just wants to make a sales pitch? The answer is you could have ended up with a worse result by taking your random seating chance. What would be your choice?
Listening to customers
In another act of social media genius, KLM used Twitter to add a flight to its roster.
It all started when a Dutch filmmaker tweeted his disappointment about the lack of a direct flight from Amsterdam to Miami. Specifically, he was looking for a hangover-reducing direct flight to/from the Ultra Music Festival taking place in Miami on March 21st, 2011. A KLM rep rapidly responded with a wager – if the filmmaker could book an entire flight (351 seats) before December 6th, KLM would add the non-stop flight to its schedule.
Beyond all expectations, the resulting campaign Fly2Miami sold out the entire flight within 5 hours.
“We can rightly call it a first – the first time KLM deployed an aircraft following a request on Twitter,” replied Martijn van der Zee, VP of e-commerce at KLM. “Social media are becoming more and more important to KLM to offer information and service to our customers.
I’ll say it again. Talk about a GREAT ability to listen to customers, and act, yes?
KLM Must See Maps
KLM Royal Dutch Airlines is ramping up its digital engagement with KLM Must See Map, a friend-sourced destination map that combines social and print.
Users create a map for a destination and ask friends for travel tips via Facebook, Twitter and email. Facebook check-ins show which friends have already visited the destination, their tips on favorite places and their locations. You can add your own tips, then order a copy of the map in print and receive it for free.
Up and running in 24 countries, the application comes from the Dutch agency Code d’Azur.
In this case, KLM’s goal is to enlarge its global e-mail database. “The KLM Must See Map campaign perfectly fits KLM’s ‘little act of kindness’ social media strategy,” says Viktor van der Wijk, Director Digital Marketing, KLM. Participants get a free personalized city map delivered at home and we receive their e-mail addresses in return. That makes a great win-win and that’s what KLM was looking for.
Tile and inspire
The KLM Tile and Inspire campaign sought to engage customers by soliciting tile image designs from them. The winning designs would be put on one KLM aircraft.
The Boeing 777 with over 4,000 Delft blue images from Facebook fans are still flying around the globe! Let’s see … 4000 winners telling 20 of their closest friends about the experience, and then they each tell ten more friends. That is a great way to spread your message, isn’t it? Here is a great little KLM video on this campaign.
Twitter social care
Have you checked out KLM’s Twitter account lately? If not, go take a look at their banner ((https://twitter.com/KLM). You will find something really neat: the average expected response time for customer care. And it is updated every 5 minutes!
The company has rocked the customer service area for almost three years because it understands that there is no business without customers. The social media team gets the job done 24/7 on Twitter and Facebook, and fully embraces monitoring and improving their response time to customers.
KLM is considered by many to be the role model for social customer care. As a sign of just how truly devoted they are, they’ve added a live graphic on their Twitter page, updated every 5 minutes, which lets you know how long, on average, you should expect to wait for a reply from their Twitter team.
One of the largest airlines in the world, KLM Airlines, is also considered one of the best in converting “Likes” into paying customers. Part of their marketing success is their willingness to take bold yet calculated risks. They are able to do this because they understand the customer buying journey. The touch points along the journey a lead or existing customer takes as they experience the KLM brand and then, how KLM works to improve each touchpoint along the path.
The conclusion from these examples
There are a lot of misconceptions about social media marketing. Just because you read something in a blog post or hear something from a credible source doesn’t mean it is true or true for you and your business.
Always do your research, and continually try to improve. Social media marketing is here to stay, and it can drive a lot of business for you, assuming you are leveraging it correctly.
There is more opportunity to fail in social media than to succeed if we treat it like any other marketing vehicle. Social media requires us to get away from being promotional and sensational and instead treat our customers with special attention. Special attention that means being social, building relationships, and creating trust.
Bottom line, listen more than you talk. You’ll be amazed how much you can learn about your audience when you shut up and listen. Try it!
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
Call today for a FREE consultation or a FREE quote. Learn about some options to scope your job.
Call Mike at 607-725-8240.
All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new ideas.
When things are not what you want them to be, what’s most important is your next step. Call today.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Do you have a lesson about making your advertising better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?
Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change. We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way. Call us for a free quote today. You will be amazed at how reasonable we will be.
More reading on social media marketing and advertising from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
Network Connection … 23 Actionable Tips for Relationships
Mike Schoultz is a digital marketing and customer service expert. With 48 years of business experience, he consults on and writes about topics to help improve the performance of small business. Find him on G+, Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
