Brands are verbs, what they do matters more than they say. It is an amazing fact … social media has been with us for over a decade now. So there are many social media celebrity marketing ideas and lessons to be learned.
And many new ones are being created every day. Celebrity brands certainly are putting emphasis or doing more than saying. Recent social media celebrity marketing ideas from our research illustrate this point.
Are you one that believes that marketing creativity can be learned? We are among that group. We also believe in suggestions for innovative thinking can boost marketing creativity through effective collaboration.
Through a series of sparks and not a single flash of insight. Certainly our way of thinking.
Businesses have seized upon this trend as it matured and according to a CMO survey by Duke University social media represents 6.6% of marketing budgets (about $4.6 billion in dollar terms) and is expected to climb to nearly 16% over the next 5 years.
So social media is still a small part of digital and marketing budgets. But the fastest-growing and in reality, it has just begun.
Celebrities from all stripes are now continually testing the limits of online engagement and transparency. Their brands are developing a true online voice and seeing positive, bottom-line results. Let’s examine some of their ideas:
Employing influencer marketing?
Influencer marketing
One thing Taylor Swift understands and consistently delivers on is maintaining the magic and the mystery in her brand. She knows that audiences today are motivated by the surprise in the relationship, as she puts it.
Swift says: “In the YouTube generation we live in, I walked out on stage every night of my stadium tour last year knowing almost every fan had already seen the show online.
My generation was raised being able to flip channels if we got bored, and we read the last page of the book when we got impatient. We want to be caught off guard, delighted, left in awe.”
But she also doesn’t show too much. She still keeps an air of mystery about her and maintains aspects of her strategy, career, and personal life behind locked doors, achieving a balance for her brand.
Another recent awesome example of influencer marketing is from Adele, who announced her new album with a music video. The singer’s video for the song Hello, which premiered online, has already been watched more than 88 million times on YouTube, reports the BBC.
It’s one of the first music videos to be shot with large-format IMAX cameras. A fantastically entertaining video.
Related post: How to Frame Marketing Messages for Optimum Engagement
Celebrity marketing examples … stay visible
If anybody knows anything about the dark arts of social media, it’s Kim Kardashian West. With 48.8 million followers on Instagram, Ms. Kardashian West has built her career and empire on social media. Her appeal online boils down to one major thing, social-media experts say: showing up and being visible.
Since she joined Instagram in early 2012, Kim has posted more than 3,180 images and counting. That’s a little more than two images a day on average. Many sources say celebrities tend to post three times more than the average brand.
Like Adele, Beyoncé released a surprise album with a 10-second video on Instagram and a nearly four-minute video on Facebook.
Last fall, Harvard Business School published a case study about her eschewal of the traditional music-industry practice of releasing singles and doing an array of press appearances to promote an album.
Beyoncé now takes to social media to directly respond to rumors and unfavorable news. When rumors swelled about marital problems, for instance, she went onto Instagram to post photos of her happy family.
Celebrity marketing strategy … engagement and dialog
In July 2014, a young Taylor Swift fan wrote a missive about unrequited love on Instagram. Then the singer wrote back.
This kind of thing has become so common, there is an Instagram account dedicated to Ms. Swift’s fan interactions called @taylornoticed. The account, which tracks Ms. Swift’s likes and comments, has about 47,000 followers.
The big lesson here: Validate your followers with likes, comments, and retweets. It builds goodwill. Companies should search for tweets and posts mentioning their brand, and respond, retweet or repost generously.
Social media celebrity marketing ideas … partnering with celebrities
Partnering with a celebrity and tapping into the celebrity social media influence is one of the best ways for a brand to reach an already engaged and targeted audience; and a strategy that highly influences future purchase decisions based on that association.
When brands brought their famous friends to social media, they were able to add something they never had before: interactivity. With most celebs being active on social media, brands gained the opportunity to be endorsed in a highly personal way across highly personal media.
As an example, H& M announced its partnership with Miranda Kerr on Twitter. The tweet received over 3000 favorites and is the most engaging tweet of 2014 for the brand.
In Nike Basketball’s partnership with LeBron James, the brand created the hashtag#witnesshistory. Nike Basketball asked followers to use the hashtag to congratulate the player on his back-to-back championship wins.
This gave followers the ability to personally convey wishes to the star himself, thereby giving them a compelling reason to tweet using it.
The hashtag stands as the most used and most engaging hashtag of all time for the brand. Nike Basketball only had to use it 3 times before followers used it 21,000 times
Light on direct promotion
Vin Diesel, star of the “Fast and Furious” franchise, enjoys one of the most popular accounts on Facebook, with more than 95 million likes. Another Facebook favorite: Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, boasting about 52 million.
While both use Facebook to promote movies, they also share personal stories. Mr. Diesel regularly posts photographs of his friend and former co-star, the late actor Paul Walker, and frequently mentions how much he is missed. Mr. Johnson recently posted about the painful decision to put down his dog Brutus.
Celebrities also take part in other cultural moments on social media, such as “Throwback Thursday” on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, where users post old photos.
As an example, a company like Ford Motor Co., for instance, could use the occasion to post ads from the 1940s.
Crowdsourcing ideas
Jason Mraz is a crowdsourcing genius. He has actually run two social media crowdsourcing campaigns: he asked fans to capture his irresistible; swoon-worthy (my words) single “I Won’t Give Up” in one Instagram photograph.
He then picked the top 25 images, put them on canvas, and organized a gallery-type event for the public.
Currently, Jason Mraz is running a campaign in which he’s giving Twitter users the chance to create plotlines for his “The Woman I Love” music video.
People tweeted ideas to Jason Mraz with the hashtag #MrazingTheVideo (I think this hashtag might be subpar considering Mraz’s gifted lyricism but to each his own).
The director of the music video takes the best ideas and creates a storyboard for the video.
Mraz’s campaign is innovative and ground-breaking, but it also interactive: it lets fans take a direct part in the creation of one of their favorite musician’s music videos.
It strengthens that celebrity-fan connection. And it can certainly be replicated by regular businesses.
Special interest messaging
Jesse Williams has amassed a social media following of close to 2 million fans between Twitter and Instagram, but where many celebrities primarily use their platforms for self-promotion, he has decided to take things in a different direction.
A former high school teacher, Williams sees social media as a means to encourage dialogue and personal growth in his community of followers and illustrates how he is doing those activities.
Leading their own campaigns
But there are still more new avenues being explored. Some events that seem small but will be significant social media marketing lessons for us all.
Normally millions are spent on traditional media. Lady Gaga hyped her latest album by spending millions on bus advertising, billboards, 2 pop up stores and performed countless interviews. The result. She sold 305,000 copies in 2 weeks.
But Lady Gaga and Beyoncé are also known for focusing on building long-term personal connections with her fans over the short-term revenue.
Even though they could have played bigger venues early in her career (after all, the demand was there), they wanted to play small venues so that she could really connect with the audience.
Beyoncé, who has 8 million Instagram followers and over 53 million fans on Facebook decided to go a different route, going straight to her fans. It was launched directly to iTunes and social media. She invoked the power of “Word of Mouth” … the best marketing approach.
Her results:
It sold 828,000 copies in 3 days.
Twitter reported 1.2 million Tweets in 12 hours.
It was the largest single week ever in the Apple iTunes store.
It was iTunes fastest selling album worldwide.
A sign of things to come in social media?
So what is the significance for the average small businessman you may ask? The implications for marketers and small businesses go beyond a celebrity with millions of social media followers.
The bottom line
Remember this: the future of marketing belongs to brands that not only understand their customer advocates but go the extra mile to build personal connections with their biggest fans and nurture authentic, long-term relationships with them.
“The value of an idea lies in the using of it.”
Do you have an idea that will change the world? Well, it’s not worth anything unless you can turn that idea into a reality. So take the plunge and see just how far that idea can take you. Or, you can sit around trading advice over the internet.
The choice is yours.
Make your thinking vivid by including what comes naturally to you. You may be excellent in infusing your visualization with emotional charge and great feelings.
Your senses are wonderful tools for you to engage while unleashing the power of the imaginative mind. Make it colorful and exciting.
Make your imagination your ally and your best friend.
Need some help in capturing more customers from your social media marketing or advertising? Creative ideas to help the differentiation with your customers?
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.
Test. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Are you devoting enough energy to 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 design from Digital Spark Marketing’s Library:
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 Facebook, Twitter, Digital Spark Marketing, and LinkedIn.
