Be honest, did I hook you with the picture?
We ask clients all the time, "How do you reach your audience? Connect people with your message? Reinforce your marketing?" Typically we have a hard time drilling down to find real meaningful answers. The world is a noisy place. Americans don't read. (In fact, I have already likely lost most of the readers of this blog post). People filter emails, hide Facebook content and skip commercials. One thing they do seem to like are pictures. You can scroll through and find the content that interests you in a photo faster than reading.
Getting your target audience to include YOU (your company, message, etc) in that photo that gets passed is the part that can get tricky. While reading an article from Forbes recently, I noticed the connection between Millennials, experiential marketing and reach your target audience...a photos. Here is an excerpt:
Hand Out Free Swag
Millennials are happy to share their feelings about brands on social media and branded events are no exception. In fact, Splash found (and shared in Adweek) that 81% of millennials shared photos on social media at a branded event, 71% used the event’s hashtag, 67% followed the brand on social and 56% signed up for an email list. All of this interaction took place at a branded event where millennials received products such as bottles, t-shirts, hats, glasses, totes or pens. Although branded swag isn’t required for millennials to talk about their branded event experience on social, it does help when it comes to images. Give millennials something to wear and share and they will.
The best way to encourage millennials to talk about their branded swag is to ensure that you give them a reason to show it off. This can be accomplished through a contest at the end of the day that requires a photo to be taken with the product or while wearing the branded swag. Sometimes it can be as simple as having a really unique and cool branded item that millennials are bound to use and want to show off immediately. In this way, branded swag can masquerade as a free product.
Millennials are not unreachable when you take the time to develop an authentic campaign aimed at connecting instead of selling and building brand awareness. Millennials are not unreachable when you take the time to develop an authentic campaign aimed at connecting instead of selling and building brand awareness.
So, maybe it is a simple as the photo shows. Hand out cool logo merch and ask people to #tagyou. Sit back and wait. The analytics may take you places that might surprise you.
If you are interested in the balance of the article I reference, you can find the article here