These days the phrase "content is king" gets thrown around casually, but how is it directly applicable to your brand? From improving SEO to building brand ambassadors, it's now vital for brands to not only incorporate social media into their marketing strategy, but to put time and real strategy into developing content that engages their audience.
With content there are a few general rules to live by – make the conversation larger than your brand, actively engage, share striking imagery. But when planning out your year, or the even next few months, how do you keep your followers interested while keeping your content on-brand?
Enter seasonal content. Yes, this may seem like an easy one, but in practice there's definitely a lot of grey area. Can we run holiday content without alienating any followers? How can we celebrate the season while still keeping the message about the product and on-brand? These were questions that arose while looking for strictly-social content for The adorne Collection around the holidays. That is, we were looking for a way to engage with our followers during the holiday season, while remaining true to the brand and really speaking to the product offerings.
If you're not familiar with adorne by Legrand, it's a collection of designer light switches and wall plates that are beautifully designed and refreshingly high-tech. Our challenge for social media overall is to engage in a conversation about interior design, making something often-overlooked, like switches and wall plates, relevant.
Knowing that we wanted something seasonal as well as something that creates strong visual content and high engagement, we turned to Pinterest and our network of blogger for two distinct activations:
Deck the Walls with adorne for the Holidays
The Ask: The great thing about adorne wall plates is that you can switch them out very easily – something design and DIY fanatics love because they can correspond with their décor (whether or it be seasonal or otherwise.) As such, we asked followers to create their own holiday design Pinterest board, citing inspiration from the adorne collection for what would really make their holiday home. As an incentive, we offered up two $200 gift cards and one grand prize $500 gift card to the best pinners out there.
The Results: We received over 100 entries. Over 1,200 pins were tagged with #adornefortheHolidays, and adorne's Pinterest saw a 30% jump in monthly views, a 50% increase in monthly engaged users, and a 30% increase in new followers during contest time.
Why It Works: Not only do users love creating and sharing their own personal style with brands, but many of these users were already creating similar holiday boards. We were asking followers to incorporate the product into décor planning they were already doing, making it a fairly easy ask, but a very brand-focused ask. Offering prizes, especially more than one, will drive entries as well.
Holiday Home and the adorne Custom Wall Plate
The Ask: Sticking with promoting adorne as the finishing touch that really makes your holiday home, we asked interior design and DIY bloggers who have engaged with the brand previously to decorate their own adorne Custom Wall Plate to match their holiday décor. This was promoted across Legrand's social channels as well as via the bloggers social channels.
The Results: Six bloggers participated and total impressions from their support for this activation were over 130,000.
Why It Works: This program engaged friends of the company to create some third party content, which works wonders as an endorsement to your brand. To boot, this was a fun concept that the bloggers were more than happy to participate in.
Do your brands plan seasonal content and promotions? Have they been successful?