We recently discovered that a food brand can drive $1B in incremental revenue by posting content exclusively on knitting-themed digital platforms.
Before you rush to the knitting websites of the world, I’m being facetious.
The point being, when thinking about digital activation, there’s no magical, undiscovered medium where media budgets are cents-on-the-dollar, shoppers voraciously consume branded content, and then quickly convert to purchase.
Eyeballs remain on the huge content platforms. So asking “where ARE our consumers?” is the wrong question. The right question is “WHY are our consumers on a given platform, and how can our content align with that?”
Open your Facebook feed (or your social medium of choice). You’ll see that a given user is there for one of four reasons:
To connect with their social tribe (the alleged purpose of social media in the first place).
To learn or collect information (think of that great chili recipe you discovered!)
To take a little vacation (fail videos et al).
To brag (great, Jill’s on another helicopter skiing vacation).
And yet, most teams think of digital media in one-dimension: are they on the platform, and therefore should we put our ad there?
But if a person is on Facebook to brag, she’s not interested in your rationally-minded ad about a new functional wellness beverage (or, more accurately, her sub-conscious attentional motivation is not attuned with your content). If a guy is looking for a good chili recipe (i.e. to learn), he’s not going to notice or be persuaded by your highly experiential video content.
And so on.
When it comes to successful activation, it’s much less about recording everything a person does, and much more about assessing WHY they’re doing them, and where your content can help the journey, vs. trying to disrupt it.
If a key segment of your consumer goes online for a little vacation during the day, provide content that provides a bit of escape. If they’re there to brag, help them show off a little. You get the idea.
We’ve seen this approach consistently separate the signal from the noise in activation planning – not to mention driving +10% sales growth, all on the same big digital platforms everyone already knows about.
