How Brands Are Adapting To Change and Leveraging Apps for Engagement
Customers are adapting to change, end-users are adapting to change even television networks are adapting to change. It should come as no surprise that the brands we’ve grown to love are leveraging mobile trends to the point that it increases engagement to a whole new level.
At the heart of this new business shift, brands and corporations are becoming more “human” while discovering innovative ways to interact with consumers on their terms. Apps, very much like the social web are already proving to be a powerful platform to interact on.
The result, if done right leads the company forward by building a personal and respectful relationship between brands and consumers. Here are a few examples of how brands are bridging the sales gap through mobile communities.
Brands Leading the Pack
Ford is looking to the instagram community to increase exposure for the Ford Fiesta with a targeted photo contest – Over the next six weeks, contestants can submit an Instagram photo that illustrates a different Ford Fiesta feature or technology and the winner each week earns a prize
Using Instagram — the popular application that allows users to take fast, beautiful photos and easily share then with friends – contestants can enter simply by uploading photos using the hashtag #Fiestagram on Facebook or the Instagram social network. The competition will run on the Ford Fiesta Facebook page.
“We wanted to run a competition which would resonate with our Fiesta Facebook fans and the wider Instagram community,” said Roelant de Waard, vice president Marketing, Sales and Service, Ford of Europe. “Instagram has grown from nothing to 150 million photos in just nine months and we are looking forward to the participants in the #Fiestagram Photo Competition contributing their creativity to the 1.3 million Instagram images uploaded per day.”
Location based marketing is becoming a golden ticket towards brand engagement. To test out the waters, NBC and the New York City Parks Department have partnered for an innovative way to promote NBC’s newest show, The Cape.
They’ve selected 30 statues of “heroes” all over New York and outfitted them with temporary capes and a sign that tells more about the hero behind the cape (and, no doubt, about the show). Foursquare users can check in from each of the statues to be entered into the Hero a Day Giveaway sweepstakes.
Similarly, Radio Shack ran a pilot campaign with Foursquare in August 2010 to really understand the platform and gain a deeper knowledge of how it was going to work with consumers. The basis of the campaign was to find out how the associates in their stores were going to work with Foursquare and to really test the platform.
What they immediately noticed was a significant result in terms of identifying core and profitable shoppers with Foursquare who not only spent more per transaction, but were more likely to buy a wireless product.
The Mobile App Engagement Metaphor
If your brand is looking at the mobile app industry to increase brand exposure, engagement and value “as it should be” one way to look at it is this – Think of a test campaign as first date, find the right fit for your organization, then move onto dating steady. If that works out, get engaged until leveraging mobile apps become a part of your ongoing brand marketing strategy.
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