Author Archives for Murray Legg

About Murray Legg

Murray Legg is an active digital entrepreneur and holds a Ph.D in engineering. He is the strategy lead for Webfluential.

Learning from BuzzFeed – Creating branded content that your audience will love

August 19, 2015 1:51 pm Published by

Whether you’re a blogger or a brand, you’ve grown and refined your tone and approach to creating and sharing content with your audience over a period of time. The topics you discuss, the articles you share and the amount you engage with people is not only an expression of yourself or your brand, but rewarding on a social, personal and economic front.

We recently wrote about the six steps to building a successful influencer marketing plan, outlining best practice to engage with influencers and achieve meaningful results with your influencer marketing campaigns. But what about the best approach to captivating your audience through the content you create and go on to maximize the shareability of your it?

In 2006, while still at the Huffington Post, Jonah Peretti started BuzzFeed with a small amount of seed funding. It’s gone on to become an internet content hub of huge significance. Peretti has experience in creating content that gets huge traction online. Remember 40 Things That Will Make You Feel Old (3.2 million views), and the 45 Most Powerful Images of 2011 (10.1 million)?

We looked into the online forums and business analyses of the BuzzFeed model and have created a list of tips to putting together great branded content.

  BuzzfeedonscreenGettyFull  

Emotionally engaging content does best

The reason kittens and memes tend to be shared so much is their innate emotional connection. By exploring the emotional connection of your content with your audience, you’ll have a good shot at it getting traction. Think about a fitness brand doing a piece on the 15 best workout songs, for example.

Target the “Bored at Work Network”

“Bigger than the BBC, CNN or any traditional media network is the “BWN” and is made up of millions of bored office workers blog, Tweet, Facebook and IM all day.” In the new world of networked media, where links passed via social networks can send millions of pageviews to a site in a matter of minutes, Peretti says the bored-at-work network effectively “decides what content is popular today.”

Employ the mullet strategy

Business in the front, party in the back. YouTube, CNN, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post all have an incredible slick front page that’s visual and able to draw people into their content. Behind the front page, users can argue, comment and fight things out in the comments section. Remember, you wrote emotional content to start with, so give your audience an easy way to discuss it.

If your readers are on your website, make it shareable

Every BuzzFeed article has several icons at the top and bottom of its articles, for sharing on StumbleUpon, Google Plus, and Twitter, among others. Users can also pass judgment on a story using BuzzFeed’s proprietary yellow reaction button system, which include “LOL,” “omg,” “wtf,” “fail,” and “ew.”

Seed the content in fertile land

“Big seed marketing” hinges on the basis that content going viral needs to be different to how a disease goes viral. A virus epidemic starts with a single patient, “patient zero” and has a break out from there. But what if there were many patient zeros, based in different networks, giving your content an opportunity to go on to a wider audience?

Assume people aren’t reading your content on your website

“What if you assume people’s home page isn’t your site but Facebook or Twitter or StumbleUpon, or one of these social sites?” Repurpose your content and share it on your social channels to reach a wider audience.

Sign up as a marketer if you would like to find out more or start using our platform to run successful Influencer Marketing campaigns.

References:

http://www.businessweek.com/printer/articles/14770-buzzfeed-the-ad-model-for-the-facebook-era

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/38013/20150306/buzzfeed-make-money.htm

https://hbr.org/2007/05/viral-marketing-for-the-real-world


Influence for sale? A summary of the #27Dinner debate

May 28, 2015 6:37 am Published by

The monthly #27Dinner was held in Johannesburg last night, which held a discussion on the topic of influencer marketing, specifically, whether influence can be bought. As a player in the industry evangelising the effective use of influencer marketing as a dissemination tactic for great content, we were asked to be part of the panel. Kirsty Sharman, our South African franchise CEO, weighed in on the conversation. A big thank you to Cerebra for hosting a super event and including us in the conversation. Below are some of the highlights.  

Your thoughts? The industry, being new, is hotly discussed, so we'd appreciate your thoughts. -


Digital marketing tactics for day-of-the-week specials

January 29, 2015 1:07 pm Published by

Retailers, both online and IRL, often offer day of the week specials to boost sales on a historically slow sales day and to create an ongoing association with the brand and that day of the week. Traditional marketing on radio and television are great methods to raise awareness of these campaigns, but digital offers a means to turn interested customers into repeat customers, even moving them to spending on non-discounted retail days. Few brands have utilized tools on the web to maximize returns on their discount-day marketing efforts.

We provide a how-to on running a day of the week special on digital, assuming a lunch time meal special. Call it “Tempura Tuesdays.”

Plant the seed

Digital marketing platforms, particularly Adwords and Google Display Network, are ideal for serving ads at a specific time of day and very targeted location. The Tempura Tuesdays lunch special needs to penetrate the minds of an audience located within a ten minute drive of the restaurant while they’re working on their desktops in the office. Display banners on news and content sites plant the seed that appeals to the almost-hungry office worker. Subliminal awareness of the campaign – tick!

Secure the customer

As the target audience starts chatting about plans for lunch, checking in on social networks and are about to make a group decision, use digital to make it for them. The audience has already been served the awareness banners, now float the opportunity past them on Facebook and Twitter through promoted posts. Customers ordering Tempura on a Tuesday – tick!

Turn deal-hunters into loyal repeat customers

By using a combination of conversion tracking to your weekday-special webpage and audience retargeting, it’s then easy to create an aggregate audience that you can reach again, at lower cost and higher conversion rate, to bring their friends, offer coupons or upsell to attend killer profit-day events like Valentines Day or Mother/Fathers Day.

Who to target

These easy to follow tactics will work well for a brand in converting awareness to consideration and through to sales. Typically, the brand’s own social channels and fans will be targeted. But what about other, similar audiences that could be drawn in? Which single digital platform offers a golden thread through display, social and audience marketing? Well, the digital influencers speaking to your target market, with their channels linked to Webfluential. Their audiences trust in their endorsements and recommendations, and often span far wider groups of people than present in a brand’s owned social channels. They also offer the long term SEO benefit of the content living online and pointing back to the brand website.

To execute a day-of-the-week special on digital, contact us to speak to an account manager who can assist you.

 


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