Three ways to up your social media game

11/12/2019

micro movements discovery fulfilment intent-rich storytelling

Marketers are moving away from traditional tactics and focusing on real-time, “always-on” strategies that engage consumers at every step of the customer journey.

Capitalize on micro-moments

A key trend in marketing for the modern age is planning a strategy for micro-moments, those tiny periods of discovery, fulfilment, and searching. Micro-moments are described as “intent-rich” moments that shape expectations and establish preferences. Moments such as looking up reviews for a product in a store on your smartphone, or Googling the answer to a question halfway through a conversation. With the rise of smartphones, organizations have pivoted to take advantage of all the points where they could interact with customers.

Micro-moments are especially useful in shaping the preferences of millennials. According to a recent Google study, 61% of millennials say that a search on their smartphones led them to discover and shop for new brands. And 55% say they ignore brands that don’t come up on a routine search or have poor online reviews.

Careful use of storytelling

If there’s any term that’s thrown around with wild abandon in the marketing sphere, it’s storytelling. Effective storytelling can strengthen your brand, place it at the forefront of visibility, and engage your members emotionally. Done badly however, poor storytelling can hurt a brand.

storytelling, content, graph, optimize, strategy, hubspot

Marketers are continuing efforts to use storytelling to create a relationship of trust with their audience, and that means being genuine. Millennials are especially wary of embellished storytelling, and generation Z perhaps even more so. Credit unions may want to focus on nonfiction storytelling: organic and authentic stories of their members and their financial woes and goals. Storytelling does not need to be an exercise in hand-holding. Only give your audience as much as they need, and they’ll run with the narrative themselves.

Video, video, video

Don’t underestimate the ability of interactive content as a crisis response tool. Famously, in July 2016, Michael G. Van de Ven, the COO of Southwest Airlines, took to Facebook Live in an attempt to soothe frustrations over a catastrophic outage that left many passengers stranded and looking for answers. The result of the outage was thousands of angry flyers logging on to social media and flooding Southwest with angry messages.

However, Southwest’s response worked. Van de Ven’s video was viewed more than 800,000 times, and by all accounts, achieved the goals it had set out to accomplish. Instead of focusing on the outage, the narrative in the days after soon turned to Southwest’s brilliant handling of what could have been a PR disaster.



« Return to "CUSG Blog Corner"