To put it in simple words, when people in America talk about the advertisements during the super bowl game and the excitement around it, it is called Buzz Marketing.
Buzz marketing is a marketing technique that gets people to talk about your brand among their friends, relatives, and other people, both online and offline. Brands create compelling and creative marketing campaigns and advertisements that intrigue their audience and entices them to share their thoughts about the brand. For people to talk about your brand, marketers need to identify what topics your brand’s users care about and create a campaign around it. The more they care about the topic, the more they will talk about it. With changing digital technology, more and more brands are now looking for new ways to create market buzz and are moving away from using traditional marketing techniques to achieve their goals. Traditional marketing mostly generates awareness about the brand but does not create enough opportunity for people to talk about it and share their views.
Brands should be leaning more towards using interactive marketing tools as they are easy to create, generate more buzz and are less expensive. Here are some of the problems marketers face when creating buzz around their brand using traditional marketing techniques:
– Content used in traditional marketing is boring and does not entice the audience to share and talk about your brand. Content used in print ads, blog posts or in other static forms of marketing campaigns are generally not very fun or visually appealing, thus they do not entice the audience to talk about your brand.
– Traditional marketing is usually a one way communication where only the brands can talk about their products and services but does not allow users to share their views. if users are not able to share their views, there is a higher chance that they will not talk about your brand, hence it will limit buzz for the brand
– Traditional marketing usually reaches the masses and it is not highly targeted. With the changing technology, if content does not reach the right audience fast, it is likely that people will not talk about it. Also the topic is not what the target audience cares about which will create less buzz.
– Sometime the content tools or the message are not right for a campaign that encourages audience to talk about your brand. For example, if you want your audience to just read a small message and you create a whole blog post on it, chances are your audience will get confused or won’t have enough time to read through it and get the message.
Interactive content marketing on the other hand is very effective for buzz marketing. Here is why:
1. Interactive content tools such as polls, quizzes and brackets are two way communication processes that allows your users to share their views and talk more about your brand. Also through interactive content you can create highly personalized campaigns that entice users to talk more about it.
2. Interactive content is easy to share. Social media lets people talk about their feelings and opinions and has become a powerful tool. You can easily integrate social media hooks in to your marketing campaigns and once users are done taking part in it, they can easily share.
3. Through interactive content, marketers can easily download data, run analytics, and generate valuable insights to help them create a series of content. The larger variety of content marketers create, the more buzz they will see for their brand.
4. Marketers can create highly personalized content through assessments, polls and quizzes that works really well to generate curiosity and educate their audience. The more you build a sense of curiosity around your content, the more likely people will talk about it.
5. Interactive content is highly visual and less wordy. Audiences generally prefer shorter and more visual content and interactive content works really well for that purpose. Also they are more likely to share visual content on social channels. This is leads to more buzz about the brand.
RadioTimes, one of the largest and most successful TV and Radio program listing magazines in the United Kingdom, partnered with Votion to use their interactive content marketing tool- Bracket and created a marketing campaign where they asked their users to vote for their favorite TV star of 2015. With more than 120 million votes in 9 campaigns, 250k+ tweets, Facebook comments/posts and an astonishing 42 pages per session and 12:42 average time per session, it was a huge success for the company . Even Celebrities like Sam Heughan and Ricky Gervais tweeted about it that led to more engagement and buzz on social media.
Conclusion:
As more and more brands are now looking for new tools to help them create market buzz, interactive content tools can help a your brand differentiate and stand out. For brands to create better stories for their users that will help them create market buzz, marketers should look for interactive content.