The world of marketing is buzzing with excitement once again. But what is it this time around, you might ask. The word on the street is that the two new kids on the block that are getting all the attention are “moment marketing” and “emotional or joy marketing”. It all sounds fascinating, but what are they exactly? How can marketers use this, and why should they use it as part of their overall communications strategy?
Moment marketing is a fairly new practice that enables marketers to maximise brand awareness and audience engagement by jumping on new opportunities in real-time. In essence, it’s the technique of piggybacking on a recent or live event and turning that into an advertising opportunity to showcase your brand and get people talking about it in the online environment.
Although the result is not guaranteed, and you might not end up being the next viral sensation, it is important to have a list of guidelines that keep you on track and allow you to navigate successfully through the realm of moment marketing. Below are a few points that will aid you in your endeavours.
Knowing your audience means that you will have done a bit of listening and formed a rough idea of what they like and do not like, therefore reducing your chances of putting the proverbial foot in your mouth.
Having confidence and knowing what you are doing is also massively important, and this can easily be achieved by planning and looking at the trends. Seeing what makes the audience tick and when is paramount to creating good content that will hit that sweet spot with your consumers.
Customise, segment and brand: make sure you provide personalised content to the users you are targeting and ALWAYS include your brand in that message. Imagery works very well here!
Last but not least, you must be swift: moment marketing is all about having the right people, whom judgement you trust and also who are well versed in the art of using social media in a way that reflects your brand perfectly.
Alongside moment marketing sits “emotional marketing”, a term used to describe ad campaigns and marketing efforts that elicit a specific and powerful emotional response within the audience and targeted consumers. This type of approach focuses more on the long term benefits to their brands than the short term benefits. This strategy caveat allows brands to build more authentic and deeper connections with their audience by pulling on those heartstrings.
This sounds like rainbows and butterflies, but how do we structure an approach of this nature? There are four critical points we must consider when introducing this into our overall strategy.
Identify who and where your audience is: before even thinking of the content or the emotion itself that you want your audience to feel, you must listen and understand what they love, hate or get excited about. Once you know what that is, you must find out where they are. This significant bit of information will enable you to cut through the noise and speak to them directly, which will increase your success rate exponentially.
Secondly, you must identify that emotion you want people to feel, which is also part of your brand’s DNA. What you are trying to achieve MUST be genuine to your company ethos.
Now you can move on to planning and creating your content in the format that your audience prefers and through the channels that you have identified to be the appropriate ones.
Lastly, you must use all the analytics you have at your disposal to listen and monitor the responses you are getting and adjust in-flight where possible.
Now that we understand what moment and emotional marketing are and what it takes to be successful let’s look at some of the industry’s good and bad.
This trend started with the group selfie Ellen DeGeneres posted during the Oscars in 2014 (see below). That is when brands and ad agencies truly understood how big this is and it’s only become more and more wildly used since. The selfie got a lot of traction, reaching 3.4 million retweets!
Photo credit @TheEllenShow
Another two amazing examples of such viral stardom are the Oreo cookie tweet they posted during the 2013 Superbowl and, of course, the Snickers tongue in cheek tweet during the 2012 World Cup where football player Luis Suarez bit his Italian opponent’s ear during a match.
It is amazing when these initiatives take on a life of their own like that, but what happens when you jump on the wrong hashtag and have no idea what you are talking about? Well, DiGiorno pizza had experienced the heat from the masses for not doing it right when they managed to offend not only a large number of people but also make light of a terrible global issue that is “Domestic violence”. That is right; the community manager jumped on the #WhyIstayed without reading the conversations first, resulting in an uproar on Twitter.
Needless to say that it took a lot of time and a personal apology to every single user that commented or felt offended by the tweet to be able to start making amends for the colossal mistake.
…… and then some more!
So the moral of the story here is that it is imperative to know what you are talking about and when to get involved in the conversation.
It is clear that the way brands and marketers need to capture the attention of consumers must change, and this new way of doing things is proving to be very efficient when done well. This is why it is imperative that moment and emotion marketing have to be incorporated into the overall brand communication strategy. The expectations that consumers have of brands now are much higher. That is why we must work harder to shift towards the long-term goal of achieving brand loyalty and awareness by building authentic connections between brands and consumers. The marketing field is no longer just about using gimmicks to get them in the door and making a one-time purchase. It is now about making them care about our brands, enabling them to shape their future and effortlessly become natural advocates.
That’s great .women’s are most imoprtatnt part of the society