CEO of Photofy John Andrews considers how collaboration with your employees could make your digital content sing…
Digital marketing today is a crowded arena. It’s become the primary tool for marketers in terms of dollars spent. But as spending has increased, saturation and diminishing returns have occurred at an alarming rate. There’s simply a finite amount of human attention and too much noise. More dollars continue to flow into programmatic media all seeking to reach the right shopper with the right message at the right time… in the fastest and easiest way possible.
Every dollar spent is becoming less efficient on a daily basis thanks to the deluge of push advertising desperately seeking shopper attention. Compounding the problem is a trifecta of digital challenges:
- Much of digital media is fraud
- Digital ad fraud is getting worse, not better
- Costs are increasing in the face of declining productivity!?!
The shopper’s path has changed, and continues to do so, and all the third party data in the world is not going to change that fact.
Don’t be an earworm
Marketers may be able to reach the right person at the right time with the right message, but in the process, they are annoying the hell out of the 99.9% of people that are not in buying mode. Shoppers’ feeds are full of messaging for products they’ve already bought, hotel rooms and flights they’ve already booked and deals on things they don’t need or want. Today’s shopper has more information than ever in the palm of their hand and is becoming very adept at using it when and where they want.
Brands that are winning this new journey are providing large quantities of fresh and relevant content for shoppers to use when they actually need it. Not only does this help simplify shopping, it also has a lasting impact on the algorithms that affect what shoppers find across all forms of search.
Especially effective is localized content, as search becomes much more geo-specific.In the face of declining returns from digitaladvertising and the growing need for more of this kind of superior, impactful content, collaborative content creation (crowd marketing) offers a highly effective solution.
“It’s well known that companies with engaged employees outperform their peers; involving employees in content creation can help to create a sense of common purpose.
Band camp
Did you know that employee generated content receives eight times more engagement than content shared from the company itself? On top of that, employee content extends brand messaging by over 500%. Crazy, right? So why aren’t more companies getting employees engaged in content creation? It’s well known that companies with engaged employees outperform their peers; involving employees in content creation can help to create a sense of common purpose.
At Photofy, we believe that Employee Created Content (ECC) has tremendous potential to fill in some of the gaps in current digital marketing stacks. First, ECC leverages the personal influence of the content creators, thereby delivering substantially higher engagement rates than corporate branded content. For larger organizations, such as franchises and retailers, ECC helps to localize and personalize content in a way that isn’t possible with geo-targeted advertising alone. Finally, since ECC using common brand assets is all customized and shared by the different users, its impact on search-based algorithms is profound. Deployed at scale, crowd marketing can significantly augment corporate digital media efforts…. and it allows the organization to empower their employee base in this effort as well.
Consider these August 2018 stats from our top five enterprise partners at Photofy:
- 14,000 users created over 28,000 pieces of content with a measurable media value of
- $538K, representing 43% of total conversations about these brands during the month.
- This content generated over 1.1 million engagements with a 5.14% overall average engagement rate.
Considering the average overall social media engagement for branded content is far less than 1%, this represent a huge opportunity for expansion of brand connection.
It stands to reason that personal networks have higher levels of engagement thanks to a real relational connection, but brands need to know how to leverage it consistently and at scale. Most organizations are sitting on a goldmine of authentic content creation that is likely closest to their customers.
Give your customers and employees the tools to create and share branded content coupled with a powerful content management system and analytics package. It’s the perfect addition to existing brand digital activities to increase the scale and effectiveness.
Photofy empowers businesses of all industries and sizes to create and share high quality branded content, and drive greater social awareness and user engagement, and advertise to our global audience.