Now a days businesses use online communities to pull there customers together. Online communities can take many forms depending on the nature of the product or service the business is providing. Blogs and forums established by companies can be added seamlessly to a company’s website to allow users to connect with one another about their experience with the company. Social media is different though in that it is an already established community space where companies can make their own social media accounts to be able to connect with customers. Now that these communities have existed for so long the content in these places is demanded to be different to stand out.
One way that companies are attempting to become more user friendly is by launching user generated online campaigns.These online campaigns capture customers attention and usually show customers exciting things that actual people are doing with the company’s product. For example, Apple ran a user-generated campaign with their new apple iPhone camera called ‘shot on iPhone’. This highlighted the iPhone’s brand new high-tech camera that they were now including in the new iPhone X. This also showed iPhone users using these cameras to capture really interesting parts of these users lives. Most of the pictures were action shots or pictures of the users environment. IPhone not only successfully showed off the high specs on their cameras but also compiled an account of pictures showing off cool things that iPhone users were doing. This subliminally persuaded consumers interested in buying an iPhone to go make the purchase so that they could be taking pictures of their lives. One of the biggest advantages to a marketing campaign like this is the low cost to the company. Companies only need to allocate a few campaign managers to decide what pictures will be published on the Apple account. More and more companies are looking to user-generated campaigns because of their genuine content, creativity and low cost to the company.
Definitely agree with what is said in your post. It’s extremely beneficial for a company to accept user generated content, as it is much more powerful than any content that a company can produce from within.
User-generated content is definitely a star when it comes to marketing. I think of Redbull when I think of the best user-generated content. Redbull sponsors so many athletes and almost every athlete today has their own brand image and marketing content. Having Redbull in most of their content associates Redbull with extreme sports. Therefore when people think of Redbull they think of extreme and exciting living. It’s such a great way to market as other users can see themselves using whatever product is used.
That is interesting about Apple’s “shot on iPhone” campaign, I had seen it occur but never really noticed the underlying play being made for marketing. I agree that finding a way to increase the return on investment of an ad campaign through lowering your acquisition cost is vital to the success of your business, and in Apple’s case potentially increasing the Lifetime Value of their customers.
Mark, this is one of the most interesting blog I have read. Being costumer focused is key and if your company delivers great value the company should be proud to show off the positive costumer feedback/experience. I think apple makes elegant and quality product which both costumers and the Apple Inc. take pride on.