When you think of a brand, what do you think of? Most can probably think of a logo, like the distinctive Nike “swoosh”. But brands interact with their audience far more than just through the physical image they present. A brand also represents itself through the perception they create within people’s minds. Consumers can’t pick up on a brand’s body language, but they can pick up on how the brand communicates in other ways.
Over the last few months I’ve noticed a trend of strangely formatted posts on LinkedIn getting incredible engagement and landing in my feed. A few things caught my eye, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and run a little test with my own network (whom I don’t post to often, shame on me) to see what types of responses I got.
What’s up with Snapchat? This quick-paced social network has been struggling to find its raison d’être over the last few years. With a core user group of millennial females, its audience can be hard to please. Snapchat is finding this to be especially true since the announcement of their redesign that was announced last month.
I want to highlight a genius piece of accidental content marketing that graced my newsfeed this weekend.
Content marketing, if you’re not familiar, is basically the practice of a brand creating and distributing content that their audience will find useful and compelling, the majority of time without an explicit conversion intent. While good and intentional content marketing should be tied to a business goal, the immediate effect is usually relationship building, education and lead nurturing.
That said, the example I’ll lay out here is nothing like that. It was unplanned, spontaneous and extremely effective.