Building Your Brand With Selfies

sem picturesEffectively utilizing social networking as a part of your digital marketing strategy, in Texas or anywhere in the world, can make a huge impact on brand building.

Encouraging your client base to post selfies that feature your product or service may be considered a new marketing tool to some- but there are large companies who have been reaping the rewards for a while.

Take for instance Dove, who ran the famous #BeautyIs campaign, which proved to be a worldwide success.

Another closer-to-home example is Dunkin’ Donuts with a campaign that featured a different customer’s selfie enjoying their product each week on their Facebook page.

Each of these campaigns engaged their customers by giving them a feeling of ownership and interaction with the company and their message.

By using selfies as a marketing tool, they created a total image that people could relate to.

WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL WITH SELFIES?

With over 26% of Americans admitting to taking a selfie, it’s clear this is an area worth exploring for marketing your brand.

SurveyMonkey conducted an informal survey of 400 participants about why people take selfies. They found that the two most cited reasons were to share special moments and just for fun.

Understanding what drives selfie sharing is the key to building this type of marketing campaign.

We all are more willing to listen to a friend who offers a suggestion on where to go if we need our car fixed, or a new salon try out, over a flashy ad campaign.

We trust their judgment. We believe them when they say it’s the best.

When you can engage your audience with the authenticity of people who are just like them, taking selfies showing off their love of their favorite brand, product, or company it is the best version of word-of-mouth advertising you can get.

In the corporate environment, a few selfies of your staff at a team-building event can personalize your business to those on the other side of the screen as well.

It humanizes your company, thus making you more relatable to the consumer.

DOING IT RIGHT MATTERS.

It’s important to strategize carefully though.

You can’t simply post on Facebook or tweet requesting your followers to take a picture and hashtag it with your company name. It has to appeal to the people you’re trying to target.

For example, if you’re a travel company, you aren’t going to want people to just take a picture of themselves outside your office. Instead, you would be better off to run a campaign asking clients to reply with selfies of their vacation and hashtag it with something like #noworries.

This sort of creative marketing is an invitation to your customers to participate, which in turn encourages prospective customers to join in. This gets people talking and sharing.

You can sit back and relax as your customers do the marketing on social networks for you. The friends and family of those participating may even hop in themselves.

You’ve appealed to those top two reasons people like to share selfies- personal touch with fun!

Whether you’re a travel agency, a museum, a non-profit organization, or a soap company, proper marketing with the ‘selfie trend’ can mean a great deal to your bottom line.

Having a professional marketing company help you with the process of coming up with effective Selfie and UGC (User Generated Content) marketing strategies is a wise decision because the wrong call to action can have an undesirable effect.

With proper guidance, a strong Selfie marketing campaign is a brilliant tool to connect with your audience on a level that is often impossible through traditional advertising, and even in day-to-day business. It’s time to get people talking, sharing, and clicking!