Emotion, greed, benevolence, exclusivity… effective marketing is knowing what elicits response and interaction.
People appear to be driven by their ego.
You can increase fans, create more personal relationships with customers, help to foster a feeling of investment in your brand, all while vastly reducing marketing spend. For instance, Papa Johns asked their fans to submit recipes for their next pizza, Corona flashed your profile photo to a huge digital billboard in Times Square when you Like their page, Vitamin Water asked fans to help them choose their next drink flavor, and Pringles let you easily create funny videos using your friends’ profile photos.
People want free stuff.
You give, they get, you get. Clairol gave away 100,000 free packets of makeup, and grew from 27,000 fans to over 262,000 fans in 4 days.
People want to feel selfless and charitable.
Kohl’s ran a campaign to give 20 schools $5000,000 each by asking fans to submit their votes, earning them 1,500,000 new fans in the process. Target asked fans to help them decide to which charity to donate $1,000,000, helping them bring their total fans to 4,000,000. Jack In The Box gave 5¢ to charity for every new fan. Southwest Airlines earned over 1,000,000 fans by donating $1 each time a fan checks in to a Southwest-served airport.
B2B marketers sometime fall into a trap by focusing on industries, functional groups, and business units at the expense of good old fashion human interaction. Ultimately, people make purchasing decisions for companies.
Those of us in the B2B space face an uphill battle. Unlike consumer advertising, B2B must clear two hurdles. First, we must evoke emotion in our target audience. Second, we must give our customers a reason to spend the companies’ money on a product or service. It’s harder than selling a ketchup Popsicle to a woman wearing white gloves.
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