GoPro, a maker of digital video cameras and accessories, practically has a lock adventure based video and UGC marketing. Their products, originally created to enable extreme sports enthusiasts to film their exploits without having to jury-rig a setup or find someone willing to hold the camera, are a natural fit for heaps of adventurous user video, and amazingly impactful UGC marketing.

Knowing this heap of user video creates an incredible marketing opportunity, the company actively shares the content their users make. They have Video of the Day and Photo of the Day contests, a popular YouTube channel, and heavy presence on other social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. They have brilliantly harnessed the power of UGC marketing into their channels, engaging customers and building a powerful brand.

But what if you happen to market a product that isn’t used to generate content? Or is not quite so naturally a fit for UGC? There are still lessons to learn from the way they do things at GoPro.

3 UGC Marketing Lessons from GoPro

1. Plug into customer passions

One key element that makes GoPro such an amazing content marketing tool is that the company’s video cameras tie directly to the passions of customers. There are other digital video cameras out there, but none that quite capture the spirit of adventure like GoPro. That’s because the company understands its audience and what they want to do with the cameras. Which is…to show off their amazing experiences to family and friends and share their passion for their sport and their unique worlds.

It’s convenient that the GoPro Hero camera also creates content that GoPro can share as part of it’s marketing program. But what can you do if your product isn’t a content generating machine like GoPro’s Hero digital video cameras?

Think about your audience’s passions and what makes them tick.

Take Red Bull, for example. They make an energy drink, but it’s fair to say that a lot of people know Red Bull best not for that product, but for their other exploits. Such as sponsoring music festivals, cliff diving competitions, snowboarding events, and motorsports. The company understands that the messaging for their energy drink ties directly into its audience’s desire for adventure. As their marketing message makes clear…Red Bull, the drink, gives you wings. Their other activities are designed to give “wings to people and ideas,” too.

2. Use video storytelling to entertain and engage

You only need to watch one or two videos shot with the GoPro camera to get a feel for how well even amateur videographers can capture beauty and mystery and the spirit of adventure. This medium is unique for its ability to entertain and engage. Many GoPro users take the time to edit their videos and add music to make the experience complete. And it doesn’t take extreme sports to get attention. Check out this very popular video about owls made with a stationary GoPro camera, very close to home.

There is enough user-generated video from GoPro that it would take you almost three years to watch it all. But, even if your brand doesn’t have that much video content, you can certainly use video to engage customers and tell your story.

For example, in the Starbucks YouTube channel, they share lots of videos about how to make coffee. And they also have videos highlighting Starbucks as a place to meet new people and maybe even change your life. That’s not extreme. Nor is it user-generated, or anything that anyone would need an indestructible GoPro camera to film. But these are the kind of heartwarming stories that shore up the power of the Starbucks brand and steep users in the experience.

3. Keep brand messages to a minimum

For their marketing purposes, the beauty of GoPro is that the viewing audience knows that all the video content they see is created with GoPro cameras. The medium is the marketing message, as it were. So there is no need for a hard sell or overt brand messaging. Whether it is user-generated content shared on their website or via social media, or videos created with their partners like the NHL, GoPro doesn’t spend too much time talking about GoPro itself.

What can you do to tell your company’s story and get to the heart of your brand messaging without hitting users over the head with it?

What about tying into the GoPro phenomenon directly? Look at Marriott. In certain locations, they have GoPro Hero cameras for their guests to borrow, to film their own adventures. They share these on their own channel as part of their Travel Brilliantly campaign and ask users to share via social media, as well. It’s a great way to get guests engaged in their vacation experience, share inspiring videos with future guests, and make Marriott the hero by enabling guests to capture their own experiences in a new way.

You don’t need to be a company that makes a content generating device like a digital video camera to get useful content marketing lessons from GoPro. You just need to understand your users’ passions, tap into the power of video to tell a story, and be willing to embrace adventure, in whatever form that takes for your product.

The post Adventures in UGC Marketing, Featuring GoPro appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

Cue the time machine: Long before smartphones, selfies, and our unquenchable online sharing culture, photos were the best mementos we had when returning from vacation. We shared prints with family and friends, pasted them in photo albums and loved showing off the fun we had during our travels. Universal Orlando’s “Show Us Your #UniversalMoments” campaign, with its tagline “Vacation like you mean it,” has captured this nostalgic sharing perfectly for our modern times. Their clever use of shared customer vacation memories offer marketing pros four user-generated content (UGC) tips to harness “universal” human behavior into marketing gold.   

Launched in April 2014, #UniversalMoments invited Universal Orlando visitors to upload their favorite photos and videos to Instagram, Twitter, Vine, or the Universal website accompanied by the hashtag “#UniversalMoments.” Since then, viewers have been sharing, downloading, and commenting, collectively building a vast catalog of UGC all about the fun times you can find at Universal Orlando.

Universal Orlando shares customer content on its website and social channels, including Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. And, many customer images were even used in a recent Universal Orlando TV commercial.

This UGC campaign works because it taps into basic “universal” human behavior.

4 universal UGC tips that tap into human behavior

1. Make your customers the stars

People love to show and tell vacay photos, especially the photos that capture the essence of the vacation, or the ones where we look our best, goofiest, or relaxed. #UniversalMoments allows visitors to pick the perfect photo and memory and share it with the world —hanging out with Scooby Doo characters to enjoying time with the family and riding roller coasters. True fans love seeing their photos on the website, and imagine the heightened excitement for those who had photos selected for the TV commercial.

2. Connect with human emotions

Universal doesn’t just post all the images on its site; it filters them into categories: excite, relax, play, connect, or thrills. This helps future customers hone in on what they want from their vacation and envision themselves at the park. As a bonus, these “vacation verbs” might inspire visitors to participate in other activities while at the park. By connecting with emotions of the customer they create a deeper desire to take action (book the trip)!

3. Give people a reason to share

We know people share their favorite images on social media, both while traveling and when they arrive at home. Through this campaign, Universal encourages their customers to tag those very photos with a simple hashtag, with the potential to be featured online. When someone’s images are showcased on Universal’s website, they are likely to share the campaign itself.

4. Use real people to tell a story

When we share our photos with friends, they enjoy it because they know us, they like us, and they are happy to see us happy. To our friends, we are real people, not just another model on location at a photo shoot in Florida. UGC used in this campaign manages to instill the same feeling. The photos that are submitted by customers are not professional shots; the people have not been cycled through hair, make-up and wardrobe, and they look like, well, real people. Real people bring authenticity to any marketing campaign.

Ultimately, what makes the #UniversalMoments campaign work is that customers become engaged through memories. Everyone wins;  those creating the moments captured in the images, the people sharing them with others, those who are planning their next vacation and Universal itself.

The post #UniversalMoments Campaign Reveals Four Universal UGC Tips appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

How Cotopaxi won at content marketing

It’s February 21, and I am jumping into a pool of snowmelt beneath a red rock waterfall, just outside Las Vegas. I am fully clothed, and my left hand is clutching an inflatable sleeping pad. After the plunge into the hypothermic tub, I heft myself onto the sleeping pad and paddle to shore. Three tasks completed, 18 points, all caught by my teammates on a smartphone and uploaded to Facebook. This is Questival: a 24-hour adventure race and act of content marketing genius that offers five invaluable UGC lessons.

A business textbook might one day say that Cotopaxi, the outdoor clothing and gear brand behind Questival, succeeded by combining mobile technology, gamification and user-generated content (UGC) in one campaign. Having now completed Questival, I have a much better explanation: Questival brought out comedy, courage and humanity in hundreds of people. Questival deepened friendships by creating a journey we’d never take otherwise – a journey that also happened to reflect the values of Cotopaxi.

Instead of trying to create a ‘relationship’ between individuals and the brand, Cotopaxi strengthened relationships among friends and strangers wrapped up in the hilarity of Questival. Instead of pleading for user-generated content, Cotopaxi made UGC the inevitable byproduct of our joy and competitiveness.

Backdrop: The Why and How of Questival

Questival began as the launch party for Cotopaxi, a public benefit corporation with $3 million in venture capital and one of few outdoor brands that only sells direct to consumers. Its “Gear For Good” model promises that each purchase contributes to a humanitarian cause in the local community that produced the item. The brand and its values are truly Millennial bacon.

In April 2014, Cotopaxi and its agency Causebrands launched Questival in Salt Lake City, Utah. 1,500 competitors traveled all over Utah completing challenges, and word quickly spread. Within 24 hours, Questival yielded 30,000 social media posts that reached one million followers, and the event was profitable in its own right. So, Cotopaxi did it again, and Questival is now on track to hit over 25 cities. I learned about it from my two Las Vegas teammates who participated in the first Questival and raved about it (i.e. word-of-mouth, brand ambassadors…people being human).

Here’s how it works: Questival invites teams of two to six people to complete over 300 outdoor, community service and quirky tasks within 24 hours. The task list is emailed to competitors 48 hours before the race. Every single task is also listed in the Questival mobile app. When you’re completing a task, you click it in the app, take a photo or video as required, add a caption and post the proof to your team page and social media sites to earn points. The top teams – determined by a combination of points and qualitative judging – earn free Cotopaxi gear, and this year’s city winners are invited to compete in the Questival World Championships, a seven-day adventure from Belize to Panama.

In Las Vegas last month, I jumped into snowmelt fully clothed in order to earn points. Floating on an air mattress and paddling a vessel were also worth points. People leg wrestled while eating corn dogs, recited limericks about llamas, worked in soup kitchens, cleaned up parks, climbed mountains and kissed strangers to earn points, too. Questival succeeded beyond the wildest expectations of this jaded reinvigorated writer, and the experience offers some UGC lessons that all marketers can put to immediate use.

5 invaluable UGC lessons

1. Connect People with People

If you’re a marketer, someone has probably told you that social media and content marketing are all about creating relationships with your audience. This is true, and maybe it has worked for you, but how many people want to chat with a brand? People are much more interested in building relationships with people, and your brand can facilitate that. Cotopaxi values, logos and staff were part of Questival, but ultimately we laughed, hiked and cooked s’mores with teammates. It still worked; I am going to buy some Cotopaxi gear.

2. Make Your Product Essential

When you sign up for Questival, your registration includes an 18 liter Cotopaxi Luzon backpack that is perfect for carrying water, snacks, props, wallets and other race necessities. Every step of the race, we were either wearing our backpacks or had them near. Consequently, bystanders saw hundreds of Millennials wearing these branded packs – and having the time of their lives. The packs of course showed up in most of our photos and videos, and they will show up in many more.

3. Involve Bystanders and Strangers

My team and I were dependent on the good will of people because the tasks required us to work with strangers. When you ask a stranger to feed you a deep fried Twinkie or slow dance to “Lady in Red,” you have to explain why you’re asking. If 20 people with matching backpacks rain dance in front of the same rain show at Las Vegas’s Miracle Mile Shops, every bystander gets curious. Conversations can’t help but begin with an enthusiastic spiel about Questival. In marketing speak, the process of producing UGC lead to word-of-mouth before we even uploaded the content.

4. Create Your Campaign for Somebody, Not Anybody

Questival tasks spanned eight categories: Adventure, Camping, Community & Cultural, Hikes, Quirky, Service, Social Media and Survival. In other words, there was something for everyone who would buy Cotopaxi gear. Yes, it attracted an outdoorsy crowd, and that’s what it should do. Cotopaxi judged correctly that celebrity trivia and word puzzles would be a bad fit.

5. Make Social Media Functional, Not Vain

I’m a lightweight social media user, but in 24 hours, I posted more content than I’d normally post in a whole year. Because social media was required for completing tasks, I didn’t feel uncomfortable using it. It wasn’t about me; it was about documenting tasks and moving our team along in the race. I produced a trove of UGC and felt darn good about it.

Questival’s strategy and execution were outstanding, but, of course, there is room for improvement. Many teams were unable to upload videos on a cellular connection. Smartphone battery life was an ongoing struggle. Teams could theoretically cheat (e.g. take a picture of a tent and claim they camped), but if it ever becomes problematic, Cotopaxi can add software to their app that authenticates the time and location of every photo. Ironically, you couldn’t immediately buy Cotopaxi gear at the after-party – you could order it via iPad and wait for it to reach your home. These issues were minor.

On a personal level, Questival was an empowering experience. It pushed me to interact with complete strangers in ways normally I wouldn’t. As a PR/marketing writer, I experienced firsthand why UGC is such a powerful content marketing tool. The act of creating content was the reward – not the “Likes” and comments on Facebook.

Marketers, if you want UGC, focus on creating moments that illuminate our humanity and the joy of living. Send people on adventures, online or offline, that they would never take without your inspiration.

The post 5 UGC Lessons From Corndog Wrestling and Llama Limericks appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.

Everyone loves the big splash Super Bowl ads make—before, during, and after the game these ads generate massive interest and provide a significant uplift for brands. But the $4.5 million price tag for a 30 second spot is out of the reach for most companies. And even if the cost isn’t an issue, advertising during a football game isn’t necessarily the best forum for all brands. In the end, you don’t need a Super Bowl sized marketing budget to have an impact.

Despite the excitement around ads during the game, when it comes to advertising bigger isn’t necessarily better. Luckily, there are many creative ways for companies to get attention and generate interest – even with a modest marketing budget. No matter when that happens—in January to leverage the hype leading up to the Super Bowl, in connection with another holiday or big event, or at any other time of the year.

As you consider how to generate buzz for your brand, first and foremost, consider what types of marketing and ad campaigns work best for your audience. Then consider some of the principles that make so many of those Super Bowl ads memorable.

Ideas to consider regardless of your marketing budget:

• Be thought provoking. People like marketing that gets them to think about things in a new and different way. For the most part, however, it’s probably best not to tread too far into the sad, depressing, or just plain scary.
• Present a clear message. Depending on your brand, it may be ok to be offbeat, funny, shocking, or yes even a little bit weird. Whatever your approach to communicating the message, the most important part is to make sure your customers don’t have to work too hard to figure it out.
• Tell a story. Customers in both B2C and B2B respond to stories, short and long. It’s a tried and true format, going back millennia. And stories work in whatever media works best for you and your audience.
• Help people to care. Genuine good deeds and connection with the community hit an emotional button for most people. Incorporating these good deeds into your marketing helps make your campaign memorable and encourages the audience to share.
• Be consistent. One-off ads can make a big splash. However, consistency and longer campaigns can make a real difference, in the long run.
• Help your customers promote your message. Let your customers and brand advocates do some of the heavy lifting for you.
  • Take advantage of social media sharing—use hashtags and include URLs (for dedicated landing pages whenever possible so you can track the campaign) in all aspects of the campaign.
  • Consider user-generated content (UGC) of the ad itself. It’s a great way to drive interest, engagement, and sharing.

Clever ideas that didn’t break the bank

Many brands have used these principles to create meaningful and memorable marketing campaigns, without breaking the bank.

Newcastle Ale
The brewer created a campaign called Band of Brands leading up to the Super Bowl. The premise: Why pay $4.5 million for an ad, when you can share the cost with 20-30 other brands? The results: A priceless set of videos that poke fun at product placement and the now traditional heartwarming Super Bowl ad. And a viral campaign that was no doubt well worth whatever Newcastle spent on it.

Taulia
The payment management and the e-invoicing company created the Take Control campaign. The premise: Use cheeky spoof videos to generate interest in their four key target audiences. The results: The videos in this campaign, along with other video content, helped influence over $125 million in their marketing pipeline.

Maersk
Maersk shipping takes advantage of the love many people have for spotting ships at sea. The premise: Encourage people to use the hashtag #Maersk and post photos of the Maersk logo on trucks and ships on a variety of social media sites including Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter. The results: A heavy social media presence focused on engagement and conversation.

These brands are just three examples of companies who are taking a clever approach to getting attention and building engagement, without breaking the budget. And without spending $4.5 million to get it done. Of course, if you’ve got the budget, and it makes sense for your brand, I say, go for it!

The post How to Score Without a Super Bowl Sized Marketing Budget appeared first on Thismoment Content Marketing Blog.