What is the ultimate objective of brands for creating campaigns? What do they want from their users? The answer is simple: to create campaigns that build brand awareness and earn the trust of users, ultimately growing their sales. Learn how to increase brand awareness and drive loyalty through these 6 tips & tricks.

Brands who innovate and who leverage new, engaging techniques will reach more consumers, faster. According to a study done by the Content Marketing Institute 72% of brand marketers will attempt to create more engaging content in 2016. 51% say they are interested in creating more visual content, and 41% say they are interested in becoming a better storyteller. With the increasing use of social networks to share content and as online advertising continues to have challenges now is the time to look for new formats that create dialogs between brands and consumers.

As we progress into 2016 and from what we saw in 2015, we’ve been impressed with the new ways brands are connecting with and keeping their customers. Here they are:

  1. More visual campaigns: We saw a major shift in how brands were connecting with their users and the type of campaigns they were creating in 2015. More and more brands are now using social media channels such as Instagram and Snapchat to create visual campaigns that their users love and share. According to Hootsuite, Instagram users share 70 million photos each day and 85% of the brands are now using this platform to create engaging campaigns. Per follower engagement for top brands is 58 times higher than on Facebook and 120 times higher than on Twitter. A good example of this is Samsung who along with its partner, The Prince’s Trust ran a #StandTall campaign for The Prince’s Trust Celebrate Success Awards – an award that honors the achievements of young people supported by the trust, where the brands posted photos of the participants of the awards ceremony on Instagram as well as other social media sites. This successful campaign resulted in 681,217 impressions for the charity with 7% engagement rate, beating the benchmark of 1.5%.
  1. More contests: Nearly 70% of mid size to large companies are using gamification to change human behavior and increase user engagement for their brands. In 2015, we saw an increase in the number of brands creating social contests and we believe that the trend will continue to grow in 2016. Interactive contest forms such as quizzes, brackets & polls are a great way to collect important data to promote businesses. Brands create contests to collect an email address and use it for micro targeting to increase brand awareness, brand loyalty and sales. A great example for this is the bracket-voting campaign by RadioTimes where users could vote for their favorite TV star of 2015 in multiple rounds. This campaign resulted in over 120 million votes, 250k+ tweets and Facebook comments over a very short period of time. Even celebrities like Ricky Gervais got involved in this campaign and tweeted about it that lead to even more engagement on social media. We will be seeing more and more of these innovative contest campaigns in 2016 that results in higher engagement and social sharing.
  1. Increase in emotional touch: Also in 2015 we saw brands creating campaigns that have more emotional elements in order to establish deeper connections with the users that ultimately resulted in more social sharing. Brands such as Dove, Coke-Cola, WWF, & McDonalds created campaigns that used emotional elements to connect with their users. This increased brand awareness and engagement, and establish trust and loyalty with their audience. In a campaign called the #LastSelfie, World Wildlife Fund partnered with SnapChat to create awareness about the world’s most endangered species. Using pictures of the animals that are nearing extinction, WWF’s motive was that people could share pictures, adopt an animal, or make donations on their behalf. After one week there were 40,000 tweets that reached over 120 million Twitter timelines, meaning 50% of the active Twitter followers were exposed to the #LastSelfie. This campaign emotionally connected with the users that compelled them to share and help save these species.
  1. Use of social Influencers to promote content: Brands have also focused on partnering with social influencers on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and other channels to promote their campaigns. Influencers already have great numbers of followers and users trust what their influencers say. In a campaign by Birchbox on Instagram, the company partnered with lifestyle blogger Emily Schuman to promote and increase brand awareness about their May box. In this partnership, both promoted 5 Instagram photos that reached 550,000 consumers and received 18,000 likes.
  1. Increase in Real-Time marketing campaigns: More and more brands are now creating campaigns that involve real-time marketing. Wayin surveyed 200 US marketers who use real-time marketing and 56% cited forming customer relationships, increasing social media engagement, and reaching new customers as their top objective for using this tactic. Social media is the ideal place to interact with customers in real-time and these real-time marketing campaigns can do a great deal of good for the brands using them, helping build closer relationships with their customers. One of the best real-time marketing campaigns of 2015 was #oreoeclipse campaign where Oreo, with the help of PHD UK, reached 20 million people by creating its own Oreo Eclipse. Suspecting that British weather might ruin the biggest solar eclipse in UK, Oreo took advantage of this timing and created a touching campaign to show its own eclipse. Through this campaign, the brand experienced a 59% rise in their sales in the month of march in UK.
  1. Celebrity endorsements in a whole new way: In 2015, we saw brands telling their story using social media and celebrities in a whole new way. Before launching their ads on TV, brands are creating more and more social media campaigns that are longer duration and can tell a complete story. In a recent campaign called the True Tales of Clash Achievery, the company Clash of Clans used celebrities like Christopher Waltz and James Cordon to tell their real time story using humor and spectacle to engage their users. This campaign was initially launched on YouTube before it is launched on TV at the end of December 2015.

Conclusion:

Brands are trying new and innovative ways to delight their existing customer base and to help reach new customers with some standing out in wildly successful ways. With customers looking for engaging content, marketers are now moving towards interactive content marketing solutions for effective storytelling leading to an increase in brand awareness, more leads generated, while surprising and delighting their customers.

Thanks for reading! I hope you found some of these tips, tricks and facts useful.

Was there anything, in particular, you picked up from this post? I ‘d love to hear from you and join the conversation in the comments.

Vinay Chand and Craig Zingerline contributed to this post. This post was originally published on the Votion Blog