3 Reasons Why Indian Brands and Businesses Are Embracing Social Media Campaigns

The sheer number of people on social networks is probably the biggest reason why companies are increasingly turning to social media for marketing and promotional purposes. More so if the target audience of a company mainly comprises of the youth.

The recent surge in the number of Indian brands and businesses that are jumping on to the social media bandwagon can be attributed to 3 I’s: INNOVATIVE, INTERACTIVE and IMPACTFUL.

Here is a look at some brands and businesses that are using social media as a tool for engagement, conversations and co-creating content with their digital audience:

Innovative:

In what can only be described as a refreshing campaign, Society Tea’s online campaign seeks to position the brand as one which is a must have start to your day. The “Brand New Day” campaign designed by Smursh Media invited four people to do new things over a span of ten days.

The initiative gave “four chosen ones” namely Anubha Bhat, Harshad Sharma, Mahafreed and Kristopher the opportunity to fulfill their small wishes and blog about the experience on the Society Tea Blog.

The endeavor worked as a means to help people realize their dreams and fulfill their wishes and created good publicity for the brand. Picking common people to chronicle 10 days of their lives while they made each day a brand new day is an innovative way to get noticed without being too brash about it.

Interactive

Brands that engage with users on social media platforms are the ones that succeed at making people sit up and take notice. They do this with ease while they influence people to discuss, debate and share feedback, all at very little cost.

The End of the World discussions with the recent hype about the possibility of the world coming to an end on 12-12-12 was put to good use by Fastrack, the hip and happening collection by Titan watches.

Targeting the youth (which is the brand’s market segment), the brand’s positioning of ‘Move on’, where moving on to hell is made way too cool if the Mayans were right about the end of the world.

The ‘Make Hell Cool’ campaign was integrated into the brand’s main site together with Facebook and Twitter. Visitors could browse through the collections and buy them online or find a store nearby.

The number of young people who came up with their ideas to make hell cool took the end of the world discussions to a new level and created brand resonance with its target audience.

Impactful

High impact campaigns are those which use pressing issues for their target groups and build on a solution for them. It’s not just about asking questions but also about giving solutions. A case in point is the Stayfree campaign planned around the launch of its new product.

On Women’s Day, it launched the ‘Be the voice of change’ blogging contest through a tie up with Indiblogger, one India’s largest blogging platforms that asked bloggers to share what they would want to change around them.

They also ran a campaign on Facebook through an app called ‘Bring down the wall of irritation’ comprising issues that are irritants – begging, child labour, corruption, domestic violence, eve teasing and dowry deaths.

Apart from the online initiatives the brand supported their endeavors with an offline effort. On March 11, Stayfree and DNA joined hands to organize the ‘I can’ Women’s day half marathon in Mumbai backed by the central theme of breaking the wall of irritation.

The marathon drew support from hundreds of women supporting various causes and NGOs supporting cancer, education for girls, and so on.

The take away from these examples can be summed up as:

1. Brands, whose core audience is the youth, are increasing using the digital platform to interact with their customers.

2. The social media route is not just for products like watches, jewellery and cosmetics it is versatile enough for banking and finance products like insurance. Service oriented companies are finding digital media, especially various social media, attractive simply because the investor community is online too.

3. Using social media tools to co-create can work to build and sustain interest simply because people are “involved”.

4. The social media space is where people express views, opinions and experiences. Using this aspect proactively can help brands leverage the strength of those opinions and experiences to support causes propagate ideas as a part of the brand building exercise.

5. Playing with the bizarre and seemingly impossible also helps to generate interest and awareness.

6. Supporting online efforts with offline ones helps reinforce and widen one’s reach all at once.

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