What is your infotainment rating? Online, you are competing with social media friends, role playing games, grumpy cats and all manner of sparkly things. Project management techniques need to include ways to entertain your audience while feeding them with pertinent information at the same time.
That’s infotainment – the ability to make those future customers stop in their keyboard tracks and take notice. It takes innovation and forward-thinking to get you there, but once you find the right tools, your marketing strategies will go boom with potential.
Put Them To Work
People go on the Internet to interact. You can expand on that concept by creating campaigns that allow them to interact in a way that imprints your brand in their memories.
To celebrate the holiday season in 2013, Galleries Lafayette, a department store in Paris, put together an interactive window to promote the release of Beauty and the Beast. People passing by could move virtual rose petals around the window to see scenes from the movie. This is a concept that would work online, too. In this example, the window could be a smartphone or tablet screen.
How About a QR Code
You make it fun, easy and almost too hard to resist. A Quick Response Code is a scannable barcode you place with all your marketing assets. Use a QR code at conferences like a virtual business card complete with a link to your website or blog. Use them as virtual coupons on Facebook and on your website to create a mobile bookmark.
Depending on your target audience, this is a powerful way to get online lead generation. The QR, or quick response, code won’t work well with the over sixties crowd, but for Millennials it’s great. It gives them a chance to use that piece of technology glued to their hand.
Add a Meme or Two
A meme is an unrelated but thought provoking image paired with a catchy phrase – a scene from a movie, an iconic picture, a bunch kitty cats mean mugging. They all work as memes.
How about Ferris Bueller with “Life moves pretty fast; if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss a great deal.”
A meme invokes an emotional response, maybe a giggle or a memory. You tie that response with your brand or product name by adding the right phrase.
Go Viral
It’s a little cliché, but it works. Make a video that is fun and fabulous to create a buzz. The staff dancing like no one is watching, cats running the office, a two-year-old tap dancing to your music jingle. Tell a story in a series of videos to play the long game and keep the buzz going.
Marketing, in print or online, is not about selling your goods or services. It’s about creating a memory that sticks in the minds of your audience via infotainment. That will get you leads, and then you can use your quality products and services to convert those leads to customers.
Writer Bio: Darla F is a full-time freelance writer who specializes in helping agencies meet their goals by developing creative and engaging content.
