How to co-create content under social marketing?

Introduction: The advent of the Internet big data era has brought tremendous changes to the consumer market, and the relationship between consumers and producers has been constantly overturned and reshaped. With the advent of the content co-creation world, how can brands seize the opportunity and gain the favor of consumers? This article will give you the answer.

With the transformation and promotion of business digitalization, social marketing has become increasingly accurate, which has also made brands constantly think about how to communicate with consumers in a smarter, more effective and more accurate way.

In recent years, Mr. Bingfa has discovered that with the socialization of platforms and media, those communications that can resonate deeply with consumers and trigger the participation of consumer groups all have one thing in common: marketing has subtly produced content co-creation or even symbiosis.

In fact, co-creation marketing has always existed. In the early days, it was content co-created by brands, variety shows, TV dramas, etc., which has exploded on social media. In fact, it is users who spontaneously create content and express opinions, realizing the co-creation and co-existence of content between users and brands, bringing wider dissemination to brands. Behind these seemingly spontaneous behaviors of users, in fact, they are inseparable from the marketing combination punches tailored by brands through social networking and grass-planting logic, leaving users with more room for interactive creation.

In the era of social media, how can brands achieve content co-creation?

01 Realize content co-creation through the logic of seeding

Compared with the crude sharing of good things or the emotional consumption of "cutting open a knife", users now prefer various real social recommendations. Products that integrate elements such as product names, recommendation reasons, and beautiful design pictures are also more likely to make people feel an inexplicable sense of trust. Combined with the guidance of soft text information to achieve conversion, new purchasing users will then post their orders, forming a sales conversion path of "exposure, recommendation, purchase, new users posting orders, and secondary dissemination."

In the era of social marketing, there has always been a slogan that "sales are the beginning of brand marketing" . In the new sales conversion path, the first exposure is often generated by brands leveraging the influence of vertical circle KOLs to gather users in the same circle together, taking the social word-of-mouth planting of KOLs as the starting point, and achieving exposure through softer content, allowing consumers to subtly follow the brand's hints and produce psychological and behavioral planting and pulling. Coupled with the promotion of reliable products and services, users can actively produce content and push it to social media for dissemination, to help brands complete customer acquisition and achieve closed-loop word-of-mouth fission.

For example, in Luckin Coffee’s Valentine’s Day marketing with the Striped Puppy, in addition to redefining the meaning of “dog” in a particularly eye-catching way, the brand also incorporated fun, deliciousness, and interest into the event by launching co-branded products for re-creation. At the same time, the official interacted with users, allowing them to discover interesting points in the event. The users who were attracted to the event then spread the event on a large scale through Tik Tok, Xiaohongshu, and Weibo, allowing more people to discover Luckin’s event, resulting in a situation where co-branded products were in short supply, which led to phenomenal communication and boosted product sales.

Obviously, Luckin Coffee used the logic of social networking to attract users to buy spontaneously through interesting and fun elements, triggering the public's hands-on ability, and displaying them through their favorite social platforms, achieving secondary dissemination and attracting new customers for the brand.

02 Enhance user value and experience, and create a more distinguished identity

In addition to leveraging the communication logic of social media to get users to buy products, brands that know how to mobilize user emotions and enhance user experience know how to achieve co-creation of brand and user content by increasing user stickiness, influencing user consumption decisions, stimulating user sharing desires, and digging deep into brands after effective reach and exposure.

What quietly drives users’ spontaneous behavior is that brands enhance user value and experience.

For example, the reason why Haidilao is so popular among users is largely because of its ultimate service, which gives consumers supreme respect and makes users feel that their money is worth spending, making users willing to share Haidilao's service experience.

After Haidilao's service became widely known, some people began to wonder if Haidilao's service had any boundaries, and went to Haidilao to enjoy and dig deep into the brand's services. Once they found new and interesting service features, they spread them on the Internet, and Haidilao's ultimate service became a participant in content co-creation. The process of users enjoying Haidilao's services became a material for the public to show off their lifestyle, and also became an important part of brand communication.

The same as Haidilao's service mechanism is that the brand customizes high-end gift boxes for users. First, the brand gift boxes are given to regular customers of the brand, and secondly, customized gift boxes mean uniqueness and high appearance. With the dual blessing of these two factors, users are naturally willing to use brand gift boxes for secondary creation and sharing, showing their own sense of dignity and bringing new consumption and new users to the brand.

03 Build a strong interactive consumption scenario to achieve conversion growth

On social media, brands have built a purchasing path for users to watch, play and buy at the same time, allowing brands to complete the links of exposure, traffic and marketing conversion, invisibly turning those onlookers into product consumers and marketing communicators. What drives the user identity transformation is: being closely related to the interactive consumption scenario.

For example, in KFC's Crazy Thursday event, KFC uses every Thursday as a day for brand discount promotions. However, as users are immune to all kinds of promotional activities, KFC has taken a different approach by telling stories, jokes, and V-ing me XX yuan to build a strong interactive scene, transforming people who watch content into creators of brand content.

Moreover, the protagonists of this marketing scenario are not the brand and the user, but the user and his or her friends. Driven by the co-creation of content with multiple elements such as storytelling and fun, the aggregation of public domain traffic and private domain traffic is achieved. On the basis of helping brands create user awareness of promotions at fixed time nodes, the communication chain from exposure-traffic-conversion is completed.

Final Thoughts

In the era of social media, the essence of content co-creation is that users are given multiple identities, not only as consumers of brand products, but also as communicators and content creators of brand marketing. Because brands provide more interesting marketing methods, users are deeply involved and spontaneously create content. In addition, high-quality products and services that exceed consumer demand are promoted, which makes it easier for brands to tap into more consumer power and maximize user value.

It is not difficult to find that "exposure, seeding, buying, generating new users to post orders, and helping brands to expand" always runs through the entire conversion chain. In the future, what new ways of playing will be generated by content co-creation under social marketing? Let's wait and see.

Author: Mr. Bingfa

Source: WeChat public account "Marketing Art of War (ID: lanhaiyingxiao)"