Situational marketing is the brand’s response to an information guide in a public, political, technological or other field that is close to the target audience. It is relevant because it helps:
- increase the number of sales;
- Increase the loyalty of the target audience to the brand;
- increase the coverage of posts;
- increase brand awareness;
- provoke communication with subscribers;
- cause resonance and discussion.
Competent situational marketing allows you to “stir” subscribers or customers, bring them to a dialogue, draw attention to a product, service or brand. Therefore, it is an effective sales tool. For example, one of the earliest examples of situational marketing is the post of TM “Oreo”, released on February 3, 2013. Then in the US at the stadium during the game of the National Championship the lights went out, and the creators wrote a post that later got to the pages of Forbes and Mashable.
Introduction of situational marketing
An information guide for situational marketing can be absolutely any event that is interesting for your target audience – from the expected end of the world to a loud political statement. Select the categories of information guides should be based on the interests of Central Asia. By the way, you can follow up-to-date news in RSS-aggregators, news aggregators or special services that track popular topics in social networks – for example, in SmmBox.
Info Pots for situational marketing can be:
The coming holidays. Many companies beat Victory Day, Valentine’s Day, March 8, Defender of the Fatherland Day and many other holidays. And before the New Year, situational marketing is used literally by everyone who is not too lazy: garlands and Christmas trees appear in offices, pre-Christmas campaigns on the sites, and bright congratulations on social networks. One of the most successful examples of situational marketing before the holiday is the annual pre-New Year’s advertising of Coca-Cola.
Popular news . You can work with both positive and negative: the main thing is to choose the right format of publications and pick up a really sensational information guide that will advertise itself. For example, you can discuss with the subscribers the upcoming increase in the minimum wage – this is good news, it is known to everyone, but many do not have much hope for the upcoming increase. Therefore, the information guide will cause discussion. Or you can use negative news – for example, to join the stars of show business and express condolences to the relatives of those killed in the fire in the shopping center “Winter Cherry” in Kemerovo. Naturally, you need to choose the relevant news that came out no more than a week ago.
The output of a popular song and / or clip . Some songs and clips scatter on social networks in just a few hours. For example, it was with an unusual clip to the song “Melting Ice”. Some still use in advertising a little altered lines from the song, its name or the main motif of the clip.
Political events. Politics is spoken about in practically all mass media, therefore the overwhelming part of the target audience knows the actual news. This can be used to your advantage – for example, invite readers to discuss the latest news, talk about it, or link it to the product. For example, you can use media coverage of the election of the President of the Russian Federation – before them and on the day of their holding.
Social events . To promote the brand, service or product, you can also use any news of the social sphere, which cause a wide public response.
How to plan and create situational content
It’s almost impossible to plan loud information guides, of course, if you do not create them yourself. Therefore, it is impossible to make all positions of situational marketing in the content-plan. The only thing you can do is:
- Leave in the content plan for a place for situational posts for holidays – all-Russian, for example, the New Year – or thematic, for example, the International Pizza Day.
- Leave the content plan for a place for situational posts once a day, once a week or once a month, and publish such content only these days.
- To create a content plan with information, entertainment and training posts and use situational marketing outside the content plan, with the appearance of a good information guide.
When there was a good information guide, the main thing is to quickly create thematic content. Speed and originality are the basic principles of developing situational posts in marketing. After all, the more readers will see the same news, the less they will pay attention to it, so the main traffic gets the fastest. And the rest of the traffic – to those who managed to present the original information guide.
To put it simply, the main principles of creating situational posts are:
- Find a quality information guide. Choose the events that have “thundered” throughout the country, or the narrow news, interesting Central Asia – for example, the story of holding a conference on medicine while promoting the portal for doctors.
- Associate the information guide with the product. You can do it in different ways – for example, tell about why your product is suitable for this situation, or talk about the holiday and offer a service to it. You can not associate with the brand, but then the return will be lower.
- Create original content. Write good text, paint a vivid picture or remove an attractive video. Read more about the basic principles of creating effective content in our other articles.
Depending on the brand promotion strategy, product features and the type of information guide, you can use different types of situational content. For example, publish:
Fasting with share . The stocks are good because they can be tied to almost any event – for example, to the news, the release of a new song, the upcoming holiday.
Congratulation or postcard . Congratulate with the upcoming holiday a cheerful and bright postcard. Wish the target audience love, health, money or anything that you can wish for.
Styling of the product, post, avatar, logo . Publish the modified logo, thematic picture to the post, updated avatar. Or stylize the product itself under the information guide.
Quest, game, test. Think of a simple online game related to the information guide, and invite subscribers or visitors to go through it.
Text, in which there is a link to the information guide . In it, you can advertise the product, tell more about the service or simply offer to discuss the information guide.
Analysis of the effectiveness of situational marketing
Today there are no precise KPI metrics , created specifically for situational marketing. Therefore, its effectiveness is monitored in various ways, for example:
- compare the coverage of a regular post with the coverage of the post of situational marketing by the number of views;
- consider conversion of a page with published thematic content;
- compare the number of reports of usual posts and thematic publications;
- consider the number of calls to the company on the first day or week after the publication of situational content;
- count the number of company mentions in social networks or on other resources after publication.
This helps to assess the effectiveness of situational marketing and continue to develop it in the right direction. To select metrics it is necessary, proceeding from a format of publications – for example, for a site calculation of conversion is appropriate, for social networks – comparison of coverage of posts.
And do you use situational marketing and how do you create posts? Share your experience in the comments!
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