Key digital trends for 2021

 Here are the seven digital trends for 2021.

1) Changes in B2B & B2C marketing strategies – Creating efficient strategies in lead generation and relationships

As well as engaging, social media now has to deliver sales results, and this is visible when a company begins to measure such results effectively. With the pandemic, some business models have been accelerated, such as online retail, click and collect, frictionless retail, and D2C e-commerce, changing the way companies position themselves to meet customer needs. Today, one of the basic principles of any content strategy is generating leads to build relationship with potential customers.

In the strategic domain, a big hit this year is expected to be big data-based natural language processing (NLP), which should help gain better understanding of the information obtained through big data systems and thus ease user interaction. Other highlights are the Data Warehouse (predictive, prescriptive, descriptive or diagnostic analytics) and Dark Data, which refer to all information that companies collect, process and store in the normal course of their activity, but are not intended for any other specific use.

2) Will 2021 be the year of AR and AI?

We are currently in the third wave of the Internet, a stage where Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are already part of all (or almost all) aspects of our lives. With these tools, brands can go beyond screens: they can experiment new formats and increase their creativity. However, like all new technology, using this resource requires a large investment in the development of prototypes.

Another factor pointing to the growth of Augmented Reality is the 5G technology, which should soon revolutionize how we connect with the Internet of Things (IoT). In the area of Artificial Intelligence (AI), we can expect a significant advance in technology being used to improve workflows and the buyer’s journey through personalization and hyper-personalization. In marketing, automation should go beyond naming the person to whom the message is directed; however, as artificial intelligence advances, some companies, such as content agencies, may probably be adversely affected.

3) Entertainment, Music, & Games – Creating online communities through influencers

It is often said that one of the paths to the future of social media is entertainment. However, several brands have difficulties in creating attractive content to their customers. An extremely viable solution is to team up with influencers who already do it very naturally. After all, real people connect with real stories, and nothing better than working with great opinion makers to bring entertainment to consumers who are increasingly demanding and seeking true connections.

Another big news is Spotify Studios , launched in 2020, which is aiming to include video podcasts. The gaming world is promising too: for instance, Fortnite has already performed several initiatives, such as including DC Comics characters in the game.

4) Flywheel – The clients are in the center

Several markets have used data captured in the digital environment and creating segment-oriented messages based on the user’s personal characteristics. Now it is time to have these data used not only by the marketing team but by the entire organization in a more strategical fashion aiming to design new products, services and solutions, and place the customer in the very center of all operations. Part of this change is related to the m-commerce, whereby purchase is made via cellphones. By the end of 2021, mobile devices are estimated to generate nearly 73% of the total e-commerce sale record, which entails that we need new digital strategies, especially content-centered strategies.

5) Engagement with purpose – Diversity and inclusion initiatives

Changing people’s lives through the enterprise’s activities is a growing trend in the market. Embracing diversity is currently a challenge for brands of which the public demands a more authentic position and long-term actions. Therefore, organizations should not decide to support a cause if they do not intend to live up to the expectations through actions. For example, if an organization is willing to invest in an LGBT-oriented campaign, it must ensure that its employees hold this ideal, provide job opportunities to this demographic, and treat LGBT people adequately. This is the only way for the campaign to be effective. This applies to any other topic of interest. Brands approaching diversity-related topics is a response to the constant changes in society, but it is necessary to be cautious and avoid superficial approaches.

6) New possibilities – Virtual Assistants, Twitch, TikTok, WhatsApp, Shoploop, & Kormo Jobs

Both voice search and use of virtual assistants such as Alexa and Siri should be taken into account in 2021. With the increasing use of voice search, brands are supposed to produce content aiming at these platforms. Twitch, which is widely used by the gaming community, has gained new audiences. Chinese social media TikTok already has offices in various parts of the world capable of designing solid strategies for brands. WhatsApp has promised to become an important sales tool, especially for small businesses.

The latest is Shoploop, a new video application that has come to compete with TikTok, but it has a more commercial focus that can truly benefit electronic commerce. This new project comes from Area 120, a Google department dedicated to innovation. For now, Shoploop is still in its trial phase, but another novelty, also from Google, that promises to draw attention in 2021 is Kormo Jobs, the Asian LinkedIn, Google’s newest professional tool. Already available in India, it promises to become the newest website connecting professionals worldwide.

7) Creative Talent – Senior professionals with a disruptive leader

With the increasing value of digital marketing over the past months, native advertising and programmatical advertising have joined forces, and now must work cooperatively. Having a team well directed by a manager with robust global experience and holistic vision is of essence. Having a well-aligned team delivering projects by the deadline is no longer enough; it is also necessary to innovate and be disruptive, to have the ability to leverage the social media and content team and assist the marketing professionals to make important decisions.

For example, in 2021 digital teams should create strategies for Bing and Yahoo! as alternatives to Google, and consider programmatical advertising for wearables, including the popular smartwatches. All that must be discussed and strategically lined-up with televised merchandising.

Web of Infamy| Smirnoff

This is no fairytale. It’s the true story of how Smirnoff became the world’s number one vodka. It exposed all 155 years of deception, revolution, exile, bankruptcy, and resurrection with an evidence wall on Instagram. 

A peek inside the brand’s illustrious past, littered with secrets hidden within videos, images, carousels, and gifs waiting to be uncovered. Things no brand would ever admit to.

Agency:  72andSunny New York

Client: Diageo

Country: United States

Hope is Power| The Guardian

 

Agency: Uncommon Creative Studio

Client: The Guardian

Country: United Kingdom

Hope is Power is the Guardian’s first brand campaign in seven years, and aims to restate the Guardian’s purpose and inspire readers around the world to support its journalism. 

The campaign’s central message is inspired by Guardian editor-in-chief Katharine Viner’s essay ‘A mission for journalism in a time of crisis’. The campaign seeks to build on the trust and affinity readers have with the Guardian and its role in giving people the facts to challenge the status quo, publish fresh ideas and opinions, and hold power to account.

Soffa Sans| IKEA UK

 

Agency: Proximity London

Client: IKEA UK

Country: United Kingdom

While on the lookout for ways to expose the hidden creativity in everything IKEA does, Proximity London found a group of people subverting the sofa planning tool for their own amusement; drawing spiral, labyrinthian and phallic sofas. In response they released the IKEA Soffa Sans font, built from 38 different sofa configurations using the planning tool. In 48hrs Soffia Sans generated 84.2m impressions and over 13,000 references on social. Organic traffic to the tool increased by 6,695% and the average time spent within the planning tool increased by 1,023%.

Grave of Thrones| Foxtel

 

Agency: DDB Sydney

Client: Foxtel

Country: Australia

Game of Thrones is one of the deadliest shows of all time, with over 100,000 characters having lost their lives since it began. These deaths have had a huge impact on fans, who genuinely mourn the characters they’ve grown to love over the years. So, to promote the final ever season, Foxtel, an Australian cable network, built a final resting place for these characters. Grave of Thrones, a live experiential media event, was an enormous cemetery featuring the tombs of the show's most popular characters. Over 40,000 fans made the pilgrimage to pay their respects.

6 Social Media Marketing Tactics That Give the Best Bang for Your Buck

 

There’s no shortage of social media marketing tactics to promote your brand online, but not all of them are efficient. As a social media marketer, you have a finite number of hours in the day and a finite budget to work with, not to mention pressure to get the best results possible. Social tactic “effectiveness” can be categorized in a few different ways, but one of the most important is a degree of efficiency — how effective is a certain tactic when compared to the effort it takes to execute?

These six social media marketing tactics offer some of the most “bang for your buck,” giving you the biggest impact and broadest return for the least amount of initial investment:

1. Content distribution. Hopefully, you’re already engaged in a content marketing strategy. If you aren’t, you need to get started — one of social media’s most powerful roles is as an outlet for promoting your published material. Whenever you publish a new post, use your social media channels to boost that post to the public. This will do a number of things for your brand — you’ll attract more initial traffic to your post, achieve more visibility (especially if that post is shared), and encourage more customer loyalty (especially with consistent updates), all of which can have indirect benefits toward improving your SEO. Best of all, it only takes a few minutes once your post is live.

2. Content re-distribution. Content distribution is about making a recent post available to more people, but content re-distribution is about maximizing the value of your older posts. It’s a good idea to keep a running list of all your “evergreen” content pieces, and re-post them on an occasional and rotating basis. This will help keep your social media profiles full of regular updates, and will maximize the long-term value of every evergreen post you produce. The trick is to time and frame your posts so your followers don’t get sick of seeing the same things over and over. Even doing so, this is not a time- or budget-intensive strategy.

3. Discussion engagement. Discussion can attract more people to your brand and keep them there for the long term. A new discussion in a newsfeed gives unfamiliar users the chance to get involved, and familiar users that engage in the discussion will feel they’re an even stronger part of your community, driving more traffic and conversions down the road. Your approach to discussion engagement should vary; sometimes, you might happen across an interesting industry-related discussion and throw your own opinions into the mix. Sometimes, you might come up with a discussion topic of your own and ask your audience about a topic directly.

4. Influencer marketing. Influencer marketing wins for sheer virtue of its potential. Though there are several potential tactics here, they all have the same basic function; you’ll engage an influencer in some way, and tap into their pre-existing levels of visibility, earning a better reputation for your brand and possibly gaining some of their followers through association. At 100,000 followers, even a 1 percent gain would mean 1,000 new followers for your brand. Your approach can be as simple or as complex as you want it to be; sometimes, even a basic action like sharing a post or replying to a question can be enough to earn you this visibility.

5. Live updates. The social media world is rapidly shifting toward real-time experiences, with platforms and technologies that support such in-the-moment posting capabilities. Your users want to know what’s happening right now, so why not give it to them? Live updates, in the context of a public forum or special event, can be extraordinarily powerful ways for you to engage with your customers — it gives them a first-person perspective of your company’s active participation, and it only takes you a few minutes per post to keep them in the loop.

6. Contests. Contests are effective because the promise of a prize or reward leads to more initial engagement, and users will be likely to share your material, giving it more potential visibility. This is especially powerful if your contest involves some means of user-based content generation, such as a photo submission contest. Either way, the money you’ll pay for a prize will pale in comparison to the visibility and reputation benefits you’ll reap.

Among the myriad social media tactics you can use, these ones will guarantee you some of the best overall returns on your time and monetary investment. Even though such a measure is hard to definitively calculate, you’ll find the power that these simple actions have for your campaign. While these shouldn’t be the only things you do in your social media marketing campaign, they should be ones that you prioritize. Keep them an integral part of your social media marketing strategy, and keep tabs on how your influence and reach develop over time.

Small Business SMM

If you own a small business, it seems like everyone is trying to get you to use social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are pushing hard for small businesses to embrace social media marketing.

Digital marketing gurus are spending big money to try and get you to spend big money on their social media marketing services.

You’ve probably already dabbled with social media marketing. You might have a Facebook business page. But, in your gut, you also suspect that social media is a bit of a scam.

You’re wrong.

Social media marketing isn’t a bit of a scam. Social media marketing is a complete scam for most small and medium-sized businesses.

What Does Social Media Marketing Mean?

Social media marketing is built around the concept of creating free content to build an audience. This is a time-tested strategy. But, social media marketing breaks this otherwise effective approach.

First, when you build an audience on social media, you aren’t creating an asset for your business. You are creating an asset for the company who owns the platform. If the social media platform goes under next month, your audience goes down with it. Social media platforms can, and do, change policies on a whim. What’s free today is pay-to-play tomorrow. Facebook pulled the rug out from under businesses several years ago making it impossible to reach your fans without paying to boost your posts.

Second, social media isn’t a great vehicle for selling. Look at any think piece about how businesses should use social media, and you will find that you should do more than just share your own content. You should be seen as a trusted authority or source or entertainment. But, it’s hard to make money just by being social and leaving a good impression.

But, as a small business, you cannot effectively monetize any of those metrics.

Social media marketing won’t lead to more sales for your small business. It will suck up all of your available time and money, leaving your frustrated and ready to quit anything having to do with online marketing.

Social media marketing is about creating posts to try and drive likes, shares, comments, and follows. But, as a small business, you cannot effectively monetize any of those metrics.

Pay-per-click advertising on social media is an entirely different beast from social media marketing. Paid advertising can be effective, but paid or free content marketing on social media platforms is a horrible investment for small businesses.

How Big Consumer Brands use Social Media

Big brands like Arby’s, McDonald’s, Target, and Ford spend a lot of money on social media marketing. These are smart companies. Why would they invest in something that doesn’t work?

They don’t.

What big brands want and get out of social media is different from what you want and what you get as a small business.

One of the marketing strategies big businesses employ is investing in brand recognition. They want people to associate their brand with specific emotions, life stages, and decisions. Big consumer brands don’t care about generating sales from social media. They care about leaving an impression.

These brands can afford this strategy because of their size, the number of different markets they are in, and because they are mostly focused on consumers.

You’re Not a Big Brand

Your small or medium business is not a big brand. You don’t have the budget or timeline to slowly build a desire for your products and brand over several years. You can’t afford to invest in brand recognition because you will get squashed by the competition.

Your company isn’t a big brand. You shouldn’t waste money trying to use their marketing strategies.

You need to focus on marketing strategies and tactics that actually make a difference to your bottom line instead of focusing on metrics that flatter your ego.

Boost Profits by Making Sales Not by Leaving an Impression

How much is a like worth to your business? How about a share or a follow? Here are the results of some back of the envelope math:

Likes = $0

Followers= $0

Leaving a good impression doesn’t generate one penny of revenue. If you want to boost profits, you have to sell more stuff. That’s how small businesses stay in business. They sell enough goods or services to pay all their bills and generate a level of profit.

You don’t have VCs backing you. You aren’t going to cash out in an IPO. You are going to have to get your cash the old-fashioned way, selling stuff people need or want.

While this seems like common sense, most social media marketers forget this fact. Think about what would happen if you suddenly had 10,000 real Facebook fans tomorrow. How would that affect your business?

It wouldn’t

You would still have to try and sell to those followers. How are you going to reach them? You can write a bunch of posts, but you will have to pay to boost those posts to get more than 5% of your fans to see them.

If you make all of those posts sales posts, you’ll start losing fans.

You’re in a no-win situation with social media.

No matter how much time and money you spend on social media, you still have to do the work of making a sale.

Instead of wasting your time and money on social media marketing, you should invest in three different tactics instead:

1. Paid advertising on social media platforms

2. Long tail SEO

3. Direct response email marketing

The exact way you deploy these tactics will vary depending on the specifics of your business. Business to business companies have different sales funnels than consumer-focused companies.

But, these tactics will help you connect with people eager to buy from you, and not just people looking to fill their feed with interesting articles.

Paid Advertising on Social Media Channels is Different

The real social media gold for small and medium businesses is in paid advertising. Writing and boosts is a slow, expensive, and inefficient way to attract paying customers.

Paid advertising cuts right to the heart of the matter. You get to ask your ideal customer directly to do something. It might just be to click on a link, but, it gets them off of social media and onto your website where you control the terms of engagement.

The biggest advantage of social media advertising is you can micro-target. You want to appeal to a very narrow set of people. When you use micro-targeting, it’s easy to talk directly to their needs. The customer can feel that you speak their language. They are excited to see how you can deliver the one thing they most want or need.

Paid advertising should be used to send customers to a specific landing page, and not just your website. You want to send them to a place where they can buy a specific product or service, or you want to send them to a landing page where you can capture their email address in return for something of value.

Advertising leads to direct sales, or it allows you to build a list of contacts that you can continue to market to, through methods you control like physical mail or email.

Paid social media advertising is one of the best ways to rapidly drive sales. Most businesses can see significant results in spending as little as $5 a day in social media advertising. But, you will have to invest time and money into testing ads and audiences. Paid advertising isn’t a silver bullet, but unlike social media marketing, it does deliver real results and generates a measurable return on investment.

Using Long tail SEO

Paid advertising is excellent for driving traffic and generating fast sales in the short term. But, if you want to build your business for the long term, you need other tools.

Long-tail SEO can provide you with small, steady profits that gradually increase the longer you are in business.

The goal with long-tail SEO is that you are driving organic traffic from search engines to your product or service pages. People who are looking to buy what you’re selling will find you. Long-tail SEO isn’t sexy like social media marketing. It takes hard work and a lot of patience. But, it delivers.

Long-tail SEO is about creating thousands of sales pages on your website that each generates a little bit of money each month.

Advantages of Direct Response Email Marketing

Email marketing is the most cost-effective form of digital marketing. It costs almost nothing to send an email campaign. When done right, you can generate thousands or tens of thousands of dollars just by sending out an optimized sales sequence to your list.

But, for this tactic to work, you have to build a high-quality list of prospects and customers, and you need to master direct response marketing.

Direct response marketing means that you ask your prospect to take a specific, measurable action. It might be buying something. It might be signing up for a free webinar.

The goal is to persuade your prospect to take one action that brings them closer to making a purchase.

Direct response marketing is a multi-billion-dollar subspecialty of marketing. It works.

When you combine paid advertising, long-tail SEO, and direct response email marketing you turn your small or medium business into a selling powerhouse.

None of these steps are easy. But, they are all simple. You will see results with each one, even before you have mastered the tactic. Each of these tactics makes it easy for you to measure your results. You can easily calculate your return on investment.

This is critical because you need good data to run effective experiments.

You only have so much time as the owner of a business. Don’t waste a second of it on social media marketing.

Instead, focus on marketing that gets results you can measure. Focus on tactics that put money in your pocket through sales instead of tactics that give you a dopamine hit from likes and shares.

You can’t pay bills with dopamine.

Instagram Giveaway| Sunny Co Clothing

Clothing retail startup “Sunny Co Clothing,” founded by two college seniors at the University of Arizona, figured creating a swimsuit giveaway would be the best way to get the word out there about their new brand. 

By reposting their photo with a specific hashtag, social media users would be entitled to a “free” swimsuit in exchange for their post — in addition to the company donating $1 to the Alzheimer’s Foundation for each one.

Overnight, their Instagram following jumped from 7,000 to 784,000. More than 346,000 people took up their offer, forcing them to cap the promotion at 50,000 units.

Let’s do the math: 50,000 units x $12 = $600,000.

No, that’s not a typo. The campaign grossed over $600,000 in 24 hours.

It was so unexpectedly popular they had to issue almost $73,000 in refunds because they couldn’t meet demand.

This spawned a slew of articles calling the campaign a failure. One writer even thought that it belonged in the same category as the infamous Fyre Festival.

But if these publications had just paused to think, they might’ve realized they were missing the big picture.

Inventory issues aside, the real story was that two college students generated more revenue in one day than many businesses do in a year. And they did it with effectively $0 in ad spend.








They’re not losing any money — they’re making it

Of the thousands of people posting all over the internet about this matter — the majority of them failed to give the site a visit and realize you still had to pay handling charges, although the item itself is technically “free.” While this is certainly a gray area of marketing ethics, it’s nothing new.

The folks over at Loretti Watches have been running their entire business on this model for over a year. Pay a small shipping and handling fee, and get the product for “free.” In fact, many of the top clients we produce scroll-stopping creative and strategy for at VAXA Digital follow this same business model.

What most consumers don’t realize is that these products are manufactured so cheap they can be produced and shipped for less than the shipping “cost” they’re charged. This is especially true in the clothing industry, where items (such as bathing suits) can be easily manufactured overseas for nothing more than a few dollars. This absurdly high margin is then used to cover advertising, overhead, and wasted product at the end of a season/trend.

In this specific example, Sunny Co Clothing charged their customers a $13 shipping fee after applying their promo code to reduce their $70 bathing suit down to $0. From a marketing psychology perspective, the consumer feels as if they’ve gotten such a discount that this nominal charge is normal and worth it.

From that amount, subtract $5 to manufacturer and fulfill the item, $6 to actually ship it, $1 for the Alzheimer’s donation, and they’re left with $1–2 of net profit for every suit sold — which brings me to my next point: how many did they actually sell?








Link: https://www.instagram.com/p/B_24HOdjfzM/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Truth is, there’s a lot to learn from their campaign, so let’s mine some nuggets of wisdom.

In this article, I’m going to break down key lessons you can apply to your own marketing strategies. Then, I’ll provide a template you can use to recreate their success.

Nothing Sunny Co did was revolutionary — it was simply well executed. And if you follow the principles they used, you too can become an overnight sensation.

How Much Was Profit?

First, let’s take a closer look at the numbers.

Unless you manufacture your own goods, the only way you can promise a swimsuit for $12 is by buying in bulk to keep costs low.

In light of this, it’s likely Sunny Co sourced their product from an overseas supplier.

I did a quick search on Alibaba and found a similar swimsuit that costs $6.10/unit (when ordering over 100).

Let’s assume they were able to negotiate down to $3/unit, given they ordered 50,000 pieces.

In 2017, you could ship a seven-ounce package across the U.S. for about $3 via USPS First Class.

Factor in $0.50 for packaging/branding and $0.70 for payment processing fees and that brings total costs to $7.20.

Estimated profit = $12 - $7.20 = $4.80/unit.

We know they ended up issuing roughly $73,000 in refunds. But assuming they could tell the future and adequately planned their supply chain, they would’ve raked in over $240,000 in profit in 24 hours.

Wow.

Why It Worked

Three key factors:

1.“Free” turns heads

Want to command attention?

Offer something for free.

Caveat: as we saw above, Sunny Co used the word “free” fairly liberally. In any other context, $12 shipping for a single swimsuit is outrageous.

Nevertheless, it’s likely many customers realized this and still wanted in, especially when compared alongside a $64.99 retail price.

The real takeaway here is that people love the idea of “free,” even if it’s merely framed as such.

2. Urgency sells

If “free” grabs the audience’s attention, limited time offers give them no choice but to respond.

Sunny Co took advantage of this by restricting their campaign to 24 hours, which persuaded their audience to jump on board right away.

There’s nothing worse than missing out on a chance to grab something for free because you waited too long to act.

3. Relevant content converts

This campaign went viral for a reason.

Points 1 and 2 are critical, but they would’ve fallen flat if the Instagram image wasn’t appealing to their audience.

That wasn’t an issue for the Sunny Co team, because they chose an image that:
Looked like an Instagram post their target audience would typically make (not a spammy ad).
Incorporated their target audience’s interests (warm weather and swimming pools).
Used colors associated with excitement (ie. red).

These elements ensured their campaign got noticed.

Template: How to Make $600,000 in 24 Hours

Here’s how you can recreate Sunny Co’s success.

Step 1: Source a product on Alibaba.

Find a product you can:
White label and rebrand.
Charge the unit cost + shipping cost + desired profit as “shipping.”

To figure out the second part, first, determine your total costs.

For example, these blue light blocking glasses cost $1.80 per unit. You can ship them anywhere across the U.S. for roughly $3 via USPS First Class. That puts your total cost at $4.80.

Next, determine the maximum amount a customer would pay for shipping on the item.

If you sell the benefits properly (ie. blue light blocking glasses prevent headaches), I think you could persuade an audience to pay up to $8 for “shipping.”

That leaves you with $8-$4.80=$3.20 in profit.

Step 2: Order samples. Inspect for quality and reliability.

This step is a must and will save you from the terror of issuing mass refunds due to quality complaints down the road.

Pay attention to the supplier’s reviews regarding fulfillment times. Make sure they can handle large order volumes in a timely manner.

Step 3: Set up a Shopify store. Create an eye-catching image for social media.

As we discussed earlier, it’s important that your image doesn’t look like an ad and is relevant to your audience’s interests.

I strongly suggest including a human being in your image. After all, humans relate best to other humans.
Step 4: Set up a time-limited repost campaign. Ask everyone you know to post about it, or buy shout-outs from large themed accounts.

Your campaign should look something like this:

“For the next X hours, everyone who reposts this image on Instagram and tags us in the post will get a free [product]. Must be following us to be eligible.”

Sunny Co ran their campaign for 24 hours. You can run yours for however long you want.

Just keep in mind: shorter campaigns create more urgency, which yields better results.

If you have an existing following or an active social circle you can leverage, you may be able to pull this off with $0 ad spend.

If not, DM themed accounts on Instagram and buy at least $500 worth of ads.
Step 5: Go viral and profit.

There are a lot of variable components here, like how good your branding is, how appealing your product is, and how attractive your images are.

So it goes without saying your results will vary.

But as Sunny Co demonstrated, knowing your audience stacks the odds in your favor. Hit on all the right points with your branding and messaging and there’s no reason you can’t experience a similar level of success.



Understanding the Framework

At the end of the day, the key is understanding the power of the “free for a limited time” model.

In the brick and mortar days, companies used this method to get visitors to their store. Their goal was to get customers to also buy other items while they were there, which is how they made money.

In today’s global economy, however, it’s now possible to make money directly off the product you’re “giving away,” because many products can be sourced from overseas for pennies on the dollar.

The entire Internet just advertised for them — and still is

Most of us have heard the adage, “No publicity is bad publicity.” While there are some cases this certainly isn’t true (looking at you, United Airlines), that’s not the case with this situation.

Within 24 hours of starting the contest, thousands of major Instagram/Twitter influencers were posting about this — whether paid shout-outs or simply memes making fun of everyone else posting.

Before long, hundreds of major news accounts began covering the story, and hundreds of thousands of comments were being left about the giveaway — both good and bad. Regardless, this company was certainly now in the spotlight of both consumers and other massive brands (and maybe even the FTC), meaning ridiculous amounts of traffic were being sent their way.

Regarding the potential FTC attention, the one area Sunny Co Clothing poorly executed was delivering a clear and consistent set of terms and conditions for the contest, as some screenshots suggest they changed their terms multiple times during the giveaway process:

Take a look at Rule #3, stating “…we reserve the right to cap the promotion if deemed necessary.” Given this was not clearly stated at the beginning of the contest, this could certainly raise some questions from the feds, especially after the FTC’s recent announcement to crack down on unethical social media advertising practices.

Targeted demographic data and followers will be invaluable

Potential fines aside, it’s clear that the real win here for Sunny Co Clothing wasn’t in the relatively small amount of money they made, but rather the data they collected from a highly targeted niche of women interested in buying clothing online — specifically swimsuits.

Considering that the going rate in 2017 for targeted email lists is between $200–400 CPM (cost per mille, or thousand impressions), with even 50,000 email addresses collected they’re looking another $10,000 minimum for every business they sell those to. When dealing with large retail brands, such as Victoria’s Secret, this cost is something marketing teams are willing to pay at the drop of a hat.

Now, what about that massive Instagram following? While “shout outs” and influencer marketing promos have been around for a few years now, they’ve certainly become popular with massive brands more recently — raking in some massive cashflows for those in charge of these accounts.

Given that the going rate for an “influencer” page to create a post promoting someone else’s product or service is about $1 per 1,000 followers (based on my experience in the industry), the folks over at Sunny Co Clothing are looking at a minimum of $700 for EVERY single promoted post. Even if they only posted one a day, that could equate to over $250,000 a year.

Worst-case scenario, even if Sunny Co Clothing somehow goes under as a result of this stunt, there’s nothing stopping them from selling their Instagram account on the “black market” (given it’s against Instagram’s terms of service) for an outrageous amount of money. Knowing their engagement and number of active followers, they would easily be able to pull in anywhere from $30–50k for an account of that size.

In the end — was it a win?

While they’ve yet to stand the true test of time and begin fulfilling these orders, Sunny Co Clothing certainly has the potential to pull off a massive “W” as a result of this scenario. Even if they were to be hit with massive FTC fines and forced to close their “doors,” they’re set up now with a large number of cash-positive exit strategies resulting from their massive social media following.

The major takeaway here is that viral marketing and growth hacking social media is certainly not dead — you just need a bit of strategy and good luck. Even with major follower-building tools such as Instagress recently shut down, digital marketers are still left with plenty of opportunities to grow their brands’ followings.

With that said, don’t be surprised if you see a large number of strategy copycats popping up over the coming weeks, such as this towel company (who were smart enough to cap the number of giveaway items at least):

In the Wild Wild West of Instagram, it’s not surprising they even stole their photo:

As mentioned earlier, this marketing strategy is nothing new, and certainly presents opportunities for retailers with cheaply produced goods to creatively target new consumers. However, bear in mind that a good number of people will now realize that pair of “luxury” sunglasses you normally sell for $79 only costs you a few bucks to produce.