Marketers are constantly trying to find new ways and means to connect with their customers and have begun to turn to moment marketing to get their message across with more relevance. Brands have been prudent in making use of the trends to catch peoples’ attention for a long time, as you’ll see in the examples below. But first,
What is Moment Marketing?
Moment marketing is the ability to take advantage of ongoing events and create communications & marketing collaterals around such events. This is used by brands to insert themselves in the ongoing conversations that bring relevance to how they market.
Now, what exactly makes moment marketing work?
Two reasons,
- Customers are already part of the 24/7 news cycle, thanks to the immediacy and richness of content available today on demand.
- Brands want to insert themselves into the daily conversations of their users, and since people talk about trends, making use of these trends automatically removes the brands’ guesswork.
People are always plugged in and just a few taps away from finding and forwarding the latest content, be it a meme, a viral video, a social media post, or a tweet. In fact, half of YouTube subscribers between the ages of 18 and 34 say they would drop whatever they were doing to watch a new video from their favorite channel.
In this article, we will quickly go over why you should consider incorporating moment marketing into your arsenal, give you a few insights into what makes for good moment marketing, share moment marketing examples, and draw your attention to brands that are doing it well.
- Why you ought to consider Moment Marketing?
- Moment Marketing > Interruption Marketing
- How Marketing Automation tools can help you land your message right?
- Ways to design a Moment Marketing campaign that works
Why you ought to consider Moment Marketing?
If you are no longer satisfied with rolling out predictable, standardized campaigns and want to move away from generic messaging to reach your target audience, consider using moment marketing to build memorable communication around popular events and trending topics.
These are campaigns that brands create by hijacking a trending topic and weaving clever content around it. Brands aim to catch people’s attention by becoming part of a conversation around a trend.
A Deloitte digital trend report defined moment marketing as “The ability to take advantage of an event to deliver relevant and related, seemingly spontaneous, and often fleeting interactions with customers in real-time.”
What makes moment marketing different from other approaches is its requirement for both agility and accuracy.
A lot of marketers struggle to move quickly enough to disseminate timely messages on multiple channels, while some others struggle with the creative back and forth required to go to market with a relevant and on-brand campaign. But those who are able to do both are assured of riding the wave of consumer attention.
Here are 3 distinct ways in which moment advertising could be helpful to you.
- Embracing the moment and publishing creatives that cleverly riff on whatever is happening in the world at a given moment certainly gives you an edge as a marketer allowing you to stand out and be memorable.
- Joining the conversation in this manner can make your brand familiar.
- Becoming a part of people’s newsfeeds organically ensures that your marketing message reaches them when they are most receptive and willing to listen or interact.
Moment Marketing > Interruption Marketing
Moment marketing wins over traditional interruption marketing because, unlike a typical TV commercial or skippable YouTube ad, brand communications that reference current TV shows, events, or news, feel less forced and artificial and more real and engaging.
80% of people dislike pre-roll video, and 82% of people have closed a web page because of an auto-playing video ad. Click To TweetPeople are more likely to ignore a non-contextual salesy message or get annoyed by a pushy ad that interrupts their day. Why then run the risk with a direct plug or cookie-cutter ad when you can start off a friendly conversation with your target audience instead?
But reaching the right customers, on the right channels, with just the right message, can be a challenging task. This is where marketing automation software can help!
How Marketing Automation Tools Can Help You Land Your Message Right?
Event-oriented, agile campaigns were hard to pull off until now. But a surge of new, automated platforms is now offering brands a suite of sophisticated tools to help them launch campaigns effortlessly, quickly, and efficiently. Today, there are far fewer limitations on how quickly or by how much you can scale your business without hiring a full-fledged creative agency or without a large team of in-house resources.
For instance, brands can now go live with digital ad campaigns and build 1000s of professional-looking banner ads or even videos in mere minutes, using easy-to-use image and video automation tools. Marketers with absolutely zero technical know-how can create complex cross-channel engagement campaigns using simple drag-and-drop editors of marketing automation platforms. These platforms even help in creating trigger-based lifecycle campaigns to send out highly contextual messages & collaterals based on specific user actions and events.
Now that we have talked about how you can go about the creative production and marketing automation problem let us take a look at some creative approaches to moment marketing and the brands that made it work.
How to design a Moment Marketing campaign that works
Here are some moment marketing ideas and examples of timely, relevant, and personalized marketing that managed to grab consumer attention while reinforcing the core brand proposition.
Seize the time
Durex, notorious for conjuring moment marketing ingenuity time and again, dropped a brilliant post to celebrate the successful landing of India’s space rover – Chandrayaan-3 on the Moon’s south pool, also known as the dark side of the Moon. The creative clearly communicates the product’s benefits with a clever pun and a hashtag.
Keep sales at the center of your campaigns
Make sure your communication ties back into your product offerings so you can spur sales. For instance, Target was prepared to take advantage of the buzz around who wore what during a previous edition of the Emmys and helped customers shop Tina Fey’s look by drawing attention to specific pieces available in-store and online.
Use humor
Brands acquire a loyal following by putting out content that captures their brand personality consistently. Netflix does a good job of channelling its sassiness with always-on-point, tongue-in-cheek humor sparking spontaneous conversations with their audience. And they never forget to use customized marketing to suit local tastes, like here.
Create event-led or occasion-specific communication
Adidas roped in 56 of the world’s biggest names from the world of sport and entertainment and attempted to re-engineer how advertising is delivered with a highly personalized video campaign around the FIFA World Cup. The ‘Create The Answer’ campaign featured one long video that could be chopped into multiple narratives, chosen to be shown to customers based on their profiles.
Ryan Morlan, Vice President of Brand Communications at Adidas said, “We are co-creating our story of sport and creativity with our consumers by reacting and responding to their preferences, attitudes, passions, and geographies. Athletes in New York will get a different experience from those in London.”
Ride the pop culture wave
Money-Heist was a global sensation, and Chai Point jumped on the bandwagon by incorporating its brand name as well as its most unique offering – Chai into the show’s impactful war cry, “Bella Ciao”. Riding the pop culture wave is an excellent way to grab customer attention and build virality into content.
Make use of existing memes or make your own
According to Google Trends, “memes” are becoming a more popular search term than “Jesus”, so God save you if you are still unconvinced about the power of meme marketing. Memes are a great way to reach millennials who spend over 200 minutes online daily. These same millennials also hate traditional advertising, so using memes to make people laugh with a casual reference to your brand is a great way of getting your customer’s attention without getting obvious and overly promotional. Like Zomato, here.
Stay true to your core brand message
Don’t run the risk of diluting your brand message or compromising on values you stand for in order to chase an event, a season, or a micro-moment.
For instance, Patagonia separates itself from other brands by pointedly staying away from offering a Black Friday sale. In this example, the brand, which stands for conscious buying, urged people to NOT buy during Black Friday to drive home their point against mindless consumerism. Instead, They used this occasion to draw attention to their commitment to environmental sustainability, thus scoring more points with their loyal fan base.
Source: Pinterest
Engage in banter
Brands are known to engage in good-natured banter, have clever comebacks, and engage in Twitter wars to keep audiences hooked. These instances also help brands earn press coverage and seed PR articles. See how Kitkat invited Oreo to a playoff to win a fan’s attention in this tweet below.
Put customers first
Brands that genuinely care for their customers and put people first win in the long run. Now that the world is in the grips of the Corona pandemic, many brands have come forward to put out responsible messages and do good for the community at large. This is a great way to cultivate customer loyalty that will outlast tough times.
Executive Creative Director of Global PR heavyweight, The Romans, Joe Mackay-Sinclair says, “Creativity has never been more vital […] When 99 percent of the news is about one subject, how do you possibly cut through without an idea? Social media usage is through the roof. Despite (or because of) the crisis, we’ve never craved conversation and connection more, and that’s got to be a huge opportunity for brave clients looking to weather the storm.”
But the key for all brand communication at the moment is “Not to appear like creative ambulance chasers,” warns Kev O’Sullivan of award-winning British agency FleishmanHillard Fishburn. He cautions that brands should stay away from trying to exploit this opportunity to drive sales and cautions communication heads to be sensitive, empathetic, and respectful.
For instance, Burger King does this well by changing up a sign in Belgium urging their customers to stay home and practice social distancing.
Source: Twitter
Don’t try too hard
And lastly, don’t try too hard. Customers can smell fakery a mile away, and brands that try and force a topical connection or try to exploit a moment for its promotional potential get swiftly called out on social media. So try and stay authentic and keep it real!
Source: Twitter
To wrap up,
These were the best moment marketing examples, and ongoing campaigns by some of the world’s biggest brands just go to show that moment marketing is much more than a fad and a phenomenon that is here to stay. For smart marketers, moment marketing can help them reach out to a large number of customers spontaneously and at a low cost. This could help them improve recall and form a deeper connection with audiences over the long term.
Moment marketing is just one of the more impactful ways to engage users. There are countless engagement strategies to hold your users’ attention and get them to stay with your brand, which is something WebEngage specializes in.
If you’re someone who’d love a test drive of the platform, book a free demo with us and learn how to engage your users.
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Diksha Dwivedi 
Kasturi Patra 