6 standout social media marketing examples to inspire your strategy
There are so many different ways to see success on social media. With a plethora of platforms and strategies to test out, pinpointing the best strategy for your business can be a daunting task.
The 2019 Sprout Social Index found that the number one challenge for social marketers is the process of developing successful social media strategies to support business goals, with 47% of marketers stating that they found it difficult to develop these strategies.
With so many platforms and tactics to choose from, sometimes it’s best to start by looking to other brands for social media marketing inspiration. The following social media strategy examples should give you plenty of inspiration to help you ramp up your social media strategy.
1. User-Generated Content – Cupshe, TheEverygirl, Lush and Essie
User-generated content is all about sharing photos and posts that your customers have created for you. It makes your own content planning much easier and can play a large role in creating a compelling social strategy.
This is because user-generated content helps to really engage and build a community around a brand. People are happy and excited to share photos of their products if they think the business might see it, and especially if they might share it.
This helps your business’s marketing strategy in a multitude of ways. First of all, you’re not having to create as many assets, take as many photos or spend as much time on content creation when your customers are doing that for you. Second of all, you’re interacting with your customers on a personal level when you share their photo on your business’s feed.
And finally, you’re building a bigger audience when your customers share photos of your products and tag your business in them. Sounds like a win-win situation to me!
One brand that’s really killing it with their user-generated content is Cupshe. Cupshe is a swimsuit brand that focuses almost exclusively on user-generated content in their Instagram strategy.
First things first, they let their followers know exactly how to be featured: by tagging @cupshe in their photos.
For your own brand, you can emulate this strategy by following two different methods: either through tagging or through hashtags.
The Everygirl is another great social media marketing example of a brand that uses a hashtag to collect user-generated content. This brand is a publication and they don’t have products, so this is a great way for The Everygirl to collect lifestyle content from their audience.
Lush Cosmetics is another brand that uses a hashtag for its user-generated content campaigns. Within Lush Cosmetics’ instagram bio, they ask followers to “Share your #LushLife with us!” This encourages fans to submit their own content directly to Lush through the #LushLife Instagram hashtag.
For the brand, when users include #LushLife as a hashtag on their posts, the brand is able to see a collection of all user-generated content in one place.
Essie is another standout social media strategy example for user-generated content. The brand does a great job in asking Instagram followers to tag the brand for a chance to be featured. This strategy is useful because it enables your business to easily collect user-generated content, as well as provides followers with a simple way to see all tagged photos directly from your Instagram profile.
If your business has a visually appealing or popular product, give user-generated content a try in your social media marketing strategy. It’s a great way to create a community around your business and grow your audience.
Build out your content calendar with Sprout
Work collaboratively to plan out your content in advance with the Sprout calendar.
Build out your entire campaign by drafting and saving posts as a team, including images and hashtags.
You can save even more time to plan future content by scheduling each post to publish automatically. Try a free 30-day trial today.
We all love some good brand humor – and Twitter is the perfect place to find it. It’s no secret that brands love to have some fun on the microblogging platform, and MoonPie has established itself as a fan favorite.
When it comes to creating a successful Twitter presence for your business, it’s imperative to insert some personality into your tweeting. With only 280 characters per post, you have to give each one as much oomph as you’ve got.
And MoonPie has this down to an art by injecting authentic humor into their marketing strategy.
When working on a Twitter marketing strategy, ask yourself: what makes someone want to follow an account? By considering the audience, you will be able to indicate the edge that your brand can offer to get Twitter users to follow your brand.
If you are looking to enhance social media engagement on Twitter, taking a humorous approach can be especially effective. In fact, the latest Sprout Social Index found that 67% of consumers surveyed stated that they are most willing to like entertaining social media content, and 55% of consumers stated that they are most likely to share entertaining content. Take a look at MoonPie’s tweets. They’re tweeting and engaging consistently, putting an emphasis on quality over quantity. When there’s a relevant holiday, MoonPie will find ways to jump on it. When there’s a trending topic or meme going around the platform, they will repurpose it in a way that incorporates the moon or eating a MoonPie.
Whether you’re working to come up with humorous one-liners or updating a meme to make it relevant to your business, it’s important to really hone in on the personality and brand voice that you’ve created for your business’s Twitter account.
MoonPie continues to demonstrate the effectiveness of humorous content throughout their Twitter feed. This strategic approach has enhanced their overall engagement on social and has built a following for the MoonPie brand through the essence of humor.
Build out your content calendar with Sprout
Work collaboratively to plan out your best social media content in advance with the Sprout calendar.
Build out your entire campaign by drafting and saving posts as a team, including images and hashtags.
You can save even more time to plan future content by scheduling each post to publish automatically.
3. Cross-Channel Marketing – Casper
Cross-channel marketing or multi-channel marketing is the practice of using multiple channels to reach an audience. Because not everyone uses every single platform, it’s a good idea to have a presence on a few, and share some of the same content across the different networks.
Casper does a great job of this. But what I love most about their marketing is their choice of platforms.
Of course, they’re using your basics like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. But I’m especially loving their clever use of Spotify, YouTube and IGTV to showcase their brand new Casper Sleep Channel.
Finding unique ways to really stand out among the competition is key to a successful digital marketing strategy. For example, their new Casper Sleep Channel is filled with soothing sounds that help their customers drift soundly to sleep. All while sleeping on their Casper mattress, naturally.
The company shares each new Sleep Channel episode on all three video/music platforms (Spotify, YouTube & IGTV) while also promoting a teaser on their other social media profiles. This is the perfect way to generate buzz around their sleep channel, increase their following on other platforms and cross-promote their best social content.
Cross promoting content may seem like a time-intensive task, but utilizing a social media management tool will make it easy.
Sprout Social’s publishing feature enables social media managers to effectively plan and schedule cross-channel content in a timely manner. Learn more about Sprout’s publishing features here.
You know the old adage: a picture is worth 1,000 words. This is why visuals are so important in any marketing strategy. You can talk about a product all day, but until you’re able to put it in front of someone’s eyes, it’s not going to have nearly the same effect.
Square Sayings is a visual representation of one such brand. They’ve created promotional products like phone cases, hats, t-shirts and more, based on their beautiful beaded graphics.
Their Instagram feed is a cohesive grid of multi-colored “square sayings”, and their products match each message perfectly. Each new post shares a different, highly relatable quote, and they turn their most popular posts into merch.
Powerful visuals help sell products by enticing the prospective consumer to make a purchase. Square Sayings demonstrates the success of this by putting an emphasis on their visuals within their social content.
5. Shopping on Instagram – See Jane Work
Year after year, social media platforms get more and more involved in selling products. This is, of course, great for business. The easier it becomes to sell products, the more revenue a company generates.
Instagram shopping is just one of the ways that your business can make it even easier for a customer to buy. You first need to make sure you’ve switched to a business Instagram account and connected your business’s Facebook Page before enabling Instagram shopping.
Once you’ve gotten your setup done, you should be tagging your products in every photo they appear.
This is exactly how See Jane Work manages their Instagram shopping strategy. A shoppable post is denoted with a small white shopping bag icon in the corner, and as you can see in their feed below, it’s more common to find a shoppable post than not.
Since they’re sharing photos containing their own products, they’re being sure to directly tag each one. If a user is checking out their Instagram feed and sees a product that they just have to have, it’s incredibly easy to go immediately to that product page on the website to make a purchase.
All users have to do is tap on the photo to view the featured products, tap on the product of their choosing, then click to view it on the website.
Instagram is working to add payment options directly in the app as well, so users won’t even have to leave the platform to make a purchase. This makes shopping on Instagram much easier for consumers, which in turn helps the brand increase sales.
6. Facebook Chatbot Marketing – TechCrunch
It was wildly exciting news in the digital marketing industry when Facebook announced it would be integrating chatbots into its Messenger feature.
At first, there were only a handful of cool chatbots to play with, but now there are so many different types of chatbots and different ways to use chatbot marketing within your strategy.
TechCrunch, an online tech publication, uses theirs as a digital digest of sorts.
If you go to their Facebook Page and click Send Message directly under their cover photo, you’re able to opt into their Messenger bot.
When a Facebook user opts into a Messenger bot, they’re giving the business explicit permission to send them direct messages on Facebook. This is a powerful way for brands to engage with users, which enhances the brand’s engagement strategy on Facebook.
For this specific social media marketing example, TechCrunch is using Facebook Messenger bots as an opportunity to increase the number of readers their website gets each day. If they’re sending daily digest links to thousands of Facebook users each day, it exponentially increases the odds of a user clicking through to their website.
This, in turn, can incrementally grow TechCrunch’s monthly traffic, which is one of the most important success metrics for any digital publication.
There are so many other uses for Facebook Messenger bots. Your business can use it as a lead generation device, answer FAQs for customers, allow customers to set appointments, and so much more.
Learn From These Examples
This was just a short list of brands doing amazing things on social media, but hopefully, they’ve got your creative juices flowing. The beauty of social media marketing is it’s accessible to businesses of any size and stage.
Small companies just starting out can take notes from how Square Sayings really pounded the pavement with Instagram to build their brand. Larger, established brands can follow in the footsteps of See Jane Work and experiment with new social media features. Use these social media marketing examples as inspiration for your next campaign, or for confirmation that you’re heading in the right direction.
Which of these examples is your favorite? Which are you most excited to try for your business?
