My 9 year old has a YouTube channel Overcreative DIY. Thanks to the kindness of classmates and their parents she has 36 subscribers and gets a little over 100 views on average for her videos. I met an internet tycoon recently and he said that if we spent a ‘little’ money with a tool we could get a million views. I struggled with this – I mean, the universe of searches on the topics she’s making videos on isn’t that huge. That’s when I got his eureka insight. It wasn’t enough to just promote content, one had to create content around whatever is the trending search. Like slime. She’s not ready to specialise yet.
Preparing for a talk at #PRCAIEngage on how to stand out in a cluttered world, I realised that it’s really hard. It just isn’t feasible for most businesses to create amazing, exciting standalone content at the kind of frequency that is required. So good PR these days has to latch on to a trending topic. If your core business is something trendy like security then you have it a little easier (though you will still have to invest in frequency and quality). Arrka recently put out a report on State of Privacy of Indian Mobile Apps and Websites 2018. Once you give out stats like 79% of apps have access to call details, you tend to get attention. But even if you do many things and not necessarily in “hot’ areas, you will have to hook it to one. A great example of this strategy is a brand of blender called BlendTec. Their marketing strategy is built around the premise that their blender will blend anything. And so they have a content calendar of trying to blend trendy things like Amazon Echo (to celebrate Prime day), iPhones, football trophies…
Over the last couple of months we’ve been inundated with stories of fancy weddings – Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Deepika Padukone and Ranveer Singh, Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas. So much so that if you wanted to stand out, you had to somehow hook your story to this topic. At yesterday’s Customer Experience in The Age of Automation Roundtable in association with Oracle, a participant mentioned that his wife’s jewellery site took off when she put up “Deepika ear-rings”. Of course, if you are the trendee (look, new word!), like say, Deepika or Meghan, you just have to control the messaging. You can do old-fashioned PR and just push stories on every aspect of your life.
Coming to yesterday’s Roundtable, it had some truly unique content with Karthik Jagannathan of Bharat Matrimony sharing how technology helps build trust in the wedding arena, and William Angelo talking about the use of digital marketing to improve donor acquisition at World Vision, followed by Madhukar Uniyal of Oracle sharing how to go about building a fantastic, automated, customer experience.
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