Scaling E-commerce Brands by leveraging on Topical content

Popular events play a vast role in capturing the consumer's mindshare. Brands need to understand how they can leverage the topical season to drive maximum growth.

Why Must Brands Leverage Topical content?

1. Build the Top of the Funnel: With video and image ads, engaging campaigns for these events can help build massive Top of the Funnel audiences. These audiences are most inclined to conversions when remarketed to, hence reducing the CAC. 
2. Build Brand Resonance: With massive viewership and following, topical events allow for subtle brand placements to build brand resonance among the masses. With the effective use of Social Media features like Polls, Quizzes, and AR Filters, brands can build a strong resonance of their brand message. 
3. Low & Affordable Cost of Advertising: Low & affordable cost of advertising allows even SMEs & MSME’s to take part via advertising in such a mega event.

Now that we know why it is important to leverage the season, let’s look at some of the topical events brands can leverage this year

Key Events & Topicals in 2021

• The Olympics 2021: Holding a massive Indian viewership of 5.6 million (Source: Brand Equity, 2020), the Olympics is a great event for brands to leverage on. Brands can use key highlights of the games, the opening & closing ceremonies, and even star athletes of the tournaments. 
• T20 World Cup- India is a nation where cricket is nothing less than a religion. Scheduled to begin in October 2021, brands can inculcate content of top players like Virat, Dhoni, Rashid, etc, team-specific conversations, and constant highlights about your offers during matches.
• UEFA EURO 2020: Scheduled between 11 June and 11 July 2021, brands can focus on relevant engagement-focused activities such as quizzes, polls, and contests relating to the matches, winning moments and even base their communication on team players.
• Other Events: Brands can also look at non-sporting events that have huge traction in India. For instance, last year 18% of the Indian consumers were occupied by the reality TV show Big Boss and 9% of them enjoyed the Femina Miss India event. 

(Source: Facebook & InMobi, 2020). Focusing on these events can enable brands to push their audiences into the marketing funnel that eventually leads to conversions.

• The Festive season: Moreover brands can leverage the upcoming 4 month-festive season that ranges from Diwali to Christmas. These festivals hold a positive sentiment for businesses as the consumer buying process has facilitated a new way of online shopping, aiding online shopping sites. A few shopping categories that usually dominate this season include apparel, home appliances, gadgets, home furnishing, and gift packs.

Let’s explore some of the key platforms & ad formats businesses can leverage to sell online and drive sales.

Leveraging Disney+ Hotstar 

In 2020, Disney+Hotstar was able to scale 86.8M total paid subscribers with 30% of them belonging to India (Brand Equity, 2020).

• Brands can now focus on creating short videos in the form of Pre-roll & mid-roll ads, streaming before and during the topical content to drive awareness of their products. Marketers can then leverage the intent of these audiences and remarket to them to drive sales.
• Remarketing to these audiences during the consideration stage serves fruitfully to the brands as audiences that have watched the videos would already show an inclination towards the brand. 

Leveraging Facebook:

• Your brand content can revolve around the top players and teams that can drive Engagement through this to build an audience and re-target this engaged audience to boost sales
• Make use of different short and catchy creative formats on facebook to push your fast-moving products like short videos, gifs, thumb stoppers, instant experiences, etc, that are attention gripping. Create different audience clusters and remarket them accordingly.

Leveraging Instagram:

• On Instagram, video scripts for influencers can promote sales with the use of unique coupon codes or exclusive offers during the topical season along with brand integration. This would increase brand credibility & value hence push your audience into the consideration level of the funnel.
• Engagements lead to brand awareness and eventually to conversions hence make sure you keep content as engaging as possible using various formats like contests, Q&As, quizzes, and polls with the topical theme, leverage cashback offers to make it more enticing for your audience to participate and win exciting prizes. Eg: have a poll with 2 products “this or that” with a swipe-up link to the offers or Announce winners/offers with Tap to reveal stickers.

Leveraging YouTube

• Behind the scenes content, highlights, key moment videos of the events are popular videos with extremely high viewer retention rates. Leveraging these on YouTube could help the brand gain visibility.
• TrueView in-stream ads are one of the known heroes in the video format field. The diversity in the lengths of the ads (i.e Communication Strategy offering 10s, 20s, and 40s Ad messaging) maintained engagement, avoided creative fatigue, and ensured higher CTRs.

Leveraging Twitter

• Twitter is most crucial to leverage moment marketing content. These Twitter moments can include news, entertainment, or even fun topics. For example, brands leveraging on the 2020 Superbowl performance. 
• Creating twitter campaigns with a blend of statics, gifs, and relevant hashtags can be fruitful to brands to increase brand awareness and eventually drive sales.
• Brands can also focus on the ‘website clicks’ or ‘conversions’ objective that Twitter has to offer to boost sales. 

Getting creative with the formats

-Playable ads: It offers an interactive preview of the app with playable ads thereby creating an immersive experience and engaging the audience. 

-3D Swirl: 3D Swirl is an immersive ad format and it runs across Google Ad Manager. Swirl Ads allow the user to have an immersive experience as the users can rotate, zoom in and expand the creativity in the ad. 

-Flipbook: Flipbook ad is an outstream video format for the mobile web. It provides an interactive experience to the audience. The video played in a flipbook ad pauses & plays as per the viewer's scrolling movement. 

- Branded content ads: Branded content ads are ads where the creators on Instagram can allow the business partners to promote their post or story and turn their content into an ad. The ads can be run through Ads Manager. 

Case Study- boAt

Creating an integrated digital marketing strategy for boAt during the topical event -IPL:

Key objective- To drive an increase in brand and ad recall.

Our Strategy 

Via Video Sequencing on YouTube, our team was able to retarget the audiences that engaged with the video in the first sequence to view the next and so on. We leveraged catchy GIFs on Google Display Network to run ads for maximum clicks that directed to the amazon product page to drive sales. With the help of leveraging YouTube Trueview for Reach, we aimed to reach maximum people over time. 

Key Results

Through our strategy & execution, we were able to achieve 44.4 Million+ Impressions, a 15.5% increase in product lift, a 59% decrease in cost per click, 3.9 Lakh+ clicks, and a 158.7% increase in brand interest. 

Conclusion

In the E-commerce industry, brands have immense potential at gaining visibility through topical posts. They must utilize the same for awareness, reach, recall & conversions. Leveraging relevant platforms with creative ad formats in their strategies would help the brands get a 360° understanding of their campaigns to gauge the impact on driving growth & sales.

Sources:

https://www.socialsamosa.com/2020/10/e-commerce-brands-youtube-strategy/

https://www.InMobi.com/2020FestiveSeasonGuide

https://www.facebook.com/business/news/festive-insights/