When people spend an average of 1.7 seconds on a piece of content, what hope is there of actually capturing someone’s interest? The answer is relevance.
According to a recent comScore study, 86 percent of consumers say that personally relevant content increases their interest in a brand’s products and services. A whopping 71 percent of them want ads they view to be tailored to their lives.
For advertisers, aligning content with your audience delivers an equally big benefit, increasing engagement by up to 60 percent. Gartner predicts that by 2019, companies that have invested in personalization will generate 20 percent more revenue than companies that haven’t.
Now here’s the challenge: How do you deliver personalized content, at scale, without increasing your budget? Every brand knows that creating content for numerous audiences can be a headache (and an expensive one at that). But when it comes to creating relevant content cost-efficiently, you just have to know where to look: at consumers themselves.
The digital age has enabled the average consumer to become a valuable content creator. Nearly 3 billion people carry HD cameras in their pockets at all times. Now it’s just a matter of brands empowering these creators to generate content on their behalf.
Engagement for rings (and other jewelry)
In an effort to establish more meaningful connections with consumers, specialty jewelry retailer Signet Jewelers partnered with Social Native to create user-generated content that could be used across the chain’s social channels (an example of which is at the top of this article). Signet operates approximately 3,600 stores including a number of well-known brand names: Kay Jewelers, Zales, Jared The Galleria Of Jewelry, H. Samuel, Ernest Jones, Peoples and Piercing Pagoda.
Signet knew it needed a solution to create social content at scale. Instead of using traditional campaign assets exclusively, Signet wanted to work with actual consumers to source engaging, authentic content built for the channels it would be used on.
“We are always evaluating strategic partners we can collaborate with and new technologies we can leverage to reach our consumers in a truly relevant manner,” says Kim Kanary, VP of public relations and social media at Signet. “Through the partnership with Social Native, we were focused on the opportunity to collaborate with talented content creators to develop original assets in support of key collections and initiatives for our retail brands, while reaching and engaging new audiences.”
To date, Signet has run six programs with Social Native across three brands. The programs have generated more than 300 pieces of on-brand content, reaching more than 4.1 million social media users and receiving more than 122,000 engagements.
“The Social Native platform presents an innovative and efficient means of working with consumers to reach our audiences with real and engaging creative, while also sourcing assets to fuel our own brand content needs,” explains Kanary.
Better content relevance and performance
More than 100 top-tier brands such as Coca-Cola, Mattel and Unilever leverage Social Native to increase performance of ads through personalized, relevant content. Brands across all industries are seeing impressive results; a large subscription box service increased ad recall by 25 points; a Fortune 50 retailer increased its clickthrough rate by 4x; and an ecommerce site decreased cost-per-acquisition by 66 percent.
Social Native was founded in 2015 to empower brands to retain relevancy with consumers via a one-to-one, personalized content solution. The content engine enables brands to generate high volumes of content on demand, while its creative optimization platform helps companies predict content relevancy and performance.
“Social Native brings the gig economy to the creative industry,” says David Shadpour, the company’s CEO. “By paying talented consumers to create content for the brands they love, we’re connecting the dots between content supply and demand, to create unparalleled cost efficiency, speed and scale in the creative industry. Creators have a new source of income, and brands are getting better content for a fraction of the cost previously possible.”
Once you dive into personalized advertising, you’ll find a number of personalized stories that can be told is as vast as your customer base—especially if you empower them to generate content for your initiatives.
