It's time brands start putting their money where their consumers are!

The biggest benefit the internet has brought along is that it allows brands a level-playing field. Gone are the days when only multinational corporations could afford to run ads on mass media communication platforms. Today, even if you are a small business owner, you can reach and influence your audience effectively, with the right marketing strategy.

In India alone, there are over 700 million internet users who rely on the Internet for everything that ranges from news to entertainment to information. Similarly, chat conversations are an equally significant contributor to the time users spend on their smartphones.

WhatsApp usage alone accounts for an astounding 22 hours per month by an average internet user. Even phone calls have slowly begun drifting away and hold no candle to the growing chatting behaviour among people.

Now is the time for brands to act!

As more people grow fond of smartphones, more marketing opportunities open up, which brands can leverage to reach users and build equity. Conversation media marketing is the best example of placing brands in everyday conversations of users to subtly promote them. Conversation media marketing uses appealing visual formats like emojis, stickers, and GIFs for marketing.

This article shows some aspects of using conversation media marketing as an important online tool that one must incorporate into their next advertising budget.

Conversation Media Marketing

As brand marketers, we are always searching for the next big thing to pull the audience closer to us. Conversation media marketing (CMM) makes this effort more coherent. Using AI technology, conversation elements like stickers, memes, and GIFs can be used in a subtle yet powerful way to engage with the audience.

https://tenor.com/search/kinder-gifs

But who uses stickers and memes to chat?

Well, if we talk about GIFs alone, as much as 63% of messaging app users use them to make conversations, share emotions and talk about trends. These conversation tools are taking over plain texting and we are pretty sure that a few years down the line, we would even be doing these articles just with GIFs.

Social media can do only so much

Until a few years back, brands believed that social media was going to shape the way people seek content. While it remained so for quite some time, eg many D2C brands scaled up through it, it has gradually become crowded with me-too product ads.

Brands are still allocating millions of dollars to advertise there, but the click-through rates have become stagnant. Plus, the growing awareness among people about privacy concerns is growing swiftly as well.

That being said, online advertising cannot be written off yet. Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram are only a few of the many applications that find traffic in the billions. So, it would only be a sandwich short of a picnic to not use social media in the advertising mix. But an effective complement to these platforms is CMM which can significantly pull your advertising game up.

Today, you can find leading brands leveraging CMM to reach and engage their users.

People like personalisation

A funny GIF from a brand with birthday wishes for their customer. Yes, that last one too, it’s conversation media marketing.

Some brands have already realised that it is not just social media but messaging applications that users spend a majority of their time on. And they have integrated conversation media marketing to share their stories among their prospective customers.

For example, many brands tried their hands on making emoji keyboards. It even got political, when Hilary Clinton used an emoji keyboard as part of her presidential campaign.

With advancing technologies, there are companies that provide brands and marketers with a more sophisticated channel to bring them the fruits of conversation media marketing.

Snapchat brings virtual branded clothing to users for free with its collaborations with big brands like Levi’s, American Eagle, and Reebok. Levi’s launched its clothing line simultaneously on Snapchat and real-life and in doing so made users its brand ambassadors. When we share our Bitmoji sticker dress in Levi's shirt, we are sharing our support for the brand and having fun trying.

https://www.retaildive.com/news/levis-unveils-clothes-for-snapchat-bitmoji-and-their-real-life-counterpart/591664/

So?

From trending conversations about the NFL to moment marketing around holidays, conversation media marketing helps brands become a part of billions of conversations. With a customized GIF or a personalised message, CMM employs small yet powerful aspects of a user's everyday habits to make the brand more recognisable. The question one might beg to ask — does it really matter?

The big picture

Marketing is all about the big picture.

Brands advertise to reach more people, engage and keep them – Big Picture.

Brands want to expand and capture the largest part of the market - the Big Picture.

Brands use conversation media to stay on top of consumer trends – The big picture.

Advertising is transforming, and the two major reasons for it are user behaviour and privacy, fundamentally driven by the increasing quantum of time users spend on their smartphones.

The more it becomes accessible, the more they are going to realise that this call could be just a WhatsApp message. It’s time for brand marketers to re-look at their advertising and ask themselves, does this still work?