Last year, as I returned to work after maternity leave, I was trying to picture myself pre-pregnancy, and couldn’t imagine myself getting back into the high heels I loved wearing every day. Scrolling through Instagram, I spotted a post describing these pretty flat shoes called Butterfly Twists, offering the same glamour as a high heel.
As a mother, you ruthlessly prioritise, and these pretty, flat shoes made me feel able to get things done at speed, which made me feel better than any heel.
Like Butterfly, many businesses today are disrupting their categories by exploiting a simple strategy; rather than targeting the 20 per cent of active shoppers who are already engaged with their product, they’re choosing to target the 80 per cent of passive shoppers who currently aren’t.
From Birchbox’s parcels full of beauty products, to Heist’s designed-to-perfection tights, to Hello Fresh’s precisely proportioned meal-time ingredients, there are many examples of similar businesses disrupting their respective categories by appealing to the 80 per cent. Although different from one another, they all have one thing in common. They’re built on discovery. More specifically, they’re built on discovery via mobile.
Mobile is push, not pull. The lesson here is: don’t wait for someone to actively express interest – you have to activate latent demand from consumers in a meaningful way.
In 2019, this capture of the passive 80 per cent will be key to brands’ profit and growth. And to succeed they will have to adopt three key principles.
The first is to stand out. If you were to print out all content an average person consumes in their social feeds every day and put all those pieces of content next to each other – it would be the height of Big Ben. That’s why it’s critical businesses be relevant, meaningful and timely in the way they communicate.
Advertising that’s cognisant of gender, age, location and interests has become the expectation on our platforms. My favourite example of how powerful this can be is a Zalando campaign which promoted the launch of Topshop on their site, and starred Cara Delevingne. Cara was filmed pronouncing the names of thousands of remote towns all across Europe, and each subsequent video was targeted to the relevant locale.
So, if you happened to be walking down the high street in Mönchengladbach and you scrolled through your Facebook News Feed, you’d see Cara Delevingne telling you that you could now shop from Topshop. You don’t have to go so far as to produce 60,000 pieces of personalised content like Zalando did –it’s the insight that matters, and the first guiding principle for brands on Facebook and Instagram, is that personalising a message, even at a basic level, helps your advertising to become more relevant. In an age where your content is competing with a huge amount of other available content, relevancy is critical.
The second guiding principle is about speed. We call content that captures attention “thumb-stopping”: it should aim to stop thumbs scrolling in a matter of seconds. People below the age of 20 consume content on Facebook twice as fast as people above 50. Think of it as a three-second audition.
Read more: Stella McCartney is on a quest to save you from the fashion industry
Mobile means speed. It takes people just 1.7 seconds to consume mobile content on Facebook, compared to 2.5 seconds on desktop. The quicker your video content delivers your message and captures attention, the better your chances of people remembering what they see.
There's an art to storytelling on mobile, driven by people choosing what they watch and for how long. To make an impact on your audience, we recommend four creative considerations.
One, capture attention quickly and deliver your message early on. Put your hero front and centre, incorporate branding upfront and keep your video to <15 seconds. Facebook and Nielsen research found that up to 47 per cent of the value in a video campaign was delivered in the first three seconds, while up to 74 per cent of the value was delivered in the first ten seconds.
Two, design for sound off, as this is the way that most mobile viewers will experience your video in their feed. Use text, captions and graphics to deliver your message. Three, frame your visual story, the screen size is smaller, so bring your story forwards visually to help drive attention and the clarity of the message.
Finally, number four is to play! Don't be afraid to experiment and test with video to learn what works best for your business. Consider image grids to emphasise features and visual surprises such as 3D.
Facebook’s partnership with Ted Baker is a perfect example of the power of thumb-stopping content. In under ten seconds, Ted Baker’s Stories campaign for Autumn/Winter 2018 had eight different assets that drove an impressive 8.2pt lift in ad recall and 3pts lift in consideration.
The third principle for businesses is to be visual. Five years ago, most of what we shared on Facebook was text. Now it’s photos and videos. In another five years, it’ll mostly be videos, and after that we believe it will be immersive content such as VR and AR.
Augmented reality is about to bridge the gap between the retail experience and mobile use. As e-commerce gains traction, bricks-and-mortar stores remain the main retail channel and deliver a unique, tactile feel. Yet this status quo is shifting, as millennials become higher earners.
Thanks to augmented reality, brands can now offer experiential services to their customers and prospects on their mobile phones. This is what L’Oréal did recently by launching an experience with its NYX brand that enabled consumers to try on cosmetics via augmented-reality integrations on Instagram and Facebook.
Many signs point to the fact that brands will need to develop immersive storytelling to continue attracting customers. However, the most effective formats and tools will be determined by behavior and usage patterns of consumers themselves.
I believe we are just at the beginning of this new way of catching consumers’ attention. In November 2017, just over a year after Instagram Stories launched, the number of people using it every day grew from 300m to 400m. Now it is now being used by 400 million people every day and a third of the most-viewed Stories are from businesses. In 2019, this growth will continue, as successful businesses no longer wait for customers to develop purchase intent. Instead, they will be creating it.
Maureen McDonagh is industry head – retail at Facebook
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
