3 Ways to Win During Economic Uncertainty by Embracing Social Video

The world bounced back from lockdown and industries like housing and travel soared; but now, financial uncertainty hangs in the balance. With war, a stock market that’s as volatile as impending climate threats, and a housing bubble threatening our economy, many businesses are considering how to cut costs to prepare for the worst. 

Luckily for marketers, social video offers unique ways of driving organic content and cutting back costs that traditional advertising doesn’t allow. 

As companies tighten their belts, strategic planning becomes more important than ever. Think: less guesswork, more data-driven decisions, and increase in accuracy & impact. 

Here are — 3 Ways to Win During Economic Uncertainty by Embracing Social Video

1. Mitigate risks

Understanding the true value of your influencer partnerships is key to mitigating risk. Oftentimes, surface-level metrics like views and subscribers offer an inflated perception of a creator’s power. Sometimes creators with the most subscribers have less influence over their audience’s shopping behavior than smaller micro-influencers.

So how can you see beyond the surface-level metrics and understand an influencer’s true value? With Tubular’s Consumer Insights, you can understand what % of a creator’s audience shops for your brand and how much more likely they are to do so than the general population. You can understand the percentage of your current shoppers within a creator’s audience. Plus, you can see how you stack up against your competitors to better anticipate their next moves. 

These deeper level measurements can help estimate the ROI of specific partnerships before you sign on the dotted line. When you do negotiate partnerships with creators you’ll have the data to negotiate a fair deal rather than one based on inflated costs. Not only does this help you mitigate risk, but it also lets you pitch your strategy to internal decision-makers. Approval processes often get stingy when upper-level management is driving cutbacks, so having a fool-proof strategy backed by data will help that process move more smoothly. 

2. Turn paid user-generated into unpaid user-generated content

During the pandemic, the advertising ecosystem saw major shifts. Many marketers evolved from massive campaign productions with set designers, make up artists, and directors to user-generated in-home content. Not only was it way cheaper to pay just one creator, but it was also necessary (and safer) amidst lockdowns.

One TikTok creator, Grace Wells, has been creating high-quality commercials in her own home and has attracted huge brand names like Glade and Dawn.

Still, paid user-generated content costs money and doesn’t always get distributed on social the way you hoped it would. In order to drive unpaid content, you need to: 

• Identify trends before they go viral
• Employ social video activations that encourage heavy engagement

Once audiences begin to engage and create related content, you’ve got a recipe for virality. Paid user-generated content becomes unpaid. 

One excellent example of a brand employing these tactics is Taco Bell’s Mexican Pizza the Musical. While the QSR brand formed paid partnerships with big names like Dolly Parton and Doja Cat, they also partnered with the lesser known TikTok creators, Barlow & Bear, who went viral and won a Grammy (yes, a Grammy) for the first ever TikTok-created album based on Netflix’s Bridgerton. Taco Bell followed the trends! Earlier this year, TikTok went nuts over the Bridgerton musical because it offered an opportunity for audiences to collaborate on songs surrounding a pop-culture moment. Partnering with the musical duo behind the album, Barlow & Bear, immediately got die-hard musical-loving audiences involved in the Taco Bell campaign.

The company then employed cutting-edge activations. They leaked anticipatory content like ‘audition tapes’ of a man trying out for the role of Fire Sauce Packet #1, and then posted duets for TikTokers to create their own renditions. Although Taco Bell mysteriously postponed the musical, they generated a significant buzz of over 150M views on TikTok.

See how other food brands are nourishing relationships with their consumers in unique ways in Tubular’s latest report.

3. Perform cross competitor analysis

When all you can see is your competitors’ likes and views, you can’t anticipate what they will do next. But, with Tubular you can easily see into the details of their content & partnership strategies.

Here is how you can leverage these insights:

• If your competitor is leaning into influencer marketing to tap into niche communities, you should identify similar creators who also have a strong influence on that audience to avoid losing market share.
• If your competitor is doubling down in a certain content category, you should market size the space and cross-reference your target audience’s interest to see if it’s worth an investment. 
• If your competitor is seeing strong results from ad spend in a certain area, you should take a look at the CPMs to see if it is worth contextual targeting your audience there too. 

Amidst massive economic uncertainty, consumers are likely to pull back on spending as well. It’s important to understand that markets will decrease and competition will increase. As such, the competitor equipped with the most knowledge has the greatest advantage. 

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Insights to actions:

Optimizing and risk-proofing strategies through an in-depth understanding of audiences, trends, and competitive markets will help any company cut costs. When cut-backs on resources need to happen, it can knock a team off-kilter and send them into chaotic hustle-mode. However, in uncertain times it’s more important than ever to strategically plan content & partnerships, and then execute them with precision and solid activations.

If you’re interested in gaining insights — click here to request a free demo with Tubular.