How seed marketing can help boost your business
In the world of marketing, seeding is a really useful way to spread your content and ensure it is seen by the largest group of people. It is the process of acquiring a large audience via social sharing and by ‘seeding’ the campaign properly, the right type of audience can see the content and spread the information spontaneously via word of mouth. More importantly, seed marketing is straightforward to implement and could reliably improve the advertising yields at low costs!
1. Find the right influencers within your industry
Getting shared by one critical influencer can significantly boost the number of your readers, yet smaller influencers in your targeted market can also be extremely helpful, and can often be more receptive to what you have to say.
To find the right influencer for your business, it is important to track the influencers by engagement rather than only by number of followers. You can use tools such as Group High, Klear or the Topsy search engine to filter the most appropriate influencers for your specific business.
The biggest challenge of the seeding process is convincing the influencers to share your content. To achieve this, you need to think about how your seed content can contribute to the interaction between the influencer and their followers. Find out more about influencer marketing.
2. Build the right seed content
With regards to the content itself, quality is always the key. What you will be spreading widely need to be interesting, unique and well written so as to engage the readers. One of the key features of your seed content should be ‘ever-green’, which means that the information contained in the content will not be outdated at least a month from now.
The content you send to each of the influencers should be tailored to the features of different social media platforms and the characteristics of the influencers themselves. To make the seed content more appealing, you should use visual content such as infographics as they are engaging and easy to share. For instance, if your seed content is a video, you should target influencers on Facebook because it is considered as the best social network for sharing videos. Additionally, you can also post your video on Vimeo or Youtube and share the links with your targeted influencer. Or in cases where you want to spread GIFs or short videos, you can search for influencers on Instagram or Tumblr. For Instagram, you’ll need high quality, engaging and appealing images.
The most important thing to remember is that content has to attract the target audience in a way that they will make them want to share it with their network.
3. Where to ‘Seed’ your marketing campaign
Once you’ve created content that is easily sharable, you can even seed your campaign without proactively reaching out to the influences. Instead, you can take advantage of various platforms such as referral websites, including Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Delicious. These websites allow you to upload your content or links so that it can be voted on by the readers. If your content seeding campaign gets popular on one of these sites, it can get views from hundreds and sometimes even thousands of people on these specific platforms alone. In these instances, it would also be easier to convince the social media influencers to share this content.
To find out the best seeding strategy for your business, talk to the seeding experts at Sierra Marketing!
Cassie Zhou
Cassie is a Junior Marketing Assistant at Sierra Marketing. Cassie is passionate about conducting market research and delivering excellent customer service. Joining the Sierra team has enabled Cassie to work on varied aspects of marketing including social media, market research, content marketing and digital marketing.
