5 Creative Ideas to Retain Your Audience’s Interest

1. Contests & Giveaways

Wondering what the difference between the two is? In a contest, you have to choose a winner based on them having done something better/faster than others. In giveaways, you can choose winners at random.

Both of these work SO well on social media - even if you haven’t run one of these yet, you’ll definitely have seen other brands do so. What’s more, when you run a contest/giveaway you can put a little budget behind the promotion so it will help draw in new users (win for awareness!) in addition to creating engagement for current followers.

How to plan a contest/giveaway:

1. Decide what you can put up as the prize - It has to be something really exciting and coveted
2. Determine the rules: When run on social media, this usually involves liking the post, following your brand page and dropping a comment, preferable while tagging someone else
3. Design vivid, exciting collaterals that really pop off the page and grab attention!

(Beauty brands, feel free to take a cue from UltaBeauty pictured here)

Need some inspiration? Explore a whole range of ideas on the Mason app - and don’t forget to leverage its auto-adapt feature so you save all the time of creating visuals for different platforms!

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2. Webinars & Expert Q&As

Information, information, information - that’s the new mantra of selling online. The brand that informs and empowers customers is the brand that comes out ahead in the race for customer interest.

With video format working so well today, webinars and the more impromptu Q&As have become more popular than ever before. We don’t recommend choosing between the two, we recommend both. While webinars are great for new product launches and for sharing information, Q&As on social media are great for a quick way to connect with customers. You can ask customers to send in questions that you’ll answer, or have answered by an expert. Both work wonderfully in increasing interest among customers!

Just to get your thoughts rolling, here are a few sample topics that apparel, beauty and F&B industries could use for webinars/Q&As:

1. Know what you wear: The difference between sustainably-grown 100% cotton and blended fabrics
2. Dissecting the beauty routine you need with retinols, AHAs and direct acids & molecules
3. The beginner’s guide to food plating and table setting

Like with contests, the great part about webinars & Q&As is that they can act as tentpole events that you should promote among your target audience, not just followers. Which means you’ll generate quite a bit of brand awareness, in addition to plenty of interest & engagement! Remember, when creating visuals to promote your webinar/Q&A session:

1. Stick to your brand guidelines
2. Use images that make it clear that you’re promoting an event - a picture of the expert you’ve brought in, perhaps
3. Include details such as time, date and registration information (if required) on the creative itself

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3. Collaborations

Collaborations are huge in the world of e-commerce marketing. Think collabs between different fashion designers, two different food companies, a visiting chef and a restaurant, a beauty brand and a celebrated makeup artist...the possibilities are endless.

The idea of a collaboration is to bring a fresh take on your brand, and offer prospective customers new products and new content to hold their interest and hopefully elicit a sale.

For a collaboration to be successful, however, you need to market it well and make sure that every prospective customer has heard about it.

A few channels to market your collaborations include:

1. Emails & SMSes (where you’ve gathered leads)
2. Social media
3. Online advertising

What to keep in mind when promoting your collaborations (to ensure maximum interest!):

1. Create a separate lookbook for the collection/range/line
2. Create a few promotional visuals with the collaborator/partner and use them liberally
3. Stick to your brand colours if you can, but ideally make your creatives about the new range
4. Ensure the essence of each creative is a cross between your brand experience and the collaborator’s brand experience!
5. Use the name of the collaborator & your brand on your leading creative, ideally in your brand font, or in both brands’ fonts

4. Charity Tie-ups

We all need to reach out and make an impact for the better on the world, everyone wants to leave the world in a better place. If you can help your customers make that happen, if you can make them feel like they’re making a difference by shopping with your brand, you’ll give them one more reason to be hooked.

Ideally, the charity you choose should tie in with your brand in some way - you could, for example, create a new line of products influenced by a charity’s cause, and donate proceeds to that charity. The new line of products will help generate more interest, more so because of the beautiful cause.

Let’s take a few cues and talk about how you should promote your cause:

1. Make the cause a part of your visuals, even your product visuals
2. Create plenty of collaterals talking about why this cause is important to you, and how you contribute to it
3. Show customers what a difference they’d be making, and try to be detailed about it!
4. When promoting the cause, use your brand colours + elements inspired by the cause
5. Use every platform to promote it - your website, social media, email marketing and more - the more you promote it the more interest you generate and the more sales!

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5. Tutorials

We’ve saved the best, most effective idea for last, just in case you haven’t already been doing this. Most e-commerce brands today have mastered the tutorial...a series of how-to videos that show social media and YouTube followers how to use your products.

You can actually create two kinds of tutorials: ones recorded in-house by you, or ones recorded by influencers. The latter, of course, will require a collaboration and hence more effort. We recommend creating plenty of tutorials yourself, and then reaching out to influencers to do tutorials during a product launch - their popularity will help your reach for the new product!

When doing a tutorial though, make it as fun as you possibly can - it needs to keep viewers engaged and interested, which means it needs to be succinct and very helpful.

Here’s what we recommend for tutorials that are fun and interesting:

1. Layer illustrations over the video to emphasize certain points and add some jazz
2. Create graphics that explain certain points/processes and superimpose them over the video too
3. Always use subtitles, at least when mentioning the product names
4. When creating the video yourself, try to ensure you have some brand colours and relevant elements in the frame

AND, if you really don’t have the resources to create videos, feel free to create step-by-step ‘how-to’ infographics instead!

Don’t forget to use different mediums to promote the tutorial - if it’s uploaded as an Instagram post, use Instagram Stories to talk about it. The more interest you can pull in the better! And there you have it - 5 creative ways that you can boost interest in your brand and keep potential customers engaged.

If you need some inspiration and help in getting these ideas on the road, allow us to recommend Mason - your go-to partner for creating content, right from inspiration to execution, and even publishing! Mason will even ensure that you stick to your brand guidelines and will automatically resize images for all platforms for you. Just think of it as the perfect partner in content creation. And you can get it for free today!