Social Media Marketing Archives - Page 5 of 6

Simplify Celebrity Endorsements with Cameo

Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes

Intended Audience: Microsoft Partners, B2B Business Owners, B2B Tech Business Owners

Revised September 2023

Imagine being able to get a celebrity endorsement for your product or service from your favorite celebrity or influencer. Wouldn’t that be a welcome addition to your marketing strategy? Don’t worry, you don’t have to hire your own celebrity publicist to make the right connections to hire your favorite comedian, actor and/or musician. Now you can hire celebrities, from the entertainment industry to sports, to create personalized videos for any occasion or promotion with the help of Cameo.

What is Cameo?

Cameo is a video-sharing website that allows people to obtain curated videos and product endorsements from celebrities. Some of the most well-known Cameo celebrities that are available on this platform are Snoop Dogg, Smoky Robinson, Mia Hamm, Caitlyn Jenner, Lindsay Lohan, Emmitt Smith, Chaka Khan, George Foreman and more.

To get started, you will submit a request to hire your favorite celebrity. You should take some time and precision in completing this form, as this is what is used to compose your video endorsement. Once they accept it, you will receive a personalized video from them! This is truly a unique way to engage with your favorite talent and create a memorable experience for your target audience. These endorsements can be used for one-on-one business relationships or for a wider audience (e.g. a new product launch).

It is also an opportunity for businesses to experiment with their content and get creative on their social media channels.

Accessible Celebrity Endorsement Options

Cameo is an public video platform that is growing in popularity and is an excellent place for businesses to garner celebrity endorsements for their products and services without needing your own publicist to get in touch with your favorite celebrities.

Here are a few considerations you need to be mindful of when booking a personalized video through Cameo:

VIP Services: Cameo offers VIP services for businesses if they choose to partner with them. In this case, your business will get additional benefits such as a dedicated customer services representative to manage and prioritize all your requests and a 5% service fee discount. For standard Cameo videos, there are no added perks. You get the service for what you pay.

Creative Brief: Since Cameo doesn’t provide refunds or permit editing celebrities’ videos to avoid the possibility of using the videos out of context, make sure to provide accurate information about the products and samples along with their phonetic pronunciations to the celebrity while booking them. This applies to personal and business videos. Also, the talent has the sole creative freedom to determine how they want to create the content.

Celebrity Endorsements vs Influencer Marketing

Now that you have a gist Cameo, you may wonder, what’s the difference between promotional celebrity cameo videos and influencer marketing. They may seem similar, but they are completely different. Here are some points that will help you clear any confusion:

Usage of Platform: Influencers are individuals who have gained popularity on social media platforms because of their expertise or talent in a particular field or genre. Any promotional content created by them is posted on the influencer’s social media platform and cross-promoted by the brand that may have hired the influencer to post the content. With promotional Cameo videos, you get access to the video created by the celebrity or talent, whereas, they don’t post or promote the videos on their personal social platform. It’s the brand’s responsibility to leverage that video for social promotions.

Revisions and Creative Control: With celebrity Cameo videos, there’s no scope for revision. Therefore, you need to find the right celebrity and share a very thorough creative brief to use as inspiration in order to deliver your request. On the other hand, with influencers, you can have more creative freedom and oversight, depending upon the budget and delivery time.

Terms of Contract: With social media influencers, you can negotiate and draft a contract that will benefit or meet the needs of both parties. With Cameo’s celebrity endorsement videos, you are investing in an experience, and the deliverables or license cannot be negotiated. If strategically planned, custom Cameo videos deliver significant ROI. To see how we delivered remarkable results with Cameo, keep reading.

“The World’s Most Interesting…Cameo” with Orchestry

As the social media space evolves, continually iterating on unique solutions to help people stay connected and entertained, marketers, like us, are always on the hunt for new opportunities to leverage these powerful platforms. Social media marketing is must-have for any B2B and SaaS-based business these days to connect with and understand the psyche of their target audience, and potentially new audiences as well, with needs and purpose for B2B products and services. That’s why creating an effective social media marketing strategy requires timing and creativity to be visible and trend on people’s feeds. For our trusted Microsoft Partner client, Orchestry, we strategized an ideal use of the celebrity endorsement platform to promote their latest product release and its powerful new capabilities. As B2B technology marketers, we understand how competitive the social media space can be. To freshen up Orchestry’s social media content and announce the latest release with a big endorsement, we chose to work with none other than ‘The Most Interesting Man In the World’. Maven Collective Marketing’s purpose for this campaign was to create more awareness around Orchestry and its new features. Generating engagement on social media platforms such as LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter), which included the promotion of our release and main virtual launch event. In planning a big product release in the middle of a global pandemic, Cameo ended up being a perfect fit!

Here’s a quick breakdown of how this campaign was run, plus the social media marketing strategies that we used to leverage the celebrity Cameo video to promote a successful product release launch:

Hiring the Most Interesting Man in the World

For this social media campaign, we hired the actor Jonathan Goldsmith through Cameo. Jonathan Goldsmith is better known as “The Most Interesting Man in the World” from the beloved Dos Equis commercials. These Dos Equis commercials ran from 2006 to 2018 and gained popularity across North America. They became so popular that the internet turned them into various popular memes that are used on social media daily.

In pitching Jonathan Goldsmith as the ideal Cameo Celebrity to Orchestry, we felt the style and tone of the original Dos Equis commercials were an accurate reflection of how we wanted to position the launch of Orchestry’s latest release. The creative brief was then composed for Goldsmith to emulate that same persona in Orchestry’s Cameo video, informing and inviting the viewers to Orchestry’s official virtual launch event.

This video also inspired us to create fun-related marketing materials with Orchestry’s Co-Founder’s dog introduced as “The World’s Most Interesting Dog”, on behalf of Orchestry.

Cameo Leveraged X (Formerly Twitter) Performance Insights

We posted the Goldsmith’s product launch Cameo video inspired by ‘The Most Interesting Man’ commercial on Orchestry’s X (formerly Twitter). It became an instant hit and was the top-performing organic tweet of September:

The campaign posts including Cameo outperformed previous month’s top tweets by 117%.
The posts also increased the company profile visits to the X (formerly Twitter) account by +750.9%.
Plus, tweet impressions rose by more than 80%.

Cameo Leveraged LinkedIn Performance Insights

Additionally, the Cameo video was shared on the company’s LinkedIn to reach a wider B2B audience and technology enthusiasts from the industry. On LinkedIn as well, the video performed extremely well.

The impressions of the Cameo LinkedIn organic posts increased by +255% and organic clicks +150%.
All the “Most Interesting Man” posts maintained a CTR of over 3.3% and an engagement rate of over 5%.
The Click-Through-Rate (CTR) increased by 95% in comparison to previous organic company posts.

These results show the true impact of a well-planned and successfully executed social media campaign!

Through only organically posting and sharing the Cameo social media posts, Orchestry was able to achieve these notable outcomes. This readily displays that B2B businesses can exceed their performance on social media by creating well thought and planned campaigns by leveraging unique tools, such as Cameo.

Is Celebrity Endorsement for You?

For B2B businesses today, social media isn’t just for B2C companies anymore. Using a little creativity, and leveraging the accessibility of celebrity talent, the sky is the limit to differentiate your brand in the technology industry. To do this successfully, B2B organizations need to segment their audience and understand their preferences to make informed decisions while building a comprehensive marketing strategy that should include social media marketing.

In the end, only you can position and prove the value of your product or service to your target audience to garner their interest and patronage. Once there’s a clear understanding of the goals, challenges, and level of competition in the market, you can define and assign budgets to achieve those marketing goals and execute on your B2B marketing strategies.

We at Maven Collective Marketing understand the pressure of putting together an extensive marketing plan. Why not involve a B2B marketing expert to help you grow further? The Maven Collective team works across North America, Europe and Australia, partnering with B2B technology organizations, such as Microsoft Partners. We understand your competition and what it takes to standout in the sea of software and services sameness. We can not only help you put together the perfect celebrity endorsement campaign, but also implement an attractive social media movement.

Get in touch to see how the Mavens can deliver the B2B marketing expertise you can measure!

Conquer LinkedIn Lead Generation

Estimated Read Time: 5 minutes

Intended Audience: B2B Business Owners, Microsoft MVPs, Tech Industry Experts

Revised September 2023

LinkedIn is a sought-after platform by professionals from all industries and has over 500 million active members. Isn’t that a great place not only to build a strong professional profile, but also to build your network with other professionals and create meaningful leads for your business? But simply creating a profile and posting every now and then is not the most efficient way to leverage the power of LinkedIn. In this blog, we will walk you through some of the ways you can leverage your personal profile for LinkedIn lead generation and be that thought-leader you want to be!

Why Invest Your Time in LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a vast platform full of people that are looking for or providing different kinds of solutions and services. It is very likely that on a platform as extensive as this you will cross wires with like-minded professionals. Study shows, LinkedIn is 277% more successful in lead generation than Facebook and X (formerly Twitter). LinkedIn is a great place to gain visibility and credibility among your peers and industry experts. Additionally, your presence on LinkedIn helps build a brand image not only for yourself, but also for the company you work for. The platform hosts nearly 740 million users, providing great network expansion opportunities to all members.

Establish Your Presence on LinkedIn

Creating a Linkedin profile is easy, but making it visible and of substantial value is what takes work. It is all about how you curate your profile for other members to enjoy, showcasing your experience, strengths, skills, and winning personality.

Optimize! Optimize! Optimize!

We can’t say this enough about the importance of optimizing your personal LinkedIn profile and posts. It is crucial how others discover your profile, aspects like LinkedIn bio, interest, work, and academic experience, all play a role in your visibility. Adding keyword-heavy details in the ‘About’ area, describing responsibilities under each work/study experience, or including links to projects you have worked on can go a long way in improving your visibility.

Prove Credibility, Authority, and Expertise on LinkedIn

Skills, endorsements, and recommendations can help your profile stand out among other members that don’t make adequate use of these features.

They are a good way to get that thought leadership status and how people view and perceive your opinions. Skills and endorsements showcase your strengths and the support you have garnered from others, in turn indicating the trust, authority, and expertise you have in the industry.

Engage and Interact with LinkedIn Members

Add people of similar interests as connections and follow your interests, other thought leaders, industry experts, and companies whose work resonates with you. Go ahead and join LinkedIn Groups to widen your network and connect with more people. It is always good to have a healthy mix of connections that ranges from people working in and around your industry and at different hierarchical levels. As you grow your connections, you will have the opportunity to analyze their content and learn from their insights as well. Once you are a group member, make sure to participate actively with relevant and meaningful content. You can even create and manage your own group on LinkedIn, this can be a very significant step to get your business the visibility that it needs.

Publish Your LinkedIn Content

Creating and sharing content is crucial to your profile’s success. Identify the gaps in topics in your industry and write about what is most relevant to your audience and connections. Sharing original content in the form of insights or from your blog post is vital to exhibit your knowledge. At the same time, don’t be afraid to reshare content related to your brand or industry. Stay on top of trends and make sure what you post is what the audience seeks.

Once again, it is time to stress optimization, but this time of your posts. Use keywords, links, and hashtags to make sure your work is reaching the right people. Tagging related company accounts or personal profiles also increase impressions of your post. Find the right balance of how often you post on LinkedIn, do not bombard your followers with too much information, but pace it out at regular intervals.

Spotlight Your Work in the Featured Section

Use the Featured section of your personal profile to showcase your work samples. This section helps boost your profile with valid examples and proof of work. You can include any form of external media, documents, and links that you would like to be spotlighted when someone views your profile. It is a great way to establish your professional identity!

Tapping into In-built Organic Feature for LinkedIn Lead Generation

Begin business development with your closest circle of connections and move outwards. This means 1st, 2nd and 3rd connection emails are your starting point. Reaching out to people in these tiers should get you a measurable response as they are most likely to be familiar with your content, hence, they are more likely to engage with you.

Did you know that the LinkedIn platform is the best place for account-based marketing? Narrow down on the industry, size, and interests of your current customers and find others like them on LinkedIn. Use professional demographics to determine who your potential customers are, it is all about persona building and finding those that fit into it in a professional capacity.

Utilize LinkedIn Events as a way to get more information to your audience. Depending upon your target you can organize meetups, workshops, seminars or several other types of events. This is an engaging way of driving interest in your work or solution and building a professional community that further facilitates LinkedIn Lead Generation. You don’t have to organize events for all LinkedIn page followers and can target specific segments and host verticalized events or product demos for specific functions. With events, you can also capture information about your attendees and view their experiences before, during, and after the event. All that information can be really helpful for future marketing initiatives as well.

If you are the administrator of a group on LinkedIn, you can send out announcements in the form of emails to your group members. This can include anything from a whitepaper to a product update, webinar, or free trial. It is a simple way to reach out to a large number of people and capture information about those that show interest.

Go Premium on LinkedIn

The LinkedIn Premium account has many added features that you can utilize to harness more leads from the platform. In the premium account, you get regular analytics like search terms and trends to improve your professional presence. Furthermore, it is uncommon to find contact details of other industry professionals on LinkedIn, but with Premium, you get to unlock more InMail credits that you can use to reach out to industry leaders and build connections with larger networks.

We might have given you a lot to consider about LinkedIn and its features. A good place to start would be with your own profile and taking small steps towards optimization. In our next blog, we will uncover more aspects of LinkedIn that help build your company’s presence and how to drive traffic from your Company Page, Showcase Page, and using Sales Navigator and several other Paid LinkedIn Features.

If you have any questions about LinkedIn Marketing and conquering social media platforms for your business, please reach out to us!