Stick Out

So you want to engage with your audience and expand your fan base, but your market is saturated with ads coming from every agency known to man, whizzing past you left and right with seemingly no target? Sounds like the same song every company around is singing right now.

You can hardly go anywhere without seeing dozens of barely aimed messages barreling towards you. Logging into Facebook results in 10 different ads ranging from meeting sexy singles to getting paid millions to become a beer taster. Every time you sit down to play a simple game of Words With Friends you get blasted with ads about going back to school or getting free coins for your FarmVille account! With all of this noise out there, how are you supposed to get your company noticed without being skipped over?

Enter Positive Disruption. You’ve heard all about it – it’s the process of making your posts and marketing efforts deviate from the status quo in a positive way, in hopes of increasing engagement with your customers without them considering it a business transaction.

Sure, you could just make a Facebook post about your brand and ask for feedback in exchange for free perks, but even that has been overused. It’s become blatantly obvious when agencies are following the cookie cutter technique – we all know the much-too-frequently-seen format of “Like this if you ____, and comment with your thoughts on ____ for a chance to win _____!” Nobody wants to respond to that – it’s boring and too common to stand out in consumers’ minds. Positive Disruption aims to create innovative content that is aligned with what consumers actually want, rather than what companies think they want.

That sounds great, but how do you make Positive Disruption actually happen? At GRA | MATR, we strive for Positive Disruption in everything we do. We aren’t content to simply send messages based on some loosely defined demographics – instead, we work with companies to develop campaigns that embody their culture and goals, all while driving sales and engagement.

For example, one client we worked with was having trouble encouraging its salespeople to sell in one particular segment, which was greatly hindering their business. As a response, we dove into understanding the company as a whole and helped them get to know themselves AND their priority personas (those sales people that matter the most in reaching our desired goals). This dive led us to our response – creating a slightly irreverent, incredibly snarky, animated character that engages with salespeople on many platforms, from Twitter to blogs to incentivized contests.

What made this response work was the idea of Positive Disruption – we clearly defined several measurable goals and set forth with everyday engagement. The salespeople didn’t want another voice spouting sales tips at them just like the 100+ other brands competing for their attention; they wanted someone that cut to the chase with information that was relevant to them, and they wanted it done in and entertaining way – “Edutainment,” if you will.

Since campaign launch, our client has seen continual growth in that segment, because they took the time to understand themselves and their priority personas, which ultimately created positive disruption that was both relevant and engaging.

So there you have it – to stand out in the midst of the ever-present flood of ads, you need to tap into your Next 90 to come up with measurable tactics that disrupt the status quo in a positive way. Once you know yourself, you can move forward with understanding who you’re targeting and how to target them in the way of Radial Marketing™.

But who knows – you might already be doing this! What methods of Positive Disruption have YOU seen, and how are you using it to grow your business?