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Collaborative advertising™ presents a unique opportunity for marketers to generate exponential eWOM (electronic word of mouth) through indirect advertising. Unlike traditional marketing, which can be hard to measure, collaborative social advertising allows for end-to-end control and visibility into downstream conversations. However, social as a communicative platform does present challenges and risks to brands looking to expose themselves further, all of which can be accounted for with the right tools.

There’s a wrong way to create electric word of mouth through scaled messaging on social media and there’s the right way. The former entails shot-gunning non-local display advertisements, whereas the right way concerns deploying hyper-targeted, consumer-centric social campaigns with differentiated messaging, ensuring campaigns complement national branding efforts while generating reach with local consumers.

Driving Factors of eWOM Engagement 

A recent empirical analysis (2020) found altruism, attitudes towards eWOM, information credibility, information quality, innovativeness, sense of belonging, self-enhancement, and social support to be significant determinants of eWOM engagement (Ali et al., 2020). When consumers perceive any message to be credible, they are more willing to take part in such communication, yet consumers tend to be increasingly less responsive to passive forms of messaging. The scholars argue that the higher the perceived quality of information will increase consumers’ likelihood to engage. Collaborative advertising blends brand credibility with the consumer trust of local establishments/retailers. According to the results of the report, consumers are already active in eWOM, either through a strong sense of belonging to a specific community/brand or an open mind to innovation, further validating an indirect approach to social advertising where channel partners are activated as brand champions. 

Real World Examples

Real Estate

When a real estate franchise company ran television advertisements, they could see Nielsen Ratings and social mentions; however, these television advertisements do not offer enough insights to analyze. The company knew it could deliver more. By partnering with their local agents, the company opened the door to understanding how consumers respond to their actual inventory. Through a collaborative advertising program, company brokerages can track local agent activity to learn more actionable insights about their social program in aggregate — all while executing better performing, highly-personalized campaigns at scale. This enhanced the real estate company’s social strategy to support its brand-level efforts. 

“Tiger Pistol enables us to collaborate with and support our agents like never before. The platform allows our brand to reach into communities through our agents, who understand the distinct dialect of their local neighborhoods.” – CMO, American Real Estate Franchise

Consumer Products

A Global Fortune 500 beverage company had been using national television commercials and on-site print collateral to drive performance for their beer brands, but the company did not have a method to reach potential customers at the right time and place with a clear brand message to drive foot traffic to its worldwide network of bars, restaurants, and retailers. Collaborative advertising offered a method to publish on-brand content straight from local establishment social media accounts with interests and offers targeted to be relevant to consumers, strong calls to action, and quality, on-brand creative. 

“We needed a technology like Tiger Pistol to deploy not only local ads but ads that were based from the local establishments’ own Facebook accounts to truly drive consumer action. Achieving that goal but also doing it at a truly global scale would not be possible if we were just working with Facebook alone.” – Global Director of Customer Experience, Global Fortune 500 Beverage Company

Learn how you can enhance your brand’s social strategy by adopting a collaborative advertising solution that supports national branding efforts and drives reach in aggregate through local affiliates. Contact us today. 

Collaborative creative permits brands to speak to communities by localizing messaging and media through local points of sale. These points of sale might be an independently operated SMB, a chain store, sales agent, or even a vending machine. No matter the front, collaborative creative is all about making the local merchant the hero of the campaign while promoting a brand product. Localization is a term used ad nauseam in ad tech these days, but what does it really mean? Is it just inserting a city name and tightening your targeting radius? It can be. But do it well, and it will be that and much more. True collaborative creative is scalable, relevant to the consumer, and still tied to ROAS.

There are three components to effective collaborative creative:

1. Locality and Community 

People like to buy things from stores and merchants they are already familiar with; therefore, it’s easier to move someone towards a transaction from a store they visit regularly than to try to convince them to buy something from an unfamiliar shop. This is why location- specific information is so important. The benefit of collaborative advertising™ is being able to connect a brand’s product to a specific place to drive consumer activity, this can only happen if you tell them where. 

Ads with recognizable brand creative launched from the location Facebook or Instagram Page offer the ability to dynamically adjust offers or other elements of the copy. Get Directions, button links to map applications to show exactly where to buy.

2. Relevance

Collaborative creative can also be used to ensure your featured products or services are presented most effectively to local consumers. This means allowing specific stores to choose which products to feature in their ads or running multi-variant campaigns which present multiple different products at the same time — enabling real-time creative optimization to discern which to display in each local market.

Text overlays compliment relevant imagery to further personalize and localize the advertisement. 

3. Proximity 

No collaborative creative is complete without the proper delivery vehicle. While the behind-the-ad targeting may not always be thought of as “creative” in the classic sense, social targeting should always be inextricably linked with your imagery and copy; therefore, targeting is an important element of collaborative creative. This means always linking hyper-localized images and text with hyper-targeted campaign concepts. An ad that says “Buy this product right here and right now” is only effective if it reaches consumers within a reasonable distance to do so. What’s more, the efficiency gains from collaborative creative come in part, from the hyper-localized targeting. 

Bringing Cohesion to Your Collaborative Creative

You can have all the components, but how does one take some localized components and make into a cohesive ad unit? Specialized analytics can help here. Understanding performance retroactively can guide future creative development. Furthermore, scalability is also of great import with collaborative creative because it works best with many differentiated ad units and campaigns that are based on your sales network of stores, merchants, and agents. With Tiger Pistol, not only can you get the best creative analytics for collaborative advertising, with analysis that crosses nearly 200 billion data points, but you also get a powerful publishing engine that can deploy thousands of localized ads with a single button click. Tiger Pistol’s platform allows you to speak to consumers in their local communities, pointing them to their nearest point of sale, with relevant brand messaging showing them products they desire.

Only Tiger Pistol’s collaborative advertising solution allows you to localize and personalize all parts of your social ads, from copy to media to call to action. Collaborative creative templates give brands the power to distribute personalized, relevant content based on their points of sale to effectively drive business. See how it works. 

To automate or empower? That is the question facing brands that rely on channel partners to drive sales. As co-marketing tools for social advertising have developed, brands that rely on retail channel partners or sales agents to sell their products are faced with a unique dilemma. They can empower these intermediaries with the tools to publish their own social advertising  campaigns, or they can simply use them as fronts in a centralized model with auto-published co-marketing content. So what will work best for your brand? Let’s start with the basics.

What is your objective for your co-marketing strategy? If your brand is looking to enable your channel partners with the skills and technology to develop their own social campaigns for your brand, using a decentralized model is the way to go. This approach can have many benefits outside of the campaign results themselves, such as increasing preference for your brand as a vendor, as well as aiding your field sales teams in their efforts to supply partners. A ready-made co-marketing solution you can point to, positions your brand as a digitally forward enabler of sales for channel partners. In addition to driving conversions for your products directly at their point of sale. The decentralized model provides flexible funding options between brand and intermediaries as well as more room for channel partners to personalize a campaign’s copy and creative. 

This contrasts with a centralized model, in which intermediaries are not participants in the publishing process, but instead simply the hero of the marketing story. If your brand wants to create hyper-targeted campaigns, without the need for trade or field management, the centralized model is the way to go. In this model, all social advertising is controlled and funded by the brand. With advanced automation and geo-targeting technology, a centrally managed program will dynamically localize brand controlled advertisements to reach their desired indirect channels. No matter the approach, the output is typically the same, co-marketing campaigns between brands and their local points of sale. And both management styles address the crucial need to advertise through indirect channels. 

Decentralized Collaborative Social Advertising Use Case

A Fortune 500 real estate services provider with a network of over 200,000 real estate agents serving multiple franchises sought a method to differentiate themselves in the market, as well as help their agents with marketing strategies. Tiger Pistol provided the real estate brand a solution that empowers its brokerages and agents with a collaborative social advertising platform that publishes campaigns directly from an agent’s own branded Facebook Page. In which agents can receive leads in real time, promote their website, or generate targeted reach in their sales area. The publishing engine is integrated with the brand’s agent and listing data, campaigns are pre-built and allow agents to customize within the brand’s defined guardrails, based on their business needs. Furthermore, the system handles local compliance to automatically populate the agents’ license number in a locked portion of the ad copy while also adhering to Facebook’s HEC Compliance requirements.The program’s customization capabilities permit agents to highlight local dialect and make it easier for the brand to meet the consumer where they are. Using a decentralized model enables both the brand and the agent to thrive, increasing agent satisfaction and retention. Though decentralized programs require some field enablement, its flexible funding options and potential for higher channel engagement, as well as increased activity (if it’s an on-demand solution) make this model worthwhile.

Centralized Use Case

A centrally managed program isn’t better or worse than a de-centrally managed program, it’s just different. An example, a digital marketing agency partners with Tiger Pistol to run templated ads for a popular car brand. In this centralized management model, the brand has complete control over the campaign template and copy but with control comes a greater degree of work required on their behalf. Dealers are able to optionally connect their own Facebook page, but otherwise all receive a brand campaign from the agency that automatically publishes. Tiger Pistol’s platform dynamic localization allows the agency to publish thousands of campaigns in less than fifteen minutes. Plus, with the solution’s geo-fencing technology, campaigns are further localized to bring consumers to the relevant inventory section of the local dealer site. 

Consumer products brands, retailers, and service brands that utilize sales agents have the inevitable challenge of relying on intermediaries to sell their products. Unfortunately, digital marketing tools have been slow to account for these specific needs despite such a high degree of indirect channel sales (75% of worldwide sales according to the World Trade Organization). Don’t let your brand fall behind the curve. Utilizing a collaborative advertising approach in your social strategy will permit your brand to increase local engagement, sales, and acquisition.

To Automate or Empower? Let’s talk which strategy is right for your brand. Contact us today.