If you haven’t yet heard about Pokémon Go from your kids, friends, or neighbors, chances are you will very soon. This free, downloadable application for your mobile phone is an interactive game that encourages users to explore their communities on foot, “catching” cute little animated creatures who appear virtually on your screen along with the actual real-life landmarks.
However long its popularity will last, it’s undeniable that right now, Pokémon Go (PG) is one of the hottest trends in the world. People are wandering parks, airports, and museums with their phones held in front of them, playing the game and incidentally getting exercise and learning about local community highlights and historical sites.
What can this wildly successful app teach us about marketing strategy? That is, what is PG doing so right at this moment that the entire world is joining the game?
Even if your business makes a point of doing things “old school,” with traditional craftsmanship and values, it’s vital that you embrace 21st-century technology. You must have a website; advertising in the Yellow Pages just isn’t enough anymore. As long as you’re building a website, why not make it work for you? A great website can be your best employee, helping educate and inform your target customers 24/7 and inspiring confidence in your brand. Beyond a website, you should engage with your potential customers and existing clients using social media—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Instagram, and/or whatever new, trending platform is all the rage these days. If you don’t understand and don’t want to learn all about your social media management options, hire an expert to do it for you. A great marketing, branding, and social media company can allow you to keep on focus on your profession while enticing new prospective customers to come to you.
PG is popular because of its convenience, simplicity, portability, and instant-gratification interactivity. Your website content, blog, and social media feeds are only going to be as successful as they are easy. Even if your website looks fantastic, make sure it is optimized for mobile so it looks and performs as well on a phone or tablet as on a desktop. If you don’t understand why it’s essential to optimize your website for mobile, you will likely lose opportunities as potential clients lose patience with your technologically-stunted interface.
Even if you’re not usually the kind of person who plays video games or games on your phone, you may be tempted to download the PG app just to see what everyone is talking about! People hate to feel left out, especially if they don’t understand something everyone else seems to know all about. Catchy trends like PG snowball in popularity after the initial appeal, as the second (and third) waves hop on the bandwagon and see what their peers, kids, students, clients, or friends are doing. The most successful marketing strategies for businesses nowadays are those that tap into the power of the collective sense of “coolness,” e.g., products targeting Millennial generation/”hipster” vibes, marketing aimed towards Generation X parents concerned about pesticides, natural foods, and conservation, and ad campaigns promoting the eternal dream of traveling to exotic places with beautiful people.
One of the unusual features of PG is its ability to encourage people to connect with each other. As cultural shifts return to desiring a sense of greater community connections rather than rugged individuality, ads like the lone horseman Marlboro man become fewer and farther between, while those with messages like “working together” and “share a Coke and a smile” become more prevalent. PG encourages people to explore their communities and physically brings people together. Consider marketing and advertising campaigns that reach out in a real, tangible way to your clients, potential customers, and brand ambassadors to help give them a reason to connect with each other.
Want to create an innovative, trendy marketing strategy for your own business but have no idea how to get started? Contact Blue Frog’s marketing professionals at our offices in Des Moines or Denver! We’ll help you develop a complete integrated social media and inbound marketing strategy, from developing your brand strategy to quality custom content creation and complete social media management. Contact us today to learn more about everything Blue Frog can do to up your business’s coolness quotient (no Pokémon included).