Personalized marketing campaigns can be incredibly effective, especially when you add a fun element. From the viral Tik Tok dance trend to a fun call to action, there are many personal, memorable ways to connect with your audience.
If companies want to inject "fun" into their personalized marketing campaigns, they need to make sure their ideas are still consistent with their brand values and relevant to the product or service they're selling. Below, members of the Forbes Communications Council share a variety of fun things that have worked particularly well in their personal marketing efforts.
1. Employment of Employees
Through an ongoing campaign called “Engineering Optimism,” we have turned our teachers into superheroes—agents of optimism. This allows faculty to create an exciting environment while celebrating their research and solutions to problems facing our planet. - Sayre Lanial, NYU Tandon School of Engineering
2. Scavenger Hunt
The search for a guardian was successful due to its practical nature. In a world dominated by online marketing, I strongly believe that using offline techniques – such as scam hunting – is the best way to increase engagement and enthusiasm for a product or service. - Chris Bibey, ChrisBibey.com
3. Provocative humor
Gigamon includes funny jokes in our brand of Surrey downloads. We had to inform our audience about potential pitfalls (deep observability) when it comes to hybrid cloud security. The campaign was outstanding as the unexpected visual style successfully broke the hype. - Carl van den Bergh, Gigamon
4. Motto
"We do the right thing" has become our motto. We distributed the sweatshirts to our distributors and encouraged distributors to post a picture of them "OK" and enter our company for a chance to win monthly prizes. It reinforced our tagline, the use of our company's social pages and our values - Molly Barnett, Smart Co.
The Forbes Communications Council is an invitation-only community of leaders in successful public relations, media strategy, creative and advertising agencies. What do I qualify for?
5. A compelling call to action
Try including sales-related CTAs in your brand newsletter. Instead of asking the consumer to take action directly related to purchasing your product or service, ask them to share a favorite song or holiday tradition. It's fun to engage, and it creates a stronger and more authentic connection between your audience and your product - Melissa Kandel, Little Word Studio
6. Local User Generated Content
We used UGC in our personalized email campaigns to show how local our business is and to create a personal connection with content in the user's neighborhood (based on zip code). We had great engagement and click-through rates as audiences engaged with powerful stories and images. - Roshni Vijaysinha, Prosh Marketing
7. Interactive, popular content
Create content with the intention that people will own it. TikTok duets and Instagram remixes are good examples of this. People want to interact with content by responding to it or adding a story. So, make sure you have content that targets this interaction to increase engagement. Usually, it's not a happy accident - you have to create it on purpose. - Keith Bandes, Lingea
8. Custom Firmware
For year-end customer campaigns, Seismic uses customer data similar to Spotify's popular "Sweep" campaign. Instead of scrolling through static slides, customers explore an interactive microapp that provides a choose-your-own-adventure experience. Thanks to the use of personalized content, no two customers will experience the company in the same way. - Echo Thomas, Earthquakes
9. Personal stories
A fun element to include in a job interview is a personal, engaging story. Interviews are often long and contain a lot of technical information, but your audience is often business owners or board members. If we can personalize the message and include a story about working together in the past or on a similar project, it will be easier for the audience to connect with us, our story and our message. - Sarah Leroy, AL Huber
10. Original Product
We have created an original brand of "Marketing Tarot Cards" for demonstration and review. The title is "Weeding Your Marketing Platform". They are popular with our marketers, showcasing their marketing skills with bright cards like Beyoncé, Skunk and Buddha - Casey Munk, The Law of Software
11. "Celebrating Pop Culture."
Our social media schedule includes the ever-popular "pop culture holidays" - like the December 23rd festival (from Seinfeld). Our social reach is always above average on this fan-favorite publication, and we engage all generations—Baby Boomers to Gen Z—because it's still relevant. It's a great way to add some excitement to the "traditional" holiday by releasing all of the brand's content. - Brittany White, Apple Development Partner
12. Personalized holiday email
At one point, we divided our audience into those who were positive about the holidays and those who were negative about them. Excited listeners received typical holiday emails; Negative listeners receive a "we received" email. It wasn't overwhelming, but it was a really effective way to show our customers that we understand them and don't treat them as numbers. - Patrick Ward, Rootstrap
13. Artificial Intelligence with Personality
Adding personality to our chat AI in a fun and engaging way was fun and effective When immediate feedback is not possible, AI can be seen using human language, eg: Paul Stoddart, Salesforce
