Get Interactive Marketing Right – Or It Will Go Horribly Wrong!

Interactive marketing is the current buzzword, yet it’s still so easy for a global brand to get egg on its face trying to make it work. Just ask Burger King, who leveraged Google and Wikipedia. It all started off so well; all you had to do was ask “Okay Google, What’s in a Whopper?”

The links then went to Wikipedia, which had already been edited. However, it wasn’t long before The Internet had some fun and replaced the delicious ingredients with less savory terms including cyanide.

The campaign got attention, but for all the wrong reasons. Burger King is a big enough brand that the criticism and negative attention is small fry – but for a smaller internet marketer, such negative attention could be the kiss of death.

Interactive marketing is, at the end of the day, a symbiotic relationship where both advertiser and viewer need to get something out of the deal, otherwise it can go wrong. The hard sell simply doesn’t work here, but having a brand experience can.

A brand experience lets people enjoy something more than just a purchase and feel like they are a part of something. It’s effective with just about anything, even something as seemingly mundane as grocery home delivery.

It’s all about the storytelling and making your audience a part of it at the end of the day. For example, in grocery shopping, we’ve all abandoned a cart (online or offline) at some point. Instacart, who deliver groceries, make it an experience simply by calling to users practically and personally. And it works!

In an age where one to one marketing is king, all the details have to be spot on – or you will end up with egg on your face. It pays to get it right.