Does your social media team suffer from content fatigue? Get lessons on how to ease demands from Greenfly and Five Below’s Master Course at WORLDZ.
Does your brand’s social media manager wear a lot of hats — social content producer, writer, designer, marketer, technologist, team spirit captain and more?
Or, perhaps your team suffers from content fatigue, finding it tough to keep up with and scale social content and still connect with your target audience.
If any of this sounds familiar, then it’s time to stop the crush of social content demands.
How? Collaborate with your community.
That was one of the lessons imparted during Greenfly’s recent WORLDZ summit Master Course with retailer Five Below, “For the People By Your People: Social-Sourced Content Gets Real.”
Greenfly’s Chief Revenue Officer, Kerri Pollard, joined Five Below’s Director of Social Media, Janna Wemmer, for a standing-room-only discussion about the challenges brands face in producing social content and keeping connected to their communities today.
Five Below is the fastest-growing tween retailer, with 20 percent year-over-year growth in an industry that is seeing many companies on the decline. With over 700 stores, the company features unlimited possibilities in its stores, and all items are priced at five dollars or less.
Social Content Through Collaboration
In 2017, the company launched a new brand purpose around the mantra of “Let Go and Have Fun.” This shift gave the company the opportunity to plan for scaling the right digital content, to the right audience, at the right time. Wemmer shared that the company needed content and needed it fast to support this new brand purpose, adding, “Content is a beast and we’re always working to feed that beast.”
To support this effort, Five Below turned to Greenfly’s content collaboration platform to mobilize the company’s greatest asset: a community of over 10,000 store associates.
With Greenfly, Five Below leveraged this store associate community and empowered them to own the brand story through the creation of digital and social content. In addition to helping alleviate content creation demands, this approach also enabled the company to give employees and stores a direct line of communication to corporate teams, a greater connection to the brand, and the opportunity to be featured and celebrated on social media.
As Pollard concurred from Greenfly’s experiences working with other brands across industries, the common denominator is that trust, relationships and motivation make a community.
Benefits of Community-Based Content
Through the Greenfly platform, the Five Below team makes weekly requests for store associates to capture authentic content from customers and employees at their “Win the Weekend” store events. Each of the store associates has the Greenfly app on their mobile device, through which they receive the content requests. They are able to immediately act upon them and send the content back to corporate within minutes.
Requests are aligned with the company’s “Let Go and Have Fun” brand purpose. They’re designed to create snackable, mobile-first, photos and short-form video clips for social media feeds, and increasingly, the Stories format. This is quick content that keeps the customer engaged and the company top of mind among employees.
In addition to experiencing a significant increase in organic social reach, Wemmer found that employees now feel connected to the brand in a different way and customers want to be featured in social content. She added, “Greenfly for us has helped us mitigate the risk of content fatigue.”
The company also found that some other benefits of this new approach have included expanded sharing of content internally, and greater cost reduction from previous highly-stylized photo and video shoots.
The Master Course audience got the opportunity to “Let Go and Have Fun” by making their own videos through the Greenfly mobile app (using Five Below items) in a lively, interactive exercise to close out the informative session.
Lessons for All Brands
Five Below’s experience offers a key lesson for retailers looking to build stronger consumer connections to their brands through content. And with good reason: A recent Motista report found that emotionally-connected consumers spend up to 2x or more with their preferred retailers, and other top retailers are turning to customers and employees to serve as brand ambassadors.
Similarly, it provides a roadmap for brands across verticals to avoid the crush of social content demands: Mobilize your community — employees, customers and beyond — to create and share your authentic brand stories at scale.
Want more social media insights? Download our new free tip sheet, Retailers: 5 Tips to Make Your Holiday Social Content Soar.
