Marketing on social platforms is about creating good content that connects with the audience, not just selling a product, according to Lego Group’s Digital creative director James Gregson. “Good content connects. Great content converts,” said Gregson at the recent eTail Virtual Summit and Expo 2021. He then cited a quote from Burger King chief marketing officer Fernando Machado: “If you create something that looks, feels and smells like an ad, it’s probably not a good ad. I’m t
. I’m trying to engage people. I’m trying to do something that gets people to laugh, smile, share… and pay attention.”
In an ever-changing marketing ecosystem, it’s important that marketers return to the fundamental concepts of social media marketing when developing an effective strategy that cuts through the clutter.
“The fundamentals have not changed on social media,” Gregson advised. “Listen to your audience, listen to what people are saying about your brand, listen to what other people are saying about other brands, understand where your audience is, where they are on social, and be informed by data and content performance.”
“There’s no point in continuing to do things if they are not working and performing for you.”
According to Gregson, there has been a big shift in Lego’s business strategy over the years, moving away from a product-first marketing strategy to focusing on how the business is reaching its audience and finding out where they are spending their time.
“We call this an audience-first marketing strategy,” he said. “That switched how we approach marketing at Lego.”
One of the strategies that Lego has created under this strategy was to celebrate its fans who have created content.
“We have fans who create amazing content and we share those content on our social space,” Gregson said.
Meeting 2020’s challenges head on
The year 2020 saw a number of changes to how Lego approached social media marketing.
“All those social habits that we thought we knew changed, which made our jobs extremely challenging,” Gregson noted. “They say adding [that you have] social media experience in 2020 is like adding three to four years of experience in your resumé.”
Last year, the Lego team was focused on being the best at adapting, predicting and driving change across the digital landscape.
“Building a change-management culture that is comfortable adapting to disruption is critical to our long-term success,” he said.
An example of an initiative that the team launched last year was the #LetsBuildTogether campaign which was aimed at offering consumers entertaining content to enjoy during lockdown. This included fun memes, livestreamed weekly classes with designers, organised Lego lessons, repurposed content and a seven-day challenge, which encouraged people to build any of the fun and free building ideas posted on the Lego site.
“It’s a lovely campaign that shows our product is not just for kids,” he said.
Again, Gregson emphasised the no-selling approach, adding that the campaign was not commercial but a strong, purely engagement- and entertainment-focused opportunity which highlighted the power of social.
The importance of creating the right content
For better or worse, social media has somehow become the dumping ground for everything related to marketing, which can be challenging for social media content creators, said Gregson.
“There’s this thing called ‘the goldfish effect’, which [talks] about the decrease in the average human attention span, dropping from 12 seconds to eight seconds. But on the flip side, we know that on some platforms, people are still spending a significant amount of time, for example, Facebook and Instagram. So there’s still a lot of time to potentially reach and engage a consumer,” he pointed out.
According to Gregson, Facebook statistics show that an average person scrolls through 300 feet of social content every day, the same height as the Statue of Liberty. Standing out should be a brand’s goal and inspiring creativity has become more critical than ever.
The Lego system has long been the ultimate platform for creative expression and creative problem solving. Children don’t just imagine what to build, they can build and rebuild, experiment, fail, break the rules, fail and try again.
“This is the cycle of human creativity and the essence of the Lego System in play,” Gregson said.
He said the interesting part about the message is it doesn’t have a commercial platform and there are no products tied to the campaign and it is very much the core position of Lego.
“I remember the first day I joined the company and I was presented with this: Inspire the builders of tomorrow,” Gregson shared. “It’s really a great statement. It’s like a lighthouse content of everything that we do. I don’t take it for granted on how critical that is to the Lego brand.”
“The key guide of our brand is being purpose-driven and we want to share that in everything we do.”