You might not get 100% matches if you search “what is seeding marketing?” It’s not a top-searched term in marketing on Google.
But brands and companies are now using the internet to seed their campaigns. This trend is not something you can ignore if you’re a marketer, or a business owner.
What is seeding and how does it fit into a marketing campaign?
Still interested? Continue reading to the end.
What is seeding?
Seeding is an online marketing strategy that allows you to create and distribute content on the internet to attract your customers.
You might be able to understand Inmagine Seeding, a more humanized form of advertising that seamlessly combines the advertising message and humans.
The seeding content creator can be either a thought leader or expert, as well as an influencer, consumer, or a regular person. They are responsible for contributing information to social media.
They can be a friend, a peer or mentor to customers. They will deliver the message effectively if they do so.
The old seeding
The old definition of seeding
Seeding implementation was once a term that defined a series of practices to create conversation around a brand or product via social media.
These conversations allow your customers to think about, search for, or exchange information about your brand with others.
Social media is a place where you can start conversations with the old seeding
This old seeding is not about sitting back and hoping that people start conversations about your brand/products. You must initiate these conversations.
Exemples
A popular method of seeding is to place a link to your website on social media forums.
Let’s suppose you ask Alex a question about a tool that can solve your problem. You reply to the question with your brand/product, using the member name Christ.
Quora allows you to ask a question about seeding
After answering the question, create different accounts and then add your solution to one of the comments.
Answer the question and leave a seeding comment.
Marketers need to be aware of the following key points when initiating such conversations:
- Emphasizing in keyword research
- Maintaining the content in line with the customer’s search habits and the current trend
- There are no spams
But, you find this tactic a little tricky, don’t you?
Let’s not get into the difficult part if you believe so. Consider answering pertinent questions about your industry. This will allow you to introduce your product and educate the public about your brand.
Facebook groups, along with other social media forums platforms, are great sources of potential customers. These groups are populated by people who share common concerns regarding specific topics in specific industries.
You can use Facebook groups to include your brand or product in comments and posts related to shared ideas, opinions, or reviews. This will allow you to build social networks and increase sales opportunities from your target audience.
Social media forums and major platforms like Facebook have allowed brands to promote products. These tactic types were popular in the past but mostly used by niche businesses because they did not require large budgets.
This seeding tactic can help you attract customers to your brand/products, increase brand awareness, and drive sales.
The old seedlings have a lot of potential
Is this an old-fashioned method of seeding?
Yes or No.
It still works, because it continues to benefit customers and brands in the digital market world.
Customers should always seek out as much information as they can from reviews, opinions, and experts to help them choose the best products.
Quora, Reddit and Reddit are the most popular social media platforms. They continue to attract large audiences each day.
Reddit is the most visited website in October 2019 by 1.29 Billion users.
Quora is ‘s online community for people who are interested . In 2019, there will be 3000-5000 questions per day. This gives you a great opportunity to reach your target audience.
Customers around the world still trust forums as a reliable information source. People will still buy your products if you provide relevant, useful and credible information.
Facebook and other social media platforms remain powerful sources of consumer communities for product discussion and idea-sharing. It is still possible to engage with your target audience about products and brands.
These seeding techniques have their drawbacks, so you might not agree with its use:
- Overused words can be interpreted as spamming
- Low level of trust
- Persuasiveness is low
- Influencers (which we will discuss in the next section).
The new seeding
The new definition of seeding
Customers have made changes to their buying habits due to the increasing influencers scattered all over social media.
Seeding is now dominated by influencer seeding and Content seeding. In this model, brands work with content creators and influencers to promote their products and gain attention.
Seeding has the primary goal of incentivizing industry thought leaders to validate your brand content and spread it through their networks, such as blogs, social media platforms, or email newsletters.
Influencers are niche-leading content creators who have the ability to encourage and engage their loyal audience.
Twitter reports that 49% of customers trust influencers to recommend products. They also take action on the recommendations. About 40% of customers purchase something online after seeing it on Instagram and Twitter.
It is important to know that influencer marketing is a growing business. You need to invest time and money in choosing the right influencers for your audience.
What to do about influencer seeding?
Influencers can mention your product indirectly or directly to reach your target customers. This will make them aware of the existence of your product and help build brand awareness among them.
Customers will trust brands when they see influencers using your product and learn quickly about your product.
Examples of content seeding by influencers
Blendjet x Jennifer Selter
Blendjet, a blender-producing business, focuses on making it easy for customers to carry their blenders around. They have proven their products to be compact, durable, and powerful.
Jennifer Selter, an American model and fitness influencer who has 12.8million followers on Instagram. She has been featured on covers of many magazines, including FHM, Vanity Fair and Muscle & Fitness, since her rise to prominence as a health and fitness guru.
The 26-year old model encourages her followers to live a healthy lifestyle and adopt good habits. Selter has endorsements for famous brands like Tarte Cosmetics and Nike.
Squarespace x Crash course
Squarespace is a website builder that offers a complete feature set to create beautiful websites starting from zero. Customers can create their own blogs or commercial websites using comprehensive solutions.
Crash Course Youtube channel is an educational channel that provides interesting, evergreen content on a wide variety of social and academic topics. This channel currently has 10.4 millions subscribers.
Squarespace’s sponsor logo was displayed by Crash Course – one strategy of seeding
Squarespace began sponsoring an astronomy course on Crash Course’s Youtube channel in 2014. Each sponsored video has a description box that links to Squarespace. This link includes a 10% discount code called “CRASHCOURSE”.
The series is very popular with viewers of all backgrounds, some videos have 1.2 million views.
Squarespace sponsors this channel and series to ensure that their brand and services are seen by millions of people searching for educational videos.
Casper x Instagram influencers
Casper, a sleep production company, is well-known for its rapid growth. It was a $100 million company.
Why is Casper so successful?
Their marketing strategy has used influencer marketing effectively. Casper must build brand trust and brand awareness through influencer seeding.
Casper understood the power and influence of social media and peer recommendation and sent top influencers mattresses free. They encouraged them to share authentic experiences with their products and encouraged their followers to do the same.
Casper shares their content on social media pages of influencers
Casper reached out to customers who have previously purchased their products as part of their seeding campaign and asked them to share their stories for a discount on their next purchase.
It’s not an easy decision to buy a mattress online. Casper leveraged the power of word-of mouth to convince customers to buy a mattress online.
This is an excellent example of how to take advantage of internet-based shopping behaviors to win your targeted audience.
Amazon Live x Neil Patel
Neil Patel, a marketing guru, is co-founder of Crazy Eggs and Hello Bar, all well-known marketing tools. He is also a prominent internet influencer. His blog is visited by hundreds of people every day.
Amazon Live was launched in February 2019, the same time as Facebook Live, Youtube Live, and Linkedin Live.
Amazon Live was born later than any other platform’s live feature. This meant that Amazon Live had to make the best marketing decisions.
Neil Patel recently mentioned Amazon Live in his blog post “One Simple Hack that’ll Boost Your Ecommerce Revenues”. In which Neil instructs Amazon sellers to use Amazon Live step-by-step,
Neil Patel featured Amazon Live in one of his blog posts
Amazon has attracted many customers to its seeding content.
How do you determine the seed content?
Although seeding seems easy due to its widespread use, not all successful campaigns can be considered so. You might fail if you don’t follow the logical plan. This is due to the misalignment of your brand with the influencers/content producers.
These proven steps will help ensure a successful seeding campaign.
Examine your audience
It is important to conduct thorough research on your target audience using reliable primary and secondary market research.
These are the questions to ask before you start your research.
- Which networks do your target audience most often spend their time on?
- These networks are why they prefer them.
- What type of content do they enjoy and what do they engage with most?
These questions will help you find the right data sources and conduct effective audience research.
Define your goals
Although the ultimate goal of seeding is to increase your brand, it’s important to set a specific goal.
You could, for example, get customers to know about new features X,Y,Z of your brand, or give them best practices when using your products.
Negotiate with influential people
This step is designed to find influencers who match your campaign target (voice, content style and audience demographic, language, etc.).
Before you can jump to a partnership, it is important to learn about the audience of the influencer.
You don’t have to Google influencers to find many other services.
After you have made your selection, you can negotiate with them about how you want the influencers to promote the product, the price and the plan.
Prepare content
Before you and the influencers create content, it is important to ask these questions:
- What is your main message as a brand?
- What are content topics?
- What are the content types? (video, postcard, article, etc.
Promote content
The content will be shared across the influencers’ social media networks, but you may still need to promote the content through your websites, social media pages, newsletters, etc.
Keep track of its performance
It is important to evaluate the performance using specific numbers that correspond with the goals.
- Is the website getting more traffic? How many visitors has the website received?
- What has changed in the engagement with your targeted audience? Changes in followers, messages and comments, ect.
- What has changed in the conversion rate?
The power of seeding
Every brand needs good content that is shared across the internet. There are some significant challenges to overcome when you do this.
- Broaden your reach
- Reach the right audience
These two goals can be achieved by “word-of mouth”, which is the act of passing on conversation from one person to another. Word-of-mouth can be a powerful tool to promote your brand and products on social media. It can be difficult to determine if the spread has a positive or negative impact on your brand’s image.
Seeding is simply a different form of word-of mouth. The brands actively control, influence and organize seeding.
Seeding allows you to encourage customers to talk about your brand and a product by releasing information. This will allow customers to be open to discussing the products. It also helps avoid customer opposition.
Seeding is a better option than advertising. Advertising is essential for any brand’s marketing strategy.
These are the benefits of seeding:
- Increase brand awareness by planting the seed in the right places. You could appeal to your target customer and get them interested in your brand.
- Monitor your brand: If you are worried about what customers are saying about you on social networks, seeding can help.
- Increase traffic by seeding your content. If audiences find your content interesting, they will click the link to visit your website.
- Convert customers: When targeted customers are familiar with your brand and your products, they can be converted to paying customers naturally
To sum up
You must win their hearts and minds in order to be successful in the coming years.
Content/influencer seeding has the advantage that you only need to choose the right partner and the right channels. These are the foundational elements of a successful seeding campaign.
We hope you find this article useful. We would love to hear your stories. Please leave a comment below. Have fun seeding!