Three Reasons Why Brands Are Flocking to Talk App Kik, ClickZ
Trio Reasons Why Brands Are Flocking to Talk App Kik
If Siri and a Promoted Tweet had a baby, it might look like an ad on Kik.
With two hundred million registered users, Kik has the attention of the media and advertisers alike. Last month, NBC became the very first broadcast news service to create an account on the Ontario, Canada-based messaging app. When Kik's users send a message using keywords like “politics,” they can receive news updates and movie sourced from NBC.
Even before NBC got on board, Kik was being employed by some sixty publishers that include Seventeen and Funny or Die. Consumer brands like Skullcandy and Vans are experimenting, too. MTV recently created an account, as did media company and digital publisher Pixable. The latter posts popular stories, quizzes, and “anything that's funny; according to Pixable's vice president of growth its pages-per-session numbers are “almost dual what we see on other social platforms.”
What's the appeal of this Snapchat rival? Let's take a look.
Kik's Ad Platform Is Interactive
In November of last year, Kik introduced Promoted Talks as a way to monetize its service. Now, brands like Burger King are wooing consumers to strike up a conversation. Users can browse Promoted Talks in the “Find People” section of the Kik app to see which brands are presently running promotions. Brands must anticipate potential user interactions using something akin to artificial intelligence, such that when a consumer sends a brand a message, Kik can scan the keywords and supply an adequate response. That message typically comes with a selection of brand content.
Talking with companies on Kik isn't unlike probing a smartphone individual assistant, if Siri or Cortana advised you to peruse some branded memes and GIFs. Questions are answered with chipper responses that are utterly on-brand (“Um, ok! LOL w/us over nine memes that flawlessly describe how u may indeed feel about V-Day,” says Seventeen magazine). Entertainment companies can invite consumers to talk with celebrities, and even fictional characters from movies and TV. It's character marketing gone fully interactive.
The Washington Post created a March Madness-themed trivia game customized to the user's skill set. The game plays out in real time when users interact with the Washington Post‘s Kik account.
Burger King, meantime, is presently using Kik to promote its Chicken Fries Keyboard emoji app. Its concentrate on delivering visual content is flawlessly suited to Kik's user base, eighty two percent of which falls inbetween the ages of thirteen and 24.
Mobile Messaging Lets Consumers and Brands Get Cozy
“The mobile messaging app space represents the most intimate form of marketing that we've seen so far. This is an chance for the brand to actually participate in the chat-style dialogue with the consumer,” says Sean O’Neal, President at Adaptly. As a developer of media buying technology for autonomous marketing platforms like Snapchat and Twitter, Adaptly partnered up with Kik last year. Advertisers can buy Promoted Talks directly through Kik or do it through Adaptly, which automates the process to help companies scale their native cross-platform social media campaigns.
According to O'Neal, Kik can suggest brands a totally unique media environment. “Facebook is more of a broadcast style advertising model, but with Kik it's one-to-one marketing communication,” he says. “The chance that Kik has developed is brilliant.”
That's because Kik isn't made for messaging alone. The fresh version of the app includes a built-in mobile browser that permits users to “kick” messages, pictures, and movie to others at will.
When in two thousand fourteen The Weinstein Company dreamed to promote the movie The Giver among its target audience of Millennials it used Adaptly to post a trailer to Kik, along with virtual stickers to enhance photos from the film. O'Neal says that similar campaigns have resulted in “hundreds of thousands and sometimes over a million fresh followers” for brands. Much of the Kik's value is in the earned media that it can produce when users share content. “We're watching incredible virality on sponsored programs,” he says.
To put it another way, the perception of a brand's content switches when it's received by way of a family member or friend. By filtering its content through Kik, publishers stand to increase its influence on viewers.
Kik Users Engage With Brands
Earlier this year, Kik commissioned a probe on messaging app engagement among Americans aged fourteen to 25. It found that ninety have interacted with a brand. Direct brand engagement was highest among Kik users, with thirty percent reporting an interest in engaging with brands compared with twenty three percent for Facebook and Snapchat.
Top activities among mobile messaging users includes following or liking a brand (60 percent), watching a brand movie (56 percent), and reading a branded post (56 percent).
Twenty-six percent of Kik users said they had chatted with a brand directly (for Snapchat, it was twenty one percent).
“It's indeed switching the paradigm of marketing,” O'Neal says. “We're moving away from the concept of pre-canned messages based on audience profiles and getting to a more human-like interaction.”
If the advertising of the future takes the form of a chat-based content exchange, we'll have Kik to thank for it.
Related reading
A guide to five Facebook ad types that will reach your marketing objectives
Facebook has announced that it is planning to withdraw the capability to boost a list of post types from its available ad formats, as they didn’t seem to align with most advertisers’ objectives. If you’re looking to reconfigure your Facebook advertising strategy, what options remain, and which are the most effective?
The brand's guide to Near-Field Communication (NFC)
There is no shortage of emerging technologies that could revolutionize the way that brands do marketing. But thanks to a latest announcement by Apple, one may have shot to the top of the ‘must-have’ list: near-field communication, or NFC.
Facebook See and the battle for digital TV dollars
Facebook’s announcement of its See movie service is a clear bid to tap into the lucrative TV market. How will it affect digital ad spend, and what do marketers need to know?
The age of m-commerce: Why consumers love using mobile as a shopping instrument
Mobile is taking the style retail industry by storm. Statistics taken from a two thousand sixteen Pew Research Center report showcase that just over one in ten American adults are “smartphone-only” internet users. But why are shoppers taking to their smartphones in such high numbers to buy clothing? Here’s why mobile and style retail go together.
Trio Reasons Why Brands Are Flocking to Talk App Kik, ClickZ
Three Reasons Why Brands Are Flocking to Talk App Kik
If Siri and a Promoted Tweet had a baby, it might look like an ad on Kik.
With two hundred million registered users, Kik has the attention of the media and advertisers alike. Last month, NBC became the very first broadcast news service to create an account on the Ontario, Canada-based messaging app. When Kik's users send a message using keywords like “politics,” they can receive news updates and movie sourced from NBC.
Even before NBC got on board, Kik was being employed by some sixty publishers that include Seventeen and Funny or Die. Consumer brands like Skullcandy and Vans are experimenting, too. MTV recently created an account, as did media company and digital publisher Pixable. The latter posts popular stories, quizzes, and “anything that's funny; according to Pixable's vice president of growth its pages-per-session numbers are “almost dual what we see on other social platforms.”
What's the appeal of this Snapchat rival? Let's take a look.
Kik's Ad Platform Is Interactive
In November of last year, Kik introduced Promoted Talks as a way to monetize its service. Now, brands like Burger King are coaxing consumers to strike up a conversation. Users can browse Promoted Talks in the “Find People” section of the Kik app to see which brands are presently running promotions. Brands must anticipate potential user interactions using something akin to artificial intelligence, such that when a consumer sends a brand a message, Kik can scan the keywords and produce an adequate response. That message typically comes with a selection of brand content.
Talking with companies on Kik isn't unlike probing a smartphone individual assistant, if Siri or Cortana advised you to peruse some branded memes and GIFs. Questions are answered with chipper responses that are utterly on-brand (“Um, ok! LOL w/us over nine memes that ideally describe how u may truly feel about V-Day,” says Seventeen magazine). Entertainment companies can invite consumers to talk with celebrities, and even fictional characters from movies and TV. It's character marketing gone fully interactive.
The Washington Post created a March Madness-themed trivia game customized to the user's skill set. The game plays out in real time when users interact with the Washington Post‘s Kik account.
Burger King, meantime, is presently using Kik to promote its Chicken Fries Keyboard emoji app. Its concentrate on delivering visual content is flawlessly suited to Kik's user base, eighty two percent of which falls inbetween the ages of thirteen and 24.
Mobile Messaging Lets Consumers and Brands Get Cozy
“The mobile messaging app space represents the most intimate form of marketing that we've seen so far. This is an chance for the brand to actually participate in the chat-style dialogue with the consumer,” says Sean O’Neal, President at Adaptly. As a developer of media buying technology for autonomous marketing platforms like Snapchat and Twitter, Adaptly partnered up with Kik last year. Advertisers can buy Promoted Talks directly through Kik or do it through Adaptly, which automates the process to help companies scale their native cross-platform social media campaigns.
According to O'Neal, Kik can suggest brands a totally unique media environment. “Facebook is more of a broadcast style advertising model, but with Kik it's one-to-one marketing communication,” he says. “The chance that Kik has developed is brilliant.”
That's because Kik isn't made for messaging alone. The fresh version of the app includes a built-in mobile browser that permits users to “kick” messages, pics, and movie to others at will.
When in two thousand fourteen The Weinstein Company desired to promote the movie The Giver among its target audience of Millennials it used Adaptly to post a trailer to Kik, along with virtual stickers to enhance photos from the film. O'Neal says that similar campaigns have resulted in “hundreds of thousands and sometimes over a million fresh followers” for brands. Much of the Kik's value is in the earned media that it can produce when users share content. “We're witnessing incredible virality on sponsored programs,” he says.
To put it another way, the perception of a brand's content switches when it's received by way of a family member or friend. By filtering its content through Kik, publishers stand to increase its influence on viewers.
Kik Users Engage With Brands
Earlier this year, Kik commissioned a examine on messaging app engagement among Americans aged fourteen to 25. It found that ninety have interacted with a brand. Direct brand engagement was highest among Kik users, with thirty percent reporting an interest in engaging with brands compared with twenty three percent for Facebook and Snapchat.
Top activities among mobile messaging users includes following or liking a brand (60 percent), watching a brand movie (56 percent), and reading a branded post (56 percent).
Twenty-six percent of Kik users said they had chatted with a brand directly (for Snapchat, it was twenty one percent).
“It's indeed switching the paradigm of marketing,” O'Neal says. “We're moving away from the concept of pre-canned messages based on audience profiles and getting to a more human-like interaction.”
If the advertising of the future takes the form of a chat-based content exchange, we'll have Kik to thank for it.
Related reading
A guide to five Facebook ad types that will reach your marketing objectives
Facebook has announced that it is planning to withdraw the capability to boost a list of post types from its available ad formats, as they didn’t seem to align with most advertisers’ objectives. If you’re looking to reconfigure your Facebook advertising strategy, what options remain, and which are the most effective?
The brand's guide to Near-Field Communication (NFC)
There is no shortage of emerging technologies that could revolutionize the way that brands do marketing. But thanks to a latest announcement by Apple, one may have shot to the top of the ‘must-have’ list: near-field communication, or NFC.
Facebook Observe and the battle for digital TV dollars
Facebook’s announcement of its See movie service is a clear bid to tap into the lucrative TV market. How will it affect digital ad spend, and what do marketers need to know?
The age of m-commerce: Why consumers love using mobile as a shopping device
Mobile is taking the style retail industry by storm. Statistics taken from a two thousand sixteen Pew Research Center report demonstrate that just over one in ten American adults are “smartphone-only” internet users. But why are shoppers taking to their smartphones in such high numbers to buy clothing? Here’s why mobile and style retail go together.