You know what? Putting in all the effort it takes to create your own content is exhausting. Planning, creating, editing, publishing, promoting. Who has the time? Ok, ok. We do have the time, and many of us enjoy it, but there is a way to create marketing campaigns which build themselves through user-generated content.
Lego has hit a goldmine when it comes to this. Their user-generated content strategy helps them in every way you can think:
- Direct product development
- Twitter marketing
- YouTube marketing
- Niche marketing
- Influencer marketing
Their campaign is called LEGO Ideas, and it is a major part of why Brand Finance called them the most powerful brand in the world for 2015. Examining all aspects of how this campaign impacts their entire online marketing strategy can help you plan your own successful user-generated campaign.
As a bonus, this is all about LEGO: You can’t go wrong with the world’s favorite building block brand!
The LEGO Ideas content generating machine
At the heart of LEGO’s user-generated content is the LEGO Ideas section of their website. This is where would-be LEGO designers can submit their own LEGO designs. Which is fun enough, check out some of these great designs:
Lots of fun, and new concepts! The real trick is where you see the section marked ‘Supporters.’ This is where their LEGO Idea concept changes from being a fun space for LEGO wannabes to share ideas, and turns it into a space where real marketing gets done.
The goal of everyone submitting designs to LEGO ideas is that if they can get 10,000 supporters to their project in an allotted amount of time, their LEGO idea is reviewed by LEGO itself. If it passes this phase it is made, promoted, and sold in stores. How cool is that? You get to see your own creation as a real toy!
Wait. That’s not good enough for LEGO. The bonus is that creators get a percentage of their product when it’s sold. Get paid to create LEGO products. Live the dream.
And they’re not joking. Here are two recent products that have come directly from this campaign:
We all need that Ghostbusters set, right?
Are you paying attention to what this all implies? LEGO have:
- Created a place where passionate fans give them product ideas.
- Made fans promote the product before it’s even made.
- Given themselves a chance to have new user-generated content created about them online with no effort.
- Inserted themselves into niche markets with little effort on their part.
- Only pay a reasonable percentage of actual sales.
This is a marketing dream scenario, and we’re not even done looking at it yet!
How this impacts their Twitter marketing
Twitter is an extremely useful promotional tool. Amateur marketers frequently turn to it, and the people making these LEGO sets are certainly towards the amateur end. You’ll see plenty of boring, auto-generated tweets like this:
And that’s fine. A piece of content being shared by an independent Twitter user is better than it not being shared at all. But one of the best things that happens with this campaign is how it appeals to niche influencers:
An account about space tweeted a project about space. A children’s books account tweeted about a children’s book project. A robotics account tweeted about a ‘first computer’ project. And, yes, you saw that right, the ATLAS Experiment people really did tweet about a LEGO project featuring the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
LEGO have set themselves up perfectly to be a niche product in nearly every niche, and to have important influencers within those niches promoting them. We all know that engaging with niche influencers is an important aspect of Twitter marketing and getting followers. LEGO have the niche influencers coming to them, rather than LEGO going to them. Brilliant move.
Having just the right user-generated campaign, with the right rewards, has paid off for them in a way that anyone can learn from.
Even LEGO’s video marketing is impacted
LEGO are fun to play with, and videos about people playing with toys are very popular. Check out Fun Toys Collector, one of the most popular channels in the world, if you need more proof of that.
With all of the fun to be had, you can be sure that the views rack up in a number of ways for LEGO and their LEGO Ideas campaign. For starters, fans work to create their own videos to push for their projects to be made. Here’s a video created for the Large Hadron Collider’s LEGO Ideas project with friends of the creator working together:
If you missed how tongue-in-cheek that was, it parodied an old iPad commercial. Granted the video only has a little over 5,000 views, but you can be sure that those views are very targeted.
There are even dedicated channels, with no affiliation to LEGO, who push other people’s projects:
Then, once the sets are made, there are channels which have dedicated series that review and show how the sets are built. Who else is wondering why the set below isn’t in their collection?
Are any of these videos or channels setting the world on fire with millions upon millions of views? Millions of subscribers? No. Is LEGO spending a single dime on any of this content? Also no.
There are dozens and dozens of videos like the ones shown above. While no one video may take off in crazy numbers, this does all add up to incredible niche penetration for LEGO. It’s the same as with their Twitter marketing:
- Science channels post science related project videos.
- Children’s book channels post LEGO Ideas related to children’s books.
- Comic book channels post comic book related LEGO Ideas projects.
When LEGO does step in to create their own video content related to LEGO Ideas, it comes in the form of these winner announcement videos:
Did you watch that video? The first winner was a Wall-E project. It was designed, built, submitted, and promoted by an actual Pixar animator for the Wall-E movie. He built it while working on the movie. How much more of a niche product expert can you get than that? You simply can’t, and LEGO have set themselves up to have these people on board with little effort on their part.
As far as the video itself goes, it could use a bit of work in being, you know, exciting, and they do address this in later videos. But all they need is their experts, designers on the LEGO team, and a camera. Even their own content is cheap, but it still gets views.
So, ready to be a lazy marketer?
LEGO have created a user-generated content campaign which impacts all levels of their business:
- Product development
- Niche marketing
- Influencer marketing
- Twitter and social media marketing
- Youtube and online video marketing
Best of all, this is all done largely at the expense of their fans. LEGO have, essentially, made any of their fans an independent LEGO contractor. Their fans play the role of both designer and marketer. This puts LEGO at an extreme advantage as it allows them to tap into new niche markets with ready-made influencers eager to help in any way they can to pursue passion projects when they wouldn’t ordinarily promote LEGO products.
If you’re serious about creating a user-generated campaign of your own, be sure to have a way to develop an idea which will impact your business in all of these different ways. Get this work done right the first time, and you can sit back like the lazy marketer you’ve always wanted to be…
