Have you ever decided what to wear the day before you wear it? Well, companies do that too.

Days (and sometimes even months) ahead of time companies and their agencies go back and forth on what Facebook fedora is appropriate for May, what Pinterest pantoloons to wear in January, what Twitter tweed tie is just right for July. More than you know, social media is about planning ahead, building a schedule and keeping it.

So what happens when your schedule doesn’t account for one of the largest digital trends ever seen? What happens when Pokemon Go becomes an overnight sensation with more daily users than Twitter and more daily engagement than Facebook?

You adapt, and you do it quickly. 

The first day Pokemon Go came out, our office already had a few fans. Within a week of the Pokemon Go release, we were already plugging Pokemon Go over social media and reaching out to select clients to develop strategies they could use to help Pokemon Go benefit them.

You may have read “select clients,” and wondered why a top notch agency like Stone Ward wasn’t implementing strategies to help all of our clients use Pokemon Go. The truth is that not every digital trend is right for every client. That’s where digital strategy comes in.

 

Our resident Digital Strategist, Abbi Siler, appeared on Arkansas Matters to discuss what kinds of digital strategy businesses can implement to capitalize on the Pokemon Go trend and what kinds of businesses may not want to capitalize on the trend at all. 

When Pokemon Go was released, one of our clients–Magic Springs, a theme and waterpark–stood to benefit a great deal from the increased traffic the app could provide. We generated a #PokemonMagicMeetup promotion and implemented Pokemon-driven social media contests to drive up park attendance. For those of you who aren’t familiar with all these Pokemon terms, check out our helpful PokemonGo Glossary for Business.

 

While Pokemon Go has certainly encouraged users to explore the world around them, not every location is appropriate for game play. One of our other clients, a statewide healthcare provider, was less likely to benefit from the app. They actually saw it as a safety concern. Pokemon Trainers kept running into hospital lobbies, catching Pokemon and running out. For them, we didn’t recommend any Pokemon promotions because we knew the trend wouldn’t benefit them like it had Magic Springs. That was true not only of our healthcare client but also of the 9/11 Memorial and the Holocaust museum.

We haved joined with sites like those in calling for a new feature allowing businesses to remove the PokeStops near them or to at least be able to flag those PokeStops that may not be appropriate so Pokemon Go users understand the insensitivity of gameplay in those particular environments.

When we advise our clients–hospitals and theme parks alike–on the best digital strategies, we adapt the strategies we recommend to fit the unique goals of our brands, even when those goals are to push Pokemon users to be a little more thoughtful.

Digital strategy isn’t really all that different from finding the perfect outfit for a particular person on a particular day, and in that sense, I guess you could call Stone Ward a team of digital fashionistas.

Need a strategy on how to make Pokemon Go or other digital trends work for your business? Contact us!