Adventure Brands and the Impact of Video: Part 2- Building your Social Channels

The fight for social media dominance is a fierce one these days. With everyone and their dog (literally their dogs) posting epic content, it’s hard not to wonder how you can stand out as a brand in the adventure or action sports industries.

We all know consistency, aesthetic, clever captions, time of day, utilizing new tools like stories and monetizing posts are helpful for gaining followers, but at the end of the day no matter how strategic you are, nothing gets more attention than quality video content.

According to the American Marketing Association in the next year, video will drive 85% of the search traffic in America. So if everyone is doing it, how do we stand out and build a solid following?

Think about your social media channel as a great dinner party. Ever snatch up so many of the appetizers being passed around that you were too full to enjoy the main course? They are easy to share, quick to consume, and probably help initiate some conversation. Before you know it the appy table is empty and you've got a nice buzz on- you can’t imagine sitting down and digging into the fancy pants prime rib dinner that the host has spent all day preparing.

Social channels with the highest engagement rates are the ones serving up a lot of those tasty little treats. They draw us in because they easy to consume and fun to share. We can watch them on the go, and they pump us up without taking up too much of our precious time.

It can be overwhelming figuring out how to keep up with a constant flow of video when it is so time consuming and expensive to produce.

The beauty of the action and adventure sports industries is there is no shortage of amazing opportunities to gather footage. You might have a filmer on staff and chances are good that you have an athlete or ambassador team that is out there using your products constantly. If you are an operator offering a service or experience, you may have guides, coaches or leaders that could be using an iphone or go pro or any personal camera to capture the experience for you. At the end of the day chances are slim that these people are going to want to sit down and edit the content they get for you day after day, but it is easy enough for them to plug in their cameras and upload it to a shared drive for you.

Write it into their contracts to provide you with their footage on a regular basis. Incentivize them to keep the flow going. The content doesn’t have to be all shot on a Red Camera to be worthy. Some of the best content to share is real, raw and relatable.

Grete Eliassen – Clayton's Peak from ChopShopCo on Vimeo.

Then, contact ChopShop about our monthly subscription programs and find out how we can consistently work our magic on the footage are collecting, and turn it around into awesome social edits that fit your budget. Ask us about how you can entice more user-generated content from your customers, broadening your social reach even more. Pump those videos out and watch the followers flow in.

Next up in Adventure Brands and the Impact of Video: Part 3- E-mail Marketing. (coming soon!)