Brief #75: We asked marketers a few questions...

This content originally appeared on August 12, 2021 as part of the Future of Marketing weekly email series. Subscribe here.

Welcome to Future of Marketing.

Each week, we send you the most relevant trends, resources, and strategies in social and user-generated content (UGC) from leading marketers and brands around the globe.

We've been having conversations with marketing leaders to learn about their advice, challenges, and perspective for the future – and today, we're letting them do the talking.

We're discussing:

What marketers should STOP doing
What the future of marketing looks like
#BrandCrush: Apartment Therapy 💘

You can listen to the podcast here:

What should marketers STOP doing?

Stop doing anything that requires me to invest a lot of time… unless it's super engaging. I'm probably not going to sit there and look at a single post for a really long time, so I try to abide by that rule myself.

Alyssa Rodriguez, Education Specialist

Super promotional content – even when I write that content, it makes me cringe because I know that it's not going to land. We're past that in B2B.

There has been a conversation of B2B and B2C blurring for a while – and people expecting more human, more empathic content. [Promotional content] really sticks out in the feed.

Claire Kennedy, Social Media Manager

It's very easy to get stressed out and worried about all the different platforms... It's not that you should ignore it, because I don't think you should, but it's important to start simple and do your research.

Even if you don't have the capacity to dig into something like Clubhouse or TikTok, see why people are so invested and identify what they need to know. Also, how is this going to evolve other social platforms that we're currently using?

Ryan Peña, Paid Media and Social Media Supervisor

What does the future of marketing look like to you?

We are going to see a lot more user-generated content (UGC).

Influencer marketing is growing and it is going to reach a point where almost everyone's an influencer.

Alyssa Rodriguez, Education Specialist

I'm waiting to see what Gen Z does.

Their humor, their culture, their language are so fascinating. I want to have Gen Zers work for me because they're so creative, and their ability to have multi-layered means is astonishing.

You can go on TikTok, and there's a parody of a dance and you have to know all those layers to understand that one TikTok, and everyone in the comments is talking about all the multi-layers of this one video that's 30 seconds long, and how genius it was – and by next week, it'll be old...

I want to see more genius, witty content… companies that are using memes and pop culture references in a really interesting way.

Claire Kennedy, Social Media Manager

It's going to, fortunately, need to get more human.

Our natural gravitation as a society is to connect with each other. If we're trying to connect with other people as a brand, you really have to put the people first. So, I think human-focused marketing.

Ryan Peña, Paid Media and Social Media Supervisor

What we're learning

Listen to the full episode here.

#BrandCrush: Apartment Therapy 💘

If you need home decor (and UGC) inspiration, look no further than Apartment Therapy. This brand shares tips and stories submitted by their community across their digital channels – a great way to use UGC to elevate the voice of their biggest fans (and share captivating content).

For example, not only does Apartment Therapy reshare UGC on their social media profiles, but they're also creating blogs from this content – featuring house tours and decor advice from their community (like this).

A decorated living room with frames on the wall and a styled coffee table

Apartment Therapy is also asking fans to submit videos for a chance to be featured on their Instagram and TikTok pages, which reinforces the notion that video content will continue to rise.

Next time you're wondering how to reuse UGC to build engagement (or just need decorating tips), check out Apartment Therapy for inspiration. 😉