What is seeding? The 3 stages of a seeding campaign

Over Digital Marketing, you have probably heard of common concepts such as: Social Marketing, SEO – Search Engine Optimization, SEM – Search Engine Marketing or AdWords,… Today, though, seeding marketing is a Marketing very important way to help businesses raise brand awareness.

Seeding marketing takes place on many platforms to draw potential customers to your brand. So what exactly is seeding, and how do you run an effective seeding marketing campaign for your business? Let's Mona Media explore the answers in detail below.

What is Seeding?

“Seeding” in English means sowing a seed so it can grow into a big tree.

In marketing, you can understand "seeding" as the act of "planting seeds" in the awareness and subconscious of our clients of customers so they get to know your brand and become familiar with it. Seeding is seen as an essential part of creating buzz, drawing interest and building customer trust in the products and services being advertised.

People who build “Seeding” are seen as the ones who plant the seeds, also called “Seeder”.

Today, seeding has become a form of Online marketing that delivers strong results. Seeders lead and deliver information to users as skillfully and naturally as possible through website, forums, blog, social media to draw in other people's interest.

In this way, seeding gets the message across and brings many benefits to the brand. Customers can easily accept it and actively look up and filter information sources, which can lead to a customer behavior with conversion rate that is higher.

See also: What is branding? How to bring your brand to customers

Benefits of a seeding campaign

Seeding is another multi-channel marketing option alongside traditional marketing activities such as press PR articles, flyers… whose effectiveness is hard to measure. Instead of spending a huge budget on ad campaigns, many businesses have chosen seeding as an alternative:

• Brings high-quality seeding content, making the business's SEO activities more effective.
• Increases brand searches and helps potential customers get up-to-date information on your products and services easily, helping grow the brand .
• Increases brand awareness among customers and helps the brand grow stronger in the future.
• Improves the chance of ranking at the top of search engines through simple keywords, and draws a flow of traffic from lively, highly viral comment threads.
• Encourages exchange among all readers, which boosts spread and recognition and builds trust among potential customers. So when you combine it with the right CTA it speeds up conversion into purchases and referrals to acquaintances.
• Attracts more people using Internet to talk about your services and products.

You can also think of seeding as a kind of "decoy." It directly affects interest and also the decision to buy or use a service of consumers.

See also: 7 factors that affect consumers' purchasing decisions

Main goals of seeding

Seeding campaigns that succeed are all based on the AISAS model. This model tracks customer behavior. Specifically, it maps to the following goals:

• Attention: Catch customers' attention with sound, imagery and meaning that makes them stop and think about your ad.
• Searching: Get customers to look into the ad. This shows they are curious, a need has formed, and reasons to buy are starting to appear.
• Interest: Build interest, turning vague meaning into real interest in the ad's message or the product.
• Action: Drive action, turning their thinking into a purchase.
• Share: Build affection and encourage them to share their feelings about the product with others. If those people share the same interests, the effect can spread extremely fast.

The 3 most effective seeding platforms

There are many channels you can choose for seeding campaigns. They include:

Social media

In Vietnam, no place is better for seeding than social media pages. It is fertile ground for seeders promoting their brands. Social networks many seeders pick include Instagram, Zalo, Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn. Facebook seeding stands out in particular.

What is Facebook seeding and what does it involve? Facebook seeding means chatting and leaving comments under posts to create buzz, build trust and draw customer interest in products and services.

See also: 28+ ways to boost Facebook engagement effectively

These networks have huge numbers of users. They are also where many people discuss the topics you set.

Seeding on forums

Seeding on forums will help your products get better reviews, because forums let people discuss and exchange views on a topic of shared interest. Each forum has many sections, and each section holds different topics, so you can choose the seeding that suits your industry.

Seeding on this channel depends heavily on SEO Offpage and link, and is much harder than seeding on social networks. The script has to be good and skillful to attract customers.

See also: Attract customers effectively to support sales

Note that one account should seed only 4 to 5 times, with some time between each. If you spam too much, the admin may knock you out. Well-known forums to look at include webtretho.com, Vozforum.com, 5giay.vn, Lamchame.com, etc.

Seeding on blogs

News blogs can be websites or online diaries. They are where seeders voice opinions about a brand or product and catch visitors' attention. Blogs worth a look include Freetuts, du lich bui, Jam Viet, Vietmoz, etc.

Principles for seeding success

Here are 3 principles for a successful seeding campaign that builds your company's brand image.

Seed as if you're not seeding

This is the first and most important principle of seeding. Users today are very "smart" about filtering content, so when you run a seeding campaign, your content needs to be as skillful and natural as possible.

Following the "seed as if you're not seeding" principle also keeps group, forum and community admins from watching you too closely. It also lowers the chance that your seeding posts end up in the "spam folder" and never reach customers.

Catch trends quickly

Social networks are growing fast today, so it is essential to catch trends quickly when you build a seeding campaign. The point of riding a trend is to "hit" users' psychology so they pay attention to your seeding post.

So you need to write a catchy headline that follows the trend to draw your target customers. Trend content you can use includes viral sayings, popular songs, etc. Using trend content like this makes your seeding posts feel natural and easy to put in front of your business's customers.

See also: What is a trend? The fastest way to catch trends

Hard work and patience

Seeding takes a lot of time and effort. It is easy to get bored because you repeat the same work every day. Seeders are also very used to having their posts deleted by group admins. So seeders need to be hardworking and patient for a campaign to deliver its best results.

The 3 main phases of a seeding campaign

Phase 1: Build brand awareness

In this phase, seeding campaigns aim to get consumers interested in and talking about the company's new or upcoming product.

If customers become interested in and start discussing the product at this stage, the business has already won part of the overall campaign.

Phase 2: Build emotional value

After the first phase, the top goal of phase 2 is to build customers' feelings about the brand. Customers need to remember your brand and feel positively about it. Then, when they face a choice, your brand sits in their minds with good associations, and they will choose products from your brand.

To do this, seeders create conversations and discussion comments that lean positive toward your brand.

Doing this naturally while still drawing customers in is not simple. To attract customers, you need to invest a lot of time in thinking up effective campaigns, and the products from your brand have to be good quality.

Phase 3: Customers act and buy products or services from your brand

The final phase decides the product's revenue results and moves customers from online to offline. It shows your seeding campaign has worked when:

• Customers trust the brand;
• Customers keep giving good feedback on the brand's products;
• In the end, they trust you enough to buy and recommend the product to friends and family.

Points to note when running a seeding campaign

Any marketing campaign campaign has many points to watch, and seeding is no exception. Seeding naturally will win your brand points with customers. Keep the notes below in mind to run the most effective seeding campaign.

Seed to the right customers

Seeding to the right customers is the first thing to watch, because it decides whether your campaign succeeds. Depending on how you approach your target audience, you can run suitable seeding content that carries your message across most effectively. That keeps your campaign from wandering, reaches the right people and raises the business's purchase conversion rate as much as possible.

For example, if you sell cosmetics, your target customers are women aged 18 – 40 who follow product review pages. The seeding campaign then plays the role of people who are using, or have used, these products and who give opinions on their quality, features and price.

Customers will read and weigh these reviews, collect opinions to analyze whether the product suits them, and decide whether to use that product or service.

Seeding that emphasizes keywords

Emphasizing keywords in seeding helps highlight a message that the business wants to get across to its target customers. It also helps customers grasp the main points and understand content about your brand more accurately.

However, don't repeat keywords too often when seeding, as it backfires. Focusing too heavily on keywords will make customers realize you are advertising a product or service. They will then put their guard up and usually lose interest in learning more.

Join relevant groups and forums

Seeding in groups and forums will help your product or service get better reviews.

• Joining forums relevant to the industry you want to seed makes it easy to reach many potential customers for your business. But to get the best results on this channel, you need a good, skillful script to hold readers' attention.
• Also, when seeding in Facebook groups, set up a real account with full information to build trust with readers. Never use fake accounts, as they make customers distrust the products or services your brand offers.

Seeding content that sparks debate

Debate-style seeding content keeps your post from sinking and raises search traffic on Google. To get discussions interesting enough to draw many online communities, you need to set up situations that get members arguing with each other.

Topics with a good theme will draw many people into arguing about your product or service. If the debate goes in a direction that favors your brand, it boosts the buying behavior of potential customers.

Seeding by recommendation

Besides seeding that says good things about your product or service, inserting backlinks in the form of Anchor text is also a good way to support SEO. This way, customers get a clearer picture of the information thanks to seeding that recommends your product or service.

To be more convincing, though, you need to play the role of a customer who has used the product or service and wants to recommend it to others. Only then do you build trust and draw many customers to the content you share.

Seeding by problem discussion

Seeding by problem discussion means you create a topical subject yourself and analyze it in depth to draw responses and catch the attention of potential customers and interested online communities. Also, keep the number of backlinks to no more than 3 backlink per post, and make sure to highlight your brand.

Managing a media crisis

Seeding works if you build content that is good and engaging. But repeating the same style of seeding content bores readers, which can spark unwanted arguments and hurt your brand image.

So when you run a seeding campaign, anticipate the worst cases that could happen and prepare backup plans for dealing with a media crisis. Only then will your seeding campaign be truly effective and reach a wide audience target customers for your business.

Seeding is a solid step forward that spreads your brand across your target market. We hope the information in this article gives you an overview of what seeding is and how to get seeding to deliver marketing strategy as effectively as possible.

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