A Link to the Past: Why Nostalgia Marketing is a highly effective tool
Friday: Collaborate and Innovate
There’s something about our childhood memories that makes us smile.
The way you look at every photo in your old photo album―it just gives you that warm, nostalgic feeling.
Did you know that you can also take advantage of these emotions in your marketing strategies?
There’s even a marketing term for that: Nostalgia Marketing!
When executed properly, this strategy will help you to generate buzz about your brand online, as this is something that people from all ages can relate to.
You know what happens next. When there’s a buzz about your brand, there’s also a higher chance for people to find you online.
That’s one good way to increase your brand’s online visibility.
Keep reading to learn how Nostalgia Marketing is effective in appealing to different types of audience.
I hope you find this week’s social media spotlight insightful as you look for new ways to establish your brand’s online presence.
Miles Everson
CEO, MBO Partners
Chairman of the Advisory Board, The I Institute
Ever had that warm and fuzzy feeling when looking back at the days of your childhood?
Oh, how simple and fun those times were for so many people!
That feeling is called nostalgia.
It’s something that marketers have utilized over the years to attract their target market.
They call this nostalgia marketing.
What is Nostalgia Marketing?
It’s a marketing strategy that makes use of past trends, products, and events to appeal to the audience’s emotions.
Many brands have used this, resulting in some of the most creative and viral marketing campaigns.
In the fast-paced digital world that we live in today, centering your marketing campaigns on something that evokes feelings of nostalgia can generate a great amount of buzz.
Why does Nostalgia Marketing work?
Here are some of the best reasons:
- Emotional Connection – People already have an emotional connection with past trends, experiences, and events. Re-introducing these to your audience will evoke a positive reaction that can drive more online buzz, traffic, and sales.
- Generate Social Media Traffic – Posting throwback content is very popular on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. You can apply this to your brand’s social media marketing campaigns to increase the number of engagements and also drive more traffic to your accounts and website!
- Increase Engagement Using Content – Nostalgia marketing campaigns are some of the most creative campaigns, allowing brands to create diverse content that includes eye-catching images, heartfelt copy and captions, relatable infographics, and even attention-grabbing video ads.
The Love for Video Games
One of the industries that have greatly benefited from nostalgia marketing is video games.
For over three decades, gaming companies have gained a dedicated following that has spanned multiple generations of people and technology.
These days, it’s common to see more people talk about their favorite games from the past.
Each generation of fans has their own fond memories during their youth, with that fondness only increasing as they get older.
Enter NINTENDO.
One of the largest video game companies in the world, Nintendo has produced some of the best-selling games and consoles of all time.
This is in part due to their commitment to making sure that they only produce games and gaming systems of the highest quality.
They have also used nostalgia marketing to a great extent, especially when they were promoting their latest products, the NES Classic Edition in 2016 and the Super NES Classic Edition in 2017.
These two mini-consoles were designed to look like their iconic namesake consoles and contained some of the best games from their respective systems (30 games for the NES Classic, and 21 for the Super NES Classic).
The announcement and launch of each product generated a lot of social media buzz, with people talking about how excited they were to play their old favorite games again.
The announcement on Facebook alone received over 10,000 likes and 8,000 shares!
They also featured some sleek retro-inspired trailers!
Overall, the marketing campaign was a huge success. Nintendo was able to sell over 10 million NES and SNES Classic consoles in total as of 2018!
At one point, the NES Classic Edition even outsold major consoles such as the PS4 and Xbox One during June of the same year!
This is one of the many examples when nostalgia evokes strong and positive emotions for those who experience it.
On the SEO side of things, nostalgia marketing can be used to enhance your content strategy. You can create blogs, infographics, images, and video content that centers around past trends and products.
When creating an SEO strategy using nostalgia marketing, make sure that you’re also targeting the right age group. You can divide trends and events by decades to give you a clearer idea of which group of people to target. Using Nintendo’s strategy as an example, NES Classic and the SNES Classic consoles were marketed to people living their younger years during the 1980s and 1990s.
As for creating blogs, list-type articles tend to be very popular when talking about past trends. They are easy to read and attract many readers. You can also use nostalgia as a way to build up current products and events, using the childhood memories of your audience to drive more page views and inquiries.
Social media is the most powerful tool for promoting and sharing nostalgia, as evidenced by the many people sharing images, videos, and memes about their childhood. The more people talk about your brand online, the more search engines rank you higher on their search results.
When done right, nostalgia marketing is a viable strategy to create viral campaigns that generate a high amount of audience engagement and create online buzz that definitely helps people find your brand!
Hope you’ve found this week’s insights interesting and helpful.
Stay tuned for next Friday’s Collaborate and Innovate!
