Gamification works well, and easier to do than ever. If you’re driving traffic to a brand website, sign-up page, or purchase page then gamifying that process can work well to skyrocket that campaigns performance. Whether it’s a competition or quiz or getting your audience to upload photos/ videos of themselves — giving the audience something to engage and interact with, rather than just filling out a boring form can work well. We’ve seen uplifts of 700% in campaign performance with this.
We often use the term “Influencers” to describe people with significant social media followings on platforms like Instagram, Twitter TikTok, Youtube, Linkedin and Facebook. Influencers have become today’s media titans, sought after for everything from product placements to timely trends. What’s the difference between influence and impact? Fans and followers? Sizzle versus staying power?
In this interview series, called, “How To Cultivate Community In A Click to Connect World” we are talking to influencers about how they define success and what we all need to discover about the true nature of influence. As a part of this series I had the pleasure of interviewing Adam Mussa.
Adam is the Founder of Campaignware, an interactive content creation platform that helps entrepreneurs and influencers create interactive sponsored content for their audience for free, with no coding or complexity.
Prior to that he spent 10+ years creating campaigns and digital products for clients including McDonalds, Dell, Ford and more.
Adam also teaches Digital Marketing at institutes including General Assembly and the University of New South Wales. In his free time he enjoys making music, cooking and trying to teach his puppy Hugo to play fetch.
Thank you for making time to visit with us! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. How did you discover your career path and what got you to where you are today?
I have a pretty strange career path. I actually have a degree in Industrial Design so I should be designing cars or furniture rather than marketing or software!
The way I fell into this was when I started my first business, I realised I had no idea how to market effectively so that business failed. I decided if I was going to do it again and achieve my life goals I needed to learn how to be a good marketer.
That led me to change my career path, starting at social media marketing, and digital agencies where I honed my craft and ended up ultimately building a product to help people to do better marketing!
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned along the way that influences how you operate now?
I never assume I’m automatically right — or I magically happen to know what people want. I don’t pretend to be Steve Jobs!
I use the Test > Measure > Learn approach daily, we like to test different marketing or campaign ideas quickly and cost efficiently, and then once we know that they work we scale them as fast as possible.
We’re all searching for some good news. How are you using your platform to make a positive social impact?
During the height of the 2020 lockdowns Campaignware was used for a campaign that let people from all over the world submit their thoughts and well wishes to a large community figure who passed away. Those messages were displated on a digital wall for people, and his family, to read.
The outreach was a phenomenal outpouring of support and love to the family from all over the world.
Many of our readers are influencers as well. Others have tried and have yet to succeed. What words of advice would you offer to aspiring influencers, knowing what you know now?
It takes time. Nothing happens quickly.
It’s very easy to become demoralized when you look at others on Instagram, Twitch or Tiktok with massive followings and think you’re never going to get there. OR to think you should have got there by now.
Everyone’s running their own race — it’s so important to remember that.
It’s extremely difficult, almost impossible, to go viral immediately — it takes time. But the good news is you can what works and doesn’t work from observing others.
Being comfortable with failure is also so important because as a business owner you’re likely fail more often than you succeed. The challenge is that people don’t often talk about their failures — so it’s easy to think people move from one success to another, but it’s extremely rare for that to actually happen.
It’s vital to remember — this is a marathon, not a sprint!
Success is often a matter of perspective. I’ve always resonated with Henry David Thoreau’s quote, “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.” How do you see success — or define success — for yourself now?
I always try to work backwards from my end goal and objective.
If your vision for success is vague and difficult to quantify (for example making vage statements like ‘I want to be rich’ or ‘I want to have millions of followers) you’re setting yourself up for failure, because impossible for you to be able to reach your goal. So being clear with what you want to achieve is key
That doesn’t necessarily mean that you must be content with one thing. You can always add to them!
I like to level my goals, so that once you achieve one you can then level up to the next one. That way you can breakdown your goals and make them much more achievable.
One big moonshot goal it can be almost impossible and quite demoralizing if you’re not succeeding immediately, so breaking them down into smaller sub-goals can be helpful.
What are your strategies to make room for who and what matters most?
I keep my work and my personal life separate.
Not letting them intertwine makes it very easy to switch off, keep relationships simple, and helps me be more present with those people.
In this industry it’s so easy to be ‘on’ 24/7 so I force myself to switch off at 5:00 PM, to cook, eat dinner with my wife, take the dog for a walk, or take a class, then maybe come back to work later in the evening if I need to.
If you’re constantly it’s not healthy or sustainable.
How do you reduce or mitigate stress?
I can’t claim to be a master at this! There were a lot of times this year and last where things became a little overwhelming!
I think stress is inevitable when you’re in charge of making your own money, so the way that I like to try and look at stress is how can I ultimately keep myself healthy and strong enough to run the ‘marathon’ which is business. I also strongly disagree with a lot of the advice given to ‘keep grinding.’ Sometimes things just won’t work out due to things that could be out of your control– and hard work is not the cure.
You must take of yourself, and know sometimes when to fight the battle, or retreat and try something new if it just isn’t working for you.
I also love to do activities where I have to be completely present in something else — like cooking, making music, or taking art classes. I can’t dwell on other things so it helps me a lot to come back to things with fresh eyes.
I’m going to try a few of your tips, and I’m hopeful our readers will, too. Now it’s time for the big reveal — the moment our readers have been anticipating. What are your “five strategies to cultivate a large & engaged social media community?’ Please share a story or example for each.
- Make content that’s authentic to your audience. The more your content resonates the better you will do. Many influencers and brands create content they want to create — without thinking about who it’s for — and what they might want out of that content. Knowing (or asking for) what your audience likes is so important to understand why they are fans of yours in the first place and then create content based on that. You can also use search tools like SEMRush learn more about your audience based on what they might be searching for before you start to create content, so you’re more likely to resonate.
- Gamification works well, and easier to do than ever. If you’re driving traffic to a brand website, sign-up page, or purchase page then gamifying that process can work well to skyrocket that campaigns performance. Whether it’s a competition or quiz or getting your audience to upload photos/ videos of themselves — giving the audience something to engage and interact with, rather than just filling out a boring form can work well. We’ve seen uplifts of 700% in campaign performance with this.
- Experiment with different types of content, keep it fresh! There are platforms like Campaignware that make this easier and simpler with templates.
- Make it as easy as possible for your audience to participate. If they’re entering a competition or you’re sending them to a campaign page to enter or interact with you — don’t try catch their details first. Let them interact with you first.
- It’s so important to remember to start small and work your way up. Nobody gets it right the first time so working with smaller companies or trying smaller size campaigns then levelling up will help massively. I always try to build relationships with them based on trust and delivering what you promise. They will in turn help you to succeed and be your biggest fans. The stronger your relationships with your first customers the better you’ll do long term.
What do you do to create a greater sense of connection and community among your fans?
Our purpose is to help people to better engage with the community and their fans.
We do that through the process of audience participation through interactivity and gamification. the thing that we do best is to give influencers and brands the opportunity to build amazing pieces of content that have two way interactions.
If the audience is actually taking part in the campaign, that way have they are far more likely to take the marketing action that you, or the brand, want them to take.
The challenge with this is that it’s always been very complex to do so is required development or some sort of technical capability which is why we’ve kind of removed that barrier to entry.
We’ve run campaigns for clients with tens of thousands of entries with very little work done by the brand or influencer or because the audience was able to actually participate and engage, rather than just be served the content and expected to take the action.
As an influencer, you are, by definition, a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
Our job is really to help influences to shine and to do their best work!
If there was one particular movement or cause that we would like to get behind and do impactful work with would be around homelessness, but the we’re happy to help anybody who has an idea that can change the world and make it better!
Get in touch any time.
We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world with whom you’d like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He, she or they might just see this. 😊
From a business perspective, Seth Godin or Gary Vee
From personal perspective, Stephen Curry or Andre Iguodala
What is the best way for our readers to further follow your work online?
Find us at www.campaignware.com
Thank you for these thought provoking insights. Here’s to your continued success!
Thanks for listening!