Why Home and Family Brands Should Prioritize Shoppertainment on Social Media

Shopping is always evolving, and advertising must evolve with it. With social media as a top advertising outlet, traditional techniques and methods don’t capture user’s attention. Successful social media advertising is catchy and authentic. See why shoppertainment — a strategy that combines shopping and entertainment to create a more engaging customer experience — is a slam dunk for home and family brands.

Benefits of Shoppertainment for Home Brands

Home and family brands are especially positioned to leverage shoppertainment as part of their social media strategy because their products and services naturally lend themselves to a storytelling approach to advertising. This allows for personalization that can boost engagement with followers likely to share and react to content that feels relevant to their household and lifestyle. These brands are well-poised to engage customers through tutorials, live demos, behind-the-scenes sneak peeks and user-generated content montages. Shoppertainment can help brands:

• Build Authentic Connections: By showing off products in real-life scenarios, like in-use at the breakfast table or in the context of a child or pet’s endearing reaction to it, brands create reliable, trustworthy content that audiences relate to.
• Boost Engagement: Entertaining user-generated content featuring your product at the center of funny family moments or creative life hacks entices social viewers to like, comment, and share, which extends your organic reach.
• Drive Conversions: Seeing products in action in an authentic way, such as a VR furniture or paint color tests, encourages the audience to interact and have fun trying various combinations, which can compel them to make the leap from viewer to consumer.
  
  

Leveraging shoppertainment for home brands can drive discovery and conversions through entertaining, shoppable videos such as engaging tutorials, influencer collaborations, and interactive experiences.

How Can Home and Family Brands Successfully Use Shoppertainment?

Not sure how to incorporate shoppertainment into your social media strategy? If you’d like to launch more interactive, engaging content on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts, start with these ideas:

• Host live shopping events with real-time demonstrations, customer Q&As and exclusive discounts to engage your audience — the limited-time live uses FOMO to your advantage.
• Show your audience creative ways to use your products (aka life hacks) through DIY tutorials and how-to videos that illustrate your brand’s value and drive engagement and traffic.
• Create and launch branded TikTok filters or virtual stickers to give people props for their content. A parent’s celebratory moment — I finally got the carpet clean! — with a sticker overlay of your vacuum, stain remover or logo vouches for your brand and connects with a larger social audience.
• Encourage happy customers to participate in ‘caption this’ brand challenges or photo contests featuring your product or a related activity to help source user-generated content. (Bonus: contest entrants often become part of your growing customer base.)
• Use polls and quizzes on social media as interactive tools to help your audience narrow their choices for ‘which couch matches your lifestyle’ or ‘the bed for every sleep style’ and continue their buying journey.
• Give your followers a peek behind the scenes with videos that show how your products are designed or produced and what inspiration keeps your brand going, and incorporate in-video purchasing for those target products.

Collaborate with creators who suit your target audience to create opportunities that authentically showcase your products or services for a campaign with a wide reach. Engage their audiences with website categories that feature favorite products influencers have shouted out.

Top 7 Tips for Creating Effective Shoppertainment

To launch any effective campaign, you need to strategize first. Follow these best practices and tips for creating a successful shoppertainment campaign:

1. Keep it authentic. Overly polished, scripted content is less likely to resonate with viewers. Instead, focus on real-life experiences and genuine content.
2. Be interactive. Incorporate polls, Q&As and live chats, and aim to respond to social media users who stitch, duet and comment on your content.
3. Tell a story. Weaving products into engaging narratives, rather than simply showing off features, is the key to producing content viewers want to watch and interact with.
4. Focus on visuals. The more eye-catching your visuals, the more likely your campaign will capture — and keep — attention for increased playthrough rate.
5. Nail down your hook. Start your videos with a targeted question, bold statement or a quick challenge to grab your viewers and encourage them to stick around until the end.
6. Optimize for the platform. Always tailor your content to the platform you’re using, whether you post on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook or elsewhere. Keep an eye on trends and format to meet expectations.
7. Leverage an agency partner. A shoppertainment agency or home and family TikTok agency can help optimize strategies that give your content the boost it needs to deliver results.

Measuring Shoppertainment Success

Before you launch a shoppertainment campaign, determine your brand’s best measures of success and how you’ll track performance. This step is crucial to refining your strategy. Consider these tips for how home and family brands may measure shoppertainment success:

• Engagement Metrics: Track likes, shares, comments, watch time length and, where applicable, the number of live attendees.
• Conversion Rates: Determine your indicators of success — for example, click-throughs, purchases, adds to cart, free sample requests or newsletter sign-ups — then monitor how many viewers take action after watching or engaging with your content.
• Audience Growth: Not all successes are measured in purchases. Keep an eye how many engaged followers you gain, which may point to increased brand awareness.
• Return on Investment: Compare sales data against your shoppertainment campaign costs to determine ROI — and start to plan ahead for your next campaign.

Shoppertainment videos are an important tool for growth for home and family brands. Using live shopping, DIY tutorial videos, or collaborations with influencers and brand partners, you can integrate entertainment into your social media promotional strategy to keep your brand top-of-mind.

Ready to boost your brand with shoppertainment? Get in touch with our team of social media strategists to learn how to incorporate shoppertainment campaigns in your content toolkit.