August 17, 2016

Here’s the thing folks, content, is KING. And if you look hard enough, opportunities for great content for are behind every corner, as demonstrated by presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s website. Hill’s website is incredibly user-friendly and boasts easy access to social media sharing (a huge plus in our book)! But the real treasure lies in her error page. That’s right. You didn’t mishear us. We’re talking about the 404-error page, the wet blanket of our web experiences.

Normally a frustrating place to end up, HC’s broken link warning is pure marketing genius. She engages users instead of calling attention to the glitch, all while teaching us a few very important content marketing tricks. Political alliances aside, we can all learn a few things from the former First Lady.

1. Do something unexpected. No matter how many fans you have, doing something that your audience won’t see coming (within boundaries), will engage current and potential users. It’s important to stick to your brand, but throwing a creative curve ball here and there will most likely work in your favor, especially if you have a sense of humor.

2. Get familiar with your funny bone. Speaking of sense of humor, this is one of the best ways to humanize yourself with your audience. When you can learn to poke fun at yourself (while staying neutral), fans can easily relate to you and your brand. Caution: Finding the fine line between humor-acceptable events and when it’s better to be slightly more serious can be incredible difficult. Discuss your comedic attempts with a large group of people before hitting ‘Go!” You want to minimize your risk of offending a follower.

3. Let your fans in. You don’t want your dirty laundry flying around the social sphere for every one to see… we get that. But it is important to let your fans peek into your life a little bit. We’ve seen time and time again that when you bring people’s stories, backgrounds and thoughts into a social space, audiences find ways to connect to your brand in a more personal and communicative manner.

4. Don’t neglect your business goals. Using social media to build your brand can be incredibly rewarding and fun (we know first-hand!), but keep your business goals and driving ROI at the forefront of your decision-making. Hillary Clinton’s team repurposed their error page, and turned it into another opportunity to gather volunteers, one of their main campaign goals.  

This political ‘Easter Egg’ is a great learning experience for all brands. Not only does this humorous stunt makes us giggle, it shows the extreme importance of strategizing every page, post and paragraph of your content to align with branding and marketing goals. Though we hope a 404-error page isn’t a commonality in your user’s digital journey, it is another opportunity for engaging content, and one that should be taken. 

Well played, Hillary Clinton and team, well played…. We’re ‘quacking’ up.