Lego Content Marketing

LEGO is the leader market in the toy and entertainment industry. It is known for the product quality and the creative way of innovating new products. In this blog, I will provide a detail explanation about LEGO content marketing strategy and why LEGO is considered to one of the most successful companies in content marketing strategy. However, first let me provide you with a brief introduction to Lego's history.

Background:

LEGO, which is one of the most popular and widely used toys in the world, has become an internationally recognized brand. The LEGO is a Danish company and was initially started in 1916 in Denmark focusing on building homes and furniture for farmers. “LEGO found its niche in 1932 when the first wooden building blocks were created, from that moment the company had found its purpose in creating toys for children. The toy product was developed further and eventually, the wooden blocks were phased out for plastic pieces.” (1) Developing several product lines for different age groups has contributed to LEGO brand’s growth. Currently, LEGO is one of the most popular, and best-selling, toys over the world.
Lego Targeted Audience:

LEGO is a fun for children and adults of all ages and gender. There are a variety of products such as dolls, construction toys, electronic toys, vehicles, puzzles and video games.
Their targeted audience:
o Children greater than 5-year-old and less than 13-year-olds.
o Parents who are interested in buying LEGO products for their children and teenagers
o Teenagers who are passionate and have a strong pound with the LEGO brand
o Adults who buy a LEGO for himself/ herself.
Consumers can find LEGO products in toy stores, hypermarket, LEGO stores or online.

Four Zones of Social Media Marketing:

Social community LEGO is active on all social media platform such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest. LEGO  has it own social media platform, where they encourage their consumer to post pictures, video, chat with LEGO community.	Social publishing LEGO has a blog that called LEGO ideas. This blog contains information about the newest products, news about new products line. Twitter: LEGO  uses their twitter account for answering consumers questions and concerns about the brands.
Social commerce Selling their product on their online website and amazon	Social entertainment The Lego Movie(2014) Games for IOS/Android users for different ages and gender

Lego Message:

LEGO message focuses on the mastering of imagination, encouraging the creativity, having fun, learning, caring and have a good quality.
LEGO encourages their customers to be creative and be innovative. At the end, LEGO does not want to sell their products, games or movie, but LEGO aims to create an experience while playing or watching anything that is related to LEGO. LEGO wants to connect with their customers 24/7 globally by utilizing social media platform. LEGO believe on storytelling when they interact and communicate with their audience. For example, in Facebook, LEGO shows that parents spending a quality time with their children playing and building a house using LEGO bricks. This message will attach parents mind and heart since they want to have memorable moments with their children.
LEGO’s has a strong social media Presence. LEGO goal is creating authentic and on-brand digital customer experiences customers value. For example, In My LEGO Network, a social networking site for LEGO fans which consist of games, movies, apps, and message boards, fans are encouraged to post what they’ve made with the bricks. LEGO is crowdsourcing and empowering people to create their own content that includes posting videos, pictures, comments, rating, holding contests and recommendations.
When I reviewed LEGO contents on social media, I have noticed that their personality in social media is to be trustworthy, creative, engageable and emphasize on have a fun time together. LEGO speaks about enjoying the creativity of using LEGO bricks by thinking outside of the box. Also, to get inspired by the surrounding environment to create a better solution for current issues or make awareness about the existing issue. For example, this video shows how to use LEGO Mindstorms Sudoku Solver.

Call of Action:

LEGO takes advantage of description text, images, and video to capture audience attention and drive them to the web to buy their product online or visit their physical store.
“Not only did social media make an impact with conversational buzz, it also created buzz across our retail partners. It helped drive a significant amount of traffic to informational and product pages across major destinations like Amazon, Best Buy, Toys R Us, Walmart, GameStop, and Target.”(2)

Lego Content Marketing Strategy:

LEGO invests in content marketing, which helps to drive impressions and brand awareness. For social channels, LEGO listens and keeps a constant eye on their feeds and mentions. LEGO ensures that their message is personal and humanize to their audience because consumers like brands who they can relate to. "It’s why LEGO have been around for well over 80 years and are still one of the most popular toys available on the market today."(3)
YouTube

In their YouTube channel, LEGO creates videos in a variety of languages since they have a big audience around the world. As a result, LEGO developed a deeper bond than any subtitled video could possibly create. In their YouTube Channel, they have a variety of video contents such as a short movie, children playing experience with LEGO, adults talking about the products they have built by using LEGO bricks and tutorial to build a specific shape from the scratch.

Facebook:

In the Facebook, LEGO uses a combination of posting pictures, short videos and incorporates them with relevant hashtags. All updates are visual with a heavy emphasis on high-quality photo and video contents. For example, in Easter holiday, LEGO posted a happy wishing holiday for its fans.

LEGO is wishing you a happy Easter holiday

Pinterest:

LEGO is not just a simple product, but It is an experience where all users regardless their age and gender can enjoy playing time, have a memorable time and use imagination and creativity. In LEGO Pinterest, there is a special board called "Learning & Education - LEGO ". The board goals are to inspire and teach the children by using LEGO to think creatively, which called education by entertainment. LEGO is not an entertaining toy, but it is an educational game. While they are playing with LEGO, children learn to think outside of the box, share their toys with other, collaborate and work with a team.

Twitter:

LEGO uses Twitter mainly as a customer service outlet. Fans can tweet them with problems or missing pieces and LEGO reply or favorite their content. On Twitter, LEGO responds to questions and complaints and are always fast to react. They engage well with the customer base and their direct fans and followers. In twitter, LEGO cross-promote other brands through sharing and engaging each other contents. For example, Ford Performance mentioned Lego brand name’s as a kind of a collaboration between two big and known brands. This help to increase brand awareness and recognition for both brand.

Successful Marketing Campaigns:

kronkiwongi

LEGO launches a Facebook campaign that asks kids to create a kronkiwongi. This latest LEGO campaign asked children around the world to create an imaginary character called a " kronkiwongi “. The goal of this campaign is to celebrate children’s imaginations. LEGO wanted to boost parents' awareness of the brand’s unique ability to encourage children's creativity. Therefore, the targeted videos ads were delivered to parents in their Facebook News Feeds.

Lego's Life of George Campaign:

A 100 $ LEGO ’s Life of George campaign is a contest which wants viral in 2011. This campaign simply encouraged customers to post an image of George in unique destinations around the world using this hashtag (#legogeorgetravels), and the contestant with the most “likes” won a Lego prize. The main goal of this campaign was to encourage engagement.

Lego's Life of George

LEGO Batman Movie:

LEGO uses #LEGOBatmanMovie to promote the new LEGO Batman Movie and encourages their audience to use this hashtag and create pictures about LEGO Batman Movie and tweet them in twitter using #LEGOBatmanMovie.

#LEGOBatmanMovie.

The LEGO Movie:

The LEGO Movie is more than a movie for children and adults. For children, it is their favorite toys that they want to play with, while the adults connect with the universal message of the film, which is that it’s important to always have an imagination.

The LEGO Movie 

Lego Use Social Media for Crowdsourcing

Lego contents in social media always aim to promote the idea of playing together and appeal to consumer’s pride in their creations. Most of its campaigns on social media encourage customers to share pictures of their own Lego builds, appealing to both adult and child fans, as well as proud parents who like to share photos of their children’s creations.

Lego Ideas allows Lego fans to upload suggestions for new kits and products and if they get 10,000 votes, the idea is reviewed by Lego designers and marketing staff, with selected ideas put into production.

Why Does  Lego have a Very Successful Marketing Campaign:

Many of us have seen The LEGO Movie, played LEGO video games or interacted with engaging LEGO displays in various stores. LEGO understands that in order to influence our emotions and motives, LEGO has to be active in all available media channels and what makes LEGO as one of the most successful brands.

• Through listening to its customers, LEGO gains more loyal consumers. By doing this, LEGO encourages tremendous brand loyalty, plus generates opportunities for leveraging its customers. 
• The LEGO values of imagination, fun, creativity, learning, care and quality. Through understanding the personas of their core audience, LEGO continually meet the demands of fans of all ages. 
• 24/7 Engagement. By encouraging their audience to upload images or videos of their LEGO creations. Lego goal is to make a strong connection with their consumers. 

“LEGO was recently ranked No. 1 among the 15 most engaging brands, as well as the top most-watched brand on YouTube. "(4)

My Analysis:

LEGO ’s success is based on their core objective to encourage creativity, to have fun, to learn, to care and have a good quality and to master imagination. All these believes have contributed to gain consumers confidence and trust. For LEGO, creating content to their audience is not a very complicated task compared to their competitors because Lego’s audience plays an important role in content creation and that what makes LEGO ’s consumers a loyal to the brand. As I mentioned before, LEGO does not want to sell their products only. In fact, LEGO wants their audience to live Lego experience to inspire them and engage with brand consciously. LEGO wants to inspire their audience in order to participate and tell the own story and experience. The most interesting thing about LEGO is that LEGO uses social media to measure ROI for 1- direct sales, 2- brand affinity, 3- marketing efficiency, and 4- risk mitigation. Having these clear objective will help LEGO to ensure the success of their content marketing strategy. In my opinion, any business wants to have that successful experience as LEGO should include their targeted audience as the core part of their strategies by using social media to listen to their needs, suggestion, recommendations and concerns.

To sum up, I believe that content marketing strategy plays an important role in LEGO 's success, and LEGO is implementing the right strategies. As a result, engagement rate and the organic search rankings are increasing.