Week 2 - Topic 2 - Marketing in the News

For this blog, I chose to focus on the marketing strategy of BuzzFeed, and in particular, their Facebook-based 'Tasty' facet of the brand. This article spoke extensively of the strategies BuzzFeed has utilized in their marketing - and in particular how they have utilized Facebook to market their 'Tasty' platform. While one reason that Tasty has become so successful is because of the content (people love food), it is also because they have tailor-made the Tasty content for Facebook. They have utilized Facebook's auto play feature, that starts playing videos without sound as people scroll by. The quick videos are easy to watch and even easier to get sucked in to watching. This is all part of strategy to publish content directly to social media outlets. Since Facebook favors videos and anything that keeps people on Facebook longer, Buzzfeed uses Facebook in order to maximize the number of people that see their content. Another strategy that Buzzfeed has employed is using native ads, that don't look like traditional advertising, for example, their Geico Native Advertisement. The final tactic discussed in this article was how BuzzFeed uses sub-platforms, like Tasty, to appeal to a specific niche. Rather than follow the traditional tactic of appealing to a broad audience, they hone in on specific people, hoping to create brand loyalty and interest. 

The biggest marketing challenge that I noted inside of how BuzzFeed's Tasty markets themselves was trying to connect with different niches and how to properly use their social media platforms to create the most outreach. By working with Facebook's existing policies, BuzzFeed has optimized Facebook's reach in regard to their tasty videos, ultimately maximizing their views per video. By maximizing views per video, BuzzFeed has then tapped into a niche audience, and created a loyal base. 

I think that I learned a lot in both this article, as well as my research into BuzzFeed/Tasty. It reminded me of what we talked about in class in regards to online marketing. We discussed the importance of marketing to certain types of people, which is very similar to the niche marketing strategy that BuzzFeed employs.