Nicho
Platform
Overview
In addition to designing sound marketing experiences, we also build digital products. In the ever evolving digital world brands are always faced with new challenges. With organic reach on the decline, brands needed a way to harness the power of social content.
SocioFabrica recognized a gap in the marketplace and seized this opportunity to create Nicho, a social aggregation platform that helps marketers engage their social audiences and activate them as advocates for the brand. The product has been leveraged by a wide variety of brands, festivals, and artists, including Red Bull, Coachella, Digiday, Sean Paul, and Eat Real.
Strategy
A solid product starts with a clear strategy driven by the needs of the market and its customers. Although marketers had done a great job growing their social audiences, many were failing to monetize these channels and their reach was declining. To understand customer needs, we interviewed marketers in both the brand and agency side and leveraged the jobs to be done framework to structure our research. Additionally, we conducted a comprehensive competitive analysis and looked at similar products in the market.
Many existing ‘solutions’ were simple contest applications that failed to help marketers maximize the impact of user generated content beyond leveraging it on the social platforms themselves. Our analysis also revealed a range of consumer needs that competitors had not addressed, such as providing brands the ability to connect social content directly with a product page. Equipped with this knowledge, we defined what our minimum viable product would be, created a product roadmap and developed our positioning: to empower brands to leverage social content for increased engagement and sales. On this foundation we built our initial brand strategy, crafted the name and developed the identity.
Solution: Building a Product
Experience Design
We translated our research findings into customer journey maps, information architecture and wireframes. We created clickable prototypes and performed user testing which helped us hone our initial concept and refine the product experience.
In order to address customer needs ranging from approving content on the go to requesting content user rights and publishing relevant images on a retail site’s product page, we leveraged responsive design for the web application. To expedite development, we built a library of reusable user interface (UI) and code components, which included interactive elements, icons and animations.
Tech Build
We built a service-oriented (Web API) architecture that was horizontally scalable and featured elastic search capabilities. By leveraging an agile framework, we were able to iterate on a feature-by-feature basis. Using open source tools like Continuous Integration (GOCD) allowed us to build, release and test new versions quickly.
Source and branch management were leveraged for version control. Our DevOps team managed software development and information technology operations to shorten the product development lifecycle while delivering features, fixes and updates frequently. We continuously performed user research, quality assurance and usability testing in order to iterate and optimize the product experience.
Product Output
Nicho’s responsive user interface improves marketers’ workflow, streamlining the collection and moderation of social posts required to build communities and tell stories.
Nicho also gives brands the ability to be truly omnichannel through the simultaneous publishing of social content to various web properties, live event display screens, and mobile-friendly microsites, call-to-action buttons and shoppable posts.
Solution: Marketing a Product
A solid product starts with a clear strategy driven by the needs of the market and its customers. Although marketers had done a great job growing their social audiences, many were failing to monetize these channels and their reach was declining. To understand customer needs, we interviewed marketers in both the brand and agency side and leveraged the jobs to be done framework to structure our research. Additionally, we conducted a comprehensive competitive analysis and looked at similar products in the market.
Based on customer interviews and research, we refined our positioning to more accurately reflect the actual product and lead with customer needs it addressed. We updated the messaging platform, voice and identity design, resulting in higher brand affinity from consumers. Musical artists Sean Paul and Deorro were the first to leverage Nicho for fan activations on tour.
Words From Our Client
“A good foundation for creating a strong community of fans on social media is simply by being genuine in your interactions and getting to know your fans. My engagement with fans differs based on what I know will bring forth a better response. Nicho allowed me to take advantage of the wealth of content from the summer tour.”
– Sean Paul, Grammy Award-Winning Artist
Results
The ability to efficiently search and collect thousands of pieces of social content in real-time by hashtag or account handle has transformed social traffic and sales for the brands we help. By giving brands the ability to quickly integrate social content into their websites, we help keep those sites fresh and relevant, boosting their traffic by an average of 10% and increasing engagement by 7x. Call-to-action buttons and shoppable posts have armed marketers with new tools to demonstrate the value of social by driving sales and conversions.
Both the proprietary analytics and Google Analytics integrations provide an in-depth understanding of visitor behavior while surfacing the most popular content, improving relevancy and increasing pageviews by an average of 12%.
The wide variety of customers utilizing the platform for event activations, site takeovers, conferences, festivals, sporting events and live streams are testament to the versatility of the product. Nicho was spun off from SocioFabrica as its own independent company in 2018.
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