Want to learn how to reach millions of users?
Learn from these 3 amazing social marketing campaigns.
If you are creating social marketing campaigns in the hopes of creating brand awareness, reaching a million users, and engaging and enticing them to share your content, do you think you are doing it the right way?
Reaching your target audience and getting your brand noticed through social marketing campaigns can be a really difficult task for companies. In fact, 62% of marketers say that social media has become very important for creating marketing campaigns, but with tons of social media platforms and thousands of pieces of content created every minute, it becomes really challenging for a brand to get noticed. To give it perspective: every minute of the day, 72 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded by users, and nearly 48,000 apps are downloaded from the app stores. It’s safe to say that there is huge competition in the market all vying to increase their user reach.
However, there are some savvy companies that are creating amazing social marketing campaigns that keep their users engaged, excited, and wanting to learn more. Some campaigns provide an element of surprise, some are hilarious, and some are heartbreaking, but most of them play with users’ emotions, which compel them to keep watching and sharing.
As thousands of companies try to create campaigns that reach the masses and lead to higher engagement and sharing, only a handful of them are successful. I came across 3 such campaigns that were hugely successful in achieving their goals while creating major buzz in the market.
1. Evian bottle service campaign
We remember watching this campaign on YouTube and our first reaction was “Wow!” We knew that we had to share it with the class next day.
The idea of this Twitter campaign was to show how marketers use real-time campaigns to create buzz about their brand. Consumers had to participate by using hashtags and tell Evian about their current location in New York during August when it was really hot outside. Consumers (including tennis star Maria Sharapova) had no idea about what the hashtag would do. But they were curious, and once they tweeted ‘#evianbottleservice’, Evian employees would come to their exact location on their bicycle and surprise them with a cold bottle of water.
As a result, the brand saw 2.8 million impressions and 75,000 engagements on Twitter during the time of the campaign.
2. RadioTimes 2015 TV Championship
RadioTimes, Britain’s largest TV and Radio program listings magazine, used a different approach and came up with a bracket voting theme for their 2015 TV champion. 512 celebrities from 8 different genres were competing against each other in the brackets, and users could vote for their favorite TV personas and then share their favorites on social channels. The campaign was a huge success with 120 million users voting and celebrities like Ricky Gervais and Sam Heughan tweeting about the competition. It was fun, exciting, and generated huge engagement for RadioTimes.
3. The Last Selfie Campaign
This campaign was a huge success within a short period of time. It was so successful that World Wildlife Fund reached is target in 3 days for the 1-month period. WWF partnered with SnapChat to create awareness about the world’s most endangered species. Using pictures of the animals, WWF’s motive was that people could share pictures, adopt an animal, or make donations on their behalf. After one week there were 40,000 tweets that reached over 120 million twiller timelines, meaning 50% of the active Twitter followers were exposed to the #LastSelfie.
So….what can you learn from these campaigns?
Although these 3 campaigns are very different from each other, they all did a great job connecting with their respective audiences.
Here are our 5 great takeaways that marketers can use in their campaigns:
1. Two-way communication: The key to a successful campaign is to involve people. Each of these three campaigns had two-way interactions between the company and their users. Users were voting, tweeting, and sharing the content all in real time. Companies are using real-time marketing to generate huge buzz and let people talk about their products. The best campaigns are the ones that make content sharable on social media.
2. Know what your business believes in: This is very important for a company to create a successful campaign. You should know what your business believes in and how your campaign relates to your company’s mission. WWF believes in saving animals, RadioTimes believes in entertaining people, and Evian believes in providing high quality water. All of their campaigns were designed to represent what their company believes in. If you believe in your business, users will believe in you.
3. Be different, be creative: These campaigns generated huge buzz in the market in a short period of time. The main reason is that all 3 campaigns connected very well with their target users and completely stood out. They were creative and original. These days you see a lot of campaigns that are similar, but companies are now using different methods to connect. RadioTimes used bracket voting and WWF used SnapChat. Evian used in-person engagement. Use methods that you think will create the best value for your campaign.
4. Connect with user’s emotions: Connecting with users’ emotions is very important for a successful campaign. The Evian campaign had an element of curiosity and surprise, the RadioTimes campaign was fun and exciting, and The Last Selfie campaign had an ‘aww’ factor in it. All of these campaigns connected with different levels of emotions. If you can cause an emotional reaction in people, there is a higher chance that they will share your content.
5. Great visual content is the key: To have a successful campaign it is essential to have great visual content in your campaign. Companies have to be creative and use visual imagery in order to get users hooked. Your campaign should be memorable in order to drive huge user engagement.
Final Thoughts:
While it’s easy now for marketers to use various products and methods to create campaigns, creating great campaigns is still very hard. These 3 social marketing campaigns worked because they connected very well with their target audience, without being complex, and provided unique elements not seen every day. They leveraged human emotion and used the products and platforms that were perfect for their business for the campaign. They tied in great visuals that helped lead to the sharing and re-sharing, and ultimately drove much higher engagement and ROI for their brands.
Vinay Chand wrote this post with Craig Zingerline also contributing. This post was originally published on the Bracketeers Blog. Request a free Bracketeers demo.
Read more: Hot Hashtags of 2015 & Hashtag Predictions for 2016