Social Marketing Campaigns. Marketing your product or service, in the B2B space, is undeniably challenging. Higher prices, complicated products, and a longer chain of approval, all pose barriers to your prospective buyers when they are about to buy anything.
What if you are one of those stuck in a cesspool in a boring industry? How do you give wings to your business that will attract customers? Conventional marketing techniques have long fallen on the wayside and businesses are embracing the social marketing and digital marketing to reach products and services to their target customers.
Social marketing could be a great way to engage in conversation with your prospective customers to make them interested in your products. But the key towards that end is to come up with original plans. It’s not rocket science and you can learn from those who have successfully tried out their customer outreach programs with creative social marketing campaigns.
Social Marketing Campaigns,
Squatty Potty
Thanks to that adorable unicorn, an extremely creative (to the point of being weird), and a colorful marketing video, there’s a good chance that you are unlikely to eat soft ice cream again; surely not a price to pay for proper bowel movements. Ha Ha!
Squatty Potty came up with perhaps the most bewildering marketing campaigns in 2015. It was one of those highly baffling, and surely head scratching, and was somewhere between brilliant and idiotic (or brilliantly idiotic). Nonetheless it was one of the most memorable marketing videos.
Ever since it went live about a couple of months back, the video has garnered over 10 million hits. The viral sensation has catapulted the product as the number one bestseller in the potty seats and toilet training category on Amazon.
Now that surely isn’t sh***y, we guess.
The biggest challenge in marketing, for companies making hygiene-related products, is the uneasiness to discuss them. While you have to retain the attention of your audience, you have to market your product as well. That calls for some innovative and out-of-the-box branding. The video is unusual, but was genius for sure.
Using a non-confrontational and comic approach, the video helped the company to converse with the audience regarding a not so “palatable” issue. None knew that you can beat the awkward, by well, being more… awkward.
HelpIsComing from Save the Children
Save the Children came up with an impactful social marketing campaign in the last year. The organization tugged at our heartstrings in 2014 with a powerful PSA in recent years, armed with the about 90 second long “Most Shocking Second a Day” video. The video was released on the third anniversary of the civil war in Syria.
You must have by now remembered this video. It was a blast on the social media attracting over five million views and counting.
Save the Children is known for its extraordinary approach to a children’s issue. It reframes a situation happening elsewhere across the globe in a Western light. It helps viewers to empathize at a deeper level. The video ended with a poignant but riveting ending line: “Just because it isn’t happening here doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.”
Save the Children has always come up with brilliantly creative marketing campaigns and they continue make waves on the social marketing space. To draw attention to their cause, the organization used compelling content over the social media. It amplified their cause. Save the Children roped in rock band Crowded House and the new Sherlock Holmes—Benedict Cumberbatch—to encourage people via a text campaign.
Save the Children offered “Help is Coming”, a hit Crowded House single, freely downloadable from iTunes. Influential people like Thom Yorke of Radiohead, Nigella Lawson, British rock band Coldplay and singer songwriter Ellie Goulding, joined the initiative and shared the campaign on Twitter and Facebook. The campaign was launched in September 2015. Searches for the phrase “help is coming” and “Syria”, according to Google Trends, surged exponentially after the campaign went viral. The popular non-profit organization bulldozed its way to our list.
Epic Estonia
Estonia! Where? Honestly—and with no offence to all our Estonian friends who may be reading this article—many are unlikely to know anything about the country that is made up of some 1,500 islands. Many may still can’t find it on the map. So when your job is to promote tourism in a country about which many are not aware of, you have to let your creative juices flow till the very last drop to be successful.
Enter Epic Estonia. The country’s government wanted to boost tourism and unlike the typical drab bureaucratic approach, took the social marketing route and let millennials do all the talking. The campaign was soon all over the virtual world. Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, blogging; you name it and it was all there.
In a series of more than 90 videos, hash tagged Epic Estonia, the country highlighted everything from rooftop tours by a chimney sweep shot to scuba diving in an underwater prison. Each video runs for approximately 30 seconds and presented in a playlist, which makes it easier for anyone interested in an exotic vacation to Estonia, go into a virtual freefall.
The Epic Estonia campaign has everything that makes a successful travel blog. It has real traveler experiences, HD quality videos and images, a memorable hashtag and an easily navigable Tumblr meets Instagram website.
Having checked out Epic Estonia, there’s only one thing that we can say: Estonians, your country is very beautiful and your tourism ministry is cool to bring up such a wonderful social marketing campaign.
That’s a job very well done.
Before I Die
A participatory public art project, Before I Die got a life and gathered much attention in 2015. It’s the brainchild of Taiwanese-American artist Candy Chang, and had humble beginnings on the shabby walls of a rundown house in New Orleans.
Chang, successfully battled depression having lost a dear one, took to art for restoring her prospective with help from neighbors. Chang covered the house with chalkboard paint and stenciled the line “Before I die I want to ___________.” She left some chalk for passersby to scribble their thoughts.
The wall was soon filled with interesting responses. It almost instantly attracted global attention with images being shared all over the social marketing.
This year, nearly a 1,000 “Before I Die” walls have come up in over 70 countries that include China, Kazakhstan, South Africa, Brazil and Iraq. It tore down the taboo of contemplating death and discussing it on social marketing. It celebrates life and makes us think about all things that truly matter to us.
The Skateboarding Cat of GoPro
The thumb rule on the internet: “When in doubt, C-A-T.” Cats are there at every nook and corner of the internet. They are on the prowl, plotting world domination and everything possible. Enthusiasts may argue that the internet’s fabric could be made of cats. That’s exactly what went through the minds of GoPro’s marketing team at some brainstorming session.
The company harnessed feline charm and some fur ball cuteness for appealing to the public (could be that most of their target customers were made of cat-ladies). But gents or ladies, the campaign was a runaway success. The company’s consumer generated video got more hits on Instagram than any other GoPro offering in 2015. Was it a victory for GoPro or the cat? That we won’t ever know.
Burberry Snapchat Pre-show
Who likes spoilers? Honestly, many of us. Burberry’s brilliant branding strategy has been created on a basic human nature—curiosity. While most brands work hard not to spill the spoilers over social marketing, Burberry went the diametrically opposite way and earned big praise for it.
The British luxury fashion house went digital and eagerly shared their entire summer and spring line on Snapchat, just a day before London Fashion Week (LFW) kicked off last year. What say? The company struck gold spoiling their LFW gems. It used the hashtag LFW. The influential and absolutely unexpected marketing campaign created a lot of buzz among the millennial audience. Beyond innovators, Burberry became a fashion titan.
Expedia’s South American Gateway
It’s safe to assume that visual imagery and the travel industry go hand in hand. Expedia, with more than 400 million active Instagram users, launched a contest on social marketing and attained much success.
Organizing contents on the social marketing is an effective marketing strategy for generating a huge amount of user generated content. Expedia’s Instagram content offered a trip to Rio de Janeiro using pictures for jacking the interest of Instagram users. The travel photos generated a lot of excitement and adventure among users, leading to a score of 999 on the Unmetric platform.
Tasty from Buzzfeed
Launched in July 2015, the spunky and creative social recipe publisher Tasty, has attracted more than 14 million followers on Facebook, besides millions of hits on videos that the company has posted. Isn’t that simply WOW? It’s a really influential and badass social marketing campaign.
Tasty is the brainchild of social marketing campaign champion Buzzfeed. Its social media pages have short videos of Buzzfeed related to recipes that is perfect for the attention span of social media hoppers.
Exploding Kittens
Exploding Kittens is a tabletop game. Developed by a team that comprised the likes of game designers Shane Small and Elan Lee and cartoonist Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal, the social marketing campaign blew away all earlier Kickstart records.
The campaign was able to fund itself fully, right from day one and is still retains the top spot as the most funded game in the history of the Kickstarter project.
The secret behind the huge success and quick funding lies in the partly gross and largely bizarre art posted on the social marketing. But the art is entertaining and whimsical. It was shared and re-shared by fans of The Oatmeal, the hugely popular comic strip.
If the Exploding Kittens artwork looks familiar, it could be because of an earlier viral attempt from the creators. Copyright infringers threatened The Oatmeal with a stupid lawsuit. The artist responded with a $20 thousand challenge to raise funds for a cancer charity. The crowd funded $211,223.04.
US Presidential Hopefuls
This one we could have never missed out on our list. Political campaigns were on fire, all over the social marketing, in 2015. Thanks to the US presidential elections due shortly, the social media geeks, politicians and just about anyone interested in it, have spread their favorite’s campaign like wildfire. More than 88 percent millennials use Twitter, Facebook, and other social marketing as their main source of news and information. It would have been too much for the political fraternity to undermine the reach of the social media.
So what does it boil down to?
While it is true that none can force a social marketing post to go viral, there are countless creative paths to explore and make your social media posts more persuasive and influential. What’s required more than anything else, is the ability to think beyond the obvious.
Sounds, sights and stimuli remind people of products and ideas. When NASA landed a rover on Mars, it was an epic moment that involved decades of effort and millions in funding. The rover touched the Mars soil and the world cheered. Media clamored to cover the story and millions of people hailed NASA.
While NASA was obviously excited, another organization raked up some entirely unexpected success. It was the Mars chocolate company. At the time when planet Mars was in the news because of the NASA landing, Mars candy saw a spurt in sales.
A successful event could trigger success of another company, like in this case. Mars chocolate bars are named after the brand’s founder Franklin Mars and not the planet. But the attention on planet Mars did something very remarkable. It brought the chocolate company to the foreground.
No campaign can guarantee you five million unique views. But most of the time, content shared by people isn’t random. Being creative and thinking what others are not, is often the key to a viral social marketing campaign.
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