Things to Learn from these 3 Highly Effective Social Media Campaigns
That social media marketing is essential for businesses is like saying that eggs are essential for making an omelet (pun unintended!). Having realized their indispensability for businesses to reach, and engage with, their audiences, social media sites have made marketing more challenging. This is to protect their users from unnatural promotions and “salesy” content. Businesses have to now overcome these hurdles and be more creative and innovative to reach their audiences.
It seems like brands have taken up this challenge and are coming up with amazing marketing campaigns that have been wowing audiences all over the globe. Other brands have a lot to learn from those who are setting newer benchmarks on a regular basis. Let us examine 3 such outstandingly brilliant social media campaigns and what we can learn from them.
#1. PwC – BallotBriefcase
How does it feel to know that an accounting firm has the most glamorous job on earth? And yet not most people know about it. PricewaterhouseCoopers is one of the world’s largest accounting and professional services company with offices in 157 countries employing more than 208,000 people, working with more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies around the world.
The one client everybody at PwC loves boasting about is the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The accounting firm has been the official ballot tabulators of the Academy Awards, or the Oscars, for 82 years. On Oscar night, two balloting leaders, along with the, now-legendary, PwC briefcase make their way to the Oscars and enter the show amid the glare of cameras, international reporters and the general public.
To highlight their long-standing association with the Academy Awards, PwC ran the #BallotBriefcase campaign to introduce freshness into the brand’s seemingly dry image. It traced the journey of the ballot briefcase through the country (from an undisclosed location) to reach the awards night just on time. It roped in celebrities like Neil Patrick Harris and generated a lot of buzz and interest around its Snapchat campaign. The campaign increased PwC’s social impressions on Twitter by 136 times and also helped increase its visibility and fan following on Instagram and Snapchat.
The campaign was awarded the Shorty Award for “best use of social media in B2B marketing strategies and campaigns.”
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What can we learn from this campaign?
It is never too late to reinvent yourself. If a brand whose parent companies are more than 150 years old and have been working in an unexciting sector as accounting can win the Shorty Award for best use of social media, it can be a source of inspiration for brands all over the world. Using its campaign, it brought a younger demographic (and a younger talent demographic too!) closer to itself and made working with the brand hip.
#2. Lowes: LowesFixInSix
Lowes Companies, Inc. is an American company that operates a chain of retail home improvement and appliance stores in the United States, Canada and Mexico. It is one brand that has truly mastered the use of the social media. Be it their Facebook page that provides original content, not recycled from other sources, or their Pinterest account which has more than 3.5 million followers. The good folks at Lowes reply to almost every comment that they get on their Facebook page and this is what keeps their more than 2.7 million followers happy and loyal.
The campaign that has caught eyeballs is their LowesFixInSix campaign that they are running on Vine. For the uninitiated, Vine is a unique six-second long video-sharing social platform. Lowes, and its ad agency BBDO, partnered with Meagan Cignoli (Cannes Lion Winner, Hubbies-Entrepreneur of the Year), to create delightful six-second home improvement tip videos. These videos use stop-motion and clay-like animation and gives tips from how to turn your milk jug into a watering can to keeping your rosebush protected by a banana peel.
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What can we learn from this campaign?
This is also a great example of how a 70-year old hardware chain is killing it on social media. Its success on the social platforms can be attributed to the fact that they don’t treat social media as a single entity. They have realized that audiences use different channels for different reasons and the best way to reach them is to tailor content for each channel accordingly.
#3. WestJet: 12,000 Mini Miracles
What started, in 1996, as a low-cost alternative to Canada’s competing major airlines is now the second largest Canadian air carrier and the ninth largest airline in North America.
WestJet’s Christmas Miracle: 12,000 Mini Miracles won a 2016 Shorty Award for Physical and Digital. WestJet motivated, through this campaign, all of its 12,000 employees to perform (and submit a video of) a random act of kindness (or Christmas Miracle) on the 9th of December 2015 to highlight WestJet’s fun and caring culture.
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The campaign was promoted on Facebook, Twitter, Periscope and the company’s site/blog. At the end of the 24-hour period, the campaign received videos of close to 32,000 miracles, 126.5M Twitter impressions and 10.15M Facebook impressions.
The campaign was also mentioned in 400 media outlets in 214 countries with over 2 billion media impressions.
What can we learn from this campaign?
This campaign used the highly emotional “Christmas connect” to motivate and generate user content. The fact that each employee was asked to perform a “miracle” and with 12,000 miracles to be performed, the idea was naturally picked up by the media and the campaign got a humongous response. In fact, one of its campaign objectives was to “own national media for a day.” They not only captured the imagination of the national media but the international media too!
Do you know of any amazing and effective social media campaigns such as these? Do share them in the Comments below.
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