This post is part of our series The 7 Essential Elements of an Award-Winning Paid Social Campaign.
#6: Make the Virtual Tangible.
The challenge of the information age is well-known: consumers deal with far too many messages for them to process, and most messages are ignored or discarded.
Successful brand planners create strong messages that stand out from this sea of nearly undifferentiated inventory. Meaningful messages are even more important in a purely digital medium like paid social.
An effective way to create a strong message in paid social is to emphasize the tangible. Tom Peters, a thinker on design and business, describes the power of emphasizing the tangible. Peters says:
If your product is intangible (banking, travel, etc.), distinguish yourself from the masses by emphasizing the tangible to wit, design. FedEx, for example, stands out on the tangibles strong branding, clean trucks, easy-to-use forms. To me a business system, like FedEx’s, that works transparently on the surface and offers brilliant simplicity is as much about design as an iMac or a Beetle.
For your online campaign, what’s your real-world strategy? If the brand is a productivity software package, what tangible thing can the marketer offer? For the retail space, is there an intangible online benefit of the brand? Combining online and offline worlds strengthens the customer’s experience of the brand in a powerful way.
Real Paid Social Campaigns That Make the Virtual Tangible
For the Burger King “King of the Road” campaign, CP+B teamed up with Mindshare to bring the King’s epic journey to BK’s biggest fans in the Twitter ecosystem and in the real world. The King physically crossed the country, adventuring with fans and awarding Xbox Kinect bundles to the most worthy fans. BK’s social ad creative changed daily as the King traveled, hinting at his next stop. Paid social drove an increase of 4,000 followers for The King’s Twitter account.
To celebrate Derek Jeter’s 3,000th hit, Gillette created a giant greeting card containing thousands of notes of congratulations acquired through paid social campaigns.
In the run-up to the Billboard Music Awards Battle of the Bands, Chevrolet sent six bands on a cross-country road trip, each in a Chevy Cruze, and promoted the musicians’ tweets and the People’s Choice contest through social apps.
What challenges have you faced trying to make the virtual tangible in your paid social campaigns? Let us know in the comments.
Tomorrow we’ll be publishing the final post in our series: “Get Your Hands Dirty.”
This post is part of our series The 7 Essential Elements of an Award-Winning Paid Social Campaign.
#5: Choose Your Moment.
Timing is one of the most overlooked aspects of campaign strategy, but the best creatives and planners consider timing carefully. Smart timing decisions can distinguish a brand from the sea of undifferentiated ads fighting for audience attention.
In Element #1: Own an Event, we discussed timing in the context of planning around a major event, but here we’re defining timing on a smaller scale, such as days of the week and times of day. Brands can reach customers at critical moments, like the Monday water-cooler hour (following weekend sports events), Sunday mornings (a peak app download time), and the commute hours (to maximize fast food drive-through sales).
For example:
The Victoria’s Secret Fall TV 2011 campaign focused on continuity in social to support an upfront buy around TV premieres for popular shows like Glee, Gossip Girl, NCIS, Dancing with the Stars, and Grey’s Anatomy. Victoria’s Secret carefully timed their social ad placements to coincide with each premiere.
TV fans saw the Victoria’s Secret message not only in TV spots during the broadcast but also in social apps in the 48-hour period surrounding each show. When a Gossip Girl fan watched the premiere, she saw the TV commercial, and when she turned to social, she also saw the Victoria’s Secret social ad, reinforcing the VS message in a narrow time frame.
Here’s how brands should think about choosing the right moment:
- When is the target customer active in social streams?
- Which days and which hours should your ads be seen? Has the brand identified optimal consumption times?
- Does the campaign revolve around a local event that generates national interest?
For example:
If your program focuses on an event like CES in Las Vegas, you’ll develop a creative flight timed for the attendees of the show, on Mountain time, and another flight for people who would attend but couldn’t but want to keep up with CES.
What have you learned from timing brand campaigns in social ad campaigns, or what challenges are you currently facing?
Read the next post in our series, Element 6: Make the Virtual Tangible.
Mobile World Congress in Barcelona was another blockbuster event. Between the sprawling vendor booths and the late-night sponsored dinners and cocktail parties, there were lots of interesting discussions on the future of mobile.
During the 140 Proof presentation on the Mobile-Local panel, we talked about a few key trends in the mobile space. Some of those topics are summarized below.
Mobile advertising is going to have another huge growth year in 2012. One of the most compelling trends in mobile is the desire to deliver audience targeting capabilities to brand advertisers on the mobile device. Of course, here at 140 Proof, we agree that targeted mobile advertising is the future. We’ve been on the cutting edge of leveraging the Interest Graph generated from social feeds to accurately match advertisers and users’ interests for almost two years – via both web and mobile applications.
Mobile payments are getting a lot of attention. Beyond Square and LevelUp, there appears to be at least a half-dozen well-capitalized startups trying to dominate the mobile payment space. The jury is out as to when or if a phone-based payment solution will ever replace the tried-and-true magnetic strip of the Visa-MasterCard duopoly. Sure the phone will replace watches for teens and twenty-somethings, but carrying a wallet is a deeply entrenched habit to break. As long as we still need to carry cash or a driver’s license, is it really that big of a deal to carry around a magnetic strip?
Social is mobile. Now this is a trend that we see unfolding in front of our eyes. Not only is there a huge macro shift to mobile computing devices (smartphones and tablets), but social media is itself becoming more and more mobile. There will always be “research use” of social networks on the desktop and certainly the “taking a social network break while at your work computer” trend wont going away anytime soon. However, the real-time nature and bite-sized consumption aspect of the social feed is perfectly suited to frequent mobile access.
Mobile local will take off. Everyone has heard the recurring tall tale of Starbucks texting you a coupon when you happen to be near a store. This has been technically possible for close to a decade, but the reality is that it simply has not materialized. Advertisers simply aren’t spending big to deliver location-based deals like this. The in-store or near-store mobile ad model based on a push system hasn’t attracted many big brand advertisers. However, a pull system focused on long-tail advertisers (small businesses) bidding to move unsold inventory (empty seats at a hair salon or excess muffins that will go stale in a day) is an interesting spin on mobile local. That said, cracking open the long-tail local advertising market is a big challenge and probably worth a blog post of its own.
I hope you enjoyed the wrap up. In 12 months, we’ll see how many of the trends actually take hold.
This post is Part 4 of our series The 7 Essential Elements of an Award-Winning Paid Social Campaign.
#4: Write Social Creative.
With advertising awards, performance matters as much as strategic brilliance. A creative approach validated by the market strengthens your candidacy three times more than a thrilling idea that resonated with no one. In the spirit of wringing the maximum performance out of your campaign, we advise you to write the best possible creative that you can.
These four tested principles of writing for the social stream will get you on your way.
4 Tips for Writing Great Social Creative
Keep it brief.
Brevity is the soul of retweets.
Stuffing three messages into one ad does not count as added value.
— Lee Clow’s Beard (@leeclowsbeard) August 1, 2011
Generally, keep your text + link under 120 characters to promote sharing (up to 140 characters are allowed). For help with drafting social ads, try Does It Fit (built by 140 Proof CTO @jm3).
Be conversational…
Feel free to use a conversational or casual voice, to match the brand’s existing social accounts or those of a comparable brand. Your ad is in a social stream context, so let it read as a natural part of the social conversation.
…but keep it professional
This means keep your voice appropriate to the brand and use hashtags sparingly. Jon Elvekrog advises in “5 Ways to Get Creative with 140 Characters”:
In the casual world of Twitter, some users have found interesting ways to get around the 140 character limit. However, should you find yourself tempted to write “ur” instead of “your” or “fr” instead of “for,” step away from the keyboard. If you’re actually going to invest in Twitter ads, whether it’s across a network or a sponsored tweet, exercise professionalism through proper grammar and copy choice.
Ask a question
Why does asking a question drive up the performance of social ad creative as much as 30%? At 140 Proof, we’ve seen this time and time again — irrespective of brand vertical, timing, or targeting. Questions increase not only Twitter replies, retweets, and likes, but they also increase click throughs and other engagement. If you’re motivated to get your paid social campaign to perform, why not try it?
Test your work
One of the similarities of paid social to search is the ease of running many creatives at once to compare performance. Create and test up to 30 versions of your social ad copy to learn and optimize quickly.
Next, read about Element 5: Choose Your Moment.
How big a role will social ads play in the 2012 presidential election?
Advertising in the social ecosystem offers presidential candidates bigger results than tweeting and Facebooking alone. To create this infographic about the 2012 landscape for political advertising, 140 Proof’s Data Team reviewed data from the 2004 and 2008 elections as well as recent reporting from AdAge, Adweek, and eMarketer.
For political campaigns, 140 Proof offers simple, powerful advertising in the social ecosystem’s top 50 apps. Our ads are targeted via the interest graph and reach over 200 million US users monthly.
To adapt your campaign for social and learn how political teams are using 140 Proof to win, email us at sales@140proof.com.
This post is part of our series The 7 Essential Elements of an Award-Winning Paid Social Campaign.
#3: Nail Mobile.
No matter where you place your social campaign, brand messages will end up on mobile. Without a solid mobile strategy, your campaign won’t travel far. So make sure that you’re ready, and plan ahead for how users might see and share the campaign message.
Most consumers already reach brands through mobile - either by visiting the brands’ Twitter profiles through a smartphone app or by visiting web sites on their mobile browser. Web traffic on mobile has grown almost 35% in the last year alone. To take full advantage of the pass along value of social, weave mobile tightly into the core strategy of the campaign.
5 winning questions to ask when optimizing a campaign for mobile
- How might the brand benefit from targeting people using mobile devices?
- Can we break out part of the campaign as purely social (focused on retweets or likes) to maximize awareness of the campaign?
- Can mobile devices load our landing page or media (videos, songs)?
- If our post-click experience is too complex for mobile, can we offer mobile users a bookmark or reminder?
- Is the ad creative shareable with a few taps on a smartphone?
For example, Burger King wanted to bring the news of its tender, crispy Chicken Tenders to busy moms and other family decision makers. Knowing that their target audience might not be at home to see the message, BK placed their ads on mobile social apps that moms were likely to check in their free time while out and about. They reached the millions of U.S. Moms and Family Decision Makers on their smartphone by targeting the followers of the 100 best family influencers in social, such as @thepioneerwoman and @Oprah.
As mobile ramps up over the next year, campaign success can be accelerated (or stalled) by mobile strategy. Just nail it.
Next, learn about Element 4: Write Social Creative
This post is part of our series The 7 Essential Elements of an Award-Winning Paid Social Campaign.
#2: Involve the Audience.
In social, ads no longer travel one-way to the audience. A winning paid social campaign capitalizes on the two-way nature of social and gets the audience talking.
Get people to talk to the brand and thus trust it a little more. When people respond to a brand in social, they buy into the possibility that the brand cares about its customers.
Request opinions by asking great questions.
To promote its selection of smartphones, Best Buy asked people on Twitter, “Do you have a friend who’s ashamed of their smartless phone?” That simple question generated a torrent of replies from people outing their friends for owning brick and flip phones. Best Buy’s Phone Shame campaign ran well before social ad campaign awards were invented, but they’d be a serious contender if the campaign ran today.
Ask people to share the brand message.
Awards show judges expect a successful social ad campaign to be shared. Copy quality counts: people prefer witty or bold creative that makes them feel smart for sharing. While social ads by definition have sharing features built in, some campaigns will benefit from explicitly asking users to share the creative. A word of warning: offering an incentive, e.g. by running a contest that requires retweets, wins big engagement but not necessarily awards. Choose wisely.
Encourage people to create content for the brand.
Chevrolet went the extra mile to promote their new Cruze compact car, and in 2011 they went to bat with the fans of prime time TV hit Glee. Chevrolet tapped the social stream to find the most fanatical Gleeks, who submitted their own versions of the classic Chevrolet song “See the USA.”
Ask for different things at different points in the campaign, too. For example, for a campaign building up buzz for an event like the Oscars, the brand could ask users to generate content during the teaser campaign (“Invent our Oscars hashtag”), ask for retweets before the event starts to increase awareness, and keep the audience engaged during the broadcast by asking for opinions during the awards show.
Always consider the nature of the medium. In social, this means acknowledging and encouraging ongoing conversation with customers.
Next, read about Element 3: Nail Mobile
This post is part of our series The 7 Essential Elements of an Award-Winning Paid Social Campaign.
#1: Own an Event.
Take advantage of the natural excitement that builds in social in advance of a major event — whether it’s a televised award show, a sports championship, or a major holiday. Get in front of the customer with a relevant message just when buzz peaks.
ESPN won iMedia’s Campaign of the Year by blitzing social media in advance of the 2011 NFL Draft, making the most of football fans’ excitement that the long-delayed draft had finally arrived. ESPN’s ads on Twitter and Facebook earned them 7 new followers a second and performance 67% above the average social advertising campaign.
There are three ways to choose the right time for a brand campaign:
1. Sponsor a major annual event, or tag along for the ride. Big brands can get in front of affluent consumers by sponsoring a televised event and touting the connection. However, a younger brand like a mobile app startup can take advantage of buzz without sponsorship — for example, make a splash alongside the latest Apple keynote by choosing the right Twitter and Facebook media to get the message out.
2. Time the promotion to the buying rhythms and the context of your customer. If your target customer is the 19 year old college student, should your big social push be at end of summer, when students prepare to return to school, or are you the european vacation company that makes its promotions around graduation time?
3. Respond with lightning speed to unexpected events. For example, political teams are expert at responding to current events, and they can use social advertising to magnify their message and shape public opinion.
Performance counts, and perfect timing makes a campaign a better success story for awards show judges.
Next read about Element 2: Get the Audience Involved
