5 Examples of Social Media Campaigns You Can Learn From

Published on February 26, 2020
3 min read
Marketing
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3 min read
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There are multiple ways of promoting your product. The effectiveness of each depends on the unique qualities of your business––your location, your product or service, your unique selling proposition, or even your price. Sometimes, businesses experiment on promotional tactics and strategies. Some businesses hit and miss. Other fortunate ones may be able to get it in one go. 

But if you are going to notice successful businesses these days, most of them are actively engaged online. They interact with their customers on multiple platforms including social media sites. In fact, they were even able to penetrate new markets, new locations through this strategy and things have worked out well for them. Extending your reach, acquiring new customers from different areas of the globe, and boosting your sales are things you can gain from launching successful social media campaigns.

Social media campaigns are organized, strategic efforts that use social media to achieve business goals like building connections and establishing long-term profitable relationships with your target audience.

Social media campaigns use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to achieve a particular goal like reaching a target market with carefully crafted ads to promote brand awareness and encourage purchase behavior.

Most social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram measure engagements – a reaction or interaction often measured by likes, comments, follows, or subscriptions. All of these are linked back to how much you are driving traffic or awareness to your brand. Brand awareness can result in lead generation and sales conversion.

So what are the factors that you need to consider when launching a social media campaign? What makes it successful? Find it out from these 5 examples that you can learn from:

1. Disney’s social media campaign to engage online customers and maintain brand awareness

Disney’s use of social media is no secret – and they are proud of using any available channel to reach out to their target audience. Although we can’t directly attribute Disney’s success to its usage of social media alone, Disney’s partnership with Make a Wish Foundation only helped it build loyalty among its community. 

Disney challenged social media users that it will donate US$5 to Make a Wish Foundation for every photo of them featuring Mickey Mouse ears and a hashtag #ShareYourEars. This led to Disney donating US$2M, which means over 400,000 participated in the challenge.

This is an example of how a social media campaign promoted online engagement with potential and existing customers all over the world (or at least outside the reach of your influence previously limited by your traditional marketing). To put more context, 400,000 participations is hard to attain with traditional means of marketing. Only an effective social media campaign can stir up conversations and awareness among the consumer market.


2. Shutterfly boosts sales through social media

Shutterfly primarily sells photo books. But for the time they took their marketing efforts to social media, specifically Facebook, they earned an 11-fold return on what they have spent for ads.

Shutterfly offered a free ceramic mug that is only claimable through Facebook. This led to 16,000 offers claimed and an additional 8,000 additional purchases made.

This would have been impossible were it not Shutterfly’s social media campaign. Because everyone is almost interconnected with each other on social media, the awareness of the brand as well as the promotion of the product and service (which ultimately led to sales) were taken to the next level because of Shutterfly’s effective social media campaign.

3. The Navy’s use of video to increase the recruitment rate

The Navy used to have difficulty looking for additional recruits but the success of their use of video for marketing made their recruitment easy.

Sixty different ads with varying durations were tied together. Their tagline, “Forged by the Sea” perfectly encapsulates the brotherhood that links the Navy together. This campaign resulted in an increase of 16% in interest in joining the Navy and a likelihood to search for “US Navy” keywords on YouTube.

4. Whole Food’s use of transparency to promote customer loyalty

If there is one thing that people are so wary about these days, it’s food – and Whole Food knows this. Not only are they transparent to their customers, but they also practice transparency internally, as an organization. Since 1986, information about salaries has been shared freely and this reportedly led to an increase in employee productivity and retention in the company.

5. Wells Fargo’s use of tools like CRM to save costs

Despite the recent events, Wells Fargo arguably remains as part of the top companies globally. It claims to be the seventh most profitable company in the U.S. and it keeps track of US$1.9T in assets and about 70 million customers. That’s a lot.

To keep everything organized, Wells Fargo uses tools like CRM to help them focus on more important tasks (while keeping their customers happy) as well as save time and energy in general. According to them, because of CRM technologies, they were able to save more than 5,600,000 hours of extra work. Again, that’s a lot.

So, what have you learned?

The first thing you should be mindful of when launching social media campaigns is that you must start building communities around your brand. Use social media, build genuine relationships, establish loyalty, create engaging content through videos, reward referrals, collaborate, and partner with influencers, among others.

All of these are proven and tested to help you establish a customer base that will keep on supporting your business – as well as bring others to the community so you can have more customers. This is a surefire way to grow. And successful companies lately have been doing this to generate more leads and boost their sales.

Don’t forget to also act according to data – all the numbers and digits that you have gathered from your campaign results to everything your tools are giving you. They will guide you and help you decide your course of action for the following days to come. Data can be easily gathered through the use of business systems and solutions and tools that can ease the entire process.

But also remember that transparency is key. In a world full of deceitful marketing tactics and schemes designed to maximize profit at the cost of the customer’s interests, transparency serves as a breath of fresh air. It’s something new and it helps you stand out from your competition. Transparency can be done internally and externally. Do it internally and it helps you retain employees and set them to be productive. Do it externally and you will have customers easily trust your brand and help it grow.

Lastly, use digital tools if you can. They are designed to take off a large part of your workload so you can have more time to do more productive work. It also gives the job more meaning – as you are expected to do more action and have less tedious, mechanical work. And while we’re at this, make sure to choose the best digital tool you can find. Read reviews and study the products’ features – they’re worthy long-term investments.

February 26, 2020