I’m sure you have all heard the term campaign before, and associate it with big brands such as Calvin Klein, Coca-Cola, Levi’s and more. Buzzwords such as advertising, launches and billboards come to mind. But, these multi-million-dollar industry campaigns are having to evolve to engage the millennial and gen c consumers living on a social media level. When people are looking at their phones more than shop windows, the competition platform is changed.
Social media has become the norm when thinking about your next advertising initiative. Facebook launched it’s first advertising option in 2005, with LinkedIn and Youtube following shortly afterwards, and most recently Snapchat’s sponsored selfie filters. Since then, social media marketing is projected to reach $11 billion in revenue by 2017 (Karr, 2014). Other sources represent this growth in social media spending averaging around $30 billion by 2017.
With the opportunity to advertise over so many new channels, the creative competition has definitely been upped. From cat’s skateboarding on GoPro’s Instagram to Hilary Clinton posting campaign updates on Snapchat, the scope for imaginativeness has broadened. With exclusive streaming apps and Instagrams new sponsored ads, you can engage active fans as well as reaching a spectrum that hadn’t considered you before. Social media profiles have the potential to increase site traffic, sales and build a lasting relationship with your customers.
Rakuten Marketing suggest 4 main tips for social media success:
- Focus on having quality content
- Prioritise user engagement over selling
- Keep active across the channels
- Use strong visuals
This focuses on drawing your audience in and keeping their attention. Customers don’t want to be bombarded with promotional ads, they value the create interactions that make a brand more than the products they represent.
NikeWoman currently have a really great campaign launched on YouTube, and shared across their channels. Their hashtag is #BetterForIt and they’re demonstrating this with a story line of Margot Vs Lily; “Two sisters—total opposites—make a bet that pushes both of them way out of their comfort zones”. Margot is challenged to start her own fitness video’s to see how Lily makes a living, and Lily is challenged to start making friends to get more happiness from others like Margot does. From reading just a few of the comments after the episodes posted on YouTube, you can see that Nike has really connected with their audience with these girls’ story, they have even reached out to many men relating to the characters as well. (Find out for yourself @ NikeWoman~MargotVsLily)
The main aim of the project is for Nike’s female fans to get involved in some self-improvement in some way or another, but it’s an added bonus if they also like the Nike products on display and go and buy some of those too. This is the first series on this scale that Nike has released. Kerri Hoyt-Pack, VP of Nike Women Brand Marketing discusses how “for us it is a way to show the full breadth of all kinds of athletes. By doing longer form, we got to show all the emotions that are a part of the personal fitness journey.” – as well as featuring great products.
Nike has been sharing the story across twitter and Facebook, gaining attention from celebrities like Ellie Goulding, but their Instagram is more focused on product images and will stick to that value offering. Some of these posts suggest that consumers add their digital app which includes training programs and tips, running clubs, and a broader “Better For It” campaign that aims to encourage women to get more involved in sports. By connecting with their audience, they’ve been able to subtly advertise their products and how they could be used, encourage customers to embrace the NikeWoman lifestyle, and influence the adoption of a cross device app that will continue working for Nike when the customers not looking directly at any of their advertisements.
NikeWoman have shown how to use a clearly developed plan, with strictly defined goals, across channels, to create an effective social media campaign. The next stage will include a thorough analysis of how this campaign connected with their target audience, how the consumers buying journey was effected, and how interactions were engaged. This will lead to improving their next campaign by finding the areas that worked well and where they could improve. The analysis stage is also crucial for optimizing where Nike Woman spend their marketing budget and how. If you clearly define key metrics associated to your goals in the initial development stage, this will make analysing the success of your campaign a lot easier.
Bonson et al (2014) studied the online relationships built by European companies using YouTube to facilitate dialogic communication with their stakeholders. Out of the 306 companies studied, 44% have an official YouTube channel, mostly used for promotional purposes. Nike stands out from this crowd already by not just focusing on the current promotion. YouTube activity was affected by company size, industry sector and country of origin. The higher the activity these companies had, the higher the number of subscribers they had, leading to better stakeholder engagement. NikeWoman have 178,946 subscribers, but their videos get between 100,000 and 19 million views. The peak was their first ‘episode’, so they should analyse why so many consumers dropped-off after the first interaction with the campaign.
Daejoong et al (2014) examined the corporate dialogic uses of four types of social networking sites with the public and their differences by industry type. Many corporations adopt Facebook and Twitter as primary social networks and have integrated uses for their networks. Twitters main use was seen as information dissemination, Facebook was mostly used to interact with the public and YouTube was often incorporated with video sharing. Nike has excelled in incorporating their YouTube channel, compared to other companies leaving it as an afterthought. They also found that industry sector effected the way corporations utilized social networks. Retail, Communications and Transport were found to be the most active, prompt and frequent with their posts and interactions with the public. The public then delivered their messages and listened to them more as a result. This social network domination and positive relations could be a result of these industries depending on good relationships with their end customers. Nike is able to be apart of the consumer journey from TV adverts, social postings and their own app on your phone to look at whenever you work out or want to.
References:
Calvin Klein images sourced from Tumblr.
D. Karr (2014) Brief History of Social Media Advertising marketing tech blog Available <https://www.marketingtechblog.com/brief-history-social-media-advertising/> [Accessed 02/04/2016]
E. Bonson, M. Bednarova, T. Escobar-Rodriguez (2014) Corporate YouTube practices of Eurozone companies Online Information Review, Vol. 38 Iss: 4, pp.484 – 501 Available<http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/full/10.1108/OIR-07-2013-0181 or http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/OIR-07-20> [Accessed 08/04/2016]
J. Kell (2016) This Is The New Way Nike Is Going After Women Available <http://beta.fortune.com/2016/01/28/nike-youtube-margot-lily/> [Accessed 08/04/2016]
K. Daejoong, K. Jang-hyun, N. Yoonjae (2014) How does industry use social networking sites? An analysis of corporate dialogic uses of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn by industry type Available<http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/docview/1550070949?accountid=9727> [Accessed 08/04/2016]
M. Hiernard (2016) How to Nail Your Social Media Strategy! Available <http://blog.marketing.rakuten.co.uk/2016/03/21/nail-your-social-media-strat//gy/> [Accessed 03/04/2016]
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