When it comes to marketing for brands, social media has always been a crucial and foremost platform to gain recognition and enhance user engagement. Over 2 billion users on Facebook, one billion users on Instagram, and 350 million users on Twitter are active every month. In short, people like to spend most of their time on social platforms.
That’s why brands and businesses prefer social media platforms for marketing purposes. They can use social media videos as a powerful strategy to build engagement and attract the audience’s attention. In recent times, many brands have run many successful social media campaigns and earned huge user-generated content for their business marketing.
96% of survey participants use social media marketing, and 92% of those agree or strongly agree with the phrase, “Social media marketing is important for my business.” – Social Media Examiner
Gone are the days when spending money was considered the best strategy. Now, effective business strategy and proper planning are more important to making any social media campaign successful.
Here, we have cataloged a list of 5 brands and their powerful social media campaigns. We have also outlined their objectives, strategies, and how they executed their plan on social media to reach the maximum number of people.
1. National Geographic – “Your Shot”
Nat Geo is known for it’s unique photographs and innovative videos. While incorporating a perfect story for most of it’s images and videos, it enhances user engagement with the brand. Being a non-celebrity brand National Geographic has approx. 90 million followers on Instagram and 45 million followers on Facebook. Recently, Nat Geo launched a campaign to create an exclusive photo community, “Your Shot,” via a subdomain, where photographers can sign up and submit their photos. The community helped the amateur photographers to connect with National Geographic’s photographers and editors through the virtual assignment.
Every week, the editors of Nat Geo choose the best 12 images and share them on the @natgeoyourshot Instagram account and its blog.
The campaign provided the followers with an opportunity to learn about different cultures and geographical locations and imagine the world through the camera lens.
2. Wayfair
Instagram experimented with integrated shopping features in 2016 and received a positive response. The Instagram shoppable posts feature was designed for U.S. clothing brands active on Instagram, but later, it was made available for non-U.S. brands, too.
@Wayfair, a home décor brand known for selling affordable furniture and various other products through powerful social media campaigns, adopted Instagram’s shoppable posts feature really quickly.
The integrated shopping feature discarded the traditional method of posting paid ads on Instagram. The shopping feature automatically tagged Wayfair products in Instagram photos and fixed the price, too.
Wayfair users had to follow some simple steps, like clicking in the product pop-up box and selecting the tab “Shop Now,” and they would be directed to Wayfair’s checkout page.
This checkout process was too smooth for users. With a few clicks, they were directed from one site to the other and completed the transaction. It also increased Wayfair’s website traffic threefold.
3. Heineken #OpenYourWorld
In 2017, Heineken launched a purpose-driven campaign that aimed to bring people together with different ideologies and analyze their differences through a series of team-building activities.
Heineken performed a real-life social experiment. They made real people meet for the first time, and the people shared their social and political views over a bottle of Heineken.
HEINEKEN: Open Your World from Edelman UK on Vimeo.
The campaign shifted its focus from products to people’s emotions. The business benefits from the campaign are still unclear, but the media coverage generated by the social media campaign was fantastic. Their YouTube video crossed 14 million views, and they also experimented on Facebook, where they designed a chatbot to connect people from different parts of the world.
Heineken highlighted how a social media campaign can encourage people to discuss their brand and foster new relationships.
4. LinkedIn: “In It Together”
At the beginning of January, LinkedIn launched a powerful social media campaign to crush the stereotype of ‘white-collar business people.’ The brand launched it during the Golden Globes award show, which was unusual. The campaign featured people from different professions.
It was the first time LinkedIn designed an integrated marketing campaign, which included paid campaigns, outdoor ads, digital display, etc. The campaign lasted 12 weeks and was targeted at four core markets: San Francisco, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Atlanta. The videos were shot in documentary style, in black-and-white, and featured success stories of LinkedIn users in different professions.
5. Intuit “A Giant Story”
Intuit, a software giant, launched its first brand campaign with an animated story. They worked with an animation team and came up with “A Giant Story,” which showcased a giant robot and signified the complexity with which Intuit manages data using different technologies. The campaign was designed for small business owners, freelancers, and self-employed folks.
Intuit made its Super Bowl debut with a 15-second spot, where they gave a time-saving message and skipped the ad.
Giant Skip Ad
According to the CMO Lucas Watson, “There are 750 million people who work for themselves around the world who juggle managing their finances while pursuing their passions.”
In this video, they describe how Intuit’s TurboTax and QuickBooks services can help consumers save time.
A Giant Story
Behind the video’s concept, Intuit intended to give a humanizing touch to its brand story, so it took the tale of a flower shop owner.
Walk through with us for 6 great tips for successful social media marketing plans, where you make use of hashtag campaigns, social media widgets, and social media walls for a leading social media campaign-
1. User-Generated Content Campaigns are Successful
Advertisers often commit the mistake of delivering clever marketing gimmicks to people. Brands push pure marketing content towards the customer who today is not ready to buy the same. What you can instead do here is use consumer-generated marketing ideas for creating successful user-generated content campaigns.
This lets your followers feel valued because you’re using their feeds for social media marketing. In addition to this, the target audience also favors this idea where real customers of a brand talk about the brand. This is reliable content for them to consider before associating with the brand.
Social media UGC campaigns are engaging and visually appealing as they reflect the personal experiences of people, their lifestyle, choices, and places. They offer a ‘connection’ to audiences with a brand. Let your brand’s loyal followers run their creative brains and do the marketing groundwork for you. A win-win for both!
2. Share Your Language
Social media campaigns are all about targeting the brand’s followers and making the necessary conversions in a friendly manner. Friendly, because only like-minded and resonating marketing tactics between a brand and its followers will make a brand connect in the long run.
It is perhaps necessary for a brand to understand the common jargon, buzzwords, and lingo prevalent among its target audiences. For this, it is also necessary to understand your target audience. You cannot be more wrong if you use a term such as ‘eerday’ with your corporate audience. Do you get the drill?
It is necessary for a brand to share the language and the experience that floats around in the target audience. Every time your brand uses those ‘words’ in its posts, hashtag campaigns, and social media marketing practices, then every time a user connects with your style and approach.
Share your language with your followers for effective communication and a successful social marketing plan.
3. Positive Conversation with Your Audience
Social media campaigns are reciprocal by default in their nature. Brands, when they organize social media campaigns and user-generated content contests, must realize the power or ‘liking’, ‘commenting’, ‘sharing’, ‘re-tweeting’ and ‘re-posting’.
The brand must respond to posts and comments made by its followers on their social media campaigns. Here, the aim is to develop a mutual association between the brand and the followers.
Whether negative or positive in nature, respond to customer feedback, queries, and comments. A negative response from a follower, when perceived by a brand duly, relieves the person having made that comment with half of his fury. Provide a satisfactory response; offer a resolving solution, a complimentary gift/voucher, a discount voucher, or any other adequate remedial option.
Of course, there are also positive feedbacks in your kitty and you as a brand must duly ‘like’, ‘comment’ or ‘share’ these experiences to make your followers feel appreciated.
4. Choose Your Social Networks
Determine the goals of your social media campaign and prioritize the social channels where you want to advertise and market. Your target audience must also be socially present and be active on the chosen channel. Cross-platform updates and advertising is also an option that widens the reach of your campaign. If your social media campaign runs on Facebook, don’t limit your social updates on other channels for swelling the influence of your campaign.
5. Collect and Display your Content
Collect all your user-generated content via your Hashtag with the help of Social Media Content Aggregator tools and display them on a digital signage or on a website. To aggregate your UGC you can try Taggbox. Also, use your UGC in email marketing or on product pages. When your customers will see social media reviews of other customers on your product pages, it will increase customer trust for your brand and product.
6. Always Analyze and Track Campaign Success
Campaign reach and results must always be tracked and measured for gaining an insight into how close you have reached your targeted goals. A qualitative and quantitative analysis must be made for the campaign such as sales boost, customer submissions, and entries, new followers etc.Social media campaigns are remarkable approaches towards speedy brand-engagement on social media. Utilize the power of social media widgets and social media walls for events and campaigns. Social media walls are a phenomenal tool for user-generated content campaigns at events.
Concluding Thoughts:
Social media has become a powerful medium for brands to build a community and transform their regular customers into brand advocates.
The above mentioned social media campaigns are some of the greatest campaigns so far. If you think we have missed out any other social media marketing campaign then share with us!