In marketing,communications and IT, we’re often jumping from one campaign to the next aiming to reproduce and improve on successes of the past. Recently, we just capped off one of our most successful campaigns and I figured it was worth a post! In a nutshell, here’s what made this campaign successful!
Clear Goals: Our campaign had a goal of generating positive association with our University by incenting high school students to create videos telling us why their school is #Awesome. The prize: $10,000 towards their school prom. Internally, we had goals of generating 20 videos, 25,000 views on YouTube and generating an increase of positive mentions for our brand in social channels.
Organizational Support: This idea needed the support of Recruitment, Marketing, Communications and IT. Each played their respective roles in promoting the contest and achieving the results.
Distribution: High School students are a target market that consumes advertising faster than most demographics, we used our advantage – school visits. Our Liaison team intelligently positioned the contest to the students directly while in schools and solicited the support of the school administration.
Awareness: As the campaign grew, our highly targeted Facebook ads were served directly to students at schools that were likely to participate. These gentle reminders funneled traffic to our campaign website where they could view videos that other schools had submitted. Our #AwesomeLU hashtag on Twitter was used relatively often, however our account saw a very significant increase in followers, as did our Facebook page.
Summary: In the end, the campaign had clear goals, a clear target market and committed execution from multiple departments that led to an outcome we can all be proud of. This has most definitely influenced the decisions of students in choosing which post-secondary institution to attend next fall.
81 thoughts on “One Awesome campaign and why it succeeded.”