SUMMARY:
Can traditional magazine ads and billboards
drive college-age prospects to submit entries
for a video contest? A marketer for a national
apartment rental service wanted to find out.
Check out how the marketer ran a multichannel
campaign that mixed offline and online efforts
to promote an online video contest. Their
results kicked butt. Includes creative samples.
CHALLENGE
Last spring, Erica Campbell, Marketing Manager,
ForRent.com, and her team were charged with
creating awareness of their brand and its
regional offices while spiking traffic at their
site. They had never launched a consumer
campaign before.
“In our marketplace, there was a lot of
confusion between the different [Internet]
apartment rental listing services and
publications,” Campbell says. “We were looking
to separate ourselves from the competition and
build brand differentiation. On the advertiser
side, we also wanted to get more qualified
leads.”
Campbell’s target group was 18-to-35-year-old
consumers, including the coveted college-age
demographic.
CAMPAIGN
Given the college-age demographic, Campbell and
her team dove into the Web 2.0 world by
sponsoring an online video contest. Before
plunging into the campaign, though, they did
thorough research into consumer promotions and
online contests to get tips on creative and
overall direction.
Here are the seven steps they took to zero in
on the campus kids:
-> Step #1. Test ads in a relevant magazine
Campbell and her team began by targeting
students at the 135 campuses included in
UMagazine’s semester mailings. They ran a
full-page color ad in the spring and summer
issues promoting a $10,000 giveaway with the
slogan: “If Only Your Apartment Furniture Could
Talk….”
To cultivate offline-online synergy, the ad
featured an image of an online media player
below the slogan. It also displayed the URL for
the contest.
Campbell says the April ad was designed to
introduce the contest to the audience; May’s ad
was meant to reinforce it. “Overall, the
circulation was about 1.25 million students per
issue.”
-> Step #2. Piggyback with a PR campaign
Campbell and team supported the magazine ads
with a PR blitz aimed at 91 college newspapers.
Press releases via snail mail and targeted
emails were sent out. To keep costs down, they
handled the PR in-house.
-> Step #3. Test vinyl versus digital billboards
The team chose vinyl and digital billboards in
the San Antonio, Texas, and Columbus, Ohio,
markets. “They appeared in a combination of
major streets and interstate highways. They were
different sorts of sizes, depending on the
location and whether or not they were digital or
vinyl.”
Campbell and her team worked for just over one
month to organize the billboard campaign. They
worked with an agency to create the billboards
and placed them with the following advertising
vendors:
- ClearChannel Columbus
- Lamar Columbus
- CBS Columbus
- Lamar San Antonio
- ClearChannel San Antonio
- CBS San Antonio
-> Step #4. Combine online and offline
promotions
Campbell’s team also wanted to mix offline
efforts with targeted online ads. So, they ran
banners across three major networks popular with
college kids: MySpace.com, Facebook.com and
Advertising.com.
One of the Facebook ads was text-only and ran
with a 110-by-80-pixels icon. The other banners
(or display ads) appeared in the following pixel
sizes:
o 468-by-60
o 120-by-600
o 120-by-240
o 160-by-600
o 300-by-250
o 728-by-90
o 430-by-600
-> Step #5. Back banners with social networking
To support the banner ads, the team created a
corporate profile on Facebook and MySpace and
began collecting ‘friends.’ They encouraged
their regional offices to do the same. While the
contest ran on the URL,
WinApartmentFurniture.com, it let people share
videos with friends at multiple Web 2.0
communities.
The watermarking tracking technology used in the
contest also allowed Campbell and her team to
track the videos’ exposure around the Internet
after the campaign ended.
-> Step #6. Take advantage of existing email
list to spread the word
They also used ForRent.com’s email opt-in list
of 56,000 names to publicize the 10-week
contest. An initial message was sent during the
first week of contest. A follow-up was sent
during week four.
Here are the two subject lines they used:
o ForRent.com’s If Only Your Apartment Could
Talk Video Contest
o ForRent.com Video Contest
-> Step #7. Get legal help with contest
parameters
The contest began on May 1 with a June 15
deadline. Voting took place between June 16 and
July 6. The winner was announced on July 21.
Voting took place between June 16 and July 6.
The team consulted with legal counsel to ensure
that contest rules would help prevent copyright
violations. The rules suggested that submissions
be less than two minutes long – while conforming
to predetermined judging parameters.
“And we gave them a wide variety of video format
files, so it was easy for them. We understood
that some people were more familiar with
QuickTime versus MP4s and things like that.”
RESULTS
The multichannel effort generated:
o 51 submissions in six weeks
o 57% increase in site traffic over the same
time frame in 2007
o More than 300 qualified leads for their
brick-and-mortar partners
o 20.1% boost in college-age visitors to their
website
Campaign data also showed:
- contest page received more than 59,000 unique
visitors and more than 251,000 page views
- average time on site per user was three
minutes
- videos received more than 500 comments and
more than 346,000 video views
- banners received more than 193 million
impressions and more than 128,000 clicks
- the first email got a 17% open rate and a 1.7%
clickthrough rate
- the second email got a 38% open rate and a 3%
clickthrough rate
Participant videos went viral thru syndication
to these social networking and video-sharing
sites:
o YouTube
o MySpace
o Google Video
o AOL Video
o MSN Video
o metacafe
o Revver
o Yahoo! Video
o Dailymotion
o Veoh
o Crackle
o viddler
o brightcove
Campbell notes that 27% of video views came from
metacafe, 26% from YouTube and 22% from Revver.
Campbell and her team also learned these lessons
about billboards and magazine ads:
- Pushing something like an online video contest
with billboards was not the most cost-effective
strategy. “We now think billboards are probably
better for branding than they are to promote a
contest like this one.”
- The magazine ads were a winning campaign
element. “We received the most site visits from
campuses where UMagazine was distributed. I feel
very confident about the success of the magazine
ads and press release. In terms of the PR, we’re
still getting a lot of coverage for the
contest.”
Summing up, Campbell says: “I think the campaign
was extremely successful, especially for our
first time in this space. A lot of our video
submissions came on the last night. Some people
waited to the last second because they didn’t
want anyone else to see what they had worked
on.”
Article
courtesty of MarketingSherpa
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