WHITE PAPER How to Maximize Campaign Conversion. A Hootsuite Campaigns White Paper

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER How to Maximize Campaign Conversion A Hootsuite Campaigns White Paper

2 How to Maximize Campaign Conversion A Hootsuite Campaigns White Paper Social marketing campaigning is a powerful way to generate leads, aggregate user-generated content (UGC), and drive growth and engagement in your fanbase. No matter what you re hoping your campaign will accomplish for you and your marketing team, its success depends on how effectively it converts visits to entries and submissions. That statistic, your campaign s conversion rate, is decided by the choices you make in the design, launch, and promotion of your campaigns. In this whitepaper, we re going to explore the different opportunities you ll have to maximize the conversion rate of your campaigns. In addition to five suggestions to help you maximize the conversion rate of your social marketing campaigns, this whitepaper offers you exercises and checklists you can use during the design process for any social marketing campaign. You might not need to do them before you run every campaign, especially if you re familiar with running social marketing campaigns, but keeping them front of mind will help ensure the success you deserve. In this white paper, your organization will learn how to: Assess Your Bandwidth Take your audience, resources, and goals into account when deciding which campaigns to run Campaign in Technicolor Choose your color scheme carefully to connect with specific audiences & showcase your brand Use All Your Space Make the most of where you host your campaigns, its header, and how you can guide visitors to purchase once they ve entered Use All Promotional Channels Broadcast your campaign across every platform you have - your website, your newsletter and your social networks Be Engaged Reach out to the people talking about & entering your campaign to turn fans into superfans 2

3 1. Assess Your Bandwidth The maximum possible conversion of your campaign is defined long before it actually launches. Alanna Fiedler, one of our Customer Success Managers, helps our clients plan effective campaigns from the minute they become customers. I try to get a sense of two main things within the organization. The first and the simplest is always team structure. When I m trying to map out my support for them, it s important for me to know what their internal resources look like. Before you design your campaign, consider how you can allocate the resources you have assess the strengths of your business and your fanbase. Then decide what you want your campaigns to accomplish. Our social marketing platform allows you to run multiple campaigns at a time. This may or may not be right for you. If you have a smaller audience, and you are sending them to five different campaigns on a Facebook page, it is highly unlikely they will interact with all five. Give them something that you know is going to hit their chord. However, if you re one of the bigger organizations that we work with, running multiple targeted (campaigns) for each audience, could be a really great strategy. You re probably going to have lower entries in each one, but because each is more targeted and more appealing to that specific audience, you might have overall higher engagement across the board, says Alanna Fiedler. Once you know what you want, you can start designing the campaign that s going to help you get it. But understanding what you have to work with comes first. Study how your fans interact with your brand, and where. Track your brand s hashtag, and see how many pieces of user-generated content have been created in the past month by your fans. If your fans aren t already inclined to take pictures for fun, you can connect with them using other campaigns like sweepstakes, polls, or quizzes. While brainstorming, see if you and your team can t answer these questions: FFWhat is your most important goal? FFDo you want to pursue your other goals at the same time? FFDo you have the bandwidth to design, launch and promote more than one campaign? FFIs your audience big enough to engage with multiple campaigns? F F How do your fans currently behave on social? 3

4 2. Campaign in Technicolor Whatever the theme of your campaign, there s a color scheme that can help convey its messaging. Extra time dedicated to color choice can pay big dividends in the end. Color can account for as much as 85% of the reason why someone decides to purchase a product. 1 The design of your social media campaigns should be complementary to your existing branding, though there are potential reasons to diverge. Do you want to differentiate yourself from your competitors? Do you want to take advantage of a holiday that already has a deeply entrenched color scheme (black and orange for Halloween, or red and green for Christmas)? Or do you just want to switch it up? Heinz, the number one ketchup in the world, once introduced a green ketchup as a novelty item. The success encouraged Heinz to expand the color selection with orange, purple, blue, teal, and pink ketchups. But Heinz never abandoned its proven identity the novelty of rainbow ketchup wore off in 2006, and aside from a resurrection at Burger King for one day in 2012, the colored ketchups have never been seen again. If you re going to invert your color scheme, remember that your brand has fans who are likely quite attached to your current branding. Don t abandon your fanbase. When you re designing your complimentary campaigning color scheme, there are a few things to think about. What industry does your organization belong to? How does your company position itself? Do you sell luxury goods? Does your customer base skew young? What s your company s existing color scheme? All of these things should be taken into account when producing your campaign s look. In terms of marketing, the color wheel is divided in half into warm and cool. Warm colors are generally used to inspire positive feelings or active behaviors, while cool colors are used to create an atmosphere of peace and security. But colors still have distinct meanings depending on what country you re from. Purple branding might convey luxury and creativity in North America and Europe, but in Brazil purple is the color of funerals. This is valuable data even if you re not marketing at an international level: if you re marketing to a demographically diverse clientele, you should appreciate how your marketing materials might affect them. Do thorough research into the connotations of your existing branding; this can help guide your linguistic choices and perhaps even inspire new campaigns in the future. Because color is universally experienced, it s been heavily studied. One scholar that s studied color is Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland. He and his team did a study of which colors were most popular by gender, and it revealed some interesting facts. Most Popular Color (by gender) Men Women 42% 25% 5% 7% 8% 1% 12% 29% 19% 6% 3% 9% 7% 27% While more women like pink than men, it s not by a significant margin. Blue is the most favored color across the board; there s a reason that social networks are almost exclusively designed in shades of blue. Purple outpaces green for women, but it s still their fourth favorite color and the third most popular choice for men. If you re picking a new color scheme for your social marketing campaigns, make sure the colors you choose fit your fans understanding of your brand. Imagine the mental whiplash if Barbie and Hot Wheels switched their branding. Your fans are buying your branding as much as what you physically make and sell. Everything you can do to make your campaigns stand out from the crowd is a good idea, and will lead to greater conversion. 4

5 3. Use All Your Space All social marketing campaigns have a few things in common. Whether it s a sweepstakes, contest, poll, or quiz, your campaign will have a custom header, usually involving the title of your campaign. The call to action will be explained and conveyed in a fun and persuasive way, and it will also close out the copy. This is the barebones definition of a social marketing campaign at its launch. However, every component of a campaign can be optimized for maximum conversion. The header is a great place for your design team to strut its stuff. But it s important not to go overboard on its prominence or design. The default header size for a Hootsuite Campaign is 970 or 2600 pixels wide, depending on whether your campaign is on mobile or a full screen. Many of our clients decide to make their headers as tall as possible. This is an understandable decision in a world where bigger is usually conceived as better, but the more work a viewer has to do to get to the call to action, the less likely they are to do it. Making the header taller than it has to be means they re going to be spending valuable seconds on your campaign scrolling down, searching for the point. The same rules apply to the design of the individual components. Many designers enjoy the effect that filters can have on brand imagery, but the more heavily filtered your images are, the less immediate their impact on viewers. On Instagram, where filters are a fundamental part of everyone s user experience, it was found that the three filters with the highest engagement rate were Mayfair, Inkwell (Instagram s cleanest black and white filter) and #nofilter. 2 The most essential component of a campaign is the call to action. If it isn t well-positioned, it will flounder, no matter how compellingly it s written. The call to action should be the first and last thing that entrants read many successful clients choose to make the call to action the title of their campaign. Viewers want to understand what they have to do as quickly as possible. The style of your campaign should support its message, not get in its way. You should also brand your Facebook cover photo with the header, regardless of whether you choose to host your campaign there. Facebook s newly-enhanced Call to Action button is a valuable way to attract some of Facebook s 1.49 billion users to your campaign. Lastly, your campaign s thank you page is a great opportunity for you to promote what s new for your business. They re on the page anyway; make the most of the opportunity, and link them back to your site so they can explore all that you have to offer. Campaign Design Checklist FFA clear call to action in the header FFUnified visual components, including a branded Facebook Cover Photo FFA simple design that doesn t force the participant to scroll down F F A clear path to the next steps (e.g., incentivized sharing, thank you offers) 5

6 4. Use All Promotional Channels Once the campaign is designed and launched, it s time to consider how you re going to promote the campaign. Social media networks are the obvious and essential place to promote your campaign. It is literally impossible to have a successful social media campaign without advertising it on social media. But there are many other promotional channels that you can make the most of over the course of the campaign. Alanna Fiedler has found that marketing is a fantastic supplement for social marketing campaigns. You re not going to e-blast your audience every day of a campaign. But what I ve seen is drastic increases on the days that they do. One client s recent holiday sweepstakes, [...] had 40x the entries the day after the eblast than on any other day of their campaign. One of the reasons this client s eblast was so successful was because it was not exclusively about the campaign; making the social marketing campaign the featured news in an existing newsletter gave it a greater weight (and open rate) than a campaign-specific would have had. Another valuable way to boost the promotion of your campaign is to enable incentivized sharing. Incentivized sharing is when companies offer additional entries into their social marketing campaigns (usually sweepstakes) in exchange for sharing the link to the campaign across the entrant s social networks. Enabling incentivized sharing won one of our clients thousands of shares and hundreds of new subscribers. One of the most effective places you can promote your campaign is on your own website. Social media promotion is essential, but if your web team has the bandwidth, consider including a callout to the campaign on the landing page of your website. Whether that means creating a Contests or Promotions tab, or including a link for the campaign in your sidebar, making the most of your website s traffic can only mean good things for your campaign. 5. Be Engaged Social media campaigning is an ongoing practice for our clients. To make every campaign more successful than the one that came before it, reach out to the people who entered. To Alanna Fiedler, this is one of the biggest ways companies can increase conversion. I think one thing clients don t do enough is thanking and engaging with people who participated. Especially if they ve opted into anything, take the time to thank them. Whether it s taking a look at who your biggest advocates were on social or who gave the most hashtag entries, engage with them further, because that s how you get superfans. And as a consumer, when a brand reaches out to you and gives some love, it means a lot. If it doesn t help with the conversion of the first campaign, it ll help build conversion of the next one. This applies to every single kind of campaign that Hootsuite Campaigns has to offer. Whether your fans have provided their contact information through a sweepstakes or formfill, submitted UGC, or even just shared a link to the campaign, thanking them for their engagement will encourage similar behavior in the future and build a lasting reputation for your brand on social media. Want to learn more about how to maximize conversion on your campaigns? Reach out for a customized demo of Hootsuite Campaigns today. Endnotes 1. Hemphill, Michael. A note on adults color emotion associations. The Journal of Genetic Psychology 157.3, pgs TrackMaven, The Fortune 500 Instagram Report,

7 About Hootsuite Campaigns Use Hootsuite Campaigns to increase your social reach Hootsuite Campaigns empowers organizations to engage with and foster their fanbase through the power of social media marketing. Hootsuite Campaigns has helped launch hundreds of campaigns for some of the world s leading brands. Our versatile campaign management interface allows users to create, manage and promote their social marketing initiatives through integration with Facebook, Twitter, Google +, and Instagram. To maximize the potential of social media, Hootsuite Campaigns allows its clients to deploy an infinite number of campaigns at a time. We strive to help our clients maximize their presence on social media through the creation of smart, fun, and beautiful campaigns. Constantly evolving, we continue to help businesses cultivate and celebrate their online communities through campaigns that speak to the needs, wants, and passions of their fans. Request a custom demo today by visiting hootsuite.com/products/campaigns Top Brands Trust Hootsuite 7