CHAPTER

BUILDING BEST-IN-CLASS SOCIAL CAMPAIGNS EFFICIENTLY AND EFFECTIVELY

When the people killed a buffalo, they did it with reverence. They gave thanks to the buffalo’s spirit. They used every part of the buffalo they killed. The meat was their food. The skins were used for clothing and to cover their tipis. The hair stuffed their pillows and saddlebags. The sinews became their bowstrings. From the hooves, they made glue. They carried water in the bladders and stomachs. To give the buffalo honor, they painted the skull and placed it facing the rising sun.¹

—from “The Passing of the Buffalo,” a Kiowa legend

Many of the Native American tribes who populated the American plains shared a common practice about hunting buffalo: use every part. It’s a step beyond how we usually think about efficiency. These tribes weren’t just interested in killing the maximum number of buffalo on a given hunting trip. They found ways to put every part of the animal to use.

Social media marketing is a lot like hunting buffalo. Just kidding, it isn’t. But this sentiment is an extremely important part of putting the concepts from this book into practice. Much of the focus of this book is in finding meaningful differentiation between social networks, and while I believe understanding these nuances to be absolutely critical to good marketing strategy, nuance also presents challenges to the goals of scalability and efficiency. How can we create campaigns that are tailored to particular mindsets in different social networks while achieving scale and working within our available resources?

In previous chapters, we discussed the competitiveness of different meme pools—different environments in which content vies for attention. In purely pay-to-place media like TV and print, competition is more a question of media budget. There remain the questions of how strategically and creatively we might fill these spaces, but whether we make an incredible commercial or an absolutely abysmal one, we’re likely going to reach the same number of people through our media buy.

Social media doesn’t quite work that way. In social advertising, when we create a piece of content that performs extremely well, it has the potential to be shared, earn additional reach, make more efficient use of our media dollars, and generate organic traction. In part, that’s why I recommend flipping the traditional creative funnel and beginning with social media—the qualitative and quantitative feedback we receive there can help us hone our creative for channels with more standard media. That’s one example of using part of the buffalo we usually throw away. What comments do people make on our ads? Where does their viewership drop off? Which creative variation is the top performer? Most of that information is lost or, at best, included in recap reports, which is practically the same as getting lost.

In this chapter, we’re going to apply the learnings from this book to a few theoretical advertising campaigns. For our first mock campaign, we’ll truly start from scratch with a fresh brand—one with no background, history, or market share. Our hypothetical new brand makes a product with an established, long-standing competitor set—camping equipment. And since I’m writing this from the Bay Area, let’s give our tent brand a fittingly hip tech name: Tent.ly.

EXAMPLE 1. LAUNCHING A BRAND WITH A COHESIVE BUT DIFFERENTIATED SOCIAL STRATEGY

Tent.ly makes premium quality tents that rival big-name competitors like The North Face and REI, but because Tent.ly isn’t bound to brick-and-mortar sales and massive company infrastructure, it’s able to sell tents for 20 percent less than most of its competitors. For Tent.ly, the category is already well established, and the use cases are obvious. Tent.ly’s first hurdle as a brand is gaining credibility. Tent.ly hasn’t developed its left brain territory for campers and hikers. It isn’t a known quantity, and potential customers don’t have a shared sense of the brand. Nobody outside the company knows how well Tent.ly’s products will perform, and that’s a big problem for a brand selling performance gear. How will its first wave of customers feel confident making a purchase?

To provide some initial stability and credibility, Tent.ly offers a five-year warranty on its tents. Any product defects or even wear and tear that impairs functionality will be repaired by the brand at no cost to the customer. A guarantee like that is an effective way to establish a goodwill relationship with new customers. It’s a tactic used by many direct-to-consumer brands. Casper mattresses offers a 100-day, risk-free trial. Away suitcases also offers a 100-day, risk-free trial and an additional lifetime warranty for damaged parts. Especially for newcomer brands, it’s not enough to simply outprice the competition in most cases. Not only does that become a race to the bottom when competitors start to play the same game, but consumers are also generally skeptical of the most cheaply priced items in a category.

To differentiate themselves from the competition, Tent.ly leans into its ability to make people feel at home in nature. Where brands like The North Face and REI often feature imagery from extreme conditions and aspirational settings, Tent.ly positions itself as bringing comfort and a feeling of home to the great outdoors. Its internal positioning statement is, “Tent.ly enables campers of all skill levels to feel at home in the midst of the world’s natural beauty.” Now the question is, how can Tent.ly live up to that promise?

After developing its brand personality and perspective, Tent.ly can start to think about how it might reach potential customers through different marketing channels. Tent.ly knows that its audience of camping and nature enthusiasts can be found in a wide range of channels—through out-of-home advertising near popular campgrounds, on nature- and camping-related TV programs, at trade shows, through email marketing, on shopping websites related to camping, through a variety of social media channels, and so on. Because Tent.ly needs to make extremely efficient use of its media dollars but also needs to grow its awareness, the brand decides to split its media budget. Half of the budget will be spent on hardworking, low-funnel tactics like paid search, programmatic advertising, and cost-per-click in-feed social ads. The other half of Tent.ly’s budget will go toward ads tasked with increasing brand awareness and drumming up buzz among its target audience.

Because Tent.ly’s stakeholders are hungry to get into the market, the brand first launches its lower-funnel marketing efforts using a range of photos of different products in different settings. Part of the Tent.ly team thinks that launching their lower-funnel marketing efforts will undermine a true brand launch, but the team also faces pressure from investors to start driving sales. While as marketers, we often want to plan our campaigns to feel as elegant and strategic as possible from start to finish, we have to remember that executions are never as clean as planning.

The sales data available prior to any brand-level marketing can actually serve as a strong benchmark for successful brand activity once it launches. If the team can show that 1 percent of the people who clicked on a paid search result converted to purchase prior to the branding campaign, and that number climbs to 2 percent after the branding campaign is in market, that’s a strong indication that the brand marketing is changing broader perceptions. If it’s sophisticated in terms of measurement and tagging, Tent.ly may even be able to connect brand awareness touchpoints with low-funnel ads targeting to measure the effect of its brand-level marketing.

Prior to launching its branding campaign, Tent.ly begins a social listening exercise to determine which channels it ought to prioritize. While the brand has enough financial backing for a strong launch campaign, it must be selective of where it reaches people and how. After studying volume of conversation, its competitive set, and its ultimate objectives, Tent.ly narrows down its channel mix. The marketing team decides to focus most of its activity on social channels where it can engage potential customers directly, and the team also has some interest in more traditional out-of-home advertising in particular markets.

Tent.ly knows that it needs robust targeting and a well-developed ads platform for at least one of its social channels. Because its lower-funnel ads are already using Facebook, the team decides to lean into Facebook as a priority channel. While the potential organic impact of Facebook is relatively low, the team recognizes that establishing a reputable presence on a platform that will carry much of its lower-funnel marketing will also help convert people to purchase. Should a potential customer come across one of Tent.ly’s ads and decide to look more deeply into the brand, an active presence within the same channel will make a much more positive impression than an inactive page. On Facebook, Tent.ly plans to balance its low-funnel activity with content that drives engagement.

The team also recognizes the limitations of participating actively on Facebook. The potential to engage in organic conversations is limited. Organic reach is almost nonexistent. The vast majority of users are organized exclusively around their social networks, who may or may not also be interested in camping. Tent.ly decides to also prioritize participation in Reddit communities organized around camping and hiking. The tens of millions of subscribers to camping-related communities, connected through their common interests, allow Tent.ly to facilitate conversations directly with groups of people with strong potential to use its products. Tent.ly also knows that winning over Reddit’s camping and hiking communities has a waterfall effect. Success on Reddit can affect opinions much more broadly, and because Reddit ranks particularly well in search, a positive thread on Reddit has the potential to be discovered by anyone researching the brand. While the team recognizes that the results from Reddit activity are less controllable, the potential payoff is massive.

Tent.ly also recognizes that one of the primary draws to camping and hiking is being surrounded by natural beauty. The visual nature of Instagram combined with the prominence of nature photography and related content provide a wide creativity territory for the brand to explore. As a new brand without a deep reservoir of content, the team also sees strong potential in partnering with influencers. Having a presence on Instagram, where many of its potential influencers have built their audiences, will also help maximize the impact of its influencer partnerships.

The Tent.ly team begins its creative briefing with the most competitive channels first, then works its way through less competitive channels. Social networks are more competitive than billboards, so that’s where the team starts. Competitiveness between social channels can vary depending on vertical, but generally, it’s worth starting at the bottom of the iceberg and working up—first Id networks, then Superego networks, then Ego networks. Tent.ly plans to start with an idea that’s compelling to Reddit’s camping and hiking communities, then find ways to expand its campaign to Instagram and Facebook.

During its marketing research and strategy explorations, Tent.ly found that one of the barriers to entry for campers and hikers of all experience levels is finding good locations. Many rely on brief conversations with park rangers or chance encounters with veteran campers to trade knowledge about great local hiking and camping spots. While apps like AllTrails provide comprehensive lists of available hikes in different areas, the reviews and recommendations feel manufactured and lack local flavor and expertise. Tent.ly decides to build its creative platform from this insight. Through a combination of organic community engagement and strategically placed paid media, Tent.ly will create an interactive, crowdsourced map designed to share local camping and hiking knowledge.

Tent.ly recognizes that in order to deeply engage communities like Reddit, the participation of the community must have a real stake in the development of the campaign. To drive meaningful participation, that participation must effect a meaningful outcome. Prior to fueling this experience with wider paid media, Tent.ly creates a series of simple posts designed to drive awareness and participation. The team identifies a few communities that have a high likelihood of finding value in Tent.ly’s map. They look for communities that are large enough to be impactful, allow for open-ended engagement, and in which their participation as a brand won’t break any rules.

The team creates a simple organic post in the r/Camping community, which boasts 1.4 million members:

Post Title: Hey Reddit, we love camping, and we want better recommendations on where to explore next! What are your favorite local spots? (Also, we make tents.)

Post Body: Hi there, Reddit! We’re some folks from Tent.ly. We’ve been camping for a collective 35 years, and in the past, we could never afford top-quality tents. We quit our full-time jobs two years ago to start a tent company that could produce extremely high quality tents without the overhead of being a massive company so we can sell them for cheaper.

Anyway, we have this marketing budget to spend, and rather than just sticking ads in your feed, we thought we’d use it to make something useful for campers and hikers.

We created a map of the United States that’s populated with all of the local and national parks we could find. If you’ve been to any of them, make a post on the map about how it was, what you liked and didn’t like about it, whether you’d recommend it, etc. If enough people participate, we’ll have an awesome map filled with local knowledge for the best camping and hiking spots around the country!

What do you think? Anything you would add or change? If you can drop in some of your knowledge, we’d definitely appreciate it!

The voice and tone of an organic Reddit post should try to provide as much behind-the-curtain insight as possible. By introducing themselves as a passionate bunch who care about the same things their potential customers do, Tent.ly immediately establishes common ground with fellow outdoors enthusiasts in a way that feels authentic. The way Tent.ly describes the campaign is also casual—almost as if they’re just other Redditors throwing around ideas. Not only does this provide some room for community members to evaluate the concept without advertiser ickiness attached to it, the team opens the door to new ideas, which allows people to feel invested in the campaign’s success. By asking people what they think and if they have other ideas, Tent.ly underscores the fact that they care about the response. This isn’t just another ad in a massive brand’s marketing fleet—Tent.ly is demonstrating that they care to engage in real conversation about it.

There are a few ways this might go for Tent.ly. If everything is absolutely perfect about the post, its timing, competition in the algorithm, and so on, it could blow up and reach a massive audience of Redditors, beyond even the r/Camping community. It’s an unlikely scenario, but it could happen—and the groundswell that follows these moments can be absolutely massive. When a new brand or website generates this kind of success and isn’t ready for the spike in bandwidth, Reddit has been known to take websites down, lovingly referred to by the community as the “Reddit hug of death.”

What’s more likely is that the post resonates with some Redditors, also generates a few downvotes, and sits around the top or middle of the r/Camping community for a few hours. In this scenario, Tent.ly is likely to generate a good number of responses, some of which will be high quality in terms of participation or feedback. This level of success is replicable and relatively predictable with the right strategy in place. There is also a chance that Tent.ly’s post receives a few downvotes off the bat, and it fades into oblivion. While that’s far from the best-case scenario, it’s still low risk, and Tent.ly can simply move on to another camping- or hiking-related community.

The payoff of organic posts is unpredictable. Even if Tent.ly does absolutely everything right, it’s at the whim of the algorithm and whatever other content it’s competing against that day. But posting organically accomplishes a few important things. First, it gives Tent.ly an initial burst of feedback from the target they hope to reach. If what they say to camping enthusiasts immediately generates negative feedback, it may be worthwhile for the team to reconsider their approach before broadcasting their message with paid media. Second, organic posting provides a footprint for Tent.ly, which signals to the community that they’re savvy and invested in the outcome. Even if the organic post receives only mediocre engagement, when Tent.ly runs broader media on Reddit, users who view Tent.ly’s profile will see its organic post. It’s a way of demonstrating that the brand is engaged beyond the media buy, and especially for community engagement, that’s important.

Let’s assume Tent.ly’s post receives a moderate to positive response. The brand can then create a promoted post on Reddit targeted to camping and hiking enthusiasts along the same lines as its organic one. Because promoted posts look and feel like organic posts, when they’re relevant to the community, engagement within the comment threads of these posts can also feel very organic. Tent.ly takes 5 percent of its media budget to promote a post with much the same copy and sentiment as its organic post, except for a few tweaks they’ve made, based on the organic response.

Tent.ly responds to comments from Redditors across its organic and promoted posts, and the brand encourages people to participate by filling out their local area of the Tent.ly map. Over the course of two weeks, Tent.ly receives its first wave of about a hundred entries. While that may not sound like much, these first submissions are usually the most difficult to drive. They’re also critical to creating the sense that this content is trending and active. Now the campaign can be targeted more broadly to specific geographies, interests adjacent to camping like outdoor photography, and other media strategies they use to reach the broadest relevant audience. Not only can media now broaden within the Reddit platform but Tent.ly can also begin to drive engagement with its other social channels. This is the true launch moment for the campaign—everything prior can be considered seeding and prelaunch. Across each of its social channels, Tent.ly allocates more of its media budget to driving participation in its crowdsourced map.

Prior to launching paid media on Instagram, the brand populates its handle with product photography in different natural environments, which they’d already commissioned. The team is very selective, choosing only photos with true aesthetic appeal—too much emphasis on the product will make the profile feel transactional and will discourage engagement. The team selects nine photos to fill a basic three-by-three grid, and it posts a few times per week organically to engage and grow its small following. Its first posts don’t need to work too hard at engagement because there isn’t much of an audience to engage yet. Rather, these initial photos are meant to represent the brand, the kinds of products it produces, and provide a feel for the content subscribers can expect in the future.

In addition to building out its own profile, the Tent.ly team partners with nature photography and camping influencers who have medium to large followings on Instagram. Tent.ly provides influencers with tents, and it prompts its partners to take a recommendation from the brand’s crowdsourced map. Influencers venture out to document their experiences at recommended campgrounds—providing live vlogging updates to their followers, posting photographs of their camp setups, sharing photographs of nature, and so on. Tent.ly shares and amplifies influencers’ content, tags them in organic posts, comments on influencers’ photos, and encourages influencers to do the same. In doing so, Tent.ly associates itself with these credible influencers and maximizes its potential for audience growth during the partnerships. The brand prompts influencers to share content with the hashtag #LoveMeTently, which connects influencer content and allows Tent.ly to draw a consistent thread between its partnerships and brand. It also provides a strong call to action for others in the community to follow suit, participate in the crowdsourced map, and share their own content with the same hashtag.

On Facebook, Tent.ly uses similar but slightly varied photography to populate its profile, cover photo, and so on. The brand allows for about 50 percent overlap between Instagram and Facebook content. While duplicative content isn’t always ideal, it’s a useful way to maximize the reach and impact of top content. It also helps to maintain some amount of organic reach by creating regular touchpoints with followers. The more often a user engages with its page’s content, the more likely Tent.ly is to show up in their feed organically in subsequent posts.

The primary differentiator between Tent.ly’s Facebook and Instagram strategies is in how it engages people. On Instagram the brand shares inspirational captions and quotes about nature, and it generally allows the focus to remain on its photo and video content. On Facebook, Tent.ly encourages connection between friends and fosters engagement more directly. Tent.ly captions a photo of a beautiful hiking trail up a steep-looking mountain, “Tag someone who would climb this with you!” Its copy aims to evoke personal connections between friends to help grow organic reach.

As the crowdsourced map continues to populate with camping and hiking suggestions, the Tent.ly team curates different articles made up of lists of different hikes based on factors such as geography, experience level, and scenery. The team targets outdoor enthusiasts in Colorado with links to articles like “Campers’ Top 10 Hikes in Colorado” or “8 Colorado Hikes off the Beaten Trail (with Incredible Views).” These article titles may feel a little clickbaity, but as long as we deliver what we promised on the other side of the link, this format of headline can be a strong draw. Not only that, people who wear camping and hiking as a badge may well share these posts with their networks as forms of self-expression—as if to say, “I’m such an outdoor enthusiast that I found these hikes that nobody else knew about.” On Facebook and Instagram especially, Tent.ly aspires to aid people in expressing their love of the outdoors through the brand itself.

The Tent.ly team earmarked some of its media budget for out-of-home advertising in specific markets. This phase too can borrow campaign elements from content generated in social media. The team leverages top-performing photography from both its own shoots and its influencers’ camping experiences on billboards surrounding airports and campgrounds in camping and hiking destinations. These billboards are designed first, to grab attention with striking photography; second, communicate the brand identity and its products; and third, to encourage connection with the brand through hashtags—“Share your best camping photos this trip with #LoveMeTently!”

Given the bandwidth, the team could also build incentives for engagement with its hashtag such as product giveaways, surprise and delights, or simply by amplifying great submissions through its own channels. Tent.ly’s campaign ecosystem fits together in a way that’s not only well suited to each of its channels but that creates efficiency between its activities in each. The dynamic nature of the campaign is interesting in and of itself. The brand meaning isn’t created by the company in a lab. It’s cocreated by participants in the campaign. Nobody wants to submit a photo to a contest if the submission is doomed to sit on some brand manager’s hard drive for a decade. People submit photos they hope will get some kind of attention, engagement, and recognition. By designing the campaign both to use media dollars efficiently and to offer deeper points of connections, the brand builds sales, credibility, and word-of-mouth simultaneously.

EXAMPLE 2. REPOSITIONING A LEGACY TECH COMPANY TO MILLENNIALS AND GENERATION Z

More often than not, when planning a campaign, we have brand history with which to contend. It’s rare that we have the challenge (and opportunity) to launch a brand from scratch. We’re often in a position of fighting our own success too. Our brand has established itself as a market leader in one area and wants to evolve to capture another, or we’re so well known for our work in one space that we build campaigns to share the spotlight with some other part of our business.

As brands grow and segment themselves across different lines of business, it’s difficult to maintain cohesion. Especially when internal marketing teams compete for budget, it’s easy for different segments to form antagonistic relationships with one another. One way this manifests for consumers is in arbitrary splits in brand social media presences. If we’re an electronics company that makes computer processors, gaming accessories, office equipment, and virtual reality (VR) hardware, it may be tempting for our internal marketing organization to segment social presences across these different offerings. But to a potential customer, that can cause confusion and frustration, especially when we expect to interact with one consistent brand behind different products.

Imagine that we represent a large electronics company called Lumina. Lumina is a well-known, entrenched electronics manufacturer with dozens of products that suit a multitude of different markets. While some of Lumina’s products are marketed to businesses, the majority of its brand-level budget is spent on consumer marketing. Lumina is generally considered a reliable electronics company among baby boomers, but it’s lost market share among millennials and Gen Z. While Lumina is known for reliable, everyday products like computer parts, televisions, and smartphones, the company has invested heavily in innovation, particularly in the virtual reality space.

Rather than creating different social profiles for Lumina Computer, Lumina TV, and so on, the company maintains two kinds of social profiles on its chosen platforms—a primary, consumer-facing presence and separate Lumina for Business profiles where relevant. While this requires deeper levels of coordination among marketing teams across different Lumina products, it creates a smoother experience for customers interacting with the brand. To coordinate, Lumina’s different marketing arms have established a brand-level strategy to maintain consistency across all of the company’s consumer marketing efforts, and each team’s work is evaluated according to this strategy for consistency.

Lumina briefs its creative agency to produce a campaign that will highlight the company’s dedication to innovation by building awareness for its work in the virtual reality space. The budget is large, and the goal of the campaign is to position Lumina as both reliable and cutting-edge to millennials and Gen Z. Lumina has published regular press releases and drawn minimal press coverage about its virtual reality technology and research, but initial consumer research shows that very little of Lumina’s Gen Z and millennial audiences associate the brand with innovation and new technology. The campaign must walk a fine line between positioning the brand to these audiences while remaining consistent and recognizable to Lumina’s loyal customer base.

Because innovation is at the heart of the campaign, the team allocates almost no budget to transactional tactics like paid search and programmatic advertising. While these tactics can be cost-effective ways to convert people to purchase, they’re not likely going to change people’s perceptions about a well-known technology company. Instead, the team looks for channels in which its virtual reality technology and creative will shine the brightest.

Snapchat is a strong candidate for reaching millennials and Gen Z, and the team decides augmented-reality filters are a good creative canvas to communicate a message of innovation in an interesting way. Lumina also recognizes that as a budding technology, creators in virtual reality space are networked into tight communities where they have relatively insular (but deeply compelling) conversations. To reach virtual reality’s early adopters, Lumina aspires to participate in conversations happening within virtual reality communities on Reddit where they can reach communities ranging from those specific to virtual reality to broader technology-related ones.

Lumina also recognizes that virtual reality is a deeply immersive technology. It’s hard enough to capture the effect of virtual reality in a video, let alone in a competitive social feed. The brand decides that YouTube, Twitch, and other online streaming ads, which allow for more immersive content, should also play a role in the campaign ecosystem. Lastly, drawing insights from organic conversations within virtual reality communities and among first-time users, the team acknowledges that while seeing content about virtual reality can be engaging, it takes firsthand experience to truly understand the power of the technology. The team decides that an event activation should also fit into the campaign.

With Reddit, Snapchat, YouTube, Twitch, and event marketing in mind, Lumina’s creative team comes up with the big idea: a massive game of Minecraft playable by people both online and in virtual reality headsets. Minecraft is a deeply loved sandbox video game that employs simple graphics and logic to allow players to form the world in which they’re playing. The game is both relevant—boasting 480 million players in 2019—and nostalgic for the target audience.² Minecraft also has a special place in meme culture, which Lumina hopes will endear the brand to Internet tastemakers and nod to the brand’s online savviness.

The team starts the campaign by interacting with various Minecraft- and virtual reality–related communities on Reddit. Again, starting at the bottom of the iceberg and working up through less competitive channels, the team spends a small amount of paid media to prompt Minecraft players and virtual reality communities on Reddit with the concept behind the campaign. After some initial research and dialogue with players, the team decides that rather than creating a Minecraft map themselves, it would be more interesting to have a shared map created dynamically by players.

The team creates its own Reddit community, and it uses Reddit’s natural community algorithm to facilitate votes on different user-submitted maps. This new subreddit is relatively small, but the team evaluates its success in terms of the number of post submissions and depth of engagement rather than overall subscribership. Over the course of two weeks, the team maintains engagement with the broader Minecraft and virtual reality communities through regular updates. The Lumina team evaluates the top-voted entries and chooses one based on both popularity of voting and its developers’ needs.

The Lumina team candidly explains to the Reddit community that there are some technical hurdles to jump before the map can be playable the way that they plan. Redditors appreciate the brand’s candor, and a few offer to help playtest. Lumina now has a small focus group of dedicated players who can be brought into the experience during development. Lumina’s agency partners with a development team to bring Reddit’s map to life in a way that will allow players online and those using virtual reality hardware to play within the same world.

Lumina’s creative team decides that Comic-Con is the perfect place to unveil its VR Minecraft experience. The creative open-endedness of the event, its strong attendance by Gen Z and millennials, and its attendees’ affinity for new technology make the event a perfect setting to deliver the campaign in real life. In the lead-up to the event, Lumina teases some exciting VR experiences with a hint of tongue-in-cheek Internet humor, something the brand hasn’t included in previous marketing but that is executed in a way that’s consistent with its brand ethos. The goal leading up to Comic-Con is to maintain engagement with the Reddit community while building anticipation for the experience. In terms of left and right brain marketing, the event is Lumina’s right brain–driven behavior. It’s designed to drive as much participation as possible during the event, but the event is also intended to create compelling left brain stories for the brand to tell afterward.

As Comic-Con opens its doors, Lumina launches its first broadly reaching set of ads designed to maximize participation in the Minecraft map. Across its priority channels, Lumina reveals that within this Minecraft server is a hidden item, and the person who finds the item will win a free virtual reality home system. In reality, Lumina has hidden a number of different surprise and delights for participants to discover—product giveaways, special in-game items, and so on.

On Twitch and YouTube, Lumina shares teaser footage of its map, in which the team has created a series of impressive Comic-Con-inspired sculptures, buildings, and landscapes for players to explore. On Snapchat, Lumina creates an augmented-reality filter that takes a person’s selfie video and turns it into a blocky Minecraft-style character—matching details such as clothing color, hair style, and accessories. When engaged users swipe up on the ad, they find that their Minecraft self is actually playable within Lumina’s multiplayer map.

Meanwhile, Comic-Con attendees are experiencing the same world through Lumina’s VR headset. The team captures video of the “Wow!” moment as event participants enter the world and interact with thousands of other players who’ve entered the map. Lumina’s team also livestreams the players’ perspectives organically on Twitch and YouTube, which allows other Minecraft players online to seek out those on the ground at Comic-Con. Online players form search parties for Comic-Con players. A game of hide-and-seek ensues. Players both online and at the event find creative ways to interact, spelling words with blocks, lining themselves up to shake virtual hands, building new sculptures, digging up hidden Easter eggs, and evolving the world in real time.

Over the course of the experience, millions of people were exposed to the content, hundreds of thousands of users viewed the livestreams, and tens of thousands of users actually entered the map. Not only has Lumina facilitated a fun and unexpected experience using its innovative technology, but the brand now also has a surplus of stories to tell. What did people build? How did they interact with one another? What were the funniest moments? What genuine connections were formed? How did different Reddit communities interact, and what memes did they create throughout the experience? The answers to each of these questions become fruitful territory for creating compelling postevent content. With the right approach to storytelling, the experience is relevant to audiences far beyond Minecraft players. The team recognizes that while the game was part of the initial draw, the stories the team plans to tell are more universal. The team treats the experience like a social experiment in the stories it tells.

Over the following months, Lumina serves a series of videos designed to highlight the funniest, most interesting, most surprising, and most earnest moments of interaction among people in its Minecraft map. The brand creates its hero spot, a 10-minute video that tells the full story of the campaign to those who are curious, but it promotes different 15- to 30-second vignettes across Reddit, Snapchat, Twitch, YouTube, and other streaming services.

Rather than using flashy graphics and filming actors pretending to have dramatic reactions to a virtual reality headset, Lumina created something genuinely unique. While Minecraft didn’t show off its headset’s maximum graphical power, it provided memorable experiences for thousands of players. The content derived from a real experience like this will almost always be more engaging and more positively received than overproduced ads created in a lab.

While Lumina expects a relatively small percentage of the people they reach with these stories to actually engage its Minecraft map firsthand, the depth of the campaign itself makes an impact on viewers. Lumina didn’t just spend its marketing dollars talking about itself—it created something enjoyable, and as a result, the stories it tells don’t feel entirely self-serving. The depth of the campaign and dedication to delivering an experience beyond a commercial shoot forms a strong impression with the millennial and Gen Z audience reached by its campaign.

EXAMPLE 3. PERFORMANCE MARKETING CAN BE ENGAGING TOO

Whether we’re tasked with revitalizing a legacy brand or building a new one, we’re often faced with a murky definition of success. Our marketing is tasked with carrying the brand forward, driving down-funnel goals, earning press coverage, and everything in between. Both new and old brands have challenges measuring marketing activity comprehensively. New brands rarely have solid baselines against which to compare a campaign’s effect, and brands with history often have so much marketing activity happening that it can be difficult to pinpoint what drove which results.

Sometimes, though, we’re afforded a unique opportunity and challenge to optimize our efforts toward a single success metric. The new generation of apps and online games is a good example; marketing these products revolves almost entirely around driving downloads. Even for free apps, the biggest marketing challenge tends to be driving download volume. Simple as driving downloads may seem, many of the same marketing challenges are present beneath the surface.

The term performance marketing is often used to describe marketing strategies that optimize toward one distinct down-funnel goal. In general, performance marketers are ruthless about optimizing toward that goal. Performance marketing goals usually include metrics such as driving downloads, installs, purchases, clicks, and follows. In more traditional advertising, creative and strategy sit at the top of the hierarchy. In performance marketing, customer data and analytics are the dominant forces, while creative and strategy tend to take a backseat.

A creative agency may approach a problem by first considering what impression the brand ought to make on a person it reaches. The performance marketer tends to start with as broad a pool of content as possible, then uses performance analytics to arrive at the winning strategy. Throughout this book, I’ve advocated for a balance of both approaches, but for even the most performance-driven marketers, it’s worth considering user mindset, anchoring in a thoughtful brand purpose, and maximizing engagement.

Perhaps the first and easiest mistake to make is to consider performance marketing as separate from brand marketing. Internally, it can be useful to split budgets and talent between performance and brand marketing, but it’s imperative that we remember that to a prospective customer, an ad is an ad. A person in our audience won’t be privy to the distinction, so whatever reaches that person is actually achieving (or not achieving) both.

In the short term, aggressive performance marketing can seem like the most efficient and effective use of our media budgets. Performance marketing tends to achieve near-immediate results, and for new brands, the promise of quick results can be tempting. However, for the long-term health of our brands, we can’t simply optimize our entire marketing strategy toward a single metric. Not only do we put ourselves at risk of building an entirely transactional relationship with our customers, but every dollar we spend marketing ourselves this way may be a step in the wrong direction. To use an extreme example, if we’re a beauty app that’s misguidedly spent $1 million driving downloads using a scandalous picture of a model in lingerie, and we find that 90 percent of our downloads have come from teenage men, we have a long, uphill battle against our own brand because we didn’t consider the long-term implications of how we represented ourselves.

Fundamentally, performance marketing and brand marketing aren’t at odds with one another. Performance marketing asks us, “What content will drive the absolute maximum number of conversions of this particular metric?” Brand marketing asks us, “What kind of content best expresses who we are as a company?” When a post from our brand reaches a person’s feed, there isn’t such a clear separation between the two, and perhaps as marketers, we shouldn’t consider them so entirely separate either.

The answers to both the brand and performance marketing questions can be compatible. If we ask ourselves, “What kind of content that expresses who we are as a company also maximizes the number of meaningful actions our audience takes?”, we find the middle ground between the two. The brand we aspire to be establishes a frame for us. By articulating our brand in a thoughtful way, we define who we do and don’t want to be. The performance marketing mindset should be familiar to brand marketers who’ve spent a significant amount of time in social media; performance marketing simply challenges us to weigh our performance metrics more heavily. When paired with a strong measurement strategy, optimizing our ads toward conversions shouldn’t be significantly harder than optimizing toward engagement—we’re just taking the measurement a level deeper.

In this last example, imagine that we’re marketing a new fashion app called Fitting Room. Fitting Room promises to let online shoppers try on clothing virtually from a wide selection of brands and retailers. Users simply take photos of themselves from various angles and enter their height and weight, and Fitting Room uses augmented-reality technology to dress the users in their desired garment. Fitting Room has agreements with major retailers and fashion brands to receive a percentage of the sale of each garment users’ engage in the Fitting Room app, and the team is also exploring clothing sales from within the app itself. The app’s target is generally women aged 18 to 34, but the team has found that men interested in fashion within the same age group are also using the app.

Fitting Room bootstrapped its way to development over the past two years. Through earned press and organic marketing efforts, Fitting Room accumulated its first 10,000 downloads. Fitting Room recently received its series A funding of $5 million to build additional features, polish the user experience, develop partnerships with more fashion labels, and grow the user base. Fitting Room must achieve 30,000 monthly active users in the next year to stay on track for its growth projections.

Currently, only 1,000 Fitting Room users of its initial 10,000 downloads are active monthly. The marketing team anticipates that some users who download the app simply won’t use it regularly, and the team uses this 10 percent users-per-download rate to estimate its download requirement goal for the year. Fitting Room recognizes that its first 10,000 downloads, achieved primarily through organic word-of-mouth and press, are likely to be engaged at a higher rate than users who simply download the app through an ad. However, the team also anticipates that as the app adds features and improves its user experience, its engagement per download is likely to increase. The team maintains this optimistic estimate of 10 percent of downloads converting into regular users, planning to revisit the benchmark after ads launch and some initial data is available. To grow an additional 29,000 monthly active users, the team estimates that it will need about 300,000 downloads.

The Fitting Room team is small and integrated enough that its head of marketing talks regularly to its CEO and head of product. (Suspend your disbelief for a moment. It’s a fictional example.) Until now, the product team has rolled out features and updates incrementally, allowing organic feedback from its engaged community to inform the product road map. With more feedback than resources in the lead-up to their recent funding round, the team accumulated plenty of feedback to inform six more months of development. Now, with its funding in place, the team knows what it needs to build in order to improve the app. The Fitting Room marketer wonders if this might be an opportunity to build anticipation for a release.

“But the app is already live?” Sure, it is. As proud of the product as the Fitting Room team is, the group knows that given all of the resources in the world, the current Fitting Room experience isn’t everything they’d ideally deliver. With that in mind, the team explains to its user base that they are ecstatic to have such positive feedback from this community, and while they’d never anticipated this kind of response, they’re taking the community’s feedback into account for a major update. In three months, the team will upgrade its features, broaden its partnerships, and reveal a new Fitting Room experience. The team is looking for potential beta testers, aspiring fashion influencers, and up-and-coming designers to participate in their upcoming campaign. Anyone interested in joining their exclusive team of Fitting Room Friends should get in touch through a short application form. With more to come and the promise of regular development updates, the organic community’s initial hesitations give way to excitement and appreciation.

Fitting Room recognizes that its brand represents more than its app’s functionality. The brand enables people of all sizes and builds to buy fashion with confidence. That’s the core of what Fitting Room hopes to represent to the world. The app opens fashion to a wide category of people interested in fashion but who’ve been previously excluded from the conversation—namely, anyone larger than a size double zero. With a $500,000 marketing budget for the next year, the team decides to create a campaign that celebrates diversity within the fashion scene—at-home makers, bedroom mirror stylists, up-and-coming designers, and nontraditional models.

The Fitting Room team decides to embody that message in a campaign that will culminate in its relaunch moment. Their launch plan has three main components. First, the team is working on major improvements to the app itself. Second, leaning into the organic interactions already taking place between users of the app, the team creates the Fitting Room Friends cohort, similar to a customer relationship management (CRM) system but a level deeper. The members of this group receive more personal communications from the Fitting Room team, have their own community hub in which to interact, test and offer feedback on new features, and are generally treated like insiders among Fitting Room users. While rare, some brands and products genuinely do facilitate community building around themselves, and in some cases, these brand-centric communities can serve a similar function to right brain, bottom-of-the-iceberg social networks.

The third component to the Fitting Room launch plan is a twist on a traditional influencer program. The Fitting Room team started an Instagram account when the app first launched, and while it’s not a massive audience, the account has accumulated about a thousand followers organically. The team drafts a note designed to announce their search for fashion talent to be featured in their upcoming campaign. They share the call for entries with their budding Fitting Room Friends community first and then open the opportunity to the public through a post on Instagram.

Rather than writing a long caption to accompany a photo, the team designs a square-shaped image of text describing what they’re looking for and how it connects to the Fitting Room brand. In doing so, Fitting Room optimizes its meme machine for sharing and virality. It’s not sure it’ll receive a massive response, but creating an image of its note both focuses the audience’s attention on the primary goal and optimizes it for further sharing. The note can now be cross-posted, tagged, and screenshot, removing as many technical barriers as possible to sharing the message.

Initially receiving a few interested emails and comments in response to their call for talent, the team continues to encourage participation over the next few weeks. Thanks to its early earned press, the team is able to secure a few more stories in reputable fashion blogs to grow the reach of their campaign. “We believe fashion is for everyone! We’re looking for up-and-coming designers and models to be featured in our upcoming campaign. Who don’t we know about yet that we should?” At this early stage, the audience is twofold: first, aspiring designers and models, and second, friends of aspiring designers and models.

A few weeks later, Fitting Room has accumulated a few hundred applications to be part of its campaign. Everyone who submitted an application is welcomed into the Fitting Room Friends community (except a handful of troll entries), and the Fitting Room team selects 10 designers and 10 models to be featured in their campaign. The team introduces the Fitting Room Friends community to their selected talent, hosts a Q&A for the community and the selected models and designers, and encourages the community to continue to support one another throughout the campaign.

Partner models and designers are encouraged to share photos and videos that can be amplified across Fitting Room’s social channels. The team provides prompts to their partners like, “What makes you passionate about fashion?” and “Where does the fashion industry need diversity the most?” The team creates regular organic updates featuring these different micro-influencers’ responses, sharing their content, and encouraging people to follow them. As partners post content, Fitting Room also comments on and shares their posts. These organic engagements both boost the micro-influencers’ reach (something they appreciate) and create a seamless way for these influencers’ audiences to discover and follow Fitting Room. The Fitting Room team uses minimal media budget to promote their model and designer content to a small but relevant audience—targeting the followings of their micro-influencers, retargeting people who’d previously engaged the brand, and reaching followers of more recognizable fashion influencers and brands.

In preparation for launch day, the Fitting Room team hosts a photo shoot for their micro-influencers. The team hires a few photographers and videographers, rents a trendy-looking house for the shoot, and flies their partners in for a few days. Not only does this build the relationship between Fitting Room and its partners but it also provides ample opportunities to capture content ranging from professional photography to candid, behind-the-scenes moments.

Professional photographers capture models wearing designers’ pieces, designers preparing their garments, and models being fitted. But the team also encourages partners to capture candid moments with their phones. Across their social profiles, partners share footage of behind-the-scenes moments of each other laughing, talking, browsing through sketchbooks, jumping into the pool, attending a fancy dinner, and so on. Fitting Room reposts and shares partners’ organic content throughout the shoot, allowing the Fitting Room Friends and broader following to feel included.

As its videos and photos are polished into content for the launch, Fitting Room lines up press stories with various fashion blogs and publications. Information about the app updates are included but take a backseat to the real hook—exclusive fashion drops from up-and-coming designers, available only through the Fitting Room app, guaranteed to fit. The team features their micro-influencers front and center. After all, sharing the spotlight with up-and-coming partners is a clear way of living up to Fitting Room’s brand promise of diversifying the fashion world’s voices.

A few weeks from launch day, Fitting Room ramps up media to build anticipation for exclusive designer releases, encouraging people to download the app for access. Across Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok, the brand promotes content ranging from silly selfie videos created by partners to polished videography from the shoot. While the creative varies widely between candid and polished, all of the content falls well within its brand strategy of representing diversity in fashion. Because everything captured fits in the brand frame, it’s simple for the team to optimize its media spend toward the content with the strongest download rate. That allows Fitting Room to walk the line between a branding campaign that also drives performance.

For Instagram, Fitting Room creates albums featuring different designers and models from its photo shoots. Each album starts with a serious, high-fashion-feeling photo but becomes more candid and casual as people swipe through. The last slide of each album is a selfie video from the designer and model introducing themselves and describing the inspiration behind their work, why they’re in the industry, and so on. By balancing high-fashion aesthetics with the personalities behind the shoot, Fitting Room grabs the attention of its fashion-savvy audience while also communicating warmth and self-awareness. In the descriptions of these albums are different copy lines introducing the partners and explaining that on September 1, these pieces will go on sale through the Fitting Room app. Only 100 of each piece will be available, and every purchase is guaranteed to fit (or be retailored). Below the photo album is a button encouraging people to download the Fitting Room app.

On TikTok, the Fitting Room team promotes selfie videos of designers and models speaking to their audiences about their pieces, their inspiration, and how they’ll be available for purchase. The team also posts clips from the photo shoot and reposts partners’ content organically to maintain an active presence. Fitting Room encourages partners who are active on TikTok to create videos wearing their garments. The Fitting Room micro-influencers learn various TikTok dances and post them wearing their designs. A few of their posts earn a few hundred thousand views, growing Fitting Room’s organic following and driving a recognizable bump in app downloads. The team doesn’t anticipate a viral hit, but by posting organically and maximizing organic activity, Fitting Room positions itself for its maximum earned success. Its earned reach on TikTok is relatively low compared to the reach of its paid media, but its strong organic footprint helps maximize the impact of paid media by creating some grassroots awareness of the brand. As awareness grows about Fitting Room, people are more likely to interact with its content, which lowers the barriers to both paid and organic engagement.

On Snapchat, Fitting Room creates a series of short vertical videos using footage from its shoot combined with more candid phone video to tell quick narratives about the campaign. The videos themselves last only 10 seconds and use a few lines of on-video text to reinforce the narrative. These ads are less about driving engagement within the Snapchat environment and are aimed more at driving download volume and building awareness.

The team also purchases a few Snapchat geo-targeted filters in specific fashion-forward markets to encourage organic sharing and engagement. One filter reads, “This is high fashion,” encouraging Snapchat users to post photos of themselves in whatever they’re wearing—because fashion is for everyone. The team anticipates both serious and silly uses of the filter, which it embraces. By championing the “fashion for all” message, the brand taps into a preexisting mindset common among those interested in fashion. People engaging the Fitting Room filters are empowered to express themselves through the brand meaning, and because Snapchat connects people with their offline friends, it has a strong likelihood to spark conversations and inspire wider usage.

On launch day, Fitting Room ramps up media across all channels. The team unveils a full “runway show” video within their app and website, and clips of the video are used in cross-platform ads to build immediacy around the exclusive clothing launch. The team benefits from the strong press relationships they’ve built, and a few articles published the morning of the release help build word-of-mouth among online fashion communities. Having worked out the vast majority of the app’s bugs during its development window, thanks in large part to Fitting Room Friends beta testers, the organic conversation remains focused on the models and influencers.

Almost immediately, 2 of the 10 garments sell out, and Fitting Room shares an update on its Instagram profile congratulating the two designers and models on their fast success. Not only does this feel like a selfless gesture but it also continues to build on the sense of activity, exclusivity, and the need for immediate action on the part of the audience. Over the course of the first day, one other garment sells out of its full 100 pieces, and the Fitting Room team maintains promotion of the remaining garments over the course of the following few days.

The team now has the option of restocking its most popular garments, partnering with more micro-influencers in the future, furthering their relationships with current micro-influencers, and so on. While the campaign was designed to build momentum for a particular moment, the team may continue to create similar partnerships in the future and release other exclusive designer clothing items. Having helped its first wave of partners grow significantly over the course of the campaign, Fitting Room also has the benefit of growing alongside its partners. These positive relationships between brands and personalities are often tangible to the audience; when an influencer actually enjoys working with a brand partner, it tends to show.

Not only did the Fitting Room brand use its media efficiently to drive downloads, it also created a brand moment designed to grab attention from the fashion community. Except for a few low-spend Snapchat filters, every paid placement the brand used to popularize its event and communicate its brand meaning also drove downloads of its app. Had Fitting Room focused on its features or the selection of clothing available for fitting, the creative would likely have been less engaging and would have failed to build word-of-mouth and advocacy.

If Fitting Room had applied a traditional performance marketing approach to driving downloads, the team may have been able to drive a comparable download count, but those users would have only a transactional relationship with the brand. Should a competitor come along and offer lower prices or better fits, Fitting Room is now in a position to defend itself because it stands for much more than an app to its engaged users and community.

REGARDLESS OF OBJECTIVE, MARKETING SHOULD BE ROOTED IN THE BRAND MEANING

The size, scale, and budget of a campaign will, in the vast majority of cases, affect the overall quantity of engagement we can drive as brands. But regardless of campaign size, we can find ways to build strong engagement. Even campaigns focused on down-funnel objectives benefit from creative and strategic thinking about how our messages—our memes—can grab attention, lean into organic conversation, and communicate our brand meaning. In doing so, we’re able to earn reach beyond our media budget, make more efficient use of those media dollars by achieving stronger engagement rates, and build deeper connections with our audience.

Good strategists and creatives will evaluate their ideas at multiple levels of analysis. Is our idea big enough to grab attention? Is it connected to some broader cultural conversation? How will we bring that idea to life on the various channels in which our brand participates? How does our idea relate to the kinds of content and connections to which people already gravitate in those channels? How will each piece of content appear within those environments? What organic sources of inspiration can we find to inspire our content approach? How can we ensure that our content is as accessible, shareable, and attention grabbing as possible? From idea to execution, from capturing broad attention to manifesting our memes in the most efficient ways possible, building optimal social media campaigns requires that we think far beyond ourselves as brands and understand the environments in which we plan to reach people.

KEY TAKEAWAYS