This is a guest post by Mario Zelaya, Managing Director at Majestic Media, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer & digital marketing agency, specializing in custom apps and promotions for web and mobile.
Marketers are starting to focu...
This is a guest post by Mario Zelaya, Managing Director at Majestic Media, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer & digital marketing agency, specializing in custom apps and promotions for web and mobile.
Marketers are starting to focus more on social media efforts, realizing that it’s an important piece of the marketing puzzle. They’ve started to use social media, but only as an extension of a traditional campaign or as a small marketing initiative on the side. Many of them are hesitant to rely too heavily on social media. They’re willing to let social media ride in the car, but they’re reluctant to give them the keys.
According to a report released by Social Media Examiner at the end of 2012, 83 percent of marketers have said that social media was important to their business. However, the CMO survey released in February found that marketers are only allocating 8.4% of their budget for social media.
Many believe that in order for a campaign to succeed, it always needs to be integrated across different channels. This is simply not the case. At Majestic Media, we’ve seen time and time again that a fully digital campaign, or even a fully social campaign, can reach hundreds of thousands of consumers, achieving millions of social impressions and engagement, and generate a tremendous amount of traffic.
Majestic Media recently launched a social campaign for Maple Leaf Foods, promoting their new product, Bacon Portions. It was a simple Facebook Application that allowed users to pledge to “Never Waste Bacon” and enter for the chance to win a year supply of bacon. Yes, bacon. Not a brand new car, $25,000 or an extravagant trip, simply bacon.
The campaign was launched organically on Facebook, posting on Maple Leaf’s Facebook Page for current fans to see. Within 12 hours, we had reached 3,458 pledges. Following the launch, Maple Leaf Foods started a small paid campaign on Facebook consisting of Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories. Within a week, we saw nearly 19,000 pledges and #NeverWasteBacon was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter in Canada.
Facebook was the primary focus, but Twitter and Instagram also played a large part in the success of the #NeverWasteBacon campaign (which is still running).
Maple Leaf was able to gain a huge amount of traffic without incorporating traditional mediums like radio, TV, or print. They were able to generate such a large amount of organic traffic because they took the time to build an audience. They spent time interacting with their followers and provided them with engaging, relevant content.
Social media has the power to drive a major campaign, but only if you do it right. This might seem obvious, but you’d be surprised by how many brands blame a failed Facebook campaign on the social network, rather than the fact that they didn’t take the time to prepare.
Social campaigns can be wildly successful if you have the right strategy in place, give people the incentive and the encouragement to share with friends and spend the time listening and building up your audience to ensure what you launch is inline with what they want to engage with. Campaigns don’t always need to be fully integrated and rely heavily on paid media to be wildly successful.
Mario Zelaya is the founder and managing director of Majestic Media, Canada’s first Facebook Marketing & Technology agency. His extensive experience on the Facebook Platform includes building out social strategy, campaign ideation, app architecture, and social design for brand clients such Volkswagen, Kia, General Motors, Mazda, Gatorade, Hot Wheels, Infiniti, Nissan, Visa and many others. Majestic Media has executed over 200 large-scale campaigns and works with big brands and agencies in helping them to get results and ROI through campaigns that are social by design. Follow Majestic Media & Mario on Twitter @majesticmedia @zelaya.
