Member Article

How to Create a Killer Media Campaign

We all know how hard it is to stay competitive. That’s why you need to be constantly in touch with your clients and promote your products or services in a smart way. Here’s how to create a killer media campaign.

Whether you are a young startup or a big brand, keeping your audience ‘hot’ is a challenge in today’s quickly shifting environment. As we all know marketing is the mother of commerce, drawing attention on your products and services and coming up with revolutionary ideas and creating original media campaigns to create engagement in a digitally-driven world is not easy, yet not impossible. For those of you who are eager to spread the word on who they are and what they do, but lack the specific strategies to build a media campaign that rocks, here are a few ideas to guide you.

Go Digital First

Social media is at the core of brand promotion. It is easy to use and your message spreads across the network with lightning speed. That is why an increasing number of businesses focus primarily on building an outstanding online presence. Platform like Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram are visually-focused and therefore more eye-catching for today’s consumer, whose attention span has reduced significantly and tends to resonate more to an image rather than to extensive written material.

Create Hashtags to Get Noticed

Hashtags are usually key-words or phrases that relate to your topic (product or service you wish to promote), which contain a ‘#’ symbol in the beginning. Hashtags are extremely efficient as they simplify searches, helping people in your network and even outside your network to find what they’re looking for quicker and want to learn more about a particular product or service you’re offering, respectively. To give you an example, AtheletsFor Cancer (A4C) used ‘#nowaitlist’ as hashtag to promote their annual Kiteboard for Cancer Event on both Facebook and Instagram.’ #Nowaitlist’ refers to the waiting list of young cancer patients looking forward to going to one of the outdoor camps organized by A4C.

Tips & tricks:

Use a word or phrase that relates to your campaign , preferably one that gives people a clue of what it is all about; If you’re also active on Twitter, make sure your hashtag is no longer than 140 characters. That will also allow people to reshare your information and add their own comment about it. After all, nothing works better than word of mouth, right?

Create Impact

Attracting participants in your first media campaign can be one of the most challenging steps. Reach out to your contacts, especially those with many followers and ask them to share your post with their network.

Even if you have people with whom you only interacted online among your followers, don’t be afraid to ask them to spread your word with their peers. You can send them a message saying “I believe this content/campaign may be of interest to your network. We’d appreciate it if you took the time to check it out and share it with your peers”. In the worst case scenario, they say “No”.

Incentivize

Consider offering a small incentive that can make your media campaign more attractive. Run sweepstakes on your social media channels by asking your followers to like and share your post: “Want to wina #magic#mug? Like AND share our post!” You may as well consider selecting a random winner. To make sure the selection is perfectly at random, use an online tool.

Create top-notch visual content

Did you know that tweets with images get 150% more retweets than plain-text posts? Similarly, image posts tend to be better rated on Facebook too. So, pictures can be an engaging way to get your message across. All social media platforms allow image sharing. The only thing you need to pay attention to is size – make sure your pictures are sized correctly so they don’t get distorted when viewed.

Encourage Debate

Numerous successful media campaigns thrive because they encourage debate. Allowing your supporters and prospective clients to have their say will not only make your campaign more fun, but it will also fire up conversation and engagement. Ask a question or add a line to let them know their feedback is welcome. This will give you more insights about your audience and what they are really after. How to do that? Read here!

Make Sure Nothing Gets Out of Mind and Out of Sight

Ensure that the information stays constantly fresh in the mind of your reader. Add a daily countdown to your ‘special offer’. This will incite curiosity and make people look forward to it. Especially if you run a campaign around holidays like #BlackFriday #SuperDeals you could use a countdown to release a story or create a scavenger hunt. Once people get the feel of what you’re doing, they will be tempted to keep a weather eye on what else is new.

Create Filters

Another smart way to engage people into your media campaign is to create a filter or a background image (especially for social media) that they could overlay on their profile picture. For instance, after the tragic event of January 2015 resulting in the death of 12 people at the offices of the French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, a massive campaign started in the media – Je suis Charlie. Joachim Roncin, the art director of the publication created a background image with this slogan that allowed everyone to attach it to their profile on social media. You can consider creating something similar to boost your outreach. That will keep your cause ‘alive’ in the mind of your supporters.

Partner With the Press and Local Authorities

If you aim to do something big and get noticed, you may wish to partner with local media. Write a couple of press releases to reveal who you are, what’s your mission, vision and what you are about to launch. Alternatively, you may even consider printing flyers and distributing them on the street or having a billboard placed in public areas. Bus stop shelters serve the purpose perfectly.

Run After-Sales Campaigns

A good idea to keep your audience hooked is to run an after-sales campaign as soon as a special offer is over. While it allows you to repurpose and revamp ‘old’ campaign content, this strategy has the advantage of letting people know what they’ve missed, giving them a reason not to miss out on any of your ‘best sellers’ again.

Now that you know how to create a killer media campaign, all you need is inspiration and… the sky is the limit!

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Charlie Brown .