Case Study: Onetime Lightweight Spackling
Project Management - Digital Marketing - Marketing Operations - Marketing & Communications Strategy - Vendor Relations
Scope: My CEO requested that we conduct a nationwide contest where users create projects using Onetime Lightweight Spackling. The contest duration was initially 3 months but was extended for an additional month. The initial target audience was primarily professional contractors and secondarily artists.
Goal
To increase the awareness of the company brand and product. This would be measured by an increase in social media engagement and website traffic by 25%.
Barriers
The company had never done a user-generated content contest before so there was no infrastructure in place.
The company did not have a strong market share or an audience that was engaged and invested in the company brand or product. For the contest to be successful we would have to build an engaged audience.
The product was not widely available in big box home improvement stores. Since users would be required to purchase the product to participate in the contest, they would need to be strongly incentivized to acquire the product.
The Process
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I worked with my marketing team and leadership to create a project plan using agile project management principles. We established task lists, sprints, deadlines, benchmarks for assessments, meeting schedules and goals for each phase.
I proposed and managed the campaign budget.
I created a marketing plan to generate the awareness we would need for the campaign.
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I conceptualized the contest brand and worked with our graphics team to create branding elements and marketing content including, social media content, videos, email marketing, digital ads, and the contest website.
I created the contest verbiage, including the rules, website text, blog posts, and all marketing content. I also created a guide and conducted training with our customer service department to ensure they were comfortable answering any questions from potential participants.
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To ensure that our verbiage was clear and our brand would resonate with the target markets we launched an internal contest for employees to create projects with Onetime Lightweight Spackling for a small prize. This contest helped us to refine the contest brand and also boosted employee morale.
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We promoted the creative ways to use Onetime Lightweight Spackling for a month to generate interest and then launched the contest using videos, press releases, and digital ads across various marketing platforms.
The Toggle
During the contest, our team was consistently meeting our benchmark engagement goals but not our targets for project submissions. Although our project team was very flexible to adjust the plan and implement new tactics based on the data we were receiving, these tactics were generating improvements, but not providing the results to meet our goals. I was routinely updating leadership on the contest progress and providing adjustment recommendations, so during our last benchmark meeting, I was finally approved to take the contest in a new direction.
Focus on artists as our primary target audience. We were gaining great awareness among professional contractors, but they were not submitting very creative projects.
Take a grassroots approach. My team and I sent more than 100 target emails to artist organizations across the nation to invite them to participate in the contest. We also instituted a tip line where potential participants could call in if they were unsure if their project idea was a good fit for the contest.
Extend the contest for one additional month. This would allow us to test the new strategy.
The Results
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During the contest duration social media engagement increased by 40% and website traffic by 50%.
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We exceeded the goal for project submissions, garnering nearly 60% of the contest's submissions in the last month of the contest.
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We established relationships with new marketing channels and identified untapped sales markets.
