Let me walk you through how the 5 Stones Media team turned a March Madness style competition into a social media campaign for our brand.
First some background…
The competition was between 64 Metro New Orleans brands that fought round after round to be named the champion of Nola brands. Hence the name, Battle of the Brands. This battle was hosted by a company, Metro NOLA SourceLink, that provides Southshore and Northshore New Orleans small businesses with business resources.
Beginning in February, an online nomination followed 5 rounds of by public-voting brought 5 Stones to the ultimate battle with brand giant, Abita Brewery (truly a “David vs. Goliath” scenario). But let’s step back a moment, how did such a small brand climb their way to the championship battle against so many recognizable and giant brands? Well, we fought!
It’s what we do!
Our number one disadvantage was that majority of these brands have what’s called brand recognition. Their companies have worked so hard to deeply root everything from the colors of their logo to the fonts they use to make sure the second you see them, your brain relates those micro technicalities to who they are. 5 Stones however is 3 years old and we are still “branding” our company. But believe me; this campaign gave us an enormous push!
Although 5 Stones Media may not be a brand giant, we battled through some tough matches winning the championship (and bragging rights of course)! But we did not do this alone. When facing opponents as big as Abita Brewery, we knew the odds were against us, and we saw this as an opportunity to utilize the skills we have, and here’s where we pulled out the boxing gloves!
We called on our clients, family and friends to help us duke it out in this battle. But we did not merely text message our moms and dads, no, no. We reached out through an array of marketing efforts, turning this battle into a full blown campaign.
We utilized social media marketing, email marketing and face-to-face networking to engage our fans. Every channel we had (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and even Email Marketing) was a part of our campaign to simply raise brand awareness and gain engagement. We had no clue that this campaign we kicked off to better brand our company would lead us to the top and make us the 2014 champ!
But how?
How did we turn Battle of the Brands into a campaign that got us extensive exposure and truly showed how loved we are by our fans? Here are a few ways:
- After every round we sincerely thanked our voters and showed them their dedication means so much to us (We even created an image).
- We made sure the information they needed to cast their vote was available and accessible.
- We created key messages to better engage our audience and distributed them at peak times.
- And most of all we were continuously engaging (two-way communication is good!) with our fans.
We used the #MNOBattle and #BattleOfTheBrands hashtags across multiple social media platforms so we remained as a part of the competition buzz. Sure, there were brands in this battle who you never heard a peep from. Not a post one anywhere on social media from their brand or fans, but as you can see that didn’t work very well for them.
The Take Away:
You can make it what you want! Don’t let anything limit you; your strengths just might surprise you!
Look at us, after changing up the rules a bit and a month of dedicated campaigning 5 Stones Media (The David of the scenario) is now Metro Nola’s “Favorite Local Brand” across the Metro NOLA region and the “2014 Brand Champ”!
