In the first of our series of TTLPresents: Webinars, our Digital Operations Manager, Hannah Nelson, delved into the topic of Responsive Social Media Marketing. Hannah looked at the importance of being reactive, knowing your brand’s purpose and listening to your audience during these ‘unprecedented times.’
For anyone who wasn’t able to make it yesterday, we have a summary below of our solutions to some of the challenges faced by COVID-19.
CHALLENGE: Events are cancelled
With all events, conferences, concerts and festivals cancelled in March for the foreseeable, brands and organisations may have been left with little to talk about on their social channels.
SOLUTION: Create new ways to engage your community online
We work in partnership with the Electric Ireland Sponsorship team and the IFA to promote women’s football in Northern Ireland through the #GameChangersNI campaign. With matches cancelled and restrictions on video shoots we had to look at new ways to engage the community online. It was so important for us to be timely here because we have an active Gamechangers following across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. We wanted to galvanise the community and let them know we were still here. We used a striking image, previously showcased on billboards across Belfast that showcased the player pathway with emotive and positive copy. Going forward, we engaged followers with challenge videos, encouraged user-generated content and developed interactive quizzes and polls on Instagram Stories.
View this post on InstagramTo the parents, the coaches, the teams, the players, the supporters and the fans – stay tuned! #GameChangersNI #WomensFootball #Football #NI #NorthernIreland #WomenInSport #GAWA #GrassRoots #GirlsFootball #GrassrootsFootball
CHALLENGE: Key messaging is off
COVID-19 shook up marketing strategies for all sectors with some industries like food and travel completely changing their brand positioning during this time. For some organisations it may have just been a case that key messaging wasn’t COVID-appropriate.
SOLUTION: Get creative and adapt your strategy
We were due to launch a new campaign for Santa Rita 120 that’s key message centred around togetherness and sharing wine with friends and family. It couldn’t have been a worse time to launch a campaign centred around those ideas so we had to change tact here and get creative and adapt a new strategy.
We decided to put a focus on recipes and wine pairings as we knew this was something at the top of a lot of consumers’ minds. We wanted to be a source of information and inspiration for our followers. We also no longer relied solely on our high quality branded photography, shooting some of our own content on i-phones at home – what else did we have to do at the weekend! This authentic and easy to follow recipe style really resonated with our audience on Instagram.
CHALLENGE: We can’t create new content
Most brands rely on regular photography and videography to create content for their social media channels. We have been able to do social distanced shoots successfully as of June but this was not the case back in March.
SOLUTION: Encourage user-generated content, utilise influencers and repurpose
When you work with the right influencers, they are experts in creating content for brands so this was a perfect opportunity to use them to shoot content from the safety of their home. We work regularly with Irish influencer, Jodie Wood and decided to collaborate with her for World Malbec Day for Doña Paula Wines. Although the content is very aspirational and perhaps not what everyones lockdown situation looked like – there is a certain level of escapism influencers offer, that was appreciated during this time. However, the glamour was met with a dash of reality (essential during lockdown!) as Jodie revealed in the comments that she captured the beautiful shot below by taping her phone to a shovel in the garden and setting a timer!
View this post on InstagramQuarantine date night at its finest! Tomorrow is World Malbec Day and to celebrate I set Will up a little at home date night with @donapaulawines_ire. I picked up a bottle of their Los Cardos Malbec, bringing a little bit of Argentina to our garden for an evening. You can purchase a range of Doña Paula Wines in Tesco, Supervalu & Musgrave online and in store. Let me know if you are planning on celebrating! Enjoy Doña Paula Sensibly AD #WorldMalbecDay #ItsAGoodSign #DonaPaulaWines
We also explored user generated content for many of our clients. For Electric Ireland, we encouraged our followers to share pictures of their thank you messages to the NHS. We then made a simple slideshow compilation of these to share. This was a really nice way to engage with our family audiences, it gave them something to do at home and they loved seeing their images shared. We also got the customer service team involved, asking them for selfies we could share on our channels, giving them some well deserved recognition. This was just the sort of hopeful and positive content our fans wanted to see.
Don’t be afraid to repurpose content – particularly pieces that performed well or perhaps a piece that worked well organically and you have now decided to promote it to reach even more people. Just be conscious of adapting for the current situation.
CHALLENGE: Social Media Fatigue
The amount of social media content available did become bombarding, leading people to have social media fatigue. Consumers were still using social media more than ever but they were bored of the same messages from brands.
SOLUTION: Listen to your audience and be helpful
We would encourage you to always listen to your audience and seek out ways you can be helpful to them at this time. Electric Ireland’s brand positioning is around #SmarterLiving in the home and it couldn’t have fit better for the current situation but we had to be wise how we activated this
There were thousands of banana bread recipes out there so we wrote a blog about 6 things you could bake that were just as easy as banana bread. People were concerned about their utility bills, so we responded with an educative piece on saving energy at home. We reviewed what posts got meaningful engagements like shares to public pages and positive comments and created more of this style of content.
And so important in digital, we had our ears to the ground. Things were changing on a week by week basis so we had to stay clued in, consuming social media ourselves, reviewing comments on blogs and asking our friends and families what they wanted to see from brands.
Thank you to everyone who attended! You can view Hannah’s full presentation here.
Join us for our next #TTLPresents Webinar on 22nd July with special guest Paddy Moogan, Co-Founder of Aira Digital.
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