Interactive Marketing Evaluation
Planning/ Pre-Production
The brief that we were given for this project was to create a viral interactive marketing campaign for the music video that we had previously made. We based our campaign on social media after researching other campaigns and seeing the success of them. We decided to focus on two main social media sites; Twitter and Instagram with some stuff also going on Facebook and Snapchat. We set the release date for Sunday 11th March and in the 10 days prior to release we teased images and short clips from the video in order to build up hype.
In terms of pre-production for this project it was fairly simple. The only pre-production we needed to do was to research other viral marketing campaigns so that we could plan ours and then set up the social media accounts and follow fan pages for the band. An important thing we learnt from our research was that the most successful campaigns utilise ‘audience’ participation and create intrigue among the public. The two main campaigns that I researched were ‘The Blair Witch Project’ and ‘Deadpool’ campaigns. I found that both of these were hugely successful due to the intrigue created around them. We then decided that this was a technique that we could use by posting stills and short clips of different parts of the video online. After we planned how we were going to market the video, we then decided on which days we should post which clips and in what order to post them so that we could build up the hype in the best way possible. By planning out each stage of the campaign in advance we were able to maximise our time and outreach to try and get as many hits as possible.
Production/ The Campaign
When it came to enrolling the campaign I was put in charge of the Instagram account and growing the following on that. I think the biggest thing I learnt was the importance of interacting with the target audience and making them feel like they’re involved. To help us get a decent following we decided it was best to follow as many of the Busted fan accounts as possible and ask them to spread the word. Once we had followed those accounts we started to post stills from the video and captioned them asking people to guess the lyric of the song. This technique worked quite well with a few people replying to the tweets and Instagram posts as well as a number of people retweeting some of our posts. Then as we got closer to the release we started to release very short clips from the video. This received even more enthusiasm from Busted fans with a number of them commenting about looking forward to its release as well as some fans sharing the clips and tagging Busted in them. We had a breakthrough with this method when Busted’s official account followed us on Instagram a couple of days before we released the video. That helped us hugely when we released the video leading to it being viewed on YouTube 30 times in the first 5 minutes.
Campaign Analysis/ Post Production
Overall our marketing campaign went fairly well with the video gaining a decent number of views immediately after release however it seemed to plateau after a while which was a little frustrating after the early success. The video gained around 30 views in the first 5-10 minutes of release and at the time of writing this it has around 70 views. We also gained around 20 followers on both Twitter and Instagram as well as have multiple interactions from fans of the band on both platforms. This shows that our campaign was reasonably successful as we originally didn't expect to get as many views as that. However, after the initial hype around it, I am a little disappointed with the outcome as I strongly believe that there was scope for this campaign to go further. I think that the main reason it did not go further was due to the time scale we gave the campaign, allowing just 10 days to get it out to the public which is not nearly enough considering that the best campaigns go on for over a month. Therefore I think that next time I work on a marketing campaign I will make sure that it goes on for at least two weeks.