Social media promotions are getting featured more and more frequently in My Best Promotion, which should be no surprise. Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social sites have been on a forever-elevating pedestal for the last several years. They’ve become a precious metric for marketers, sometimes valued over website page views and other more traditional online statistics, such as e-commerce activity or total amount of registered users. So why is this need for social activity translating into so much use of promotional products?
There are several reasons, but one of the primary ones is that social media interest is hard to fake. Either people like your brand and want to interact with it, or they don’t. So to drive interaction then, you have to give them something they like and want to talk about. An easy and convenient way to do that is through promotional products. Hold a contest, a direct mail campaign, however you want to approach it, the important thing is that you’re giving someone a product that they’ll like, brag to their friends about, and most importantly, photograph.
Michael Reisbaum, regional director, Maxx Shop, New York City, provided an example of such a social-networking themed promotion. Below, he goes into what they used, what their goals were, and how they added an unusual hook to the promotion.
Promo Marketing: Could you briefly describe a promotion of yours that you consider one of your best, or one of your favorites?
Michael Reisbaum: A work in progress, a famous brand body wash company is developing a highly interactive Facebook community, and wants to engage that group with a contest. To that end, we’re creating a dynamic design for tees, towels and shower curtains. Each winner will receive their prize of choice delivered by the USPS, fulfilled with a sample of the product and coupons, but the key is that the winner opens the envelope and gets an immediate whiff of the products distinctive aroma (supplied by a captured scented product in the package).
PM: What was the promotion’s goal? What did you do to make the goal happen?
MR: Our goal is to continue to engage our active Facebook community, and maintain the “tongue-in-cheek” association with the brand’s quirky marketing.
We’re looking forward to great reaction from the recipients, who we expect will post their comments “Look at this great shower curtain I won!” on the company’s Facebook page; thereby increasing brand and product awareness to their own community, organically growing our clients market share and increasing the program.
PM: Did you run into any problems with the promotion, and if so, how did you overcome them?
MR: We struggled to determine the most effective and efficient way to maintain the stability of the scent in transit, but if I tell you how we did it …
Want to be considered for a future edition of My Best Promotion? Contact Michael Cornnell at [email protected] or (215) 238-5449 for a list of questions and other details.
