3 tips for a successful interactive marketing campaign by Olivier Danhier
In 2016, Raphaël Cardon and I had the idea to create a marketing agency helping brands that wanted to target dog owners. To carry out our mission and meet the different needs of our customers, we decided to develop our audience via the “Dogofriends advantage club”, which our customers can target with their actions. In exchange for their data, club members receive discounts, tips and invitations to Qualifio contests.
Our first Qualifio campaign: a photo contest for Purina
Purina, Nestlé’s dog and cat food brand, came to Dogofriends with the need to promote its dog chewing sticks Purina Dentalife. The brand wanted to promote its product while raising dog owners’ awareness on their companion’s oral hygiene. For this reason, we decided to create a photo contest. The campaign, entitled Dog Smile Challenge, aimed to deliver a message: use Purina Dentalife daily to take care of your dog’s teeth.
This first campaign created and managed with the Qualifio platform allowed us to learn different lessons. Here are three tips that, I believe, are essential for a successful activation campaign with Qualifio.
#1 Test your idea
The first lesson we learned from this campaign: the importance of testing your idea.
- Test your idea with a small sample of people before starting promoting your campaign. Check if your form works, if your questions are clear enough and adapt your campaign accordingly.
- Once your idea has been tested, launch only a part of your activation budget. Start by spending 10% of your budget and check if the results meet your expectations. The advantage of the Qualifio platform is that you have a global view of the ROI generated, thanks to the advanced statistics of your campaign (number of participants, new profiles collected, number of opt-ins, etc.). You can adapt everything in real-time.
For the Dog Smile Challenge, the first idea was to invite participants to hold the stick on their dog’s nose and take a picture. However, after conducting several tests, we realised that the challenge was too complicated for the average dog. So we showed flexibility by easing the rules and accepting all the photos with a dog and a Purina Dentalife stick.
#2 Run a multi-channel campaign
Diversify your promotional channels and don’t use only one channel to promote your campaign. For the Dog Smile Challenge, we mixed online and offline promotions.
Online
- Facebook ads
- Partnership with influencers
- Newsletter
- Display banners
Offline
- Flyers presenting the challenge distributed in-store and in the Dogobox (gift box offered to Dogofriends members)
- Sampling campaign
- Internal promotion to Nestlé employees
The objective is to increase your visibility, not to bet everything on one channel and to be present where your customers or prospects are, which means everywhere! This will allow them to discover your campaign or brand in a way that suits them best.
#3 Participations vs engagement
The number of participations to your contest shouldn’t be your main interactive campaign KPI. If your ultimate goal is to convert your participants into clients, it is better to focus on engaging your audience rather than maximising the number of participations.
To illustrate, here are three pillars to consider:
→ The reward. Offer a prize related to your brand to ensure you attract the right target. You may get fewer participations, but you will attract people who are interested in your product, which you will be able to convert more quickly after.
→ The promotion. Launch a Facebook ad with the number of participations as the primary KPI may not be the best strategy in the long term. Proof by example: after launching your ad to two audiences (A and B), you realise that audience A has a lower cost per participation. You will, therefore, tend to cut the budget of audience B to put it on audience A, in order to generate a maximum number of participations. However, if you go further into the analysis, you will notice that audience B is a much more engaged audience and it is, therefore, more appropriate to focus on engagement.
→ The level of engagement required. It’s all the necessary efforts to participate in a campaign. Let’s take another example: you are a car brand, and you hesitate between two forms for your campaign. You spend 10% of your activation budget on an A/B test. The results lead you to choose the shorter and more popular, the form A. However, if you analyse it further, you will find out that the form B allows you to collect relevant information (car brand, age, etc.) and that, despite its length, will allow you to attract truly interested people. Again, if the objective is to sell as many cars as possible, maximising participation may not be the most appropriate solution.
For the Dog Smile Challenge, we chose to focus on engagement rather than the number of participations to remain in line with the overall objective of converting participants into customers. We asked our participants for a high level of engagement to participate in the challenge: buy the product, develop the plan, take a picture and post it.
Why ask for such a level of engagement if it is not to collect more data?
- Virality. It’s a campaign that stands out from the crowd.
- Brand awareness. It’s a campaign that was relayed by more than 40 influencers.
- Engagement → Emotion → Memorisation
What’s next?
How to capitalise on your Qualifio contest and use the data collected? Here are three possibilities:
- Retarget your participants. With the Qualifio platform, you can easily install a Facebook pixel in your campaign and then re-target your participants with an ad or a discount for your product.
- Push the right message. In the case of the Dog Smile Challenge, participants had to answer a question about the frequency of use of the Dentalife stick before posting their photo. Then, a personalised message was sent to them according to their level of knowledge. To the participants who answered correctly and therefore understood the message, a newsletter was sent to encourage them to convert. While the others received a newsletter reminding them of the benefits of the product.
- Improve the personalisation of your emails. We always ask for the dog’s name in our forms. We noticed that when the dog’s name appears in the subject of the email, the opening rate increases on average by 10%.
So here they are, my three tips for a successful interactive marketing campaign with Qualifio!
Want to create your interactive marketing campaign like Dogofriends? Request a demo of the Qualifio platform now!
This article was written by Olivier Dahnier. Olivier created his own marketing agency Dogofriends, after more than 6 years of successful sales & marketing experience in the digital industry.
