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As part of a social media drive by Toyota GB in 2008-09, iCrossing ran a bold experiment to drive a car to as many cities in the UK as possible on one tank of fuel. So, two members of the iCrossing Content and Media team undertook a ‘Hypermiling’ road trip in the iQ that was comprehensively covered through social media spaces. The attempt reached over 105 million people worldwide and 3.7 million in the UK and led to a 200 per cent uplift in traffic to the iQ blog.
Brief
The Toyota iQ is a car for 30 to 40-something city dwellers. This is a younger and more fashionable demographic than Toyota’s traditional UK customer. The iQ social media campaign had to appeal to this demographic and had two main objectives.
The first was to raise awareness of the iQ and its attributes among hard-to-reach but influential environmental, automotive and technology blogs and to connect directly with people who use social media platforms such as Twitter and Flickr.
The second objective was to increase the visibility of information about the iQ brand in the results of major search engines via links and traffic back to the ‘This is iQ’ blog. Influential blogs are ranked highly by Google and other search engines as authoritative sources, meaning that links and traffic from these sites have a more positive effect on the rankings of recipient sites. As a result, mentions and recommendations on social media sites can have a significant influence on a brand’s overall online profile that is above and beyond the simple value of the blog’s own readership.
Strategy
The overall iQ social media campaign was based around the idea of marketing activity being driven by strong editorial output. The nature of social media means that one-way, product-led interaction simply doesn’t work.With this in mind, the iQ blog is written by journalists rather than marketers. The content is designed to appeal to readers and to contribute to existing online conversations around cars and fuel efficiency. For this reason, it was vital that a proportion of the content on the blog was exclusive and unique; it needed to be based on good stories that other users of social media would want to read about, comment on, link to and write about.
The hypermiling attempt was developed by the iCrossing team as a way of creating exclusive editorial content that would grab reader interest while highlighting one of the key attributes of the vehicle, its fuel efficiency.
Execution
The attempt saw two of iCrossing’s ‘This is iQ’ bloggers attempting a 500-mile road trip in a Toyota iQ, all on a single tank of petrol. The trip would take the two drivers to 18 UK cities and every step of the journey would be shared through social media. The drivers reported their journey on the iQ blog, reported their status on Twitter and uploaded photos to Flickr. Their position was tracked via a Google Maps mashup using the GPS function on an iPhone. Given that the activity had a clear editorial rather than marketing focus, all of the creative output to these social media sites was presented in a deliberately ‘lo-fi’, human and non-commercial manner.
Results
On the drive, the car exceeded its official combined cycle figure of 65.7mpg, reaching 71.6mpg.
In terms of coverage, the hypermiling activity resulted in 64 blogs, including Wired, the New York Times and Treehugger, reporting the attempt with Toyota reaching a potential audience of over 105 million readers worldwide and 3.7 million in the UK alone.
Traffic to the iQ blog increased by more than 212 per cent and, just as importantly, the origin of incoming traffic fundamentally changed. Whereas visitors were previously arriving predominantly from search engines and the Toyota website, traffic directed from third party sites rose from 15 per cent to more than 50 per cent of traffic – representing a 32-fold volume increase in referrals. These readers were also likely to be high value, being pre-disposed to view iQ in a positive light because of the independent advocacy of the editorial coverage.
The Twitter channel was also effective. While overall users numbers were relatively low, reflecting the emergent nature of this platform, the levels of interaction were impressive, with ‘followers’ contacting the driving crew with hints and encouragement along the way.
Beyond these numerical success metrics, the hypermiling attempt meant that Toyota had succeeded in reaching new audiences – readers of influential blogs who might not have otherwise visited Toyota’s site.
It also enjoyed a high level of advocacy because the challenge element of the Hypermiling campaign – and the fact that the car was good enough to meet it – have led to universally positive editorial coverage. Toyota will also continue to benefit from the long term impact of the activity because links from influential blogs will remain and continue to deliver tail traffic to support natural search rankings.
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