Swiftcover.com 's Roadology social media campaign got into gear at the end of March. Senior Marketing Manager Amanda Edwards, Creative Director Richard Watts from PR agency Brazil and Kate Bath, Account Director at digital agency Steak talk to Figaro Digital about the campaign's background, and explain how social media can drive engagement
We all know social media is a vital destination for marketers, but for many the question remains: what to do once you're actually there? Swiftcover.com's Roadology campaign, launched at the end of March, aims to deepen engagement within the social sphere while forging long-term relationships between consumers and the brand.
Focussing on the insurance company's key 25-plus demographic and taking Facebook as its hub, Roadology lets users plan their own UK road trips: by inputting the start and end points of their journey, the app plots a route, pulling in content from other users and partner sites such as VisitEngland, guiding motorists to cool events and interesting places. It's a campaign built – a bit like a classic Chevy – to go the distance, and at its heart is the notion that the more deeply and frequently users engage with it, the more satisfying the experience will be. Absolute Radio and kgbdeals are on board as partners, and users can create and share their own road trip playlists via Spotify.
Rules of Engagement
"If we go back to the swiftcover.com brand," says Richard Watts, Creative Director at swiftcover.com's PR agency Brazil, "the message is 'get a life'. It's about getting your insurance quickly and efficiently. Taking that message into social media, we needed a platform that supported the brand message, and it had to be something tangible - something swiftcover.com's audience was going to find relevant."
"Within car insurance generally," says swiftcover.com's Senior Marketing Manager Amanda Edwards, "it's quite hard to engage with people, so we had to find something that wasn't necessarily talking about insurance that'll build awareness so when users do come to look at insurance, they'll remember us."
For swiftcover.com it was vital that the campaign should nurture and develop long-term relationships with users. "It's quite easy to develop social media campaigns that have a short burst," says Watts. "There'll be quick peaks and then it'll burn off. What we're trying to do is build a longer-term strategy – a tool that's relevant to the product. The purpose is to create a platform that contains really useful content that people can refer to. And it's not just content that we provide, but content generated by users."
That focus on relevance, engagement and added value is what promises to make Roadology an effective tool for swiftcover.com. "When users go onto our Facebook page," says Kate Bath, Account Director at digital agency Steak, "we want them to know what they're doing there. We also wanted to make sure that we targeted the right audience. It's very easy in the social space to attract a younger audience, but our audience is slightly older. In the social space it can be difficult unless you understand why that audience would interact with you."
Bath points to recent research by Forrester which contrasts the model of engagement within social media with more traditional demographics. Whilst a younger audience are frequently 'creators' (of video, blogs and uploads), older users tend to review, comment and engage through content created by others, so the key was appealing to these older, targeted users' interests and giving them a reason to participate.
"We know from experience that you can't just create a social media campaign and expect it to work," says Watts. "It has to be relevant and it has to have longevity. If you engage with somebody online there needs to be consistency of communication. So there needs to be an ongoing programme of developing content and interesting information about travel across the UK."
Personal Space
That's easier said than done, of course, but Bath is emphatic about the single most significant factor in a campaign like this. "Content is absolutely key," she says."You can have as many hundreds-of-thousands of 'likes' as you want, but unless people are actually engaging with you and your brand on a regular basis, 'likes' just aren't important. What is important is that users are continuing to engage with you because you're providing great content.
"The second thing," she says,"is recognition, almost on a one-to-one basis. Recognising that people on Twitter or blogs are saying, 'what can I do this weekend?' and then reaching out to them and saying, 'why don't you check out our Roadology page?' People love being recognised, so if somebody's done something great, we make sure we congratulate them online and then maintain those relationships."
In the case of Roadology, it's the added value introduced by users themselves that drives this engagement. And what that added value means, says Watts, "is brand value – we're adding value to the brand. We're not creating a campaign for the sake of it. We want people to see value in swiftcover.com beyond the product they sell."
That means offering a mine of genuinely useful information in a format that users can go back to again and again with greater and greater engagement. And that's something that Facebook, with its endless capacity for disseminating and replicating information, is uniquely able to provide. For most of us however, our relationship with Facebook involves an occasionally awkward mix of the public and the private, and marketers need to respect that personal space. Overtly commercial messages, the team acknowledge, can be counter-productive. Ironically, the less explicitly you push people to buy, the more engaged your audience is likely to be. For that reason the number of daily Roadology updates is kept to a minimum. "We're talking about something that people want to be part of their daily view on Facebook," says Watts. "That's where our users' attention is and we hope to be part of that experience within daily life."
Push 'n' Pull
As the campaign evolves Brazil along with Steak will help evolve partner relationships and monitor user engagement – following the advocates, tracking the trippers and giving out video cameras to bloggers and other advocates, enabling them to film their own road trips and share the footage online. Campaigns like this need to be agile, flexible and quick to respond to users. So what general issues do the team think marketers need to be considering when entering the social sphere?
"The simple answer," says Watts, "is that every client is different and you shouldn't expect one solution to fit all. A FMCG product will have a completely different social media strategy to a service-led organisation like swiftcover.com because there's a different kind of sales process, if you like. Campaigns like swiftcover.com are really about engagement and keeping in touch with that user. It's relevance, and it's consistency. You don't want to contact users just once, and then again in three months' time because you've done a new campaign. It's got to be an ongoing process. It's got to have longevity and a purpose that's going to build awareness and reputation in a positive way."
"We can shout from the rooftops as much as we like about our social campaigns," says Bath. "But what's going to make it take off are our users, and if our users aren't engaged with us and don't find the content relevant – then we've failed.
"We want to be in an area where the content is valuable and it's something people actually want to use. The shift in marketing over the last couple of years has been amazing. In the past it was always about pushing to your consumers. We're now in a world where we're pulling in our marketing ideas from our consumers – we're listening to them and we're actually able to make changes according to what they're telling us they like or they don't like."
Campaigns like Roadology have a lot of ground to cover: coming up with great content, spreading the word, raising engagement and maintaining those long-term user relationships. "Over time online engagement will raise brand awareness," says Watts, "but we know this campaign isn't just about the immediacy of the quote."
That 'just' might be the key to successful, service-led social media campaigns like Roadology. They need to be about providing users with something genuinely desirable and finding a creative way to align that with the brand. In social media – as with any great road trip – it looks like the journey is going to be just as important as the destination.
More: www.facebook.com/roadology
Article by Jon Fortgang