This blog post is derived from a case study posted on moz.com, which can be viewed here.
Rise Interactive, a digital marketing agency, dared to create personalized content for an influencer (aka: social awesomizer) to see if they could turn him into a brand advocate. Their results were fascinating.
What businesses can learn from this post is not so much how to catch an influencer’s attention, but how to reel in brand advocates that will share the brand with hundreds of thousands of their loyal followers.
The story we see in this case study is about how an avid Kansas City Chiefs fan’s tweet created an incredibly powerful effect that accomplished something seemingly impossible.
The story begins with the following tweet by Travis Wright, which was shared with his 129,000+ Twitter followers:
Right after this tweet was posted, @kcchiefs replied rudely to Travis, which then ignited a social media explosion. It quickly turned into a battle that was then picked up by Reddit, Yahoo, Mashable, and other sites. Some even think that the explosion may have attributed to the firing of Scott Pioli, the Chief’s general manager.
The team at Rise Interactive started thinking, “Could a brand create noise for itself on social media just as Travis had done?” They decided to experiment and see.
Rise Interactive was not directly connected with Travis Wright, so they chose to develop personalized content to catch his attention. They invested a lot of time and effort creating this infographic about Travis’ compelling story, and then personally submitted it to him as a gift on Twitter:
Travis not only responded to Jon Morris to thank him, but he created a separate tweet mentioning @riseinteractive and shared the infographic with his 129,000+ followers.
If that wasn’t enough, he also embedded the infographic on his personal blog, where he linked back to Rise Interactive’s blog.
Then, he tweeted about his new blog post.
Travis found the gift not only intriguing enough toshare, but he also benefited from the infographic himself. This is where Rise Interactive started to build a brand advocate for their business.
Rise Interactive gained significant increase in traffic from the infographic. They received approximately 15,500 referral visits, 98% of which were new visitors. Not only did they create more traffic to their website, they successfully converted Travis Wright into a brand advocate. It was truly a win-win situation. Travis Wright gained a great infographic to help him create a cohesive story, and Rise Interactive elevated their brand’s online presence.
Key Takeaways:
- Find influential people online, and reach out to them to offer personalized content for them to share with their followers.
- Choose an easily sharable content format, such as an infographic.
- Make the content valuable for the awesomizer in order to incentivize sharing.
- Include exclusivity in your strategy. Let your awesomizer be the first to share it.
- Have analytics in place to track your success. By having a strategy in place from the beginning, you can determine if the initiative was truly successful or not.
- Have multiple channels in place, all with one common goal: to implement an innovative strategy and achieve awesome results.
