My most successful campaigns are normally also my most creative and abstract. If you can take an offer and think of a way to promote it which is “outside of the box” then you are on to a winner. Coming up with the idea is the difficult bit and I’ve laid out an example of one campaign I have used in the past to promote an offer.
Start with the Offer
Take an offer that you would like to promote and google the important keywords. For this example I’ll be looking at Neverblues LoveFilm offer. This is an offer which pays about £14 for a user to sign up for a free 30 day trial with credit card details.
With a few of the top players in the market use Quantcast and Blekko to figure out your demographic and targeting. Try to build a concise picture of who is going to be buying this product. I’ve actually decided to break it down into two demographics to target:-
Demographics
a. Young Males aged 18-25, interested in Xbox and PS3 games.
b. Women aged 30-45, interested in movies, low income.
Now the obvious way to promote this would be to scrape a list of movies. Use a script to scrape each movie and create a massive url list and then setup a dynamic landing page for each movie with a pic and custom text etc. While this may work well for many affiliates it is never going to give you massive ROI because the people that are reading about a movie are not really in buying mode. They want to see what the movie is about, they could well be about to download it of piratebay or go see it at the cinema or on TV. So at where would a person go when they are considering registering for Lovefilm or could be tempted to register for Lovefilm?
That is the big question, if you can find a place where consumers are in buying mode and are interested in your offer you will have a winner.
What about people looking to register with Sky or Virgin TV. They are in buying mode, because we can target specific pages on their websites. Are they looking for a movie package? Could LoveFilms service offer them better value? It is then the job of creating a lander to inform the consumer that is the case.
Benefits not Features
Anyone who has worked in Marketing will have heard this more than once. Lets outline Love films benefits compared to a satalite or cable package:-
Lower cost per month
Newer Movies as soon as they are released on DVD
Includes Games and your favourite TV series
Wider range of films over 70,000 to choose from
Only pay for films you want to watch
These are some of the benefits to the end user you can probably think of more. What I like to do is put these in a comparison table with LoveFilm as one heading and Satelite packages as the other.
This is a key stage to consider your demographic. If we were going to focus on the male gamers you really need to push the games side of their service, maybe put a picture of the latest Xbox hit or something up with it. “Get Call of Duty 8 for £5.99”
Add a bold title, something like “WHY BUY SKY?”, you see what I did there with there with the 3 Y’s. Put in a nice image creative and you are good to go.
Split Test
Remember to split test something from the start, so design two creatives with different positioning and split test between them. Or split test the image or a border. Choose one that you think will have the most impact to start with. With PPV it is critical to grab attention so you could try adding some Jquery onfocus effects to make the add pop out at the user.
Note. I wouldn’t go out and copy this campaign like for like as it didn’t return a good ROI for us which is why it was used as an example, the theory is sound even if the campaign itself doesn’t work.
