We've always wanted to launch a campaign that will raise the awareness of our brand - and now it was finally time. Since we usually do not create campaigns to promote the brand, but only around our product, this project was also a novelty for us.
At the same time we set ourselves a certain goal and asked an important question: It should be spent a maximum of 500 €, because we did not want to spend thousands of euros for an agency (our marketing plan is already set for the next few months), and on the other hand, we also wanted to see, in a way, what we can do with our ideas without outside help. Therefore the question was if we are able to produce a good idea and a campaign with our team and little resources, which has a noticeable impact on our visitor numbers?
For these reasons, we made ourselves to work and tried to get as many visitors with a given budget of 500 € on our side.
Why did we set that low budget? As with the features of Stackfield and our website, we also run different tests on advertising. We started this tests on completely different platforms / user bases, for which - after deduction of about 50 € for pictures and the like. - a total of 450 € advertising budget could be used. Even if the budget is quite low, this is sufficient to get a first impression of the possible, much greater success of a campaign.
We did the following when creating the campaign:
The basics
After we had decided in advance that the campaign should be a kind of image campaign with a focus on security, we dedicated our first thoughts to the target audience:
Who do we want to reach?
Only in this way is it possible for us to create a campaign that has the right audience and transmits information that is relevant to the viewer / reader. With Stackfield's main focus on industries with an increased need for security, we quickly decided to choose the same areas that also our other advertising and our own product focusses on: product development and research, banking and private equity, Management consultancy and lawyers, engineering firms and architects, associations and foundations, but also advertising and PR agencies. Too narrow the target audience a bit, we also decided to only target the german market.
In addition to determining the purpose and the target group, we also choose the media, through which our campaign should be published, before starting to create ideas. Since we offer a digital product and the gap between offline advertising and online registration is very large, this campaign has been designed exclusively for social media distribution.
The execution
Idea
Due to the rather broad target group an idea was needed, which can be adapted to several industries, but it also needed to be easy to understand for viewers from other sectors. In addition, we had made it our mission to provide all ads with a single hashtag.
After some thoughts and brainstorming about security and our name, we came up with the idea to create a campaign with an ambiguous slogan: „Sicher, mit Stackfield!“ - translated it means „Sure, with Stackfield!“. What’s ambiguous about that? The german word „sicher“ means „of course“ and „secure“, therefore it’s an answer and a statement in three words.
A little excursion: To what extent does Stackfield have anything to do with security? Our cloud tool offers an end-to-end encryption, by which the data of our users are encrypted directly in the browser and stored in this state on our servers. This ensures that no unauthorized person - not even ourselves as a platform operator - has access to it. This type of security is not to be found in our competitor’s tools, and since we also save all data on servers in Germany, this is a relevant feature of our product and product for our potential customers.
For this reason, the phrase "Sicher, mit Stackfield!" is very ambiguous and makes sense only in the right context.
To give this statement a little more emphasis and context, we decided to create a specific question for each industry, which was then answered with the answer "Sicher, mit Stackfield!". Those questions sometimes also explained the product details of Stackfield, without having to go into detail about it.
Execution
The execution started with the definition of an image format, which should optimally support the distribution of the campaign in the various media. Since on social media, pictures are mostly displayed in a square format, our choice fell directly on this format.
While the first drafts of our campaign images contained only the questions and answers, we soon decided to make the campaign a bit more emotional and to give each industry a face by using portrait images of fictive workers.
In order to verify our personal opinion that the emotional versions with pictures of persons are better, we advertised both versions of the ads with a small budget on Facebook and also surveyed some befriended companies. The copies with faces scored on Facebook a 15% better result and our test persons also liked them more, which is why we finally committed to this.
The execution of these ideas caused almost no cost, aside from the working hours for the idea and editing in Photoshop. In addition to the individual images for the ads, we have also created a landing page for visitors of the advertising campaign. This site summarises all the information of the ads and also explains other features of the platform itself.
Distribution
The distribution of the campaign images took place on our own channels on the platforms Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Xing. For this, we had already analyzed from our previous posts the best time to publish pictures and purposefully spread our new campaign over several days.
In addition to the normal posting of the images, we also created ads on almost all of these platforms, each with a very low budget. Although these ads are no longer displayed on our site, it is a great way to test different target groups and to run campaigns efficiently.
The results
As described in one of our previous blog articles, Facebook ads are not directly suited for generating customers, but this cost-effective way to reach your audience can be used to increase brand awareness.
By distributing our campaigns over several days and on several platforms, we have seen additional 8,917 visitors on our website within one week, as measured by a special tracking link.
The number of impressions was much higher: our posts and ads were displayed a total of 121,394 times.
The costs
The largest part of the costs, while not being counted in, is clearly related to the working hours of our employees, since the other costs were very low: The pictures of people for the campaign pictures cost a total of 19 €, while the cost of the ads on the different Platforms amounted to € 478.34. Thus, we paid a total of € 0.054 for each visitor to our site.
Our conclusion
As mentioned earlier, this campaign was designed to improve Stackfield's brand awareness and reputation. Due to the good numbers of visitors, however, we were also able to directly determine an influence on the marketing of the product, which exceeded the actual intention. (Of course, both correlate to each other in some way, but at that point a specific evaluation would have to be created.) We recorded an increase of 8.3% in registrations from non-traceable sources - a fluctuation, which is rather rare for us - but a very much positive result.