Unilever?s Clear shows strategic limitations of optimizing for reach on social
A campaign by Unilever?s Clear shampoo brand that leveraged social word of mouth to motivate a strong mobile response to a challenge to promote healthier, more beautiful hair points to the limitations of optimizing for reach vs. influence as a strategy on mobile social.
Clear leveraged Mavrck?s technology and Weber Shandwick?s creative to form the brand?s most engaged fans on social into a community that created content in news feeds about Clear?s seven-day healthy-hair challenge. Driving the campaign was a philosophy that one person on social strongly engaged with half of his 1,000 friends is more valuable than one person weakly engaged with one million friends.
?When you optimize for reach, the main result you drive is impressions, and sometimes clicks,? said Lyle Stevens, CEO and co-founder of Mavrck, formerly known as Splashscore. ?When you optimize for percent of level that the influence is actually engaged, you activate other influencers and drive sales.?
Mobile engagement
Just over 60 percent of participants in the Oct. 27-Nov. 16 campaigns were on mobile. By comparison, 22.5 percent were on desktop and 17.3 percent tablet.
The brand?s biggest everyday influencers were activated to create content in social news feeds about Clear?s seven-day challenge for healthier, more beautiful hair.
Posting on Instagram.
In exchange for creating a post, they received a product sample. In return, they had to create another post about their experience with the sample and tag a few friends that might enjoy it.
If friends engaged with those tags, they would click through to a landing page that collected data on the influencers? reach.
There, the friend could enter his or her email to take the healthy-hair challenge in exchange for a $1.50 coupon off any Clear product.
About 1,000 influencers created posts that earned 11,000 engagements, according to Mavrck, which recently raised $2.5 million in financing from GrandBanks Capital for its platform.
The net promoter scores of those activated rose from -47 percent to 83 percent, with 5 times more influencers selecting ?10 ? I would definitely recommend CLEAR to a friend? after the campaign was over.
?When those influencers post content on a social network, there is a guaranteed high ranking for that content since their typical content posts are well received by their connections and are not advertisements,? Mr. Stevens said.
?When you activate an everyday influencer, who earns high engagement on beauty related posts, to create a post about a product, that post typically goes to the top of the news feed and is trusted more by the influencers? friends than a traditional ad.
?This results in higher engagement and more conversions than an ad.?
Motivating a community of influential fans.
Mobile social is evolving along with the rest of the mobile-marketing field.
Last month, Make Your Case, a personalized phone case manufacturer, saw double the interaction rate than the industry average through the use of mobile ads featuring shareable content that mirrored attributes of tumblr, Vine and Instagram.
Hyundai leveraged a 3D character as part of its #NewSonata campaign on Vine and Twitter, designed to showcase new features of the 2015 Sonata.
The Vine series, titled #HyundaiHank, featured a 3D action figure based on Hyundai Motor America?s director of marketing communications, David Matathia. In the short clips, ?Hank? explored the new Sonata?s features, including Rear Backup Assist and a Panoramic Sunroof.
Human connection
The response to Unilever?s Clear campaign points to social?s power to drive loyalty and sales by unifying fans around an objective in which they can find human connections, recommendations and validation.
Finding social influencers.
?We all use social everyday ? but consumers go to social to connect with people, not advertisements,? Mr. Stevens said.
?Also, the amount of engagement around promoted posts on Facebook and other social networks is dropping as people are realizing they are essentially ads, and people are learning to hide that ad content from brands.?
Final Take
Michael Barris is staff reporter on Mobile Marketer, New York.
