Leonardo won, finally.Since the very beginning, February was all about Oscars and Leonardo Di Caprio. Social media was flooded with memes and trolls of Leo.
But, hey, I am an Inbound Marketer and I shouldn't miss out on the opportunity of leveraging Academy Awards through inbound marketing campaigns.
In November 2015, I had attempted to use Di Caprio for one of my campaigns and the response was decent. Keeping that in mind I decided to reuse him during the Oscars.
Yes, Reuse.Now that I have your attention, I had tried to leverage Di Caprio's selling skills for our client - Inside Sales Box back in November. Inside Sales Box is an All-in-one Inside Sales Software to build, manage and accelerate your sales process.
Being in the inside sales space (Inside Sales Box), Di Caprio was an obvious choice after his performance in the Wolf of Wall Street (portraying Jordan Belfort), but still the engagement wasn't that high in November (although it was decent and fairly average) as compared to February.
I was calling it a success at that time, but seeing results of the February campaign I am a little confused, whether it was a success or not.
Here are some statistics from the two inbound marketing campaigns. Clearly, 5X better results in February. So what made such a huge difference?
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— Inside Sales Box (@insidesalesbox)February 10, 2016
Everything was same except for one thing - A high profile event like the Academy Awards and we piggybacking it.
Compiling everything I have come up with a framework which can help your campaign go viral and provide conversion rates which are unreal.
Target Market
It was USA for me.
Target market will be a huge factor in choosing the event to be leveraged. Had it been United Kingdom, Oscars probably wouldn't have made such an impact. Football campaign should have worked better there and I would have preferred a city wise campaign in UK for the respective club fans.
Do you know of any other country where I could have leveraged Oscars? - May be the respective nations of the nominated actors.
Events
Bigger the event, easier it will be for you to leverage it.
When shortlisting an event, just make sure you choose something which will impact a huge mass. Greater the size of mass, better will be your reach and engagement. It was obvious for me to go for Oscars as we were already looking to leverage Leonardo Di Caprio and his selling skills.
Hope you don't mind it Leo :)
Talk of the Event
Once you have the event, think and shortlist the heroes of that event. No matter how big the event is, some guys just go above it.
Leonardo Di Caprio in Oscars, Aamir Khan in Filmfare Awards, David Beckham in Football, Shane Warne in Cricket.
No, I am definitely not telling you to go after the controversial guys. (Do that at your own risk).
Character and Context
Last but the trickiest.
You have the event, market and heroes. Its time to contextualise and put all the pieces together. Check which character fits in and start building a campaign around it. We went ahead with Di Caprio because he had done a movie very close to selling and sales - "The Wolf of Wall Street".
I have my Oscar, when are you getting yours?
Don't forget to share your views on the framework proposed and let me know if there is something I can do to improve it further.
