OVERVIEW OF CAMPAIGN:
My campaign focuses on my brand, Desiree’s Studio. I want to market my brand as I am passionate about capturing and enhancing the beauty and personality of the people around me using still image. I have an already existing Instagram page for my brand that I have been using for the last 10 months. Instagram is a photo sharing app and as my brand provides photography services – specifically portrait photography. Instagram is a way to connect with people based on the kinds of images that inspire them. The use of likes and comments provides a great way to receive feedback (Mitchell, 2012). These along with having the ability to have a clear layout on my page, I believe Instagram the most appropriate social media platform for my service and campaign.
As I am promoting a service, I will use the content marketing approach. Content marketing is the management of different mediums such as text, audio and video that is aimed at engaging customers. This content is repurposed and syndicated to be published through the web and mobile platforms such as blogs and social media (Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick, 2016). For my campaign, I will use the content marketing approach. According to Alan Charlesworth, social media is often used as a way to communicate content as part of content marketing and one of its main objectives includes brand awareness (Charlesworth, 2015). I think this approach would be useful for my campaign as my overall goal for the campaign is to increase brand awareness.
The idea for the campaign is to showcase a series of portrait photographs. This series will resemble a portfolio that my target audience – males and females between the ages of 18 and 40 – can view on social media. I have decided to do this because this is a great way to exhibit my photography for my audience to see. In addition to this, any potential clients will be able to see my work before requesting my services. In conjunction with being the photographer for my campaign, I will also be the director and editor so I have full control of the whole photoshoot. This gives me the freedom to experiment with different ideas for my campaign. Within my brand, I would like to promote diversity and individuality so my campaign would include people of different genders, ethnicities, sexualities and religions.
I do not want to include any text on my photographs as this will take away from the main focus of the campaign; my skills as a photographer. This is where I will apply the content marketing approach; the massive growth in social media over the years has resulted in an increased relevance in this approach. This has impacted the quality of online content as it has become more crucial to attract a defined target audience in order to drive profitable customer action (Charlesworth, 2015). As a result, the selected photographs for my campaign must be able to capture the attention of my audience. In order for my audience to know that the photographs belong to me and for copyright purposes, I will have my logo on the photographs instead. As my campaign will be on social media, I have the option to include relevant and valuable information regarding my campaign within the caption of my post in order to attract and engage my audience. I think this campaign would be successful if properly executed because I will be able to increase my brand’s visibility and aid customer engagement.
MARKETING PLAN:
I used SMART – specific, measurable, attainable, achievable (actionable), realistic/relevant and time-bound – goals which are ‘concrete targets that you can easily aim for’; they must be ‘realistic, quantifiable and focuses’ so they can be achieved (Chi, 2018). By following this, I was able to construct the following marketing objectives that I plan to achieve by the end of my campaign launch. In order to make sure all these objectives are attainable I am making my campaign for a UK audience as this is where my brand is located and this would also make it easier for communicating with my audience, scheduling posts and client work in terms of location scouting, transport to locations, time zones, etc. I also aim to meet these objectives with the first 3 months after my campaign has been launched.
My main objective is to increase my brand awareness by 40%; I can measure this by the number of followers and profile visits I receive on Instagram. Daniel Rowles believes that the term brand awareness ‘is an excuse used by marketers when they don’t know the value of what they are doing’ (Rowles, 2017). However, I disagree with this because this is a way of my target audience becoming familiar with the identity and attributes of my brand and the service I provide. A way to achieve brand awareness is by word of mouth which will have to be ‘unpaid, authentic and people-powered’ influencers, brand ambassadors, super fans or connectors (Funk, 2013). These influencers’ opinions are viewed highly by their audience and this could create a great and long-lasting impression. Funk also argues that there are five pillars of successful word-of-mouth (Funk, 2013). Using these pillars, I will enlist the help of influential people on Instagram such as super fans, brand ambassadors or connectors who can effectively spread the word. A way of doing this would be to have them share my campaign and the link to my page on their Instagram page or story. The reason I want to do this for my campaign is that people are more likely to trust another person’s opinion rather than traditional advertising. However, word-of-mouth might not be successful so I will increase the amount of content posted on Instagram daily.
In addition to this, my Instagram would see an increase in engagement; this is another of my objectives. Instagram defines engagement as the number of times that your post was liked, saved and commented on. To increase engagement, I will strategically use hashtags in the captions of my posts, schedule my Instagram posts for when audience is most active, use CTA (call-to-action) on Instagram posts to get my audience to comment or engage, use Instagram stories more or host a contest for my audience to win a free photo shoot (Chacon, 2017). I would like to increase my engagement by 50% because Rowles argues that this is a way to ‘measure and benchmark against your competitors’ (Rowles, 2017). Taking this on board, I will continue to focus on this throughout my campaign launch. In order to measure, my engagement I would use Instagram Insight to measure my engagement. This function allows Instagram business users to review insights about their profile including activity interactions such as profile visits and website clicks, insights on content (posts, stories and promotions) and audience (Instagram Help Centre, 2019). By using Insight, I can use this to monitor my engagement levels and use this as an indication as to whether not my campaign was successful or not.
My campaign has a primary and secondary target audience because my campaign would reach more than one specific type of person. My primary target audience is the people who would be engaging with my photographs on social media. They would be males and females between the ages of 18 and 34. Their occupations would vary but they would have a common interest in art and photography especially portraits. Their attitudes and values would need to be in line with my brands in order for us to have a business relationship. I would use Facebook to drive my primary target audience to drive them to my Instagram page. According to Anindita Bhardwaj, Facebook is best used for community building. This is a platform that can reach a massive audience who could be potential customers. They can easily see your work as Facebook is the largest social networking platform in the world and has over 1 billion users (Bhardwaj, 2017). Both my target audiences are between the ages of 18-34 because 62% of people surveyed by Statista in October 2018 showed that 18 and 34 (Statista, 2018). I would use Facebook to create adverts that would be displayed to other users; this would give me the opportunity to potentially reach my target audience (Brown, 2012). I can direct my advert to my Instagram so my audience are able to view my campaign. I could also create a business page on Facebook that would be connected to my Instagram page. Users can like my page and just like Instagram I can use Insights to see statistics on how my page is performing. In addition, I can connect with my audience through the use of polls, posts and also direct message. This will help me maintain engagement on Facebook as well as Instagram.
My secondary target audience is my potential clients; there are two types of potential clients I could have individuals or companies. For the individuals, this focuses on males and females aged 18-34 whose occupation would include students, models, musicians, actors or another type of performer. I am aiming it at them because often models and performers need headshots or a portfolio of photographs and hey could come to me to have them done. I would also target fashion, beauty and makeup companies because these are the types of industries that predominantly use portrait photography. Their attitudes and values would need to be in line with my brands in order for us to have a business relationship. I would target these companies by using LinkedIn as ‘clients, recruiters and employers look for people in LinkedIn’ so this would be the most useful platform to achieve this (De Milto, 2015). I can also make posts on LinkedIn to inform my target audience about my campaign and use this to drive them to my Instagram page. By using LinkedIn, I am able to invite potential clients to connect with me and develop a relationship with them as well as my reputation.
Using a variety of social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn can also help to improve my brand awareness and around 91% of marketers had noticed an increase in their brand visibility (Baker, 2018). As Instagram is my main social media platform campaign used in my campaign, I am using the other platforms to drive my target audience to that page in order to gain the most engagement with my campaign.
PUBLISHING SCHEDULE:
As my campaign is to last 3 months, I would plan to market my campaign from February to May; the launch date would be 25th February. The reason I would do this is that I would then be able to use the summer months – June till August – to work with clients on photo shoots. Two weeks before my campaign is to be launched, I will post a photo on my Instagram to make my audience aware that I am planning on sharing my campaign with them and reward them with my ‘surprise and delight’ campaign (Funk, 2012). In order to make sure that my audience is engaging with my page I will use a CTA of getting them to give that post 100 likes if they want me to post my campaign. One week before, I will use Instagram analytics as a reference for when to post my campaign. I will use the audience section on Insights which shows the ‘days of the week and hours…when your followers are most active’ (Alexander, 2018). With this information, I will be able to have an idea as to when the optimal time to post my campaign would be. By doing this I will be able to reach more of my audience if I post my campaign when they are active on Instagram. On the day of the launch, I will put a countdown on my Instagram story 24 hours before to keep my audience engaged right up until it has fully launched. Throughout the day, I will post a blurred-out photograph from my campaign each out hour to entice my target audience.