Key Learnings

After every campaign the most important thing is to analyse the result. There are definitely more learnings from a failed campaign than a successful one but the successful one helps you to understand the secret to success which will help you recreate it.

Along with the tangible benefits of the campaign (number of downloads and impressions); there were far more intangable returns (connections with the influencers and amongst other things)

Content is King

The most important piece of the viral puzzle is having amazing content. The content has to be designed in such a way that people are compelled to ask their friends to check it out. While strategising the content ensure that the it does not sound like a sales pitch. Even though Demo Apple Watch was customized for Pipes News and the second bit of the website did have a mention about us; it was never meant to be explicitly about Pipes. It was always about the experience. Even the established publishing houses like The Telegraph ended up putting up their logo in the demo screen.

Image uploaded by The Telegraph

Hence the content and experience presented to the world should be interesting, informative and enjoyable for the consumer along with being packaged to perfection.

Timing

Timing is the linchpin of every marketing campaign. This was another thing where we hit the nail on the head. 7th of January, 9 to 5 Mac’s Mark Gurman leaked the delay of the launch day of Apple Watch. This was the perfect time to get their attention.

As Mike Butcher has rightly mentioned in his blog “The most solid pitches come when the startup relates what they do to a CURRENT news story of the day”.

A lot of publications wrote about this delay in the launch and ended the article at a note asking their viewers to check out this virtual interactive demo of Apple Watch instead. Timing makes or breaks your marketing strategy.

Creating demand

Even being optimistic we were estimating about 50,000 impressions for this campaign. Hence we didn’t care to pump in too much money into the server. We went ahead and purchased a shared hosting with a very limited bandwidth. Due to this we were not able to support more than 12000 concurrent users.

Since we got such an amazing influx of users, a lot of users were not granted direct access. They had to hit refresh a several times and some had to even wait for 2–5 minutes to get access. This did get a few people upset; they even left bad comments on the press coverages. But, on the other hand we also had a large proportion of the highly satisfied users. Some even went one step ahead and jumped to our defense against the negative reviews.

Comments on the coverage we received from 9to5Mac

The result that this chaos had created was ‘Demand’. Since, the supply was scare demand for Demo Apple Watch went through the charts. This helped in taking the campaign to places. This also helped the campaign last longer than we had expected.

Make sharing easy

A campaign or an idea goes viral only when the people who see it share their experience with their friends asking them to try it out. Marketing is at it’s best when your users do the selling for you. In order to encourage the buildup of this organic chain it is important to make it extremely easy for the users/viewers to share across different platforms. Hence, visibly integrate a share plugin with all major social media platforms.

Conclusion

There is no sure shot solution for a successful marketing campaign. You can take back some tips and learnings from the successful ones and apply it to your campaign. Having said that there is no assurance for success. But my advice to you is do not ever give up. Keep trying. Keep hustling.

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