Performance-focussed Social Media

Social media provides powerful tools for brands to deliver increased revenue and results. But many business struggle to achieve the maximum value from those tools. Our approach is born out of years of experience helping brands effectively use Social to grow their business. We do that by relying on four key principles

Strategy

Lots of brands have multiple stakeholders with differing goals on what their Social channels should do, and what they should deliver. We will perform a Social audit to understand the current lie of the land and, where possible, a workshop to understand the challenges of the wider team. Our strategy start point involves us asking a lot of questions and then doing a lot of listening. And taking a look at the data. Does it back up everyones gut feel about what works? What comes from this is a strategic approach about how to get the right message to the right audience. When we deliver against that, we know we can achieve the desired results for the brand.

Conception

Our teams generate ideas that capture people’s attention and are optimised for not only the platform but their role in the path to purchase. We work closely with our clients from start to finish, to ensure that the concepts are as effective as the strategy they came from. 

Production

We shoot with a range of directors and cameramen whose style and experience best suits the script. This means our team is bespoke for each project. It also helps answer the question we’re often asked: “which type of content is the most effective?” (Anything with cats, surely!) The answer being the one that appeals to the interests and passions of the target audience and is served to them thanks to a considered media plan. When we establish the target audience in the strategy we can then put together a production teams with the right skillset to deliver cost-effective content that will cut through for that audience.

Distribution & Media Buying

We use a combination of data insight, ad-buying tech and smart campaign planning to maximise reach, leads and sales revenue for our clients. And we provide insight-rich reporting every step of the way. Because for us a media plan is constantly evolving. If things aren’t getting sufficient traction with a certain demographic on one platform we halt the spend and move it to where it will work harder. The result being the media plan evolves in line with the data we get back. It gets increasingly more efficient and effective the further we move through the plan.

Case Study - New Balance Acceptance Range

To coincide with the 2019 Virgin Money London Marathon ballot draw, New Balance wanted to raise awareness of their sponsorship whilst simultaneously increasing product consideration and purchase intent for their 2019 Virgin Money London Marathon Acceptance Range; kit produced to support runners through their marathon training.

Our performance-focused strategy was to create a phased social media campaign to launch the new kit in October 2018. With sequenced messaging and targeting, our content would take potential customers through a “what, why, where” progression from awareness through consideration to purchase.

New Balance wanted to showcase the product range and drive sales directly through newbalance.co.uk

We produced a series of format-first video and stills to create a campaign that would be distributed across a range of unique channel formats; Instagram Stories, Facebook Carousel & Facebook Collection.

The results…

Case Study - New Balance Marathon ‘19

The London Marathon has huge cultural currency across the globe and shares many of the values that live at the heart of New Balance; heritage, community, inclusivity and diversity. It was important for New Balance to create a campaign that celebrates and amplifies these values through accessible channels.

120 days, created by VMLY&R put the days leading up to the Marathon into the spotlight, because the journey starts long before the start line. The campaign gave New Balance a rich storytelling thread that would be activated across digital, social, OOH, print, PR and experiential. 

 Tapping into insights around how runners plan their Marathon training and leveraging key moments in the running calendar we developed a multi-channel content and engagement plan designed to demonstrate New Balance’s commitment to providing valuable training support to all runners. 

We worked with the campaign’s five ambassadors to create a weekly series that shared key moments and milestones during their training journey. This episodic content was distributed through Instagram stories, reaching our most engaged audience with (close to) real-time and relevant content that felt contextually relevant to the platform format.

The results…