Case Study and Lessons Learned: Startup Product Launch and Lessons Learned

Case Study #1.2: Startup Awareness Campaign

Background:

The website-based service targeted parents, in particular Moms, concerned about their children’s social media activity. As a startup, they hadn’t done any marketing and didn’t have marketing elements such as audience profiles, brand voice or digital reputation in place. Competitive products were gaining traction and action needed to happen immediately.

A radio advertising blitz was planted and the business knew they should incorporate social media into their marketing efforts.

Due to the nature of startups, there were several challenges:

• New, unestablished brand or user base
• Lack of user testimonials
• Staffing inadequacies in all departments, but particularly marketing
• Budget constraints effected ability to create custom content including video and graphics
• Established relationships with security and parenting authors existed, but none had a social media presence
• Time was critical: Akamai Marketing was contacted with less than 4 weeks to go before the radio advertising began.

Listen:

The goals were clear:

Raise awareness of the brand, the product, and its marketplace differentiation.

As a new brand, it needed a social media and marketing voice. It needed clear target audiences and key messages for each target audience. It also needed to identify social media influencers for each of these target audiences and develop share-worthy content that spoke to the motivations and fears of the audience.

 

Digital optimization, including website, establishing social media with keywords, competitive analysis.

Staff training on blogging and social media best practices for community building and engagement tactics.

 

Think:

For the research phase, Akamai Marketing and their client began a two-week audit of competitors, keywords and audiences.

We knew the first phase of social media was an awareness building phase, so we focused on building community within the identified social media profiles.

Do:

Over 8 weeks, Akamai Marketing initiated a strategic grass-roots conversation and community building program that included listening, measuring and strengthening the new social media profiles.

Listening campaigns started on Facebook, Twitter and in forums. We identified current concerns, trends in social media usage by parents. We incorporated these concerns and usage into blog posts, and provided feedback to Product Development for future product features.

We began by testing a variety of voices and content types to see what resonated best with the target audiences. Within the first 4 weeks, the social media brand voice was refined and consistent as were successful content formats.

We actively engaged social media influencers for the target markets.

Marketing staff were training in corporate storytelling, social media engagement, social media tools and best practices.

Results: Increased brand awareness and visibility.

2.8 Million organic brand impressions
252,000 unique people reached
2400% increase in Twitter brand mentions zero to over 25/day
300% increase from 4,000/month to 16,000/month in Facebook impressions
5% Increase in Facebook comments
23% increase in website traffic from Facebook
20% increase in blog traffic from Facebook

Lessons Learned: 

COMPLETE THE LOOP. Feedback from social and digital media is only useful if the right people get it. Much of our listening campaign generated information useful to marketing and product development. Target audiences spoke very clearly to the company and certain test messages helped inform future strategy.