In creating this campaign, we hoped to:
1) Increase visibility and awareness for FedEx business initiatives, products, and solutions, with a focus on core business priorities during the Peak shipping/Holiday season
2) Enhance FedEx brand and reputation and increase favorability and preference for FedEx
Additionally, we wanted to personalize the brand by showcasing our hardworking team members, giving our social audience an opportunity to see the true power behind our network; showcase our operations and facilities in an exclusive way for our followers; tastefully commemorate the various, business-relevant holidays that occur during the late September to early January time frame; highlight our grantee relationships, volunteer efforts, and overall CSR strategy; utilize social media to aid with recruitment efforts at a time when the corporation hires approximately 50K new team members; and develop an overall content approach to increase positive sentiment and engagement metrics across all channels.
The FedEx Global Social Media team worked with stakeholders to create and/or curate content across all social channels. We primarily focused on 5 content pillars:
1) Holiday content – publishing on-brand content tied to relevant holidays
2) Hiring – targeting key critical markets to promote professional opportunities during our Peak season
3) Team member stories – highlighting our amazing team members through our Delivering Thanks series and Brand Journalism features
4) Network and operations – providing an exclusive look into our facilities and operations
5) CSR – featuring deserving nonprofits with which the corporation collaborates, team member volunteer efforts, and interesting in-kind shipments made possible by FedEx
We customized our content to fit specific channels to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach, creating visuals exclusive to platforms, and crafting personalized approaches for each channel to eliminate the potential for redundancy in copy and images. For example, as part of our CSR focus, we captured and/or secured assets for our Trees for Troops collaboration. Through this initiative, FedEx delivers Christmas trees to servicemen, servicewomen, and their families at military bases around the world, and we celebrated the delivery of our 200,000th Christmas tree this fiscal year. In total, we showcased 6 of these base deliveries across all of our social channels; however, we analyzed each base delivery and associated assets to strategically publish content on select channels, even choosing to utilize Snapchat and LinkedIn to provide an exclusive look at certain activations that could only be found on one of those platforms. We were highly intentional about preventing oversaturation and blanketing content on all FedEx owned channels.
Additionally, we worked to tie our social posts to key moments-in-time, while effectively targeting audiences with the highest likelihood of engaging with our features. For our Tag a Tree program, an activation that asks our social audience to write holiday greetings to military families, we published related content on and/or around Veterans Day, including relevant trending hashtags (e.g., #MondayMotivation). As a result, we secured approximately 100,000 messages over a 2-week period, netting an 8,410% YOY increase.
This Peak activation also presented some FedEx firsts. We published our initial Facebook canvas ad to highlight some of our amazing team members; we published our first onsite media activation to offer our social audience a behind-the-scenes look into live coverage from CNBC's Morgan Brennan; we posted our first Peak Snapchat and Instagram stories; and, we collaborated with NBA teams in two of our headquarter cities (the Memphis Grizzlies and the Miami HEAT) on CSR activations that ran on the FedEx social channels and the teams' platforms as well. Via the latter effort, along with our team members' utilization of our employee social media advocacy tool, we were able to extend the reach of our content without spending additional funds to boost related posts.
Our Peak campaign consisted of approximately 150 pieces of content, which garnered 1.7M total social engagements (up 139% YOY) and more than 22M impressions (with approximately 1.2M impressions attributed to our team members' use of our employee advocacy tool). These results were accomplished even with 26% less paid budget when compared to our FY17 Peak campaign. Our top performing content focused on our team members via our Delivering Thanks features, a collection of stories that acknowledges examples of excellent customer service and even life-saving acts performed by our workforce. Additionally, content related to our Trees for Troops activations were particularly successful on Facebook and Twitter, earning favorable comments from around the world and highlighting the corporation's relationship with military causes and nonprofits. Overall, our Peak content propelled our average engagement rates, with some channels experiencing a 7.5% increase specifically in that KPI. Social commentary was primarily positive, as many commenters offered their praise for our featured team members and were quick to defend associated posts/team members when some users attempted to provide negative commentary. Additionally, our social recruiting efforts were received favorably and contributed to our hiring efforts in critical markets, while our ability to incorporate and create content with other well-known brands helped us to reach additional audience segments and leverage non-FedEx owned channels.
