In the credit card world, if you’re not top of mind, you’re not top of wallet. American Express and MasterCard were becoming the most talked about brands in the Financial Services category. Despite being the #1 credit card in the world, Visa was 7th place in terms of engagement in that same category, so it was time to up our game. The challenge was to get people to care and share about Visa in an online environment where they had only become accustomed to seeing deals, discounts, and financial information from the brand. They had all but tuned out the advertising bombarding from every feed they read. We saw the opportunity to put Visa in the center of conversation, making the brand top-of-mind and the preferred way to pay. We turned to where consumers naturally express themselves with what they are passionate about –- social media. And more specifically, we tapped into how how they talked about those things. We changed the way we marketed – shifting from products to passions, deals to inspiration, and tools for living to life worth living. Highly visual, short, snackable content was the name of the game. So we designed for the mobile flick and got right to the point: 6-word stories, 6-picture vignettes, 6-second films -- a complete storytelling construct told through the lens of six, identified with the moniker #GoInSix. Now we could help people “Go" faster and easier than ever before. No fuss. No long-winded conversations. Just Go – deliberately intended for consumers to tell their friends to come along for the ride. We inspired people to go on Facebook with visually arresting, must-be-there experiences. We showed people how to “Go" by provoking curiosity on Twitter with of-the-moment conversation starters and wonder-inducing 6-second films on Vine. We invited consumers to share how they Go with a UGC promotion on Instagram. Throughout our content, we lowered the barriers to Go by placing links to third party sites providing the means to actually have that experience. We amplified our content beyond the owned community via Facebook Sponsored Stories and Promoted Tweets. We brought on influencers to co-create Go stories of their own. From Padma Lakshmi to Dhani Jones to Ivanka Trump and more, celebrities customized a #GoInSix message in their own words, primed for their high-reach communities. To be as timely and relevant as possible, we employed two predictive strategies: Instead of waiting around for the next Super Bowl blackout, we built a model to anticipate what people will be talking about and sharing in the future. Using a blend of search query data, social listening forecasting, and photo sharing auditing, we could predict the conversation that would occur, timed to when cultural zeitgeist would be at its peak. Once we knew the conversation we wanted to create, we reached beyond our posted content. We developed a robust response plan by anticipating followers’ comments, allowing us to continue the dialogue with custom content, perceived to be made in real-time, just for them. When applied to respondents with high follower counts, this successfully furthered our earned reach.The results? We were #1. Prior to #GoInSix, the Visa Facebook Unmetric score was 56, ranked 7th in the financial services category. Over the course of the campaign, we averaged 75, 1st in financial services, but more impressively, 2nd when compared to all top ranked lifestyle competitors in each relevant spend category (restaurants, food/beverages, travel & tourism, retail, entertainment, luxury, and sports)…outdone by only the magic of Walt Disney World. #GoInSix delivered 330MM earned impressions and 37,046 storied engagements per post. #GoInSix delivered 6x the earned impressions and more than 10x the storied engagements per post than industry standards. Every “lets go" came from consumers, not from the brand, where 91% of those engagements came from outside our owned Visa communities, signifying we persuaded the broader public and not just an echo chamber of deal-hunting financial services enthusiasts. Visa achieved the most efficient Facebook CPEI (cost per earned impression) and CPSE (cost per storied engagement – likes/comments/shares per community size) in the financial services category, and across relevant lifestyle industries (shopping, entertainment, and travel). We achieved a 35% greater efficiency in cost per earned impression (a more difficult to achieve, but higher value metric) compared to industry costs per paid impressions (an easier to reach, but lower value metric). CPSE was 77% better than the financial services benchmarks and 65% better than the lifestyle category benchmarks Basically we proved ROI in Social. The holy grail of marketers.
Visit Visa on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VisaUnitedStates?brand_redir=1 Visit Visa on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Visa Visit Visa on Instagram: http://instagram.com/visa_us Visit Visa on Vine: https://vine.co/Visa Visit Visa on Google+: https://plus.google.com/+Visa/posts Visit Visa on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/user/visabrand
