Mother's Day is one of the most important and talked about holidays on social media each year. Knowing this, we wanted to become part of the conversation in social by bringing together fans' love of cars, with the love they have for their mothers.
We had three primary objectives:
1) Strengthen Nissan's relationships with its existing social fans by giving them a platform to celebrate and reward their own mothers in a tangible way.
2) Drive engagement on brand-owned social channels.
2) Generate earned media coverage of our activation to help reach new social users beyond our current fan base.
While cars may be more commonly associated with Father's Day, we know there are also many high-RPM moms who play a key role in teaching their children how to drive and fostering a life-long love of cars.
Mother's Day conversation is largely comprised of grateful children saying thanks or sharing stories of what makes their mom the best. We wanted to leverage this behavior and give participants a platform to publicly recognize moms who go the extra mile.
Moms give their kids the gift of life and the keys to the family car. Simply showing thanks with a card and flowers won't do. But what about a car?
The #BoxOfNissans program married online love with offline hugs by asking participants across social to share a car-related story that demonstrates how their mom rules the road for a chance to win a gift: 15 limited-edition Nissan vehicles made entirely out of chocolate and delivered in a sleek, custom-made box worthy of a mom who owns the asphalt.
We created a custom landing page at BoxOfNissans.com to provide participants with more information and give them a closer look at the painstakingly detailed milk-chocolate Nissan Rogue, dark-chocolate Nissan Maxima, and white-chocolate Nissan GT-R.
In analyzing our past Mother's Day activations, which had mostly been limited to the day itself, we saw an opportunity to stand out from the crowd by launching a couple weeks before the holiday and building momentum. Just as our initial promotional posts went live across Nissan USA's social channels, nearly 200 media contacts received a Box of Nissans and were encouraged to share their moms' stories and drive readers to the landing page.
Social posts with paid media support continued at regular intervals leading up to Mother's Day to create a steady drumbeat of conversation. On the big day, paid media was increased across all channels, taking advantage of spiking conversation and driving additional entries.
By the end of our Mother's Day promotion, Nissan distributed nearly 250 boxes of chocolates and was able to deliver some pretty delicious social results.
The #BoxOfNissans campaign generated more than 26 million total paid and earned social impressions, including more than 8 million impressions from earned media placements.
Social posts promoting the program earned 77,430 engagements across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, including more than 3,700 awesome mom stories/contest entries. Despite our best efforts, Nissan was not able to reliably track how many smiles the Box of Nissans promotion put on the faces of moms across the country or how many brownie points were earned by their children.
However, once the gifts arrived, tweets, comments and posts poured in from excited moms and contest winners who were thrilled to receive a fleet of cars they loved almost as much the ones in their driveways.
Overall, the program achieved its goal of connecting with Nissan fans during this heartwarming holiday in addition to driving engagement on Nissan's social channels and earned media coverage.
