Moms – one of the most coveted, sought after and time constrained demographics in our country. Everyone is seeking their attention, from their spouses and kids, to schools, teachers, coaches, employers and corporate marketing departments.
March 20-26, 2016 was National Poison Prevention Week and we had an important safety message to share: Store your medicines up, away and out of sight. The challenge we faced was this: How can one small educational foundation cut through the noise and effectively capture the attention of this highly sought after demographic with a message on safety? The Up & Away campaign, funded in part by the Consumer Healthcare Product Association's educational foundation, partnered with boutique social media agency SOMA Strategies, to launch a micro-campaign during National Poison Prevention Week.
Rallying around the data showing nearly 60,000 kids go to the Emergency Department every year due to accidental medicine ingestion, translating to 4 busloads of kids every day, our task was to build awareness among young parents, moms in particular, with this incredibly important message. Our goals were to engage parents through parenting bloggers while launching a new Instagram channel for the CHPA's educational foundation. If parents were engaging with and sharing our messages, and we saw a lift in the following of the new Instagram feed, we had found success.
How we reached 25+ million parents in 2 weeks: Messaging, partnership and tone.
Messaging
Parents today are seeking quick, credible facts dominated by visuals and they are motivated by a clear call-to-action. Rallying around the hashtags #MedsUpAway, we created visually compelling content around the theme "In the blink of an eye."
Recognizing the need for diverse content, we created cinemagraphs in both English and Spanish, for use exclusively on our newly launched Instagram feed. The content was short and to the point with just the child's eyes moving, launching our theme of "In the blink of an eye," to convey how quickly accidents can happen. To leverage our messages and further cultivate strong relationships with important allies, we actively worked to ask our blogging team to tag and share content from program partners, the Centers for Disease Control and the American Association of Poison Control Centers.
Tone: How we successfully used humor, data and toddler perspective
The second ingredient to the success of our mini-campaign was the tone we struck in our messaging. When messaging around health and safety, the risk in sounding preachy or uninteresting is high. We rose to the challenge by creating an overall theme of "In the Blink of an Eye" but creatively presenting it in three different ways: serious to humorous to the perspective from a child's eyes. By offering a range in tone among our content pieces, we were more accessible to parents, and the success in our content approach is demonstrated by the strong engagement rates, between sharing, commenting and liking the posts. We heard not just from parents but aunts, uncles, grandparents, even babysitters, all sharing an experience with kids accidentally accessing medicines.
Partnership: Influencers & User Engagement
When creating an issue-based campaign, specifically when targeting busy parents, the right messenger is a critical part of the success. To supplement our existing six diverse parenting blogger ambassadors, we partnered with one additional "power influencer." Activating one additional high level partner enabled us to reach a bigger audience and launch a creative, engaging story-telling approach while maximizing our reach among our target audience. We partnered with Ilana Wiles of Mommy Shorts to creatively showcase our call-to-action from three different perspectives across her three Instagram channels. While our core blogging team focused on their own personal experiences with kids getting into items, we worked with Ilana to infuse humor by sharing pictures of readers' submissions, showing kids creating trouble "in the blink of an eye." The approach cultivated a spirit of community, made us all laugh, and avoided the risk of sounding preachy or dull. Further, we activated an additional 30 bloggers to share our call-to-action and images of their own safe storage locations across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest.
Ultimately, we believe strategic partnerships, coupled with visually-driven content, sparked a dialogue and inspired awareness around a potentially life-saving topic.
Execution:
25+ million impressions in 2 weeks told us we made a huge impact.
But the real story is in the engagement with our target audience. Conversation and engagement were our markers of success. Were we inspiring parents to talk about our issues, were they using our hashtags, sharing our materials, did we effectively engage our blogging partners and program partners and did moms want to start following us on Instagram?
In 2 weeks:
