New Balance

We looked to launch a new competition via Instagram to increase social following and brand awareness of the new range of football range boots. To enter the competition, participants had to tag a friend and follow the brand on Instagram.

Due to the nature of the competition prize (ten free pairs of football boots), we identified the need to schedule the posts around kick-off times for football that weekend, when the target audience were most likely to be online, thereby maximising engagement.

Strategic

• We began our strategy by sourcing potential publishers to work with for the competition. Potential candidates were held to a strict criteria; they must be well respected in their industry, be capable of producing relevant content and have a large social following themselves.
• We secured a prize that was strong enough to entice publishers to want to work with us on a gifting basis only. The agreed prize was ten pairs of football boots from the two new ranges.

Tactical

• After creating a shortlist of potential publishers for this project, we searched their socials to find examples of campaigns in which they had launched similar content. It was through this extensive research we found a piece ran by Joe.co.uk and the client in regards to a previous boot launch.
• We used this previous article to reach out to Joe.co.uk with our proposal and demonstrated how running this activity would allow them to create relevant content while continuing the story from the previous launch.
• Joe.co.uk loved the idea and we then had to negotiate the exposure for free. This is where we provided added value and agreed that moving forwards we could look to produce much more regular content.

• The social following of the client’s football-focused Instagram channel was at 606k when the first post of the campaign went live. By the time the competition ended, the social following had reached 627k, translating into an increase of 21k followers in only ten days.
• Using the analytics tool Social Blade, we could identify that the brand had an average social following of +1200 a day. For the ten days the competition ran, the average following rose to +2100, resulting in a daily follower increase of 75%.
• All of this was done free of charge in return of ten pairs of football boots for the competition winners. The tenancy cost was negotiated to £0, whereas the cost of this type of competition would usually be expected to reach a total of around £20,000.