The social media marketing strategy should serve as a channel for listening to your audience and engaging them in conversations, but it’s also a valuable opportunity to show the world how clever you are.

1. Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign

Coca-Cola’s “Share a Coke” campaign is one of Coca-Cola’s most successful social media campaigns since Diet Coke Break. Back in 2012, Coca-Cola wanted to revive their decade-old Share a Coke campaign by bringing back the personalization aspect while creating new labels with popular names on them. This time instead of just putting people’s first names on the bottles, they put the 150 most popular names from that year onto Coca-Cola bottles. In addition to this, they created over 250 different unique slogans including lyrics from songs such as Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off and Fall Out Boy’s My Songs Know What You Did In The Dark. By bringing back a campaign from the past, while still being creative with it, Coca-Cola created a huge amount of buzz from consumers on social media.

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2. Oreo’s Super Bowl tweet

Oreo took advantage of their competitor’s mediocre Super Bowl tweets by tweeting “You can still dunk in the dark” during the blackout at the Super Bowl XLVII in 2013. This tweet received 10,000 retweets and 28,889 likes which were brought on by only 36 people following them on Twitter at that time. A different approach Oreo took to take advantage of a situation happened after a massive power outage caused the 2013 Super Bowl to be delayed for 34 minutes. Instead of quiet like many brands did during this time, Oreo tweeted an image of their cookie with the caption “Power Out? No Problem” which got over 10,000 likes and 1,500 retweets. In both situations, Oreo somehow managed to get on people’s minds by cleverly using something that had nothing to do with them creatively.

3. Blendtec’s Will It Blend campaign
   
   Blendtec is a company that specializes in creating blenders for consumer use. Their most popular product was the Will It Blend campaign where they would film themselves blending different objects such as iPhones or marbles just to see if their blender could handle it. This event has been turned into a YouTube web series that has generated over 300 million views since 2007. So how does this have anything to do with social media marketing strategy? The people over at Blendtec are geniuses who know how to take the simplest of ideas and make them thrive. By taking their company’s name and shortening it to “Blendtec” they created a trend on Twitter where people would tweet things like “(Insert product) will blend” or “(insert person/thing) will get Blendtec’s”. They also went with this idea by creating several parody accounts that all have the same description, “@WillItBlend because some things can’t be Blendtec’s!”. This campaign was very successful because it pushed their brand out into social media while allowing consumers to create content for them.
   
   4. The North Face’s #NeverStop Exploring campaign

The North Face is an outdoor apparel company that has been creating quality outerwear since 1966. Just like The North Face, they have been creating quality social media campaigns since 2008. This is when they began their #NeverStopExploring campaign which encourages people to get outside and explore the world. They do this by having people who work at the company share their adventures on Twitter while tagging it with #NeverStopExploring. From hiking mountains to surfing beaches, The North Face has taken people from all walks of life and made them famous through sponsored posts and consumer-generated content (CGC). Another tactic The North Face takes advantage of with its CGC is allowing consumers to post pictures of themselves wearing or using a product while adding a “challenge” for other consumers to complete to win prizes.

5. GoPro’s extreme sports footage

GoPro is one of the most innovative camera companies around today. Their cameras are used for many different situations such as filming extreme sports or capturing a moment in time on Mount Everest. But GoPro also knows how to use social media marketing strategies to its advantage by giving consumers the ability to create content by themselves. This is done through their Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter accounts where all anyone has to do is post a picture or video of them using their product while tagging the account to be featured on their feeds.

This last tactic may not exactly fit into the “5 Marketing Campaigns” category but it still deserves some recognition. Keep in mind that we are not talking about TV commercials, billboards, or print ads; instead, we are going to be talking about Vine videos, Snapchat stories, and YouTube channel content. These “5 Marketing Campaigns” are using social media platforms to their advantage in a different way. They found out how to turn people who would not normally use or care for their product into potential ticket buyers by creating funny and relatable content that shows off what the brand can do. For example, The Fault In Our Stars is about two teenage cancer patients who fall in love after meeting at a cancer support group. With this film being released on June 6th, 2014 we looked through TripAdvisor’s list of top movies and came across #TFIOS as one of the highest-rated movies. This made us think that director Josh Boone must have done an excellent job with this project! Since we’re talking about movies here may we also say that The LEGO Movie (which also received a TripAdvisor rating of 4 1/2 stars) was another film that had top ratings on the site. So what can you learn from this? Creating social media content is one of the best ways to market your brand, but it’s even better when that content isn’t advertising any product or service. This brings us back to our opening statement where we say that “social media marketing isn’t all about pushing your brand out there”. For your audience to care about what you’re trying to sell them they need to know who you are and why they should buy from you.

This last example is similar in some ways since it uses Vine videos, Snapchat stories, and YouTube channel content. What GoPro did with its social media content was give consumers the ability to create their advertisements for them. And what Blendtec did was show off what it can do by having people blend random objects. The main idea here is that giving your audience some power may just put you on top of the world.

The North Face, Oreo, and Coca-Cola are all brands we believe will be successful in the future based on their current marketing campaigns. GoPro and Blendtec on the other hand seem like they already have a hold of their target market’s attention so they don’t need to worry too much about growing in size.

As we mentioned before, these 5 Marketing Campaigns teach us several things about how to market yourself online while making sure not to overdo it. What are some other ways companies can make sure not to overdo it? We think one way they can do this is by giving their audience the ability to create content about themselves instead of them trying to make things for their consumers.

We hope you learned a little bit from these 5 Marketing Campaigns and how social media can be used to get more customers! Thanks for reading and feel free to comment below.