Tag: Content Marketing

Case Study: Haggai

Posted on by Janay Boyer

Overview 

Haggai International is a Christian leadership development nonprofit dedicated to equipping indigenous leaders to share the Gospel and conduct ministry activities in 189 countries across the globe. In 2019, Haggai enlisted See.Spark.Go to execute social media strategies across Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, and to support paid social campaigns to increase donations and program admissions. As a result of the partnership, Haggai has gained 8,610 new followers, generated new leads for their international program and secured national PR coverage. 

Deliverables

  • Communications Playbook
  • Social Media Strategy
  • Blog and Long-form Print Content
  • Paid Growth Campaigns
  • Paid Donation Campaigns
  • Seasonal PR

Results 

  • Implemented content gathering strategy for generating stories from 189 countries
  • More than DOUBLED social audience in 3 years
  • 565 Applications for 12-week virtual Haggai Leader Experience at a $6.12 cost per lead
  • Secured Coverage in Christianity Today and Outreach Magazine

Thinking Like a ‘Zee

Posted on by Dave Burns

One thriving niche of See.Spark.Go’s service offerings is our work in franchise marketing. Partnering with Fortune 500 clients is often accompanied by the excitement of nationwide reach and the welcome challenge of keeping up with the best of the best in multiple industries. So what exactly goes into franchise marketing?

In order to speak to an audience who’s interested in expanding their portfolio to include franchise ownership, you must think like a franchisee.

They’ve got options.

Around 10% of U.S. businesses are franchises.* So it’s safe to assume your audience is already considering other options. That means they need to know a brand’s unique selling point. The sooner that differentiation can be highlighted, the sooner a brand sets itself apart from the sizable pack of competition.

It’s a long game.

Franchise owners are about to make a substantial investment of their money and time. They can’t be expected to make a six-figure investment right after learning about it. Our content team nurtures franchise prospects through social media, digital and email campaigns to establish trust, credibility and consistency. However a potential ‘zee does their research, they’ll find valuable content to help them fall in love with our clients’ brands.

Capital is a must.

Every ideal franchisee has one thing in common: they have cash to make a splash. This isn’t your coupon-clipping demographic. Franchising is a high-investment table. We focus our messaging on aspects like ROI, industry growth and how well each business sustains external challenges, like a recession. At the end of the day, potential franchisees seek confidence in the benefits and profitability of their investment. 

So how do we find and attract zees?

More like, “What tools are we NOT using to find and attract them?” Our franchise marketing efforts run the gamut form press releases and print ads, to social media, email, trade shows, digital ads and text messages. The SSG digital team uses a well-crafted cocktail of digital ad types that start with the highest-impression, low-conversion ads, funneling down to highly-targeted, high-conversion ads that truly drive lead conversions. With all of our service areas combined, SSG drives franchise prospects into the funnel and converts them into proud franchise owners.

And that’s how we take leads from A to ‘zee.

*U.S. Census Bureau

Case Study: Once Like a Spark

Posted on by Avery Carson

Overview 

Once Like A Spark is a female-owned photography and videography collective serving clients in select cities across the U.S. to capture all of life’s moments — from engagements, to weddings, to family portraits and more. Their team of experts have mastered each part of the wedding photography and videography planning process to allow clients and artists to stress less.

Strategy 

See.Spark.Go managed Once Like a Spark’s organic Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest presence and executes digital strategy in 25 key markets to capture leads for potential wedding clients.

Results 

In 2021, our strategic efforts helped the Once Like A Spark team generate the most leads and highest sales numbers in the 11-year history of the company. Additionally, engagement across Facebook and Instagram increased by more than 40% year-over-year, with high-quality metrics like comments (+140%), saves (+106.2%) and Story replies (+190%) increasing the most.

Case Study: WORLD Watch

Posted on by Natalie Chapo

Overview 

WORLD Watch is a current events program produced by Christian journalists that keeps teens up to date on what’s happening in the world through highly engaging and biblically sound 10-minute videos. The subscription-based program helps young people understand today’s news through headlines, news briefs, and feature stories, and develops a child’s critical thinking skills and discernment. WORLD Watch provides parents and teachers a safe, reliable video alternative and a positive way for their teens to spend screen time.

Strategy 

See.Spark.Go manages WORLD Watch’s organic social media and paid digital advertising to bring awareness to this new program that launched in August 2020. Through influencer outreach, strategic digital goals, and consistent community engagement on WORLD Watch social channels, our team has elevated their brand awareness.

Results 

Since hiring See.Spark.Go in 2020, WORLD Watch’s online presence has continued to expand and grow year after year leading to 14.6 M impressions and 7,000 new WORLD Watch subscribers with a $30 advertising cost per new subscriber in 2021.

Testimonial

“SSG team members are highly skilled, personable, and passionate about what they do. Thanks to them, we can move forward with confidence because we have the support and expertise that we need.” 

– Claire Hopple, WORLD Content Strategist. 

Case Study: It’s a 10 Haircare $10K Giveaway

Posted on by Callie Young

Overview 

It’s a 10 Haircare is a female-owned professional haircare line offering exceptional multipurpose products. It began with a single product, Miracle Leave-In, which quickly rose to fame through pro hairstylists who shared the cult-favorite product with their clients. Today, its products are sold globally in more than 25,000 professional independent salons and 15,000 professional salon chains like Ulta and Regis.

National Love Your Hair Day Sweepstakes Campaign 

It’s a 10 Haircare approached See.Spark.Go to help plan and execute an exciting 10-day sweepstakes to celebrate its national holiday, National Love Your Hair Day. The sweepstakes was held on It’s a 10 Haircare’s social media channels, with 10 random winners selected to win $10,000 each at the campaign close. 

The primary goals for the campaign were lead generation — opting into the email list — and Instagram follower growth. In order to achieve these goals, we asked that each entrant 1) follow @itsa10haircare on Instagram and 2) fill out the entry form to share their email address. For additional entries, entrants could share the in-feed giveaway post to their Instagram Story once per day, which extended our organic reach on the initial giveaway post and drummed up more excitement throughout the giveaway period. 

To increase entries, we executed two paid campaigns with the objectives of 1) engagement and 2) lead generation, which concluded with an average cost per lead of $2.95 for their primary goal of new email subscribers. We also worked with It’s a 10 Haircare’s press team to amplify influencer content sharing about the giveaway.

At campaign close, we had generated the following results in a 10-day period: 

  • 1.6 million+ impressions garnered
  • 378,046 engagements generated
  • 12,919 net Instagram followers gained
  • 19,496 emails captured

It Takes Two to Tango

Posted on by Jennifer Mbala-Nkanga

Working with an agency can be daunting, challenging and regrettable or it can be capacity-creating, inspiring and dare we say it? FUN! Every potential partner, current client or former relationship at See.Spark.Go has heard us say two words: Relationship and Results. 

This mantra has made its way from proposals and vision statements to annual reviews and client-health checks. We have found that the most successful agency-client relationships we have boil down to our relationships with the people we work with and the results we deliver. If we don’t have results, we all know the partnership will never last — no matter how much we enjoy working with one another — but equally important, if we don’t have a relationship, our performance becomes transactional and will never survive a mistake, budget constraint or change in the tides of leadership, trends or teams. 

Here’s how we can both succeed:

How to get the most out of your agency

  • Be responsive
  • Show gratitude
  • Get excited when it’s right, tell us when it’s wrong
  • Give us margin to be creative and produce great work
  • Trust us

How to best serve as an agency partner

  • Communicate – often and customized
  • Be the expert you were hired to be
  • Strive for continuous improvement and innovation!
  • Know the goal and the challenges/obstacles
  • Survey the market landscape and know where your client best fits 

What have we missed? Are there intangibles you have seen that make your agency/client relationships succeed? We’d love to learn from you!

Striking the Right Tone: How Marketers Should Communicate in the Age of Coronavirus

Posted on by Jennifer Mbala-Nkanga

As the old adage goes, timing is everything. As strategy partners to our clients, it’s our job to identify good timing and to make the most of the opportunities it presents. This includes knowing how to strike the right tone when the going gets tough and things go viral (literally).

From terror attacks to recessions to natural disasters, marketers and their agencies have faced plenty of challenges before—but the worldwide COVID impact is, well, unprecedented.

The messages we publish are under a microscope, and rightly so. Curating just the right tone for your communication approach is imperative to your brand’s success through this temporary, yet highly sensitive time. Here are our top five tips to help brands strike the right tone during difficult times:

  1. Keep it human. See.Spark.Go President & Co-founder Brittany Thoms says it best: “It’s all about staying relevant and human.” Audiences are far more likely to give to, buy from or support people-forward organizations over faceless brands. It’s imperative that brands carry an empathetic tone that fits whatever its audience is experiencing in the moment.
  2. Stay aspirational. Shed a light! Your audience is ultimately looking to you to be a resource, example or inspiration for the type of life they want to live. Keep producing the good stuff—just make sure it doesn’t read as “oblivious” to current events.
  3. Check it twice, or more. Brands are currently reevaluating the tone of their ads and social content. Many have had to pull spots, shelve already-produced work for another time, or retool existing content. While it may feel like wasted effort to scrap that awesome campaign you worked so hard on, if it no longer makes sense within the global climate, you (and your leadership, clients, and consumers) will be so glad you decided to pivot. 
  4. Humor and sarcasm aren’t out! Just run it through several sensitivity filters before hitting “publish.”
  5. Be generous. Consumers are looking to see what you can offer to the community in these times. Are you adapting your operational services to meet current needs, or possibly reimagining your business model to focus on customer convenience? Keep working to create value for those you serve by meeting them where they’re at, and you will be rewarded.

We hope you will view this time as an opportunity to evaluate your brand through a new lens and lean into better understanding your audience. Approach them as if you were approaching yourself—as humans who are also navigating uncharted waters. They may not want to be “sold” to right now, and we have to respect that. Take this time instead to cultivate community and foster loyalty among your audience, and they’ll continue to support you in the long term.

Social media for brands requires a deep understanding of your target market, which is why See.Spark.Go invests heavily in time and resources to help brands listen and respond to the audiences they serve. For more on See.Spark.Go’s crisis management approach and how we can serve your brand with social media management and tone development, get in touch.

Case Study: Airstream

Posted on by Ashlyn Belding

+87m

SOCIAL MEDIA IMPRESSIONS ACROSS FACEBOOK, TWITTER, INSTAGRAM + LINKEDIN

+674k

LINK CLICKS ACROSS ALL CHANNELS

+146%

INCREASE IN ENGAGEMENT PER POST ON FACEBOOK

+80%

INCREASE IN INSTAGRAM FOLLOWERS YOY

+10x

MORE LINKEDIN ENGAGEMENT YOY SINCE SSG TOOK OVER

 
 
“Overall, our experience has been excellent. The See.Spark.Go team has positioned Airstream as social media leaders, consistently growing and engaging our audience. We are a dynamic organization and so is SSG. They have helped us find the balance of honoring our history while simultaneously celebrating our desire to move the industry forward.” 
– Carey L. Walley, Airstream Director of Marketing

 

 

 

 

FOSTERING A COMMUNITY OF DREAMERS

Airstream, manufacturer of the iconic “silver bullet” Airstream travel trailer, is the longest-tenured recreational vehicle manufacturer in the world. Since 2012, See.Spark.Go has worked alongside Airstream to foster its online community and promote the brand’s #LiveRiveted lifestyle to current and potential Airstream owners. With creativity and enthusiasm, See.Spark.Go has led the charge to foster a robust online community of more than 600,000 social media followers across eight social media channels. The two specific goals for SSG’s partnership with Airstream are: to increase online growth by expanding our community of Airstreamers + Airdreamers and to foster community engagement so our online audience will become even more invested in the brand.

BEHIND THE RIVETS

See.Spark.Go creates, curates and manages content for Airstream’s full family of social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Additionally, our team manages brand partnerships, new product launches, influencer collaborations, event activations and Airstream’s #EndlessCaravan program, which sends travelers on cross-country road trips to tell the story of a certain mission or cause. Our team of social media strategists engage on the platforms daily, answering customer service questions and stirring the community toward specific events, promotions or products. Each week we track and report what’s working and what can be adjusted, making our content calendar an ever-evolving document based on the community’s real time responses.

Hugh Acheson Endless Caravan Airstream

RESULTS

In the seven years we have supported Airstream, its online presence has grown exponentially, spanning more than half a million total followers across eight social media channels. In 2018, the Instagram community grew 80% and engagement per post on Facebook increased by 146%. Throughout the years, our team has created and executed creative social media strategies to ensure the online success of multiple new product launches, including Airstream’s first ever “smart” trailer, an innovative fiberglass trailer, a co-branded

Class-B touring coach and Airstream Connected, Airstream’s Wi-Fi connectivity option in partnership with AT&T. We’ve also assisted in facilitating partnerships with celebrity chef Hugh Acheson, British race car driver Justin Bell, American Girl, Spartan Race, Adobe MAX, LifeStraw, the National Forest Foundation and many more.

Crafting the Perfect Media Mix

Posted on by Jennifer Mbala-Nkanga

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, SnapChat, Instagram Stories—wait, Facebook has Stories now, too? And what are Twitter Moments? Throw in a LinkedIn and Glassdoor strategy, Yelp monitoring and a pineapple and cherry on top, and you have the opposite of a cocktail meant to help you let go of a week’s worth of stress.

Creating the perfect social media mix — not to mention crafting the content to go to each channel — is overwhelming for the best of digital marketers. Working with dozens of brands of varying size, scope and type, we preach sustainability and consistency, but when establishing a brand, it’s also important to have multiple touch points to engage your audience. Many entrepreneurs think the easiest solution is to prioritize one social network where they know their audience is (can I hear an amen from our Instagram-only friends?). This approach can not only miss potential audiences but it can keep you from sharing your whole story and engaging with your audience in ways that best achieve your goals with little additional effort.

The perfect social media mix tells the right story to the right audience at the right time. Think of it like having that beer at the baseball game or the bottle of champagne on your anniversary! Timing and environment are everything.

Here’s how to create a holistic social media strategy in the most efficient and effective way possible.

DEFINE YOUR WHY: YOUR GOALS

What value do you add to people? Why do you exist? What do you want people to do? Often we think that engagement and awareness are all these bad boys of social media can do, but it is possible to use them to increase the number of products you sell by 50 percent, get 5,000 people to subscribe to your newsletter or have 500 people register for your workshop.

DEVELOP YOUR HOW: YOUR STRATEGY

A social media strategy encompasses the channels you’re going to leverage your story through, how often and in what way. You can determine the best channels to use by discovering where your audience engages (not just has accounts), which channel’s format helps you achieve your goals, and where your content works best. The cadence question is best answered by testing, evaluating, and optimizing. We love tag reports in Sprout Social that allow you to compare and contrast posts by theme or timing. Other reports allow us to compare engagement per day to how many posts were sent. For both, it’s essential to be intentional with A/B testing that compares multiple weeks and not just a day here and there.

DEVELOP YOUR WHAT: YOUR CONTENT

Once you determine where you’re going to post and how often, the secret sauce is what you post. We love the 80/20 rule (80 percent of engagement will come from 20 percent of your effort). In other words, do more with less. Creating a communications calendar will help you leverage that 20 percent of effort (quality content!) as far as it can go.

1. Identify your themes. Pick the TOP 3 core messages or big ideas and TOP 3 calls to action to expound on throughout the year. Align them across the year at the top of a spreadsheet.

2. Develop a content pyramid. Put all of your communication channels down the side, starting with foundational content pieces (i.e., blogs) down to the channel with the shortest content (i.e., social media).

3. Leverage foundational content. Themes help you plan blogs, which you can then trickle down to a blurb in an email, make the headline a tweet, an image with a caption on Instagram, and a quote and link on Facebook to drive people back to the full post.

4. Drill down deeper. A social media calendar will expand your row for social into a full, day-by-day content calendar. In the same way, one content piece can be leveraged across different channels, but more posts per day or week means more categories. Here’s an example of categories that create a balance of content across your channel:

  1. Spotlight people inside, around, and affected by your organization
  2. Inform or educate about your industry, pain points, etc., to connect to why you or your product exists
  3. Entertain your audience with inspirational, funny, or engaging tidbits
  4. Curate content by thought leaders that aligns with your mission or vision
  5. Promote your initiatives with clear calls to action

Once you’ve defined your why, how, and what, you will be able to fill in the blanks with the right content to reach the right audience at the right time. Before you know it, that stressful social media cocktail will drive the results you need to be sipping a more delightful Mai Tai on Friday night.

Download Rising Tide Society’s Social Media Guide E-book here for more resources from a variety of social media experts.