Old Spice Body Wash, New Social Media Strategy

I’m really excited about this week’s social media success story because it involves one of the freshest smelling brands on the internet. Old spice, is a brand of Procter and Gamble, and maker of body wash, deodorant, and a line of various products. They are managed by Weiden + Kennedy, a portland based advertising agency. What Makes Old Spice so interesting on social media? To start, they launched an awesome ‘Swagger’ campaign which completely changed the face of the brand previously associated with the past and elderly men. Their newer campaign ‘The man your man can smell like’ helped them become one of the largest sponsored channels on Youtube to date. Let’s check out some factors in their campaign that led to success and how your business can learn from it.

Real-time interactions

Old spice did what many brands struggle to do every day, and that’s to create a personal connection with their fans. It didn’t come easy, but it wasn’t impossible. They created about 205 videos on Youtube spanning 30 seconds each. Old Spice was connecting with their customers by directly answering their questions in real time. No waiting around, no emailing, nothing. As the tweets came in, their video productions began. It wasn’t a traditional strategy, but it was genius. They did this in a creative way, and transformed their actor into ‘The Old Spice Guy.’ Before they knew it, they had more interactions than they could handle. By engaging directly with fans and creating personal messages, Old Spice gained solid traction on Youtube. So much, that more people watched the Old Spice videos in 24 hours than those who watched Obama’s presidential victory speech.

Shareable content

The best way to have your content shared is to make it easily shareable. Makes sense right? Still, so many businesses and marketers alike struggle to understand what this means. There is no specific platform where sharing is the easiest. Strategies that work on one platform may not work on another. Old Spice used video interaction with their audience because it was the best way to resonate with them. Old Spice responded to questions in these videos that were easy to embed, link, and share across multiple platforms and devices. Aside from making content shareable, it also needs to be entertaining, charming, or funny. In some situations, all three may apply in order to emotionally connect with an audience.

Relevance

We’re all curious as to how a brand can make it look so easy. The Old Spice ‘the man your man could smell like’ campaign was relevant to their audience because it targeted both men and women to start a conversation about body wash. They brainstormed on ways to make such a simple product worth talking about and nailed the content spot on using material they collected in real time. So how do we find relevant content? Go on Facebook, Twitter, and any platform that your audience is on and see what they’re talking about. See what their interests are and what they care about. What’s relevant to you is not always relevant to your audience, so find what they are looking for and deliver it in a creative, yet personal way.

Platform Integration

Using Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube, Old Spice structured their content in order to appeal to demographics across various platforms. While the content was the same, they used each platform to compliment the other thus creating an entire social media campaign as opposed to sticking to one channel. Driving their efforts into one big picture allowed them to manage the campaign as a whole and track their social media efforts into ROI conversions. It also drove followers from one platform to the next thus creating an overall following from their audience.

The lesson in social media

After measuring results of the four week campaign, Old Spice found their sales to be up by 106%. Many people were not impressed as their competitor Gillette produced an increase in sales by 277%. They did this by offering a buy 1 get 1 free coupon and using TV ads. The difference? Old Spice spent a fraction of the cost in advertising, and created so many new relationships with their customers. As we’re starting to see in business, return of investments can be measured numerically, but return on relationships add a value that no amount of currency can purchase.

If you keep all of these elements in line, you’ll begin to notice how they are connected. Real-time is what drives the internet and we’re constantly living in the moment of things. Making those moments easily shareable increases the likelihood of this content being shared. Making content relevant and easy to integrate across various platforms is what will allow your social media efforts to thrive.

Are there any other tips you may have to create successful social media campaigns or do you have any questions we can answer in future blogs? Leave us a comment or tweet us at @BoxlessMedia