Bring your digital strategy to life with an App-driven campaign

Execute a high-impact, integrated campaign that works across your digital platforms to support your audience growth and engagement objectives.

Fabrik's suite of applications can enhance your traditional audience engagement campaign by adding a powerful real-time element, along with sophisticated campaign insights and metrics you can leverage in-flight to increase your outcomes.

To help you get more comfortable with executing app-based campaigns, we'd like to share some guidelines on how you can get started.

Let's imagine an example of a campaign that can more clearly illustrate these steps. How about something like 'Create your own Christmas Jingle?'

For this kind of campaign, we'll be asking our app members to send us a voice-note of themselves singing their most festive Christmas tune. The winner at the end would be the person who'd sent through the best one!

Step 1: Plan your campaign

The first step in this process is to consider what you'd like to get out of the campaign, and start to plan the activities required to achieve those goals.

Determine your Campaign Objectives:

The objective/s you'd be aiming to achieve with an app-based campaign should ideally support your Business Strategy, such as:

• growing your digital audience or membership,

• increasing engagement, or

• obtaining more meaningful demographic or psychographic information about your membership.

For each campaign, consider any particular objectives you have around audience growth or engagement, and whether there are specific audience insights you'd like to gain or habits you'd like your audience to form.

These could be objectives such as:

• Educate your audience on how to use key functionality of the app i.e. sending voice-notes or images.

• Increase the size of your app audience through new downloads.

• Increase the size of your addressable audience through new registrations.

• Enhance audience insights through the addition of new profile fields or through surveys and polls.

• Create a compelling case study you can take to future advertisers or sponsors.

In our Christmas Jingle campaign example, we want to increase the size of our audience and engagement through new app downloads and registrations, as well as introduce our audience to the concept of sending voice-notes.

Create your Campaign Mechanic:

Consider how you'd like to invite your audience to enter the campaign in a manner that aligns with your objectives. Ensure that the mechanic is easy enough to follow so it does not deter your audience from entering.

For example, in our Christmas Jingle campaign, we would want to encourage our members to

1. Download the Fabrik app.

2. Register your profile.

3. And send us your most festive Christmas Jingle via the Contact Us conversation!

You'd also want to make sure your mechanic is very clear when it's being mentioned within social media promotions or during your on-air broadcast.

For more fun campaign ideas, check out this video with promotions expert Jonathan Lumley!

Choose Inventory to support your Campaign:

There are a number of in-app inventory options you can use to support your campaign objectives within the app, including a promotional billboard, or even a pre-roll audio that can be added to your live-stream or podcasts, or both!

An example of a campaign billboard

Within our Christmas Jingle campaign, we're adding a festive billboard and an audio pre-roll (a clip that plays before our livestream and each podcast) to remind our audience about the campaign and how to enter.

Read more about the various kinds of advertising options available.

Engage with potential Advertisers: When planning the campaign, consider whether it would work best as an internal engagement campaign, or whether you'll invite an advertiser to be a part of it.

This may be a good opportunity to get one or more of your advertisers or partners acquainted with how to use the app, and demonstrate how their investment can yield pleasing results.

Consider offering sponsored prizes to incentivise your audience to engage with the campaign, and ensure they pose a large-enough incentive to obtain the engagement you're looking for.

STEP 2: CONFIGURE YOUR APP

At the heart of any Fabrik-powered campaign is your mobile app, and using it effectively throughout the campaign is important to maintain a high level of engagement and interest with your audience.

Plan your App Engagement and Content:

The way the app's Messaging functionality is employed is a key part of sustaining audience engagement throughout the campaign.

During our Christmas Jingle campaign, we might consider adding a dedicated channel for the duration of the campaign where we could share regular updates about the campaign, celebrate winners, etc.

Consider whether you'd like to make it a Conversation in which people would be able to chat about the competition, or a Channel in which only Trusted Members in your organisation can share information that everyone else can view.

An example of a Conversation

Watch this video to learn how to use Conversations and Channels more effectively.

Create your campaign using Campaign Manager:

To make it easier to monitor and measure the impact and engagement of your campaign, you'd want to track responses to the campaign using Smashboard's Campaign Manager.

Set up your campaign to view all entries

Campaign Manager empowers you to enter a particular keyword associated with the campaign that would be monitored throughout, and facilitates the selection of winners from those who've submitted entries using that keyword.

In the event that your campaign is active across other messaging platforms, you also have the option to consolidate all entries from Twitter, Facebook or even SMS.

Update your app's Profile Fields:

Consider the kinds of information you'd like to collect from your audience, and use your campaign as an opportunity to encourage people to update these fields.

Profile fields are configured within the Community Centre application and can be set as 'Required' or 'Optional.'

STEP 3: set up your Promotions

In order to ensure the success of your campaign, there are a number of activities you can embark upon to promote your new campaign and create awareness.

Use Social Media to create awareness about the campaign & drive engagement:

• Use all your social media platforms to create awareness around your campaign, mention the entry mechanic often and share information about winners to create buzz and excitement.

• Put together a content plan to begin a few days before the campaign and to run throughout the course of the campaign

• Set aside some budget to boost specific posts promoting the campaign within which you'll ask your followers or those targeted with the content to download your app.

An example of a promotional social media post

Co-ordinate any other Promotional Activities: Consider how else you could create awareness around your campaign.

• Rally your internal team around incorporating the campaign into their routine communication initiatives like monthly emailers or your on-air broadcast.

• If your organisation is a radio station, consider prepping your presenters with live-reads they can incorporate into each show or include your on-air audience in the fun by getting your presenters to read out the winners on air, or better yet, call the winners back on air and ask them to answer the call with a specific phrase to win.

Step 4: execute & Monitor your campaign

It's now time to execute! During the duration of your campaign, your aim will be to optimise the effectiveness and impact of the campaign to provide the best ROI possible.

Looking at the data on a daily basis will help inform "in-flight" tweaks that need to be made to the execution, and help keep all important stakeholders informed on the campaign progress.

Create in-campaign analyses for internal and external stakeholders:

Keep all stakeholders informed throughout the campaign with regular updates. Consider including information like new downloads, new registrations, daily engagements via Smashboard's Campaign Manager and social media engagement.

You can obtain all this information easily using the Metrics application.

Watch this video to learn about the engagement information available within Metrics.

If you've included an additional action in your campaign mechanic like asking your audience to update their Profile Fields, you may want to include some information about how many individuals have updated those fields.

Get in touch with our Customer Success team if you'd like access to insights or information that are not yet available within Metrics.

Step 5: Create your post-campaign Reporting

Fabrik offers powerful data and audience insights after the fact, which you can use to demonstrate value to your advertisers or impact to your team.

Create a post-campaign analysis:

Use Fabrik Metrics to create an insightful post-campaign analysis which your stakeholders can use to gauge the impact of the campaign.

Create a campaign case study:

Once you've created your post-campaign analysis, you may want to package it in a different way, to appeal to your press office for added publicity, or send out to your Sales teams which they can use to engage with potential advertisers.

Further Info:

• Read this case study around how one of our customers successfully implemented a Fabrik-powered campaign.

• Watch our recent webinar around how a Fabrik customer achieved over 1 million campaign entries!