Objective
The name of my ad campaign was “The Finals Countdown”, and the main goal was to share my meme with the hopes of going viral. By incorporating different tools like Imgur, Twitter, Twitter Ads, and Facebook, I created a detailed editorial calendar that was followed throughout the campaign. In addition, within my plan, I inserted my goals for the assignment, my strategy for outreach, and objectives that could be measured at the end of my campaign. More specifically, I laid out four different objectives in my marketing plan:
1. Earn at least 500 views on my meme (hopefully close to 1,000) on Imgur = Achieved
- My Imgur view count reached 1,042 views by the last day my campaign. I not only surpassed the minimum requirement of 500 views within the first day, but I reached my mini-goal of over 1,000 views.
2. Earn 10+ points on Imgur = Achieved
- When I first downloaded the Imgur app, I was unsure what “points” meant. After playing around on the news feed, I realized that they closely resemble a thumbs up/down on a post. After discovering this, I set an objective to receive at least 10+ points on my Imgur meme. By the end of my campaign, I received a total of 15 points on my post (13 up and 2 down).
3. Earn an engagement rate of close to 5% from my Twitter Ad post = Achieved
- After realizing that my Twitter account only has 15 followers, I decided to set the bar fairly low in terms of engagement rate. Though my advertised tweet reached an engagement rate of over 7% in the beginning, it unfortunately began to drop as the days continued; my tweet finished with an engagement rate of 4.96%, which accomplished my goal. As a whole, my post received 89 engagements through 1,795 total impressions.
4. Earn 5+ likes on a Facebook post promoting the meme = Achieved
- I usually do not earn too much engagement on Facebook, so I felt that 5 likes would be a realistic objective. In fact, with one post, I earned exactly 5 likes (4 thumbs up and 1 heart).
Imgur Meme
Overall, the theme of my meme worked well. The stress of college and finals is something that many can relate to, and I think that my title of “The Finals Countdown” helped draw in audiences on all of my platforms. By choosing a topic that is relatable to millions around the world (especially around this time of year), I was not surprised that I reached my goal of 500 views within the first day.
Twitter Webcard and Twitter Ads
College students… watch your back #NHsmc
— Austin Towns (@austinntowns) November 5, 2018
For my advertised Twitter Web Card, I decided to create a daily budget of $1 per day. As this was my first-time using Twitter Ads, I was unsure as to what was the best strategy for splitting up my budget. After looking at the end results, I found that each day earned at least 150 impressions, including the last day which earned 844 impressions. I think this strategy worked well, and I would most likely do it again for a future campaign.
Other Analysis
On Imgur, I chose five tags that I felt would help generate the exposure needed to reach the 500-view mark; the tags included “funny”, “memes”, “meme”, “college”, and “stress”. I felt it would be wise to choose a group of tags that had both larger and smaller audiences. For example, the tags “funny” and “memes” both combined for 2.4 million followers. Though this may sound great, I noticed that unless my post was very popular within the community, my meme would get lost in the news feeds as there are many other people posting with the same tags. Therefore, I chose to add the other three tags of “meme”, “college”, and “stress”, which had a combined following of only 58,000 users. As my post received a lot of early views/engagement, my meme stayed at the top of the popular section for each of those lesser-followed tags during the seven-day period. I discovered that this strategy worked well for my campaign; I received a lot of views from the heavily-followed tags early in my campaign, and as the week progressed, I believe that most of my views came from the other tags as my picture lingered on their popular pages.
For the most part, my marketing campaign strategy on Twitter and Facebook was successful. Not including the advertised tweet, I found that my tweets directly from Imgur received the most engagement. For example, both Imgur embedded tweets combined for 31 engagements and an engagement rate of 16.3%. In contrast, I tried two other Twitter strategies throughout the campaign that did not work very well. Along with using a quote tweet of an earlier post, I decided to draft a tweet with a GIF and a regular link to my meme in the caption. These two tweets combined for one engagement and a 1.4% engagement rate. I did not expect this result, but it was clear that my followers were not drawn in by this strategy. If I was given the opportunity to complete this project again, I would change my editorial calendar to include more tweets directly from Imgur.
FINAL ENGAGEMENT
My Imgur meme received 1,042 views during the campaign , and has now reached a total of 1,227 views since it was posted on November 5th.
Hi Austin,
This meme was honestly so hilarious. It’s really impressive how you were able to get 1,042 Imgur views, but I am not surprised because your meme was great. It was really smart of you to use Facebook to share your meme because of its high reach. I should have done that! It was also a genius idea to incorporate a GIF with your meme.
Best,
Josh
Austin, your meme was hilarious. It was relatable, comical and resonated well with your target audience. Your analysis was well thought through and extremely detailed. I liked how you included your Twitter web card campaign and metrics to give the audience a clearer understanding to how the meme worked, and what didn’t work. I liked how you included other tags to optimize the meme and gain more likes and views.