#AATStudyHacks - Integrating a social media campaign with the marketing strategy of the association
Success achieved
2 weeks and 81 entries for a competition held across social media platforms - How AAT linked the #AATStudyHacks social media campaign with the association’s overall marketing strategy to engage and provide value to their members
- Website
- https://www.aat.org.uk
- Project dates
June – July 2016
Project team
AAT’s online community team:
- James Brant, Online Community Manager
- Paul Coombes, Online Community Executive
- Siana Tulley, Online Community Coordinator
Tools & Systems
- Woobox - to build competition pages using a drag and drop completion builder
- Hastagify - to identify the best hashtag to use and to check if they are being used by any other brand
Introduction
We were faced with two challenges of how we better utilise user generated content and how we reward our members for doing so. We wanted to run a competition that encouraged sharing of this content that we could then reward our community for being part of it.
To do this we needed to create an entry mechanism that could live on social media channels, promote this content through organic and paid media and amplify user contributions at every opportunity.
Discovery
A key element missing from our social media presence at the start of this year was rewarding our community. We’d given away some freebies in the past but we really needed to provide an opportunity for our members to get stuck in and show off their skills as qualified and trainee accountants.
Every day we are blown away by how much knowledge our online community has and even more so by their willingness to share it all with other AAT members across social media. From funky flash cards, to accounting anagrams, we’ve seen a tonne of great study hacks. Unfortunately due to the nature of social media, content shared directly with us doesn’t reach the audience that would benefit most from it. With this in mind; we created the #AATStudyHacks competition with the intention of celebrating the creativity and knowledge of the members, teachers and professionals of our online community.
By successfully sharing the UGC we increase the support available to our student members during their studies and offer additional support that will ultimately allow them to progress from students to full members. In addition, by rewarding this behaviour we look to strengthen that relationship with key individuals and influencers in order to increase their affinity to our organisation and retain their membership.
Objectives
- To gather a tonne of shareable, inspiring, user-generated content and build a stronger relationship with our membership on social media, evidenced by increased engagement and traffic to our website.
- To encourage members and tutors to share their top study tips on social media, in turn creating a stronger sense of unity and support amongst our online community.
Activities
Competition prize
As we were already aware of the kinds of user generated content the campaign would generate,
we started with thinking around how to reward the user’s participation.
After some short research, we were aware that our students, especially the already engaged ones, were keen to receive AAT branded products. We would also often receive requests for AAT notebooks so we decided that this would be deemed as a respected prize at minimal cost to AAT. We recognised that the ability to reward multiple users with a prize would garner more content than offering one large value item.
Once we had decided on the reward, our next challenge was identifying the mechanic to run the campaign. For this we used Woobox, one of several suppliers who enable users to build competition pages using a drag and drop completion builder.
Woobox enabled us to create a landing page to drive users to in order to explain the competition in more detail. It would also create a gallery of the submissions that were entered via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, by including our hashtag, #AATStudyHacks. We identified the best hashtag to use and checked on hashtagify that it wasn’t being used elsewhere or by another brand.
Example of social media post created by AAT
In order to help our participants with their submissions we created examples of the types of content that we were looking for; this could have been in video, image or written copy. Our budget only permitted us to offer images as examples but considering this would be the most common format for the user entries, these examples proved to be highly effective.
Once our assets were built and the landing / competition page was finished on Woobox, we launched the campaign. We pre-scheduled multiple posts across Facebook and Twitter, creating a variety of posts that encouraged participation or offered examples of how to enter the competition.
In addition to this, we used Facebook and Twitter advertising to target our students and promoted the competition into their newsfeeds. This enabled us to ensure we reached a much wider audience.
Once the competition was underway, we maintained the momentum by making sure we shared users entries. This enabled us to continue to promote the competition with new content and reduced the chances of fatigue by over using the same posts. We were also able to reinforce our relationship with these users by recognising their contribution.
Once a competition closes, Woobox offers the functionality to select winners at random from the entries and we were able to then contact each of them to arrange the posting of their notebooks directly to them.
Finally, we were able to share the gallery to our student audience as a resource for them to find study tips, equally, we were also able to download this database and have started to utilise the content to create new posts for our own channels growing the engagement with our own content.
Innovation
The campaign linked extremely well with AAT’s overall marketing strategy for student members, focusing on providing them with practical, fun and relevant content to get them through their training. An area we’ve always struggled with in terms of our student membership is supporting our distance learners through their studies; they don’t have as much support as those members studying with training providers and this is, in many cases, reflected in their performance.
This campaign complemented AAT’s marketing strategy by empowering our distance learners with extra support, essential for them to completing their course and also highlighting for those distance learners, the amazing support network that is available to them in AAT’s online community.
Challenges
The time scale in which to plan and deliver the competition was fairly compressed, we did not have a significant amount of time from conception of the campaign until it’s launch. This meant we were not able to integrate it with our other digital communications as much as we would have liked.
Initially, we were concerned that the level of content that we would receive from our community would not be of a high enough quality that other students would find it useful or of interest. However, when we started to share the best examples it allowed our participants to see what the expectations of the entries were.
Ultimately, rather than trying to figure out what our students find most useful, we let them tell us by putting the whiteboard and marker pen in their hands and by getting our members to share their top study tips, not only did it serve to help others in their AAT training, it also helped to reaffirm their own knowledge for themselves – it’s like the Roman philosopher, Seneca said: “While we teach, we learn.”
Achievements
The competition allowed us to get to know our membership in an entirely different way. We learned more about what motivates them, what gets them through the difficulties of studying our qualification and most importantly we provided an opportunity for them to share ideas and support each other through their AAT training.
Across the 2 weeks in which the competition was held, we received 81 entries, resulting in the #AATStudyHacks competition being one of our most engaged social media competitions.
#AATStudyHacks - statistics
Stats aside, we’re really happy with the outcome of this campaign, not only did we deliver greater value for our online community by way of prize giving, we also provided a platform for our members to share their expertise with each other and celebrate them for doing so.
Financials
The competition did not have a significant budget, however, with a very small investment, we were able to achieve some surprising results and ultimately form a stronger relationship with influencers within our community. Not only have we been able to support them with their studies we have also managed to discover new pieces of content that will help future students with their studies.
What would we do differently?
Work closer with training providers and third parties to help promote the content. If we had a longer lead time, we would better integrate with our student E-newsletter and rally support from our key partners.
Feedback & Testimonials
Thanks @youraat Super motivated to take lots of new study notes! #aatstudyhacks #competition #AAT #bookkeeping #finance #accounts #fanaatic
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