About
As a business with a core ethos of smarter working, Powwownow is a conference call company that encourages businesses to have smarter interactions. The company believes time is much better spent breaking free from email chains and traditional ways of working. So, with technology enabling employees to work in a more agile, flexible way, Powwownow helps businesses to increase productivity and ultimately, work smarter.
Strategy
Conference calling isn’t the most exciting thing to talk about especially on social media. The industry was Powwownow’s biggest barrier, as telecommunications doesn’t lend itself easily to everyday conversation, so a key challenge was to drive engagement. The company needed to become part of the conversation to get the results.
Powwownow also wanted to prove that it’s not like its typically dry industry; it can talk about much more than just conference calling through a light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek tone of voice.
Objectives
Powwownow aimed to create a series of campaigns to drive engagement and stay true to its key focus.
The target was doubling the business’s growth rate of 20%. For social media, the marketing team were set the challenge of a 40% increase for KPIs (engagement, click-throughs and website traffic). These were tough targets to achieve, so a solid strategy was needed to support.
So with that, Powwownow‘s strategy for 2016 became campaign-led and audience-centred.
The target audience
Powwownow’s target audience was UK-based employees who were interested in productivity and moving past traditional ways of working.
Media, channels or techniques used
The company used its key social media channels – Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram, with a particular focus on Twitter as this was most popular among the target audience.
The team posted content organically and used paid ads to support.
Testing was also implemented throughout the process, this included A/B testing, paid ads on social and a range of prizes as incentives.
Timescales of the campaign
Throughout the year, Powwownow launched a series of campaigns aimed at driving engagement and aligning with its ‘Here’s to flexible working’ 2016 advertising campaign – which highlighted how traditional nine-to-five office-based hours are outdated and flexible working (combined with technology) enables smarter working.
The #FlexibleWorkWin campaign
During Easter – a time when flexibility is crucial – Powwownow encouraged people to share what their flexible working meant for them. This could be a lie-in or quick gym session instead of their morning commute to work, or being able to take their kids to school. This way, employees promoted the benefits they experienced from flexible working. Not only did it align with the company’s strategy of being campaign-led and audience-centred, it also got people on social media to advocate the advertising campaign.
The ‘Smarter working initiative’
Powwownow launched the ‘Smarter working initiative‘ to encourage businesses to let their staff work flexibly on the first day of the school summer holidays. The campaign used social media as its main communication channel to raise awareness and challenge the assumption that modern, more agile ways of working are hard to come by.
The company also ran the #Flexie competition alongside the initiative by encouraging people on Twitter and Instagram to take a flexible working selfie – producing image-based content further promoted the initiative and kept the audience at the heart of it. This helped visualise how smarter ways of working lead to increased productivity, motivation levels and improved work-life balance.
Cut-through for Christmas
Powwownow decided to further highlight how telecommunications companies didn’t have to be boring.
The #WorkWish campaign highlighted how individuals only made Christmas wish-lists for their personal life, and never for work. The marketing team asked employees to divulge what their work wish was, not knowing that Powwownow would actually surprise them at their workplace with their #WorkWish. This positioned the company as prime enablers of smarter working.
Budgets
- Paid social ads: £6000
- Prizes: £9000
- Total: £15,000.
Results
Powwownow exceeded its initial target of 40% increase in KPIs.
- Engagement skyrocketed by 2083% (from 6395 in 2015 to 133,191 in 2016).
- Reach grew by 162% (just short of 20 million).
- Click-throughs increased by 248%.
- Followers increased by 154%.
- Traffic to the website via social increased more than threefold (350%).
The campaign achieved cut-through and Powwownow was able to use social media to tap into conversations that didn’t lend itself to the business before.
The creative ideas gained coverage in The Sun, HR News and B2B Marketing.
And to top that, the brand was recognised as one of the six best B2B brands on Twitter by B2B Marketing. To stand alongside such big names like Hootsuite, LinkedIn and Hubspot – brands which no doubt have more dedicated resources for social media than Powwownow – was incredibly gratifying for the business. It proved that spend can only go so far, and that there’s much more value in creating genuinely interesting, fun and engaging campaigns that will get a brand to the heart of the conversation on social media.
Client testimonial
“Social media continues to be a key source of growth for our business. By leveraging our brand campaign, we’ve seen higher levels of engagement than ever before. Cut-through, which has put our brand top-of-mind has enabled us to have a firm place on social media. An opportunity which telecommunications companies often struggle to achieve in a traditionally dry industry.” – Simon Prince, marketing director of Powwownow
