Outdoor clothing retailer SmartWool recently found success in mobile and social marketing by allowing fans to tell their stories as part of a holiday campaign. For the second year in a row, SmartWool ran their ‘Share the Joy’ campaign: fans pick Facebook friends that might appreciate SmartWool gifts, and if those friends are chosen, the original fan receives a SmartWool gift as well. The 2012 holiday campaign saw not only an impressive jump in entries, but also a huge increase in mobile and desktop daily likes.
SmartWool “doesn’t advertise much,” according to Molly Cuffe, SmartWool’s senior manager of global brand communication, since the brand has a word-of-mouth referral rate of 96%. Cuffe told AllFacebook that the goal of this holiday campaign was to “encourage its already pleased fans to spread the message about SmartWool’s products” – in this case using mobile and social media.
While the brand’s loyal, dedicated fanbase is largely composed of the ‘outdoors type,’ they bring their phones with them on adventures. As Cuffe says, “We are thinking mobile first because our consumers are on the go.”
The results of the campaign speak for themselves:
- SmartWool’s mobile daily likes grew 1,313%
- desktop daily likes rose 113%
- SmartWool saw a 67% jump in entries year-over-year
- 75% of traffic came from mobile during the campaign
The impact of mobile was impressive, but Cuffe also emphasized that it didn’t detract from desktop engagement on Facebook. The ‘People Talking About This’ metric rose 330% during the 2012 Share The Joy campaign, and that same metric is now 25% higher than it was before the campaign launched.
SmartWool is all about giving their engaged fan base “a platform they want to use.” On Facebook, fans are encouraged to send in photos that the company will occasionally post. The brand has also allowed fans to engage in their own content curation through two apps on the Friend2Friend platform: Fanalog (fans create catalogs of SmartWool products they want and have a a chance to win them) and Strip to Your SmartWool (fans enter photos of themselves wearing nothing but SmartWool). These efforts, according to Cuffe, help “grow brand recognition and loyalty.”
How is your brand using mobile – and social – to directly engage fans?
