If you have participated in Easter egg decoration activities over the past 130 years, chances are you’ve used a PAAS Easter Egg Kit. And, except for the most brand aware of you, chances are you didn’t realize the kits were made by PAAS.
For the past several years, we’ve had the pleasure of working with PAAS to help create a deeper connection with its consumers while also building its brand awareness.
Our first step in the process of creating deeper connections with PAAS consumers was to better understand their behavior. We conducted an attitudes & usage study and, according to our research, consumers first turn to friends and family for Easter inspiration through social sites, like Facebook (with Pinterest following close behind). And surprisingly, we found that Easter egg coloring kits are not a last-minute purchase; over 48% of those we polled purchase kits a few weeks before Easter.
With limited resources for a national paid media campaign, we turned to social media to help build awareness of and word-of-mouth recommendations for PAAS.
A key tactic in increasing brand awareness was building the PAAS community on Facebook. Our strategy was to create a highly active, seasonal community—where consumers could find tips, inspiration and information about new products while also sharing their own tips and inspiration with one another. In order to do this effectively, we knew egg-ceptional content (I really couldn’t resist.) would be central to our strategy.
Sounds great, right? Actually, for a lot of brands, content generation can be quite challenging, especially for those with lean internal departments or limited resources.
So, here’s what we did: We harnessed the creative power (and content) of key influencers to help bring PAAS to life across the social web. We began by carefully curating our influencer network, using existing contacts while also keeping an eye out for new talent, who not only fit our target audience profile but could also represent PAAS. Once we had our influencers, we turned over the keys (or in this case, the kits) and allowed them to let their creativity go wild.
They didn’t disappoint. From easy how-to videos highlighting the new kits to product innovation and creative display ideas, we gathered a robust bank of content to share with the PAAS Facebook community.
In short, great content combined with a paid media and amplification strategy resulted in a huge success for the brand. Here are just a few of the results:
- The number of PAAS Facebook fans increased by 65%
- Our 17 influencers generated over 6.3M impressions
- Engagement increased exponentially over the prior year’s engagement
Leveraging experts and influencers can be a great way to not only increase reach but also help supplement brand-owned content. Consumers will continue to seek out inspiration, so providing expert third-party content created by your consumers’ peers may be a great way to inspire and educate.