In interviewed GungHo energy drink company?s Danny Mason about their successful product launch. I was looking for a story about Pinterest and video, happened on their press release and stumbled on a great story. The company made a profit despite giving away free product because friends of friends signed up for the company?s autoship program.
Images are Shared More than Video
With the rise of Pinterest and Instamgram, image sharing has become one of the biggest social media trends of the year?video and YouTube, less so. According to StruckAxiom, images are shared 11 times more often than video.
Videos Not Getting Pinned
Pinterest lets you pin videos from Vimeo and YouTube. However, looking through the top brands or categories on Pinterest you won?t find a lot of videos being pinned or repinned. Even in the video category there are almost no videos with more than a single repin.
An example of the weakness of video on Pinterest is the beauty retailer Birchbox. On Pinterest, Birchbox has over 22,000 followers for it?s unboxing video board, but unfortunately they do not have more than a single repin on any of their videos.
With these numbers, it might be surprising to know that Birchbox does well on YouTube. They have over 11,000 active subscribers on their YouTube channel, and close to a million views. Yet, when these same videos are pinned, the Pinterest community doesn?t visibly engage (though, undoubtedly their Pinterest fans help their overall YouTube viewing numbers).
Reasons Video is Not Shared as Often as Images
Mason, co-founder of GungHo, sites 3 possible reasons for why people don?t share videos as often as images:
- People are not sure what the video is before they click it.
- People are not sure what their time commitment will be to watch the video.
- People are not sure they will want to share the video.
Aware of the challenges of getting people to share video, Danny found a way to combine video marketing with Pinterest marketing.
Tapping into YouTube Communities to Drive Social Sharing
Instead of incentivizing people to pin videos on Pinterest and hoping for the best, Danny tapped into the power of a YouTube community. They invited YouTube viewers to go to a landing page for a special offer for sharing their funny ninja images (ninjas are a big part of GungHo?s brand).
GungHo initially thought they were marketing to a younger male demographic, which fit best with YouTube. Their focus was on college students who want extra energy to get through their finals and college courses.
GungHo looked for a YouTube celebrity that could reach both men and women. They found the husband and wife duo, Charles and Ally Trippy. The couple agreed to do a video review of the product. Danny provided an exclusive deal to the Trippy audience, giving free samples to the first 5,000 people to respond.
The Trippy?s shared how they were fans of the ?world?s only energy shot with Ninja-like focus? ?and then provided the exclusive offer to their 760,000 plus viewers. Within 7 hours GungHo had given out all of their 5,000 free samples, beating Orabrush?s YouTube marketing record that moved 10,000 free samples in ten days.
Yet, the success of this launch really wasn?t about how quickly GungHo gave out free samples, or even the power of the Trippy?s YouTube community. The true magic came when all of the Trippy fans hit the GungHo landing page.
Providing Images and Incentives for Sharing
On the landing page people could choose several funny ninja images to share on social sites including Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest. To entice people to share, the GungHo group promised to provide additional free samples or a steep discount if someone bought product after clicking on one of their ninja images.
The second wave of sharing brought down their website for over an hour. As unfortunate as a crashed website is on a product launch, the massive amount of response GungHo received ?provided some great insights.
Women Engage with Brands More than Men
The first insight they gained was that women were more gung ho than men about sharing on social media sites. According to Danny, almost 60% of the social engagement was from women.
Women also proved to be a valuable contribution to the campaign because they often added their personal endorsement with their shares. These findings made the team re-evaluate their strategy, which included a redesign of their packaging to make it more appealing to women.
?We learned our most vocal advocates are women. Men would just share to get the product. Women would add their comments about it, even though they didn?t have to. Men also tried to game the system? more than women did, stated Danny.
Women Chose to Share on Pinterest
Finally, Go GungHo learned the power of Pinterest. Even though more people used Facebook and Twitter to share, Pinterest users were more active in endorsing the energy shot. Due to this level of engagement, Pinterest outpaced the other social networks when it came to referral traffic.
Video is powerful, though it may not necessarily be in getting pins and repins on Pinterest. Instead, by tapping into the YouTube community Gungho was able to grow all of their social numbers, and get increased engagement from women ? on Pinterest in particular.
The funny images combined with an easy way to share resulted in growing their fan base on every network.
Key Campaign Stats:
- The GungHo webs site got 69,000 hits within hours. The 5000 free were gone in 23 minutes. The next 5000 (with discount) was gone in under 4 hour live up time (site was down for >1.5 hrs). After 40 minutes when site went down, they turned off the discount. With no barriers to sharing it spread too fast. Only Trippy?s fans got the discount after that.
- Of the 69,000, over 5,700 bought or got the free sample, but the company had to turn off the viral share piece because they lost money on the $10 discount if they chose the monthly auto-delivery option. They are convinced they would have been wiped out of product if Trippy?s fans? friends got the offer. Trippy?s fans friends just saw the funny image but did NOT get the offer.
- The buyers from the Trippy?s site was about 59% female.
- Men tended to share via Facebook and Twitter. The women, via Pinterest.
- Women shared their endorsement (comments from them vs our pre-populated text in the FB, twitter or Pinterest window). Less than 5% of the time men shared personal endorsement. Over 80% of the women did.
- Go GungHo got over 1300 new Twitter followers and over 1100 new FB fans in a matter of hours from the Trippy offer. They had almost zero following before (this was our launch campaign).
- The community loved the offer from the Trippys. They had over 80 tweets, posts or other comments from his fans thanking for the hook-up. We had over 60 comments / reviews on our fan-page (they offered a free 12-pack for the best review).
- 5778 customers total pinned their image before they turned off the offer. 3409 were women. 2292 of those women chose to pin vs. share on Facebook or Twitter (67% chose pinterest vs FB or twitter). They determined the sex of people sharing by looking at the name of the person.
Have any launch tips or stories of how you successfully leveraged social media or Pinterest? Please share in the comments.
Also look for my next post about GungHo tapping the power of press releases to get media coverage (and how we both got on TV).
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