CORPORATE

Here you can find the marketing justification for all the socials (Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook) we used after the social media campaign.

INSTAGRAM

Context of campaign and promotional activities

Instagram Feed/Posts

For our Instagram feed we have decided to stick to our color palette, and overall style. We used the same background color in all of the posts, as well as on our website. The same fonts were used throughout our entire brand experience, and we made sure that our logo or our brand name is visible in all of our content. We deeply incorporated our brand values, which are boldly visible with our brand colors. We added our personal experiences with our brand values as well as an explanation as to why we think those brand values add significant meaning to your life. We felt like we could create a connection with our viewers and thus, community if we made it more personal. For the illustrated posts we used a neon light element, which is also seen on our Facebook page.

Instagram Reels

We decided to create reel/video content as well since our target group (interviews) explained that they memorize video content very well. We tried to start a little trend by making it easy for people to interact and feel incorporated into our brand, since pretty much everyone will have at least one pair of dirty shoes. Once we showed our official STAIN shoes/product on our page, we also shared an “inspiration” reel for people to know what our main goal is with these shoes. Both reels perfectly fit our theme of getting dirty/messy.

Instagram Stories

We tried to interact with our followers, as well as make them aware of our new posts. We linked posts in our story’s, we put up polls or we asked them to comment on their own experience underneath our posts. We also added some extra story’s that go well with our product (for example a “Shoe Care” series of posts).

On Instagram, we really want to create a community that is open to sharing their experiences with others. We are aiming for interaction with and from young adults or anyone that comes in contact with our page.

Overview of Our Instagram Campaign

To see our story highlights and reels, please click on our Instagram feed below and navigate to our Story Highlights and Reel page.

Learning Points

Instagram Reach Objectives

What did we expect?

We knew that going into this project, we had to post consistently in order to become somewhat successful on social media. Therefore, we decided to post something on Instagram every single days for two weeks straight. We expected that creating the content for Instagram would be easy, since we could easily stay true to STAIN’s style guide, and brand values. Secondly, we expected a lot of PRJ4 Brand Development accounts to follow us, so we already expected a small following to start our account with. While setting our goals, it seemed reasonable to pick 100 followers. Even though it would still be classified as a small account, we thought it would be doable within the time frame that we anticipated for this project. Moreover, we expected some of the other PRJ4 Brand Development accounts, or even some of our personal friends and family to leave a couple of comments on our posts. We also expected to get the least amount of interaction, since a lot of these PRJ4 Brand Development accounts are not interested in watching the story’s of other brands, and we assumed that people would be more interested in interacting with our actual page and the content on there as opposed to our story content. Since Instagram is focusing more and more on reels, we set the expected amount of views for our reels on a higher level as opposed to our other reach objectives. However, we do think it is possible to achieve 1000 views, since Instagram pushes reel content to more accounts than any other content on the platform.

What worked?

We were pleasantly surprised by the views on our first reel. Within 24 hours, we already obtained 3000 views while we only had 30-35 followers at the time. However, there wasn’t much interaction with our reel, which is probably why it didn’t get pushed much after that. We received 24 likes on this post, but there were no comments. We are not entirely sure how this post got this many views. It could be because of the song we used, but it could also be because of our hashtags. However, we used the same hashtags on our other posts, and they did not obtain the same reach. After this pleasant experience, we decided to experiment with another reel. We used the same music, and the same hashtags, and again, we obtained around 3000 views within the first 24 hours. We concluded from this that Instagram pushes reels within the first 24 hours of posting. However, if there is minimal to no interaction with the reel, the algorithm will assume that the post is not liked by many others, which is why it doesn’t really get recommended in the reel section of other users after those initial 24 hours. It has been a little while since both reels have been uploaded, and the views on the reels are 3068 and 3053.

The best performing posts on our feed are the posts that state our brand values in our STAIN font and STAIN colors. These are the four posts where we added our personal quotes, and it is striking that they performed best. This shows us that our followers are looking for more of a personal brand experience, as opposed to only communicating about the product for example.

What didn't worked?

Our IG comment section is completely empty. Nobody responded to the questions or remarks in our captions. We feel like this could be caused by us not commenting on others’ posts either. We could probably create more engagement on our own page, by engaging and interacting with other accounts.

Adding Hashtags to “older” posts. We tried this to see if we could re-gain attraction and interaction with these posts, however, we did not notice a difference. This could be due to the fact that we used quite generic hashtags, so our posts probably got lost amongst thousands of others. The lack of change in interaction could also be because of the fact that we added these hashtags to posts that were not recent. So that even if we would show up under these hashtags, our posts would already be a lot lower on the page, since they were not recent posts anymore.

Very few “new” people followed us. At the start, we gained new followers quickly, but these were mainly people that we already know. After this, it was a lot harder to gain followers. We probably didn’t interact with enough other accounts to be recommended to more people.

We also noticed that gaining, and even maintaining interaction from different accounts is hard. We would assume that the first few set of followers, would keep supporting our brand and interact with our posts. But we noticed that after a few days, the likes on our posts would decline a bit. We tried different ways to interact with them and try to get them engaged, by posting more story’s, reels, etc.. However, we probably should have focused more on personal content to maintain the relationship and the feeling of being part of a community that we were trying to achieve.

Like beforehand mentioned, we reached 5.977 accounts, however, this includes only 28 followers and thus, 5949 non-follower. This information is quite confusing to us since we have 51 followers. Somehow our content did not reach all of our followers, and we don’t know how this happened.

What did we learn concerning the campaign?

It is more difficult to obtain a “new” following than we originally thought. We envisioned that it would be a great start to follow and interact with the other PRJ4 Brand Development Instagram profiles, as well as interact with and follow some of our personal contacts like family and friends. We envisioned that this would be a great start and that more interaction from people that we already know would lead to Instagram pushing our profile more to new accounts to be reached. However, we noticed that this did not really happen.

For two weeks our follower count stayed around 40 followers. After conducting some research, we started to experiment with adding hashtags to the comment section of our first five posts, to see if we could attract more engagement to these “old” posts. We used an average of eight hashtags. We were informed that posting the same hashtags over and over, will negatively affect your account. Therefore we have chosen for a random combination compiling from this list: #bold #breda #comingsoon #confidence #courage #creativeshoes #customezedshoes #customize #dirty #dirtyshoes #empowerment #followme #like4like #messy #motivation #provocative #risktaking #shoes #smallbusiness #shoesoftheday #shoestagram #trend #quoteoftheday #viral #2022trends After seven days, this did not create more attraction to either our account or those “older” posts. We used mainly used generic hashtags, which might have been our downfall since these hashtags are used by so many people. Which will result in our posts that probably got lost amongst thousands of other posts. We should have probably done more research into more niche hashtags. Which would also be a point of improvement for next time.

Something that did pleasantly surprise us, was the number of views we obtained on our first reel. Within 24 hours, we already reached 3.000 different accounts. We had never expected this since we only had around 30-35 followers at the time of posting. A week later, we tried posting another reel to see if we could obtain the same or even a bigger reach. Again, we reached around 3.000 different accounts within the first day. However, we weren’t able to generate more than a little over 3.000 views. The interaction on our reels is very low. We obtained 24 likes on our first reel, and only 3 likes on our second reel. We didn’t receive any comment on both of the reels. The interaction with our reels is probably lower, since we decided to not upload the reels to our main Instagram feed, but only to the reels section. We made this decision so that our feed still looks nice according to our style guide. The reels portray our message, but they don’t necessarily fit our style guide. However, due to this decision to post the reel only to the reels section, the reel did not show up in the main page of our followers’ Instagram. We did link the reels to our story, however, we also got quite low numbers of views on our story’s. This is due to the fact that a big part of our followers are those other PRJ4 Brand Development accounts, and they are not inclined to watch the story’s from other brands. Based on the number of views on our reels, I think we can conclude that Instagram only pushes reels for the first 24 hours after they are posted. When there is little to no interaction with that specific reel, then it won’t really get recommended to others anymore, since the algorithm notices the lack of interaction. If there would be more or a lot of interaction, the reel would probably be pushed again and again.

It was briefly mentioned before, but we had a low amount of views on our story’s since mostly PRJ4 Brand Development accounts were following us and they had little to no interest to view story’s of other brands. In our story’s we tried to interact with our viewers by asking questions, putting up polls, and directing them to our posts. However, this had little to no effect on our overall interaction because a lot of our viewers did not watch this content.

Even though we posted on Instagram almost every single day (either posts, reels or story’s) we still didn’t grow as much as we expected. We think it is due to a lack of interaction with other accounts, and maybe or content wasn’t diverse enough.

What would we do differently?

Use hashtags more sufficiently, because we noticed that it did work for other accounts. It probably only works on “new” posts, as opposed to commenting on them under less recent posts. Therefore, we would research some niche hashtags that fit our brand, and start commenting them under posts right when we upload them.

Interact more with accounts. We could have done more research into other accounts, and maybe find a niche community that fits our brand. That way we could become part of an already existing network, to really find our target group, interact with them, and grow our account.

It is quite similar to our previous point, but we should follow more actual accounts that are similar as opposed to mostly PRJ4 Brand Development brand accounts and our friends and family. In this way, we didn’t create new engagement, since we only got recommended to the same set of people, as opposed to branching out into other areas of the Instagram community.

We could have added a give-away to make it more interactive and fun to participate. However, we don’t have the actual product (the STAIN shoes). A give-away could include stickers of our logo for example. To keep it a small, but still impactful give-away.

We would also like to see how using a small budget could influence, and maybe even significantly improve our brand page. We are curious if adding a budget, will increase only views and maybe affect the likes as well. Or if this will also cause more engagement in terms of comments.

Future Planning

Reflection on what has been done

For Instagram, we focused mostly on creating the content, as opposed to really trying to obtain a close-knit community, which was our goal. We should have tried harder with trying to find our target audience on the app and interact with them. We did realize that reels are a very good way that is relatively easy to create more brand awareness.

How would we continue the project?

We should continue creating reels since they have obtained the biggest reach for us. We surpassed our reach objective for views on our reel, which proves to us that reels are really being pushed by Instagram so it’s smart to follow the algorithm of the brand.

We should find a different way to make our content more engaging. This could be done by asking our target group what type of content they like to see, as well as trying to utilize giveaways of shout-outs on our account.

We should experiment more with using relevant, and niche hashtags that are not that generic since this tends to be a way for people to find other accounts and groups to join.

We should aim to find a nice community that fits our brand vision, values, and message in order to find like-minded people. Then we could further improve our engagement and interaction with other accounts.

Future recommendations for our campaign

We should try recognizing popular trends (mostly in reels), and alter them to our own brand identity to get more known in an easy way. When we gain more followers on our account, we can really focus on creating our own unique content that will maintain our current followers, as well as gaining new followers.

We could try experimenting with posting at different times to see what time is most efficient, since there are a lot of different time zones around the world, and we want to reach as many members of our target group as possible.

We could also try experimenting with boosting the performance of our posts by paying a small amount of money. After working on the Instagram campaign, we are very curious to see how a small budget could impact the engagement and interaction surrounding our account.

What would we do differently based on experience

We would focus more on our reach objectives, as opposed to focusing mainly on the type of content we are posting. We should have paid more attention to the interaction and how to increase our engagement. We should research how other small business positioned their brand on social media, and what their content and interaction with followers look like. This way we can learn from others, while still focusing on our own progress

Professionalism

In case if the Instagram Feed below doesn't show, visit our Instagram profile here.

TIKTOK

Context of campaign and promotional activities

TikTok Videos

According to our interviews, we concluded that video content is one of the most memorable forms of content among our target audience. Short and entertaining videos are a great way for our target group to focus their attention on the content we provide. Young adults tend to have a short attention span, which we can make perfect use of in our TikTok videos. As noted in the interviews, our participants mentioned they like short videos, with almost no text. Moreover, they tend to enjoy the different challenges and trends on Tiktok. This is why we decided to focus our attention on trying to create a new trend and challenge.

Overview of Our TikTok Campaign

Learning Points

TikTok Reach Objectives

What did we expect?

We expected that our first 2 videos would provoke our viewers and get the attention of new accounts to make them want to follow our TikTok account.

We expected to create a small trend that would be recreated by a couple of accounts. Which would help us to generate more engagement, followers, and likes on our account.

What worked?

Without obtaining any followers, we got 70 views on the first Tiktok post, followed by 85 views on the second video that we posted. We already gained a sort of steady view count of around 80 views. This was sufficient enough for us to continue.

Next, we created our own challenge that corresponds with our brand message. We used the same music and hashtags on all of these videos. One of these video’s went a little viral. It obtained around 200 views even though our account did not have any followers at the time. We classify that as a success even though we have no idea how we reached this amount of people.

What didn't worked?

We received a total of 523 views on the 7 videos. Next to that, we received a total of two likes, and we did not obtain any followers. We tried to see how TikTok’s algorithm would push our content and page to other users to really experiment with how TikTok spreads its content, but this resulted in quite little interaction and engagement from others. 523 views might not seem like a lot, but we believe that for an account with zero followers, it is quite an accomplishment.

What did we learn concerning the campaign?

Even though our aim was to achieve 100 followers, we made a plan to not interact with any other accounts. We were not going to like or follow anyone else, just so we could investigate how TikTok’s algorithm pushes videos to other users. We learned that TikTok’s algorithm is not very consistent. On four out of seven posts, we have around 80 views. However, on two posts, we received 0 views, while another post received 201 views. We used mostly the same hashtags. For the four posts that are part of our #icecreamchallenge, we even used the same music. One of them got 0 views, two of them got around 80 views, and one of them got 201 views. Based on this we can’t really conclude how or why TikTok pushes some videos more than others, since they all looked similar, used the same hashtags, and even used the same music.

What would we do differently?

To create more engagement and interaction, of course, we should interact with other (similar) accounts to find like-minded people, however, we really wanted to see if we could find “the formula to TikTok” and see if we could try to understand the algorithm that the platform uses to really utilize this to its full potential. However, from this short time span, we could not really conclude a specific algorithm.

We should probably also focus on reviewing the current TikTok trends and creating similar posts by adding our own twist to them. We think this is the way to go more “viral” on this app since we know that this is how other accounts have achieved accounts with more engagement.

Future Planning

Reflection on what has been done

We uploaded seven different tiktoks, including our own challenge with four videos as a way of trying to create our own trend. We decided to experiment and explore TikTok’s algorithm to see how it would push our content to other users, without interacting with them. Therefore, as an experiment, we did not interact with other pages at all, and let the algorithm send our content to other users.

How would we continue the project?

It is clear that we did not achieve our reach objectives for TikTok. However, we do see great potential in TikTok.

We would continue our TikTok campaign by actively starting to follow accounts that are similar to our brand. We would like, comment, and interact with them to make ourselves more known around similar accounts. On TikTok you can also collaborate with other brands to create a crossover of content, which will be useful to attract more engagement.

We would take a more in-depth look into already existing TikTok trends, and see if we could implement those and add our own STAIN twist to it. This way we will stay gather a unique audience, but we also try to utilize the success of other trends.

We would post videos more frequently, to fit better into TikTok’s algorithm. This is proven to push content to even more people to obtain a bigger reach.

Future recommendations for our campaign

We should link our TikTok and Instagram to each other by reposting some of our TikToks onto Instagram reels, as well as promoting our Instagram account on our TikTok. Both platforms are quite similar, as they both focus more on short-form video content. This is most popular on both apps, so we should fully utilize this feature, and create more video content for both platforms.

We should interact with others on the platform, to gain a bigger engagement and create a community on TikTok as well. We assumed that Instagram would be the best platform to create a community, however, we can still interact and engage with our target audience on TikTok and then direct them to our main social media page on Instagram.

What would we do differently based on experience

We would continue posting TikTok videos, however, as beforehand mentioned, we would definitely interact more with others. We would find like-minded people to get in contact with, and possibly to collaborate as well to share each other’s engagement.

We wouldn’t rely on just the TikTok algorithm anymore, and we would fully focus on engaging with others ourselves, as opposed to waiting for other accounts to find us.

We would focus on utilizing current trends, and trying to get to know our target group even more. This way, we can create better content that will fit their needs and demands even more.

Professionalism

In case if the TikTok Feed below doesn't show, visit our TikTok profile here.

FACEBOOK

Context of campaign and promotional activities

Facebook Page

For Facebook, we wanted to create a page that communicates the information about our brand, our product, and our website.

Facebook Posts

We used the style guide to base the designs of our posts on, mainly focusing on our brand colors and fonts. On top of that, we added a neon light element in every post to create consistency and coherency between all the content. These neon elements can also be seen and recognized in our Instagram content. Moreover, we added a contest to attract more engagement and interaction from viewers and our target audience. Throughout all of our posts, we also use the same hashtags (#stain and #getdirty) so that our target audience can find us easily.

Facebook Reposts

To attract more interaction between our different social media posts, we reposted one Instagram reel, and one TikTok video. We wanted our viewers and target group to really see the connection between all of our different social media platforms.

Overview of Our Facebook Campaign

Learning Points

Facebook Reach Objectives

What did we expect?

We expected to achieve at least 10 likes per post since the interviews with our target group included that quite a significant amount of our target group still uses Facebook. Of our participants, mainly Bulgarian young adults used Facebook.

Moreover, we expected to reach 50 followers. Which we thought would be a challenge, since we weren’t sure how to reach mostly young adults in Bulgaria because they are more inclined to use Facebook than other social media platforms.

What worked?

Reposting one of our TikTok videos and one of our Instagram reels, was more successful than anything else on this page since we managed to get 62 views with just four followers on our page. With these short videos we were able to generate significantly more engagement with our account, as opposed to our other picture/gif posts that were specifically created for Facebook.

What didn't work?

To be quite frankly, Facebook as a platform did not use well for our brand page. Going into this project, we originally didn’t think that Facebook would be the right platform to use since most young adults have different preferences regarding social media platforms. However, during the interviews with our target group, we were persuaded to try utilizing Facebook because a significant amount of our participants still use it. We noticed quite quickly that the interaction and engagement on our Facebook page was way less than what we aimed for. Despite that, we still tried to create more brand awareness and engagement on this platform to see if we could push ourselves and our brand to the limit. Our message is to face your difficulties and don’t be scared to make mistakes and get dirty, so that is exactly what we have done on our Facebook page. Even though, the process didn’t follow the path we thought it was going to take, we persevered and weren’t afraid to fail.

With that said, we did notice that posting early in the morning resulted in an even fewer reach than posting at later times during the day. So we can conclude that if you want to target young adults on Facebook, you shouldn’t post early during the day, but rather during the afternoon.

What did we learn concerning the campaign?

We noticed during our interviews with the target audience that some still use Facebook, which is why we chose Facebook as one of our social media platforms for the brand. However, during the Facebook campaign, we noticed that our target audience doesn’t interact and engage much with the Facebook posts. Most of them scroll past our posts. After reviewing our interviews, we already concluded that mainly Bulgarian young adults still use Facebook, since Dutch young adults are more inclined to use other platforms. Even though Facebook is still very popular globally, it takes a lot more effort than for example Instagram to get recommended to other users. Especially, if you aim to attract accounts in a different county.

If we encounter a similar project next time, we would first come up with a way how we can reach our target group on a certain platform, before committing to the social media platform and finding out later that it was not the most ideal option for our brand or target group. We could have spent our time more wisely, if we had focused on Instagram and Tiktok more. During the interviews with our target audience, we could also ask them how they use their different social media platforms, to determine which the best social media platform for our brand is.

We also noticed different engagement in the times that we upload our posts to Facebook. Therefore, we decided to try a couple of different upload times on Facebook. Based on the insights on our posts, we concluded that it is most effective to post in the early afternoon.

What would we do differently?

For a similar project, we would probably refrain from using Facebook. We noticed that it doesn’t appeal to most of our target group in the Netherlands, and it is just way too difficult to reach young adults in different countries, especially if you can’t or won’t post your content in that language. Therefore, we would focus our efforts on different platforms that did create noticeably more engagement.

Future Planning

Reflection on what has been done

We have created a couple of posts that were specifically created for Facebook, as well as uploading one of our TikTok videos and one of our Instagram reels.Overall, Facebook was our social media campaign with the least amount of engagement and interaction.

How would we continue the project?

Since Facebook was significantly underperforming, we would probably not continue with our Facebook campaign. However, if we would continue with a Facebook campaign, this is what we would try:

After noticing that our Facebook reach is very limited, we would try to boost our post by adding a small budget of around 10-15 euros to see how this would affect our page and its interaction.

Moreover, posts that are uploaded in the early afternoon perform better than posting at other times. Therefore, we would upload all of our posts during the time sloth that worked best for our page.

Next to that, we should make more posts where our target audience can vote for something (such as our second Facebook post). This post performed the best, so we know that our target audience likes to be involved in the content. By doing this, we try to achieve a bigger reach and engagement that still fits our target audience.

Lastly, as we mentioned for Instagram as well, we should probably interact with other accounts and find niche communities that fit our brand and become a part of them. Getting to know like-minded people and networking with others, can really increase brand awareness and engagement.

Future recommendations for our campaign

We should research if and how other similar small businesses utilize Facebook and make it useful for their brand.

We should continue uploading posts in the early afternoon since we noticed this time worked best for us. We could also do some additional research on when the best times to post on Facebook are, and experiment a bit more to see if we could increase our reach.

We could experiment with different ways to make our target audience feel more involved in our posts. For example, letting them vote on what type of content they would like to see or doing another give-away that will get the attention of our target audience.

What would we do differently based on experience

Based on our current experience, it would probably be best to end our Facebook campaign. It was a good learning tool to experiment with three different platforms, however, we really noticed that our target group is not on this platform, even though it was a conclusion from the interviews we conducted. These participants might have been exceptions. It would be in our best interest to focus our attention on other platforms, like Instagram and TikTok since they have brought us more engagement and interaction with our target group.

Professionalism

In case if the Facebook Feed below doesn't show, visit our Facebook page here.