We built a national, integrated brand + marketing campaign for the leading provider of commuter benefits, Accor Services, that alone brought in 14% more leads than their goal for the entire year. The branded campaign, "Commuter Nation," reached consumers through multiple channels, including:
- Street Teams
- A Viral Website
- Social Media/Social Marketing - Facebook/Twitter
- PR/Influencer Strategies
- In-Transit Advertising
- Magazine Advertising
- A Contest
The program was designed to get consumers to tell employers about Accor and its benefits administration services. Here are the six steps we followed to create and manage the campaign:
Step #1: Pitch the plan to executives
Our strategy required substantial investment, which called for buy-in from Accor’s executives. The "bottom-up" approach was new and we had to carefully pitch viral marketing ideas, which was a new concept. "It wasn't foreign, but it was completely untested and had never been tried before by anyone in any of our [offices]," says Doak, VP of Marketing.
Step #2. Work with transit partners
Accor had dozens of transit agency partners from whom they bought commuter passes for companies enrolled in their benefit plans. These partners maintained major transit stations, such as Penn Station in New York City. We asked partners’ marketing departments to collaborate on a campaign to promote commuter benefits. The selling point for partners: Promoting commuter benefits would help increase the agencies' ridership.
Step #3. Build and train street teams
We used street teams of eight to ten people to conduct 20 events, during which they handed out commuter benefits information. We held 8 events in New York City, 6 in San Francisco and 6 more in Washington, D.C. Since commuters are notoriously hard to approach, and very few have time to stop and chat, we coached the street teams to deliver a five-second pitch. The key message - the ability to save up to 40% on commuting costs and the suggestion to visit program website [eventually adding in the competition – see step #5].
Step #4. Build a viral website
We created an engaging website to receive a majority of traffic for the campaign. This new site took a lighter tone to explain how commuter benefits focusing on cutting commuting costs, helping the environment and improving personal wellness. From the homepage, visitors selected one of the three cities by clicking branded names such as "Benefrisco" and "New Perk City." From there they could:
- Select one of three virtual tour guides to explain the website and benefits OR put themselves in the tour
- Send a link to friends via email, Facebook or Twitter
- Send a link to an employer via email
- Find out more about their preferred commuting method
Step #5. Add a contest as an incentive
Initially, we thought that the potential to save 40% on commuting costs would be enough to entice consumers to visit their website and take action - but we felt this could be accelerated. So we crafted a sweepstakes to give away free commuting passes:
- Three grand prize winners would win a free year of commuting
- Awarded lesser prizes of two and six months of free commuting
- Selected nine winners, three in each market per week
Encourage forwarding to employers
Commuters could enter the contest by visiting the website and filling out a form with personal information. They placed the entry form next to another form that encouraged visitors to send a message about the site to their employer. Forwarding a message to an employer was not a requirement for entry.
Step #6. PR and social media outreach
Social media channels were another low cost, high impact strategy that played greatly into the success of this campaign. We found local commuter- and bicycling-focused groups and blogs that were particularly responsive and made the program’s potential savings -- not the sweepstakes -- the central point of their social media outreach.
One-to-one messaging
We searched social networks and the Web to find people talking about commuting, fare hikes and public transit to tell them about the website.
Pitching bloggers and local news
We identified and pitched about 100 commuting-oriented blogs, and sought relevant blogs, even if they had a small number of readers, to ensure they reached appropriate audiences.
Transit rate hikes were a hot topic at the time, so we used that angle to pitch local newspapers in the three target markets as well.
Groups and professionals
We mentioned the program to relevant Facebook groups and HR professionals on LinkedIn and linked to their website.
The Results
We captured more than 2,000 leads in the form of employer and HR representative email addresses during the six-week campaign -- 14% more than their goal for the entire year. The street teams distributed about 324,750 handouts during the campaign, which generated 5,755 visits to the website, or about a 1.8% visitation rate.
Results for the viral website/campaign:
- 2 minutes, 31 second average time on site
- 11,542 total visitors
- 52% visit-to-contest conversion rate
- 17.3% visit-to-lead conversion rate
- 88% of traffic directly to site
- 12% of traffic from referral sites
- 80 tours created
- Every video tour created and forwarded to an employer generated 4.3 additional visits to the site.
One Pica Related Work:
Case Study: Accor Services - National Brand + Marketing Campaign
Article adapted from Marketing Sherpa – written from the perspective of Accor: Article
