Bienalto adopts a scientific, technology-driven approach to online marketing for Make it so competition
This week’s public launch of Make it so, Engineers Australia’s $2.5 million public awareness initiative, is the culmination of a six-month mobilisation campaign executed by Bienalto.
Bienalto was appointed to manage the online component of the 12-month public awareness campaign, and has been educating and engaging with the engineering community since August 2009.
Online activities are supported offline by an extensive public relations campaign being rolled out by Pulse Communications, which focuses on sharing inspirational stories of how engineers are ‘making it so’ in the community.
Advocates key to the campaign’s success
Getting engineers to sign up as advocates – and asking them to throw their weight behind the Make it so campaign following its public launch on Tuesday – has been critical to the campaign’s success.
Bienalto implemented a series of step-by-step micro-campaigns to galvanise the support of engineers. It worked – nearly 8,000 people have signed up as Make it so campaign advocates, far exceeding the initial target of 4,000.
Each micro-campaign was meticulously planned to collect content for the website, and to ensure the advocates would be ready for action once the competition reached voting stage.
“This has been an incredibly scientific and technology-driven campaign, from the very outset. It’s like a complex machine – where every single step has a purpose, and nothing is wasted,” said Hurol Inan, Managing Director, Bienalto.
For example, one of the micro-campaigns was a competition where engineers had to enter a definition for their engineering discipline (such as electrical, civil, mechanical, etc.). From the data collected in this competition, a taxonomy was developed that is now being used to automatically workflow ideas to the right engineers.
“With hundreds of ideas coming in every day, we wanted an efficient and intelligent way of sending ‘civil engineering’ ideas to civil engineers, for example. By creating this powerful taxonomy, we can apply scientific rules to every aspect of the competition website,” said Inan.
The competition website runs on a cloud computing environment, with servers in US and redundancy in Ireland.
“This is a first for Bienalto. We selected cloud technology for its massive scalability, as we are expecting huge peaks when the mainstream media pick up on the competition and drive masses of people to the site. The last thing we’d want is server failure,” said Inan.
Rich online marketing strategy
To date, the Make it so campaign has utilised a broad range of online marketing strategies, from direct response campaigns to social media campaigns on Facebook and twitter.
A social media survey conducted by Bienalto indicated a significant Facebook presence amongst advocates. “We responded by developing a distinct Facebook strategy; and also introduced a ‘trivial pursuit’ style micro-campaign on twitter to build up a following in this channel,” said Charlie Graves-Morris, Campaign Manager, Bienalto.
Now in the competition phase of the campaign, Bienalto will continue to apply a scientific approach to managing the competition website.
“With a rich array of analytical tools available to us, we can afford to be responsive – the data will give us the agility to shape strategies on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, we continue with our weekly engagement with people already committed to the competition and use them to spread the word,” said Graves-Morris.
For Engineers Australia, the Make it so campaign seeks to lift the curtain on what it is engineers actually do.
“We want to help Australians understand that from bridges to Blackberrys, drinking water to the Water Cube – engineers and engineering teams help ‘make it so’ in the community,” said Jamie Penrose, Director of Communication and Marketing at Engineers Australia.
“We have achieved an incredible level of engagement with the engineering community through Bienalto’s rich online marketing strategy – and now we plan to build that same level of engagement, using similar strategies, with the general public.”
Finally, a successful marketing campaign about something postive. It seems that all the marketing that we hear about are for large corporations selling thier stuff.