IGA ups marketing on social media with Valentine’s Day Vine videos
IGA has kicked off its Valentine’s Day social media campaign, encouraging customers to tweet a message for a loved one using the hashtag #IGAlovesongs as the brand increases its use of social media channels as it takes aim at rivals Coles and Woolworths.
Metcash Food & Grocery national digital marketing manager Ram Bhat told Mumbrella the objective behind the campaign is to increase IGA’s Twitter followers, following on from similar social media campaigns for Christmas and Australia Day.
“Social media’s been a focus in my team over the last couple of months. We launched Facebook back in Novemeber and ran a 12 days of ham competition which performed really well for us on there – we went from nothing, starting from scratch to 35,000 likes,” Bhat said.
“A similar thing happened for us when a couple of weeks ago we launched on Twitter with the Australia Day campaign where we hired two Aussie sketch artists and got them in a room for a day and put together some Australia day sketches.
“The newest idea we had was for Valentine’s Day, with the Valentine’s Day theme we saw there was a gap in the market for a campaign like this. I’ve seen a lot of campaigns overseas where consumers either respond back or get surprised with short musical videos.”
So far the brand has amassed 35,000 likes on its Facebook page and 1,700 followers on Twitter. Coles has 658,000 Facebook likes and 16,000 Twitter followers, while Woolworths has 595,000 fans on Facebook and 7,000 Twitter followers on its inactive account.
The challenger brand has traditionally rolled out community-focussed messages in TV campaigns, recently using celebrity ambassador Ahn Do and the “Lock it in IGA” tag line.
For the Valentine’s campaign IGA is asking people to start sending their quirky “special message” into the team via the hashtag #IGAlovesongs, which video artists will use as the basis for a seven second music video sent back via micro-video site Vine.
“We’re getting three video artists next Friday for Valentine’s Day and putting them in a studio and recording short seven second videos and posting them on Vine and YouTube,” Bhat explained.
“The objective there is to increase our followers as we’ve just launched on Twitter and we wanted to do something different. There’s an option there for us to expand and reach our customers organically.
“The second objective is to increase the amount of brand mentions on the day.”
IGA is pushing the campaign in its catalogue with a link to the website which explains the Twitter activity and how the process will work.
“Valentine’s Day is a last minute thing, we find consumers are really active in the last week. The activity will really build up I think on Wednesday next week,” Bhat said.
“It’s very different to what our competitors are doing, we’re always trying to do something different and unique. It’s a very different campaign to what we’d normally do.”
Miranda Ward
Linkedin
How about
My darling valentine. I love you so much I bought this Cadbury Chocolate bar on special for you at my local IGA. Yes it’s true, 20% off at selected IGA stores only until Sun Feb 16.
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That would totally work for me Konrad, shall I send you my postal address? 🙂
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Well done IGA. Great campaign!
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Who would use a wordpress site for a corporate site such as IGA
enough said.- The brand is suffering but if you are going to do it – do it right just like the locals.
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Alan, WordPress is used for the New York Times corporate site and many many more If I’m correct.
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New York Times -not any more
Its just my opinion people can use what they want I just think as a developer of 16 years experience I would not recommend it – hey its an opinion I like the brand and shop there.
[edited by Mumbrella]
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Mumbrella is a WordPress site and so are some of these top corporate brands http://vip.wordpress.com/clients/ I believe Forbes has an instance of WordPress as well
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Hang on, didn’t I see Leggo’s do this two years ago?
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