A cross-country digital marketing campaign to promote an understanding of the electricity sector.

Digital Marketing: Canadian Electricity Association/National Electricity Month

bv02 worked with the Canadian Electricity Association (CEA) to develop and execute a digital campaign to create awareness of and increase engagement with their National Electricity Month program and PowerForTheFuture.ca website. Through a comprehensive set of stakeholder interviews and a detailed environmental analysis, bv02 developed a strategy to achieve their overarching objective: to create awareness of the imperative for infrastructure investment in Canada and to drive key influencers and decision makers to create political change.

The strategy spanned across a number of areas, including recommendations to improve branding, national reach and engagement through digital content. bv02 executed this strategy during National Electricity Month (June 2015) and the following case study is a detailed description of our strategy and tactics, as well as the results from the campaign.

Strategy

Prior to putting anything into the market or creating any collateral for that matter, bv02 conducted several stakeholder consultations as well as extensive research and social listening to determine the key challenges with their previous campaigns and the opportunities to integrate digital marketing tools into a new campaign that solves those challenges in 2015.

Through this discovery process, we identified four key objectives for this year’s National Electricity Campaign:

In order to achieve these objectives in a one-month campaign, bv02 crafted a strategy that focused on leveraging existing content to engage with their core audience: the Informed Canadian – someone in Canada who is educated, aware and active in the community. Key elements of the overall strategy were:

  • a social media strategy and editorial calendar for CEA and their members to promote National Electricity Month and the literacy tools;
  • an overhaul of the information architecture and wireframes of PowerForTheFuture.ca website to improve the user experience and reduce clutter;
  • a content strategy to turn key messaging into interactive tools with built in sharing functionality;
  • a comprehensive digital advertising campaign utilizing sponsored social media content on three platforms in five regions across Canada;
  • an analytics strategy to measure channel performance, messaging resonance and return on investment

Literacy

The fun part came next. Leading up to National Electricity Month, bv02’s in house designers and developers worked on creating the assets required for the campaign including a new and improved PowerForTheFuture.ca website, infographics, interactive maps and quizzes to engage informed Canadians. See below for a snapshot of key assets used in the campaign:

  1. The existing PowerForTheFuture.ca website was converted to a responsive design theme to improve the mobile experience for smartphone and tablet users.
  2. bv02 developed a six question Power Savvy Quiz to assess visitors’ understanding of the current electricity landscape in Canada and dispel myths. We built sharing functionality into the tool for people to spread the word on key issues and misunderstandings.
  3. Large amounts of important text were transformed into two responsive infographics that simplify the complexity of electricity issues and change attitudes – on desktops, tablets and smartphones.
  4. To highlight the bright future of the electricity industry, we developed an interactive map that displays CEA member companies’ projects and initiatives shaping the industry economically, environmentally and socially. Users can share the map or individual stories to their personal networks via social media and email.
  5. To address CEA members’ difficulty in bringing the public out to their open houses, we created a unique virtual open house section where members can post videos, photos and presentations to give people behind the scenes access to facilities in remote communities.

 

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Awareness and Engagement

Upon completion of our new digital literacy tools, we were ready to promote them. From organic social media posts to sponsored stories across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – social media played an integral role in the National Electricity Month campaign.

To ensure our key stories were told throughout the month, we developed an editorial calendar. It was the bible we used to develop social media posts against those key stories. In total, we developed 295 posts for Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, which were scheduled in advance to hit key regions at specific dates and times (between June 1-30, 2015).

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During the strategy phase, bv02 learned that CEA’s members have over 600,000 collective Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn followers across the country. To leverage this mass of active listeners, we developed 40 branded social media posts for CEA member companies to post to their social channels and extend the organic reach of the campaign.

The biggest driver of traffic to the new website and interactive tools was sponsored social media content on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn – where our desired audience spend most of their time. We developed and tested multiple variations of creative to find messaging and photography that would resonate with audiences in each of the five provinces we advertised in.

Once content was developed to highlight each key story of the campaign, we used specific targeting criteria to maximize traffic and engagement for the lowest cost per click against our demographic profile in the strategy.

The advertising appears as sponsored content in users’ timelines – where they find their news and share stories with friends and family. By advertising in our audiences’ native environment, we were able to break through the clutter and avoid the risk of being overlooked in ad desensitized environments such as television and print media.

Measurement

To meet the fourth and final objective, bv02 developed an analytics strategy to identify key performance indicators and their data sources. Once identified, we designed and developed a live analytics dashboard to measure campaign performance, website traffic and engagement in real time.

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The dashboard leveraged APIs from various data sources such as Google Analytics, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, LeadLander and more to create a holistic visualization of results day to day. We assigned unique tracking codes to all assets (digital ads, member toolkit, etc.) to track performance in real time and make agile improvements to the strategy and creative of the campaign.

Results

2015 was by far the most successful campaign since the launch of National Electricity Month three years ago. Without spending more than last year and simply reallocating more of the budget to digital marketing, we were able to achieve significant return on investment and impact on the audience.

Website visits doubled from the year prior, with unique visitors increasing by 57% — some 30,000 individual site visitors. The time spent on the website — how we measured engagement — also doubled, and the bounce rate (the percentage of people leaving the site upon arrival), reduced by 25%. What’s more, 5,000 people took part in each of our on-site literacy activities (arguably one of the more difficult goals to reach), with 85% completing them on average.

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Solutions Provided

powerforthefuture.ca