ROI on April Fools campaign
Managing social media is both art and science. On one hand, you have all these quantitative number on likes, views, reach, comments, and etc. On the other hand, what does it mean?? Well, it is completely up to your creative self. (wink) OK, let’s be serious. How does the 1000 likes translate into real business value? When my April fools campaign attracts 100K views, 300 comments, and 50 shares, what is the ROI?
Among all the April fools campaign, my favorite is the BBC Store Video. H&M and Lyft have good ones. But don’t you miss some good old British humour and sarcasm? Enjoy the following video and I will throw in my short analysis for its ROI.
To properly understand and communicate the result of the initiative, we need clearly defined goals, metrics and tools. They are critically important to determine whether the campaign is a hit or miss. And even more important, you gotta tell that to your boss.
The first step is to clearly state the business goal of the campaign. The goal of BBC’s video is to put out an original and hilarious April fool content to engage with the audience in a way that foster team’s spirit. It creates business value by spreading a harmless joke around BBC video and hence increase awareness of audience. Having a little fun project for the team to work on also boosts team morale and culture.
After determining what we want to evaluate against, we need to figure out how to measure the result by setting up relevant metrics. For the culture piece, we can use surveys before and after to gauge the engagement of the team. One example is to use Net Promoter Score (NPS)- we can ask each team member how likely are they to recommend BCC to their friends and family. This technique is widely adopted by Hubspot and other organizations. I do not have access on those data, but my guesstimation is that it is a hit for the BBC team. The video looked like a collaborative effort. There are more than 20 employees starring in the video, and it is filled with individual jokes and sarcasm. There are multiple scene that the actor tried so hard to hold the laugh. It seems that everyone had a good time. And when the wider audience likes and comment on the video, it fostered a even stronger team spirit and employee would feel proud to be on the team.
For the brand perspective, BCC should monitor the reach and engagement of the post and video. The video has 168K views, 600 likes, 500 shares and 150 comments on Facebook. If we compare this with the usual engagement of the post, this is a huge spike in reach and engagement. And when I look through the comment, the sentiment is very positive from the users. This is definitely a hit in reach and engagement.
Finally, if I am reporting this to my boss, I would sell this as a hit. As a media company, I imagine the video was put together using in-house resources and the budget is hence reasonable. This is a very low price compared to the cost of broadcasting a 3min TVC that can reach 150K viewers in 3 days. It would be a handsome ROI.
