How to sell a bus on Facebook
The headline might sound like potential click bait but the context is very much true! We are a bunch of marketers working for a company called Enfection- yes the name’s a bit funky but we try to crack the word ‘viral’ quite a bit, hence the name.
Toyota is part of our belief network (yes we don’t call them clients or customers) and we have been helping them achieve some short term lead gen goals recently by running some tactical digital marketing campaigns within certain segments. They were so impressed (that’s what we think anyway) with the results, they offered us a chance to help them manage their day to day social media activities too.
Like I mentioned earlier, we are a bunch of nutters and I don’t say it lightly. Some of the ideas we brainstorm on a day to day basis are actually stuff that might put even Putin and Trump to shame. However, we usually don’t discourage anyone in the team from coming up with any idea at anytime. If you put a software connotation to us, we are the open source version of a digital ad agency.
Anyway, getting back to the story. During one of our weekly catch ups with team #Toyota, we learnt that they wanted to get the word out there about a bus that they were planning on launching. Yes a bus! Toyota Coaster to be exact. The target audience was a typical Sec B to B+ bus owner, fleet owner or even a corporate user. We then looked at ways of making this bus a bit more interesting and creating a bit of awareness about it.
A major event in the local calendar was around the corner and usually during this time, most brands tend to create interesting gifs, spend heavy on ads or create online games pertaining to that event in order to get some engagement going. However, we wanted to do something different and looked at some of the things that was intertwined with this event. What we realised was that certain folk tunes called ‘Raban Sural’ played through a unique drum known as the Rabana got top recall amongst this audience. It was an age old tradition that stemmed from the ancient times of the kings in Sri lanka or even before.
We then came up with a great campaign idea that involved creating an EDM track using sound bites taken off a #Toyota Coaster bus. We didn’t use any high profile video recording equipment but used a DSLR instead to record some footage of the bus to give it an authentic/real look and feel and then recorded the sounds and created a very popular Raban tune using these sounds. Rather than doing any high end production, we mixed the footage into the tune and also added bits about the actual ‘making of the’ tune using the mixer console. And voila, we created a piece of online gold!
You can view the actual video here.
We didn’t use youtube as the platform but instead used #Facebook to host the video mainly because during this holiday period #Facebook usage is at it’s peak and users are more receptive to native content. Within a day of uploading the video onto Facebook, it managed to achieve over 84,000 views and at this rate it will be a 100K video in a few days time. It’s also got shared by over 1000 people and over 5K engagement on one single post alone.
We are quite chuffed about this and judging by the comments we are getting on the video, seems like most people are too :)
