UX isn’t just Screen Design
A case study on customer engagement.
Role(s): Experience Designer, Product Manager
Team of 4: A videographer, a journalist, an editor, and me.
Experience design is far beyond, app and web design. For example, ever see BBH’s “The King” experience campaign? The whole campaign was architected by experience designers.
During the launch of this campaign, the props in this video were given to people who commented on the video about the specific props.
Experience design is now getting a new niche into the advertising space. Gone are the days of Don Draper’s mass brainwashing with some smart copy, the people want more!
More meaning more engagement and real interactions with the brand. Brands now more than ever need to not just think about creative, they must take into account the touchpoints of a campaign. At those touchpoints, how can experience designers surprise and delight their users?
I’ll attempt to explain how in the following case study of a campaign I ran a little while back.
How to Graduate Twice as Fast
This is the story of this video:
Before the above video was made, I was following the process I preached and testing out of college credits.
Whenever I told people about what I was doing, I would always get the same response:
You can do that?
I realized that this was some juicy information that would make a great PPC campaign. Being the head of digital experiences at the paper I mobilized the digital media team to craft a viral experience based on this topic.
Persona
Brian is a 28-year-old student who has taken his time to get through school, he has changed his major a couple time and is just ready to graduate. He currently has a couple classes he doesn’t want to do but has come to terms with the fact that he has to “pay his dues” and plans on enrolling in 18 credits to “bang them out”.
Brian’s Journey Map
- Brian gets on Facebook to check his feed.
- He sees an ad from the UVU Review on how to graduate faster.
- He watches the video and likes it.
- To be a hero, Brian tag’s a couple of his friends, who then share with their friends.
- They like the Reviews FB page to get more curriculum hacks.
Facebook First. Why?
Facebook has a very robust ad targeting product that makes it perfect for launching a longer video. Through Facebook’s ad platform, I can target people on what coffee they like, where they work, what school they go to, and if they are politically active. Data privacy is most definitely a problem for the consumer, but for business, it is good. We can serve up relevant content to the right people instead of doing a mass market blast like traditional TV.
For us, the targeting of our video PPC ad can be as accurate as the persona we craft.
Another thing to mention is that video consumption on Facebook has surpassed that of Youtube. That is because the videos are sprinkled in between the posts and pictures of your friend and family. It is more natural, and if you find something entertaining the sharing flow is all on the platform, you just need to tag someone’s name in the Facebook comment section to put it on their feed.
Here are some other fun facts about the power of Facebook for a video campaign experience. (wideo.com)
- 80% of all video interaction on Facebook is with natively uploaded videos.
- 1 billion views daily of video content on Facebook since June 2014
- Over 50% of people in the US who visit Facebook on a daily basis watch at least one video daily
- Facebook video ads promise to deliver 1.2 billion users to small and big businesses.
- With Facebook video ads, companies can track audience views that turn into actual sales. (Which is good for future campaign retargeting.)
Video consumption on controversial topics is on Facebook. That’s why it makes the perfect channel for a short-term campaign like ours.
Don’t get me wrong, Youtube has the strength of long-term relationship building, but for short campaigns, their experience isn’t conducive to viral sharing as well as the native FB video option.
The Campaign
So we made the above video and made an ad.
These are our targeting settings:
I made sure to cover whoever is affiliated with the local universities as well as BYU and UVU because they both have our persona. The targeting is intended to be broad because we wanted to use pixel retargeting to capture those who like the video.
The Creative
We sent out the video ad and optimized it for video views, that way we only had to pay a few cents a view, saving us ad spend.
We only needed to spend enough money to get the network effect to kick in, then we had free distribution in the form shares.
In a matter of hours, people began tagging their friends and family in the comment sections. Enhancing the reach of the video.
To increase engagement, we would go through the comment’s section and answer questions about the video, increasing brand affinity and social engagement.
The Results
AT the start of the academic school year, the FB page had:
1158 Likes
Using Facebook Pixels we created a warm retargeting audience that we could boost future posts to after the campaign run. The benefit of the warm audience is that we were only putting our content in front of people who like our content. So it is relevant to them it makes for a better brand to the consumer experience.
After the initial run to this campaign, we built a warm audience of:
3500 People
This essentially 3x’d the amount of reach and readership we had to the content of the paper.
But because this video is timeless and evergreen we reposted it at the start of the following semester, the same thing happened again, with friends tagging their friends and us answering questions. After the second run, the warm audience grew to:
5800 People
From when I started at the paper, to this point, good experience design 5x’d the original audience of the paper.
That means 5800 people that we can retarget and send them articles, videos, and relevant content based on their interaction with our paper. That is 5800 people who see our posts. We can take that number and show to advertisers that we have that many students who consume our content.
Results
With the increase in more exposure to our campaigns and the increased pixeled audience, our ad revenue increased by 300%.
Conclusion
What is experience design? It is much more than pixel pushing in Sketch. It is designing the touchpoints a consumer has with a brand. Depending on the goals of an organization, it might just be a well-crafted video and some well planned social engagement on an established platform like Facebook.
