Turning a Social Campaign into a Conversation

Aka: How Our PetSmart Puppy Day Reached More than 2,000,000 People

What Was the Challenge?

Every year PetSmart runs a contest on National Puppy Day where fans can win a year’s supply of dog food. The idea is to reinforce PetSmart’s dedication to pets and their pet parents. For the 2017 contest, they set a lofty goal of 10,000 contest entries and wanted the contest to reach as many people as possible. The simple answer to this challenge would be to push a #NationalPuppyDay on the day of the campaign and let people know over the course of 24 hours what was going on. We saw an opportunity to do more than simply activate PetSmart’s social profile. We wanted to turn it into a source of conversation.

How Do We Build Conversation?

For most people, social media is a place to catch up with family and friends, find inspiration, and express creativity. Yet for brands, social media becomes an opportunity to connect with their customers and create more than a brand identity, but a voice that people can gather around. Social media becomes a chance to create a new touchpoint to enhance the user experience. Brands can deepen a customer’s experience and build loyalty by getting customers involved in month-long campaigns, answering questions on Twitter or even just posting helpful content

One way to organically build conversation is to build suspense and excitement. Think about how massive music festivals such as Coachella will create posts leading up to the artist lineup announcement. These posts can drop hints about who might be coming, ask users who they would like to see, or simply serve as a graphic reminder stating “Announcement in 3 Days!”. By creating buildup to even something digital like the lineup announcement, brands are keeping the audience in suspense and getting people talking and guessing. At that point, the day the lineup is released is like the grand opening of a new store or restaurant. In the same way, the new store will use popup tents and giveaways to get people to come inside and talk with employees, brands can use social media to throw digital events to get people talking and engaging.

What Was Our Solution?

Instead of simply pushing the contest on National Puppy Day, we made the Puppy Day contest an RSVP event and promoted it on Facebook the week prior, telling fans to get ready for something big. In doing so, we were able to harness the power of social media by using Facebook’s automatic sharing when someone says they are attending an event. More importantly, we generated suspense about something new and different leading up to the event, instead of trying to grow a campaign within 24 hours.

Then, on the day of the event, we released a video that explained the surprise: if fans commented with a picture of their pet, not only would they be entered into the dog food contest, but they’d also have a chance to get a custom illustration of their pet done by a professional illustrator.

Why Did This Work?

By changing the contest for National Puppy Day from a single-day contest into an event that people could digitally attend, the suspense we generated spurred conversation in the PetSmart community. We were no longer throwing messages into the void hoping someone heard them. Instead, we got people excited about something unique and something they could take part in. More importantly, instead of simply asking people to retweet, share, or like, asked customers to engage in a deeper interaction that was rewarding to them and their pets. The ability to watch a caricature artist sketch someone’s pup in real time, then giving those people a digital copy of the sketch involves so many more potential customers than simply the giveaway. It also inspires them to share their photo with their friends, creating a larger reach and therefore furthering the conversation.

How Did It Turn Out?

The original goal was to get 10,000 contest entries, but by looking at social media as an opportunity to create an experience instead of simply a message board, we were able to collect 20,700 contest entries — over double our goal! Over the course of the day, we were able to draw and share over 120 caricatures and reach over 2.2 million people. By taking the entire campaign a step further and making a real event out of a digital experience, we were able to help PetSmart build a conversation with its customers, rather than simply doing more posts on a specific day.