“Hello, this is Sweden”
This week’s digital marketing success story is about The Swedish Tourist Association.
What Can We Learn From The Swedish Tourist Association: A new way to give references.
Example: The Swedish Number campaign that spanned 79 days earlier in 2016:
Basically, random Swedes signed up to be phone “ambassadors” and field phone calls. Anyone in the world could call the Swedish number and talk to a random resident about Sweden.
Here’s the wild part, those who signed up to field phone calls on behalf of Sweden received no instructions.
No training. No coaching. No script.
Pure Sweden (I’m from Michigan).
Why Was This Campaign Effective?
- Generated $146 million in media value (no ad spend)
- Received 9.4 billion media impressions
- Prompted 197,404 phone calls from 190 countries
- Got a lot of people talking about Sweden
The agency behind the promotion, Ingo Stockholm, received an award at the Cannes Lions Festival honoring those in creative communications, advertising and related fields.
Even the Prime Minister of Sweden fielded phone calls and President Barack Obama of the United States mentioned the campaign during a speech.
The Bigger Picture: Could Some of Your Customers Become Phone Ambassadors?
Think of your die-hard fans. Those customers that sing your praises to everyone. Would one or a few of them be willing to give this a try?
A business could mimic Sweden if a phone number was setup to automatically transfer calls to a pool of customers or someone’s call got transferred to a customer.
Imagine something like this on your website or promotional material:
“Call and talk to a customer that knows more about our company than us.”
This would generate some phone calls and maybe one sale you might not have otherwise gotten.
Other Thoughts
One of The Most Powerful Forms of Marketing
We all know that customer references can be one of the most powerful forms of marketing.
When I worked in the capital equipment business, we had one customer sell at least four machines for us because of their reference. This led to four more potential good references, which could lead to more references and sales (snowball effect).
We always had a close relationship with them and other die hard customers.
Sometimes, we sent them free service parts and we always stayed close to make sure things were still going well.
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I share social media basics and success stories, press the heart button if you think the Swedish number campaign took some guts.
Even though I write this on every post, thanks for reading.
Big thanks to Mark Schaefer for alerting me to this success story!
Originally published at www.erp101.com.
