Hand Crank has helped fill the gap between grabbing the attention of our audience and converting that engagement into a lead for our retailers.
- Justin Lee, Firstech Marketing Chief
The Problem: A Nuanced Story
Typically, when it comes to social media, we advise our clients to stick with documentary style stories and user case-studies, etc. These are fairly straightforward to produce, and tap into the “authenticity” attribute that is so important for getting good social “travel” – i.e., free shares and views, etc. However, sometimes this style just won’t do. Sometimes, you want something that is bigger than a docu-style piece. Something that has grander ambitions, bigger production, and ultimately hits home through the means of big storytelling, rather than testimonials. And, you want it to work for you on social. How the hell do you do all this?
Well, if you follow this blog closely, which I know you all do, you’ll remember when we posted all about how much fun we had creating a dramatic, large-scale video for one of our favorite clients, Firstech and their industry-leading car starter product, DroneMobile. Since that piece dropped a few months ago, we’ve been lucky enough to head up the social media targeting and placement for the video. And it has been working out phenomenally. How?
The Solution: Modularity in Design
The thing is, typically social doesn’t handle large scale storytelling all that well. The wonderful film we made of a family going on an early morning road trip with a nicely paced setup, etc. is not something that many on social are probably going to stop and take the time to watch. It works great when you have a captive audience at a trade show, or in pre-roll, or for a tv spot, but not so great for a social feed. So, to make the piece useful for both audiences, we built modularity directly into the apparently seamless video from the beginning.
Ultimately, we rolled 3 new cuts out for social. We made one short :30 version of the main video to kickoff the campaign, and then we created two REALLY short, 12-15 second cuts that just focused on a singular core feature of DroneMobile. The point was, these didn’t tell the whole story, but they told just enough to get you interested, and they told them beautifully enough to make you want to watch.
The Results: 10x Previous Year’s Social Conversions and More
“The results of this approach have been really phenomenal for Firstech,” says Justin Lee, Chief Marketing Officer at Firstech, maker of DroneMobile. “We’ve seen a 10x increase in conversions via social compared to this time last year on this product. But beyond the conversions, we also feel that Hand Crank was instrumental in closing the gap between people learning about our product, and then learning where and how they can get our product. That’s always been a problem for us, to go from perusing the feed, to finding out more, to becoming a lead – Hand Crank’ approach really helped us solve this.”
To find out more about how we managed the social targeting and placement of these feel free to reach out to us and we’ll bore you to death with the details!