When the brief came in, Vodafone’s VOXI was almost brand new to market. The mobile network offers sim-only plans with unlimited minutes, texts and endless data to social media websites and apps. The plan was initially billed for u-25’s before the upper age limit was raised to u-30's in 2018. VOXI needed help to educate potential customers about their unique proposition within the telco space and drive direct customer sign-ups.

VOXI’s endless social data offering is an attractive one for the target market but in a competitive mobile landscape, even the best offers need to be seen to drive sales. It’s no secret that u-30’s are continuing to spend even more time on social. According to a recent survey from GWI, global internet users in the 16-24 age range are now spending over 3hrs per day on social networking and messaging platforms with dwell times at 2 hrs 37 mis for 25-34’s. What better way to inform the social generation about the benefits of VOXI’s plan by using the power of social itself.

We executed a two-part strategy from The Hook’s main Facebook page as a base, to firstly mobilise our large and highly engaged youth audience, and secondly to use the platforms advertising and targeting capabilities to drive those customer conversions through.

We produced two stand-out newsreel style videos featuring actors and text overlays to hammer home key messaging from VOXI’s offering. These were served directly to the 18- 25 target market using Facebook’s age-gating functionality. Additional links and a call to action to sign up for a free sim-card was included and resonated perfectly with The Hook’s audience on Facebook. As the partnership progressed and VOXI’s upper age limit increased to under 30’s, we generated a third newsreel video to capture the remaining audience.

From here, we were able to create custom audiences to re-target from a pool of people who had actively engaged and interacted with the newsreels on Facebook.

Phase two saw the recruitment of iconic influencers with a combined social following of over 15M fans. Examples included Gary Beadle and Aaron Chalmers from popular reality TV show Geordie Shore, and Stuart Barter aka ‘Stuggy’ a social media entertainer, comedy actor and cultural influencer in his own right.

The guys filmed individual selfie-style adverts to drive through VOXI sign-ups for a second round of targeting from both The Hook’s Facebook page as well as the influencers individual social accounts.

In a nutshell, the campaign looked to gather a laser-targeted audience first on The Hook before activating this audience to sign up to VOXI. As links were trackable, we were able to directly see individuals converting on the affiliate platform.

• Drive sign-ups to VOXI and deliver 1000 new customers
• Brand awareness. Clear messaging on what VOXI offer, based around endless social data
• Hit a combined reach of 2.5 million
• Keep cost per customer acquisition to the target of £55

We smashed our targets with 1270 new customers (+27%) while beating VOXI’s target customer acquisition by saving 16% at £46 per customer acquisition. We drove brand awareness with a huge 8M+ impressions from the direct u-30 target audience and hit a combined reach of 4.5M, overdelivering by 80%.

“The Hook enabled us to not only drive awareness for VOXI, but also ensure that those users who acknowledged our campaign actually went on to become VOXI customers. The campaign perfectly illustrates that having a performance mentality when putting together a brand campaign will ensure you hit a number of business KPI’s.”

Mahdi Khan- Affiliate Manager- VOXI/Vodafone

WINNERS

Performance Marketing Awards 2019

• Best Influencer Marketing Campaign