5 effective social media campaigns from Science and Engineering
Increasing awareness of your organisation is one of the biggest challenges that marketers in science and engineering face.
Fierce competition, budgets and resources often hold many organisations back when considering different channels for promoting their businesses.
A potentially great way of reaching new audiences and raising the awareness of your organisation is on social media.
Having well managed and optimised social media pages is an important starting point but using specific social media campaigns can certainly help your organisation to reach its objectives.
What is a social media campaign?
A social media campaign is a coordinated marketing effort across one or more of your social channels, that increases the chances of the target audience taking a certain action that supports your organisation in achieving a specific goal.
What makes an effective social media campaign?
- Setting Goals – these could be increase brand awareness, encourage social engagement, generate leads, drive sales etc.
- Focus intensely on your audience and break them down into specific buyer personas
- Choose the type of content and channel that matches your buying personas
- Create amazing visual content that will capture your audience’s attention
- Engage with your audience and build a community around your campaign
5 examples within Science and Engineering
Now we will look at 5 examples of effective social media campaigns within science and engineering.
Each example will provide you with ideas that you can take away and consider for your own organisations.
1. Goodfellow
Goodfellow is a global supplier of materials for use within science and industry. They regularly run multi-channel social media campaigns in the form of competitions.
Goal: To drive awareness
Channel: Multi-channel
Why it works: This type of competition requires entrants to follow their pages, tag friends in the post etc. in return for the chance to win a free prize.
Everyone loves free giveaways so if it is easy and quick to enter then you can gain a lot of entrants quickly.
The more people who enter, the more people will see the post which increases the chance of further engagement and further entrants. This is a continuous process and momentum can be built quickly.
This style of campaign can increase your reach dramatically, whilst gaining new followers who are likely to have some level of interest in your products or services. These new followers have become qualified leads that you can engage with after the competition has finished.
2. Society for Neuroscience
The Society for Neuroscience is extremely well known within the industry. They have a large following on social media and create content that promotes research within the industry.
In more recent times they have used social media to keep the followers informed and engaged regarding COVID-19 and how they are supporting the response.
Goal: Brand engagement
Channel: Twitter
Why it works: They are positioning themselves at the forefront in terms of shaping the debate with regards to neuroscience and COVID-19.
They are responding to an event in real time and use the hashtag #COVID19andNeuro.
This is an effective campaign because of its relevance.
People are already engaged with this issue and the followers of the Society of Neuroscience pages would be fascinated to learn and debate the links between COVID-19 and neuroscience.
As a result, they will see an increase in engagement from their following.
3. Waters Corporation
Waters Corporation utilises social media to support the organisations philosophy of always ‘delivering benefit’.
Goal: Boost brand engagement
Channel: LinkedIn / Facebook / Twitter
Why it works: The organisation can position themselves as thought leaders in their industry by providing valuable content that informs and educates their audience.
Water Corporation use the #EmpowerTips campaign to do this.
This works because thought leadership encourages dialogue and debate which leads to online discussions and sharing within wider networks.
This works particularly well on LinkedIn because the organic reach of a well-engaged post is much wider than on other main social networks.
4. Jacobs
Jacobs is a well-known international organisation that used social media to showcase their people and give their community a more detailed insight into the work they do.
Goal: Build a community around the business
Channel: Instagram
Why it works: Showing the real side to your business is a great way to generate interest in your organisation.
Jacobs use the #OurJacobs hashtag to showcase their team and the work they do.
The organisation prides themselves on putting their people at the forefront of everything they do and by putting them front and centre of this campaign they are enabling potential clients / customers to get the inside view of the people they will be dealing with.
Campaigns that highlight your teams can be an extremely effective way of improving the perception of your brand to potential customers or clients.
5. Gravity
Gravity is an organisation that engineer’s human ‘ironman style’ suits and consistently aims to test human limits.
Goal: Boost brand engagement
Channel: YouTube
Why it works: The #takeongravity campaigns focus on showcasing amazing video examples of the engineering done by the gravity team.
The uniqueness of the videos means they encourage huge amounts of views, shares and comments.
Many of their videos have millions of views.
Their campaigns work because they produce a product that can wow people and inspire them into taking specific actions.
Conclusion
In this post we have seen some great examples of effective social campaigns from science and engineering that have produced exciting results.
With a clear strategy, committed focus on your audience and well thought out creatives you too can start putting together your own social media campaign.
Like AZoNework on Facebook for the latest insights and news from the science and engineering industry and get in touch with the team to arrange a free consultation about your organisation's marketing.
