Points to Learn from the Best Marketing Campaign of 2009

In a move that created history in the marketing world, last month a single marketing campaign took home the Grand Prix award in three categories simultaneously – direct, cyber and PR, at the International Cannes Advertising Festival. The winner was not some brand that had spent millions on its advertising campaign, but rather a small Travel and Tourism board that was promoting Hamilton Island – a little known island off the Great Barrier Reef.

The campaign that was called the "Best Job in the World" was a big online search conducted through various social networking media for a new "caretaker" for Hamilton Island in Queensland, Australia. The budget of the campaign was comparatively paltry. It basically relied on PR and word of the mouth marketing to achieve shocking results. The campaign generated over 34,000 video entries from applicants in 200 countries, and more than 7 million visitors to the site who gave a vote count of nearly 500,000.

The successful marketing campaign is already seeing tangible results. The domestic Australian Airline Virgin Blue just started flying a direct flight between Sydney and Hamilton Island to meet the rise in demand from travelers wanting to get to the island. Apart from this, Amway Australia also chose to hold their upcoming annual conference in Hamilton Island.

The success of this travel marketing campaign makes it clear that the importance of the social media in the field of marketing cannot be denied. So how can a business make great use of the social media while promoting their service? Here are a few tips that should make it easier for you to come up with the perfect campaign for your business.

Focus on the content – the traffic will follow

Most marketing campaigns focus on the traffic that its site generates. But the unique thing about the campaign of Tourism Queensland was that it encouraged people from around the world to upload videos on YouTube. Now, if you total the views of all those videos, and multiply them over the long term, you will be able to realize what a huge impact such a strategy can have on the campaign. 

Give them a reason to share

For this strategy to work however, you need to create an inherent reason for people to share their videos. This was taken care of by the Tourism Queensland campaign by enabling voting. This meant that after a person uploaded his video online, he would have the incentive to come back and share the video with everyone in his social networking site so that he can win more votes!

Content creators online are important

Statistics have pointed out that 1-10% of all the users of social networking sites are active content creators. Though this seems like a small percentage, the fact of the matter is the potential impact of these users online is great and must be taken into account while promoting a business through the social media.