Social Media Case Study with Proctor & Gamble – The Key is Creativity

Proctor & Gamble has gotten clever with using social media to entice it’s buying demographic. Their buyers are women between the ages of 25-54 with children at home. This target market spends an average of 484 minutes on Facebook which is 14% more time than Facebook’s typical user.

Where P & G used to rely on TV advertisements to market Iams dog food, Cover Girl cosmetics and Pepto Bismol they are now going to where the consumer is hanging out which is Facebook. Rather than just put up a P & G Facebook page and hope buyers will see them they have cleverly created social media campaigns in unique ways around their brands.

For example they created a Facebook campaign for Secret deodorant called “Mean Stinks” an anti bullying drive aimed at teen girls and created added traffic and sales. The page now has over one million likes and and has created a 5 percent market share jump for the core brand in the 12 months after the campaign.

They cleverly discovered that the words, “Pepto Bismol” showed up on Facebook on Saturday’s and Sundays after their demographic had been out partying the night before. P & G built a Facebook & Twitter campaign promoting the pink remedy as a hangover remedy and a must have before night out celebrations.

Their brand Cover Girl has added celebrity social media by having Ellen DeGeneres and Sofia Vergara promote the brand through their social networks as well. Ellen tweeted, “working on Cover Girl commercial with Sofia Vergara- I can’t understand a word she says” which was sent out to the Twitterverse as well as being a TV ad and a print ad.

The key with social media at this point is to monetize it with clever positioning. Social media is not the same medium as print ad or TV it is meant to engage, enroll and create a movement.

If your company is in retail- how can you create a movement around your products? A client of mine who I have worked with as a coach created a movement around her Gratitude cards- she teamed up with a non profit and created a social media campaign around the movement not the cards.

If you company is service focused how can you align your services your demographic? Putting up a Facebook landing page isn’t going to do it- you need to create a clever way to engage visitors, to get them to ‘like’ your page and to carry on conversations around the service.

We really are moving towards community conversations in regards to products and services. Who is in your community and how can you add value for them while increasing business?