K atie c ouric

Chatbooks Case Study
A great example of finding message champions outside the core target
market is a project I worked on with Chatbooks, the number one online
photo printer in the world, with more than a million subscribers. Chatbooks
came to me with a Mother’s Day awareness campaign in the form of an
emotional video about mothers from the perspective of young children. In
the video, kids aged four to eight talk about how their mothers are
superheroes. It’s an amazing piece of creative that was produced by Nate
Morley, whom you’ll be hearing from later in this book.
Chatbooks told me that they wanted to “target moms aged forty-five and
above.” After seeing how great the creative was, I knew there was strong
potential of people sharing it at high velocity, so I urged them to allow me
to test the content and find brand advocates for this video. When I began
testing, I used a broad demographic spectrum but was specific in terms of
interests related to their product (e.g., scrapbooking, photography,
motherhood, and parenting). On awareness and engagement campaigns, I
tend to start by targeting the message to reach both men and women, aged
eighteen to sixty-five years old (unless we are selling a gender-specific
product as mentioned in the beginning of the chapter) and see where
Facebook’s algorithms push the content within the first few hours of the
campaign. I find this to be beneficial because Facebook’s algorithms are
constantly evolving to help you discover your most engaged audience and
will give you useful insights. If the insights are showing that your content is
not resonating with a specific demographic or interest level, launch another
test. And then another. Keep launching until you find the answers you’re
looking for. I also suggest you keep a wide target audience on broad-base
awareness campaigns because it generally brings down your cost in the
auction, giving you more impressions and chances to engage your audience.

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While running the tests, I noticed that the people who were sharing the
video were actually women between eighteen and twenty-five years old. It
wasn’t that they were necessarily the ones who would be buying the final
product, but they were the ones who were connecting with the content.
After further analysis, I found that they were sharing the video with their
mothers, tagging them in it, and starting a dialogue with their moms about
the content.
Broadening the scope to reach the younger women allowed Chatbooks
to hit their core demographic in a far more powerful way. They were
targeting the emotional connection between mothers and daughters. In turn,
this also allowed them to expose the product to a new audience.
That’s where I see the power of shareability and using a broader
approach to targeting. It can increase awareness of your messages and
content, help you find brand advocates, and, most important, reach your
core audience in an influential way—by getting a friend to share with
another friend or loved one. Essentially, you hack word-of-mouth sharing,
which is one of the most difficult things to achieve in marketing.
Get creative and allow yourself to make connections between your
buyers and your message sharers. You may discover new ways to market
your product or brand as well as gain new fans, boost your social numbers,
and sell more stuff.