Lufthansa, Eurovision & Facebook
Lufthansa aren’t first choice in the UK for trendy young travellers looking for a weekend city break. They do have a lot of great European city destinations though, a fleet of brand new aircraft equipped with state of the art ergonomically designed seats & a great set of in flight services to beat many of their rivals. A highly relevant & appealing proposition for the target audience!
Get the message out!
It’s hard to cut through the marketing noise, particularly if you’re trying to reach a young media savy audience. Social media channels are well used by the 25-35 year old target demographic who spend a lot of time interacting with friends across community networks through channels like Facebook.
Facebook Advertising?
Facebook provides some highly targeted data for you to work with, but placed ads need to work alongside a wider brand engagement programme, basically you’ve got to talk to the audience as well as put ads in front of them, if you’re going to be as effective as possible. .jpg "Lufthansa Facebook")
Lufthansa Facebook fan page?
A brand owned Facebook page also has its uses, but really it depends on two things. How engaged are your audience with your brand? How compelling is your content? The big questions is: why would anyone bother to come to your Facebook page, & more importantly keep coming back? Just having a Facebook page isn’t enough.
Understand Social Media
Social media isn’t a campaign channel like the ones you’re used to. Social is about dialogue, relevant content & building trust. It’s about establishing relationships on an ongoing basis. This means you really need to understand your audience & find out what they’re interested in, then engage with then on that basis.
Eurovision sponsorship
Lufthansa were main sponsors of the 2011 Eurovision song contest, a brand association designed to get them in front of a younger audience, in particular, students, the gay community & young families. Eurovision’s fun, it’s about a party & of course it’s about Europe & European city destinations. As part of their sponsorship programme, Lufthansa made available 4 tickets, including flights & hotels, to the Eurovision final in Dusseldorf.
So, using one of the primary rules of effective social (make the most of the content you already have), we built an online engagement programme around the Eurovision sponsorship & this great prize promotion.
Using Facebook & Twitter channels to promote the Lufthansa Eurovision competition:
• A Facebook fanpage promoting the Eurovision event & ‘win tickets’ competition
• Simple ‘Like’ button to enter the competition , maximises conversion & posts the Eurovision page to the Facebook Wall of each competition entrant, exposing the page to the broadest possible audience
• Fan page provides a hub for all Lufthansa Eurovision content, tapping into their main sponsor status with exclusive photo & video content around the event itself
• Twitter channel promoting Eurovision content & driving traffic through to the Facebook Fan page
Community Engagement
• Engaging with the Facebook & Twitter community as the voice of the Lufthansa ‘Eurovision Sponsor’
• Identifying active an influential community members & engaging in conversation & providing Eurovision content to these groups
• Build trust & relationship with the target audience through association with the Eurovision event
• Drive traffic on to the Lufthansa Eurovision microsite
What happened?
Focusing on a UK audience over a two week period:
• Over 500 competition entries & opt-in data capture
• Over 200 brand interactions (content posts, comments & conversations)
• A community of people talking to each other in the Lufthansa environment
What happens next?
Plugging into the Eurovision promotion through Facebook was a really successful way to introduce the Lufthansa brand to a new audience & to kick start a community. The key to conversion is all about how Lufthansa engage with this embryonic community. Continuing the dialogue, providing interesting & useful content, a reason to come back & talk to Lufthansa:
• Continue the dialogue
• Provide useful & engaging content regularly
• Build the relationship, familiarity & trust
• Use the relationship & the data captured to target conversion messages