Less is More

Often less is more with social media. Don’t feel like everything you do in advertising on social media has to be an elaborate advertising campaign costing inordinate amounts of money: try something simple. Here are some examples of extremely simple ad campaigns that had tremendous success.

Gap
Gap teamed up with an online company called Goupon that offers its customers special deals through coupons. Together they used social media to advertise a nationwide sale: $50 worth of apparel for $25. 441,000 Goupon tickets were sold in one day bringing in about $11 million in revenue. In addition to selling a ton a clothes Gap was able to bring in new customers that might not otherwise have shopped at Gap. There wasn’t anything specifically unique about what Gap did. At the end of the day they had a sale – nothing new there. But they were able to use social media to amplify their efforts. Often the simplest idea is the best.

Will It Blend
The beauty of social media is that fantastic add campaigns don’t necessarily have to cost a lot a money. Will it blend is an advertising series by Blendtec. The ads feature co-founder Tom Dickinson saying, “Will it blend? That is the question.” Then proceeding to blend everything under the sun, from golf balls, to magnets, to cell phones, IPods, IPads and much more. These extremely simplistic YouTube videos become a roaring success and Blendtec has seen a 500% sales growth from online sales.




Movie Trailers
It’s extremely common to find movie trailers on YouTube. It’s such a simple and obvious use of social media that people often forget about these types of advertisements. Posting a movie trailer on YouTube is practically free advertising, and any movie worth its salt has a trailer on YouTube. However, a few years ago a movie, Cloverfield, put a slight twist on their YouTube trailer. A couple months before they released the official trailer, they release a short trailer on YouTube without the movie’s title. This created a buzz about the movie before the preview even came out as people tried to guess which movie it was. Never underestimate curiosity.

When coming up with social media advertising campaigns don't forget that simple is often best.