Case Study: Louisville Slugger

4:30 — Cale Johnson introduces imc2‘s Chief Strategy Officer, Mark McKinney.

4:31 — McKinney gives us an overview of The Sweetest Spot Program – The Drop. Louisville Slugger sells bats to high school and colleges. How do you select a bat when they are all pretty much the same? “You’ve got one chance to sell them.” and the way they do that is by being unique and using word of mouth.

4:34 — During The World Series, they hid 45 winning bats all over the city. If you checked the social channels, you could receive clues about where they were hidden. People got on the social feeds and began to communicate about where the bats could be stashed throughout the city. There were some challenges: people followed the cars and spied on people hiding the bats. The Louisville Slugger social team was crafty to throw some curve balls at people (yeah, that was my pun) so that they could make the game fair and keep it interesting.

4:41 — Bat winners took pictures with the bat and posted it to their social streams; a great way to encourage user generated content.

4:43 — The Sweetest Spot Program “breathed new life into the brand’s social media presence and produced tremendous results.”

4:45 — Results: An average of 23 likes and 20 comments per message, 161% increase in Twitter followers, 834% increase in Facebook’s “Talking About This” metric. Sales generated from the campaign are still being evaluated.

4:50 — Q&A

What are things that Louisville Slugger is doing to track the sales of the campaign?

We are tracking the year over year sales to make inferences about the campaign’s success.

Now that you have a great social presence, what are you doing to keep it going?

The long term goal is to foster a conversation about BBCOR bats and to keep the social channels as a place for discourse and conversations about the brand. The sales team is also monitoring online conversation and following up with people who have bought bats.

The last session for the day has wrapped up! It has been a jam packed day, Team. Everyone is headed downstairs to the WOM.org post conference happy hour sponsored by the Online Marketing Institute.

 

 

About Yola Blake

Yola Blake is the lead social strategist at Get Page One, a search-marketing agency in Austin. Her current role includes full-service community management, corporate and small business social strategy, social profile optimization for SEO and editorial project management. Yola is also a contributing author for the Social Media Club's global editorial team and the Austin chapter’s web chair.

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