Berghs School of Communications wanted to increase the number of applicants and decided to focus on just one native campaign in collaboration with the Swedish publisher KIT. The effort made sure that Berghs School of Communications got the largest number of applications ever.
Publisher/Agency: KIT
Campaign: Berghs
Brand: Berghs School of Communications
Country: Sweden
Berghs’ goal was simple: to get more applicants than ever to their programs. They also wanted to reach outside their usual bubble in the Swedish media world
Berghs School of Communications had tried a number of different marketing strategies to increase the number of applicants over the years. In the spring of 2017, they skipped everything else to do just one thing: a native campaign with KIT – on Facebook.
KIT is a new, Swedish publisher who publishes their editorial and commercial content primarily on social platforms. Berghs had seen KIT's work on Facebook and liked it and wanted to try out KIT’s unique way of working with data and social media.
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KIT agreed that a native campaign on Facebook would most likely be the most effective way to get the message out to the target group and still keep a tight budget.
Berghs’ goal was simple: to get more applicants than ever to their programs and to reach outside its usual bubble in the Swedish media world and get other people talking about Berghs.
KIT always look at all data they possibly can to be able to draw as many conclusions as possible and learn from every case. But in this case, there was one KPI that was more important than all the others: how many applications Berghs would get after this campaign.
Swedish men and women in the ages 20-30 and parents with kids in that age group.
In a media landscape where distribution monopolies no longer prevail, increasing demands for quality are put on every individual piece of content.
In a media landscape where distribution monopolies no longer prevail, increasing demands for quality are put on every individual piece of content. There is no room for irrelevant, or ”page-filling” content in a ruthlessly competitive distribution system of social feeds, search algorithms, and content partnerships.
Core to this new reality is
1) understanding why a certain story performs well, and
2) being able to use these insights in creating new stories.
Understanding and applying these insights give structural advantages for publishers who create processes and build systems to support increasingly efficient storytelling. KIT seeks to do just this.
At KIT, they’ve come to the conclusion that distributing content on social platforms boils down to one thing: that you are doing the right content. If you're working with bad content or wrong content you'll have to put large budgets behind it to get the effect you want. But if you're sending out the right content to the right audience it will find it's audience almost by itself.
KIT’s storytelling always starts and ends with their platform for content creation: Story Engine. Here they collect data from all their published content
But what is the right content? In social media, the answer usually is; "it depends". It depends on which story you are telling, why you are telling it, who your audience is, and so forth.
KIT’s storytelling always starts and ends with their platform for content creation: Story Engine. Here they collect data from all their published content and from the whole content process; from ideation to creation and distribution.
To be able to understand and describe content, they've invented a completely new language, KIT Core, which describes the editorial process in much greater detail than the traditional standards in the editorial world today. KIT Core consists of 17 new content taxonomies or categories, and for every piece of content they publish, their reporters describe what they are doing within these categories.
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Since they've been doing this with all their editorial content the last two years, the platform today gives them precise recommendations on how they should tell each and every story to get the effect they are looking for.
KIT has also mapped every video they’ve made, both editorial and commercial, to be able to single out a number of different formats that they constantly seek to perfect.
They’ve also taken a closer look at every format and mapped the dramaturgical patterns for the videos with the very best retention and identified the best practice dramaturgy for every format. To be able to follow these best practices carefully they’ve created script templates for each format.
Combining these templates with the recommendations from Story Engine gives them an extraordinary advantage when it comes to working with video in social.
So the strategic approach was simple: to follow the guidelines given to KIT from Story Engine and use the script templates for the video format they wanted to use. Doing this would drastically increase the probability of success.
KIT also knew they wanted to work with both video and articles since the two has completely different effects on the audience.
KIT knew they wanted to make one video and two articles, which was a completely strategic choice - and a way to use Facebook as effective as possible.
All KIT’s creative ideas start with Story Engine. By giving the platform the right input, it presented them with recommendations on how they should tell these stories. Story Engine recommended for example that they should have an identifiable editorial intent, a reportative article objective, and a personal tonality.
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KIT knew they wanted to make one video and two articles, which was a completely strategic choice - and a way to use Facebook as effective as possible. Facebook video is a quick and easy way to reach a big audience and give people a short and brief introduction to a message. When distributing the articles you can instead focus on a tighter audience and give them a deeper look into the world of Berghs.
KIT wanted to keep the storytelling simple and together with Berghs they decided to tell three stories about:
For their video, they closely followed the dramaturgical script templates for the format "interview", and they based all content on the recommendations from Story Engine.
KIT distributed primarily on Facebook, which is the main focus for KIT’s distribution overall, but they also published the content on KIT.se.
KIT distributed the campaign for four weeks in February and March and primarily used sponsored posts since they wanted to know that they reached the target group. Publishing organically on Facebook can be a good way to get free distribution, but you can never guarantee that the right people have seen the content.
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Most importantly, the marketing effort made sure that Berghs School of Communications got the largest number of applications ever this year.
The team at KIT was amazed by the reactions to content: The audience watched, read and loved it.
This case study is part of a collection of award-winning native advertising examples studies from Native Advertising Awards presented by The Native Advertising Institute.
We aim to acknowledge and reward great native advertising and promote inspiring, effective and creative work that helps organizations worldwide achieve their goals and tell great brand stories in a non-disruptive way.
DOWNLOAD: Native Advertising Trends 2017 - The Magazine Industry
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