Burson Cohn & Wolfe - Innovation in Content Marketing / Branded Editorial
Name of Organization / Company: Burson Cohn & Wolfe, Beijing, China
Category: Award for Innovation in Content Marketing / Branded Editorial
Entry Title: LinkedIn China: Dare To Be
Essay:
With 2018 International Women’s Day (IWD) approaching, LinkedIn, the largest professional social network in China and worldwide, wanted to celebrate the achievements in improving gender equality at workplaces and in life with Chinese women and men. The objectives and target audiences were made of multiple layers: 1) reaching the general public for brand awareness and positive perception; 2) engaging users for brand favorability and activeness; 3) engaging B2B customers to bring them marketing value.
With a very limited budget of less than RMB100,000 (US$15K) in agency fees and no paid media expenses, BCW China helped design and deliver an integrated campaign – #DareToBe, with an earned approach at the core. By strategically leveraging data- driven and visualized storytelling, and conducting pitches to activate influential media, brands and individuals, we successfully made the campaign virally trending on China’s social networks, earning millions of readership, impressions and organic engagements.
To implement with the best resources, we bridged L’Oreal and LinkedIn, two BCW clients, together to co- brand the campaign, providing brand endorsement, spokespersons and media channels at the stage of designing it. L’Oreal is also a LinkedIn B2B client and shares the same viewpoint on improving gender equality.
We kicked off the campaign with interesting data facts and insights from a branded perception survey on the topic of female identity. We designed and asked questions on how people view a woman’s role in family and workplaces to women and men in China across cities and ages. The results indicated a significant positive shift in Chinese women’s self- perception, especially among the Gen Z group. We then leveraged media’s curiosity on Gen Z, and the IWD topic, developed a press release, along with an infographic for distribution and pitching. With the efforts of several mainstream media pitching, in- depth articles were generated and shared through the media’s Weibo accounts, taking the branded survey report viral immediately.
Riding the momentum created by the survey results, a social media campaign #DareToBe was initiated. LinkedIn community influencers, internal female leaders, and pitched brands were activated to share their authentic #DareToBe stories with branded visual assets like campaign KV, posters, and infographics, on LinkedIn, Weibo and WeChat platforms. Their fans were engaged to share their own stories of breaking traditional identity perception and pursuing their life and career dreams.
The campaign was a huge success, achieving: 1) Surge in online and offline brand awareness. On social media, the branded survey report became Weibo’s trending topic #1 (similar to Twitter), discussed by the most influential media and brands with a fan base of millions of people on Weibo. It also became Zhihu (similar to Quora) trending topic #26. All organic! On media’s side, 402 media stories were generated, including key coverage in several mainstream business and metropolitan media, in print and portals. 2) Engaging LinkedIn users and B2B customers. 30+ LinkedIn business customers including Unilever, Huawei, Baidu and JD.com participated in the discussion with their 8M+ followers on LinkedIn. 17 LinkedIn- based influencers developed blog articles and posted on LinkedIn, garnering thousands of authentic new readers from their professional networks.
URL 2
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6376999929965047808/
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https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6377453000373436417
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https://www.linkedin.com/feed/topic/?keywords=%23%E4%B8%8D%E5%AE%89%E5%88%86
URL 5
https://m.weibo.cn/2803301701/4214613501483125
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https://m.weibo.cn/1784473157/4214510665198824
URL 7
https://m.weibo.cn/1657240352/4214657465800231
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https://m.weibo.cn/2847531955/4215275916358664