One of the magazines I design for The Royal Marsden is called ‘Advance’ and is a showcase of the latest science and technology behind treatment and prevention of cancer. After 2 years of designing the magazine I was then involved in the redesign, which is shown here.
Following the success of our Advocate Quote campaign, we took the idea of using people’s stories to promote P&O Cruises, and created a ‘Done on a cruise’ video series. This features quotes from past cruisers about surprising and extraordinary experiences they had on a P&O Cruise. The idea was to boost these as ads to the extended audience (those who don’t follow the P&OC page and who wouldn’t consider cruising for a holiday), in hope that it would surprise them and change their perspective on cruising – leading them to consider a P&O Cruise.
Part of our “Where Would You Rather Be?” campaign, this has a different creative approach to asking the audience ‘which one?’; where the visual is representing someone who cannot decide which destination they prefer. I pulled similarities between the two destinations to sit side by side to make an engaging visual, especially the opening frame where I wanted the audience to almost make a double take as they scroll through their feed.
Understanding our P&OC audience engage with interactive posts and gamification, I came up with the idea of “Where Would You Rather Be?”, featuring two destinations where the audience has to pick their favourite in a ‘would you rather’ style. The audience would comment with their favourite and then we followed with a short video of the winning destination, in a “we asked, you answered” style. In terms of engagement, the polls did better on social as they required the audience to participate, which they react very well to; the first one we posted (Norway vs Caribbean) received 378 comments. We also accompanied these with Facebook polls, and the use of Instragram Stories poll stickers, as part of this campaign.
Our P&OC audience engage extremely well with gamification, it is one of our top performing creative formats, some have generated over 1000 comments on a single post. Previously I have created word searches, emoji hunts, anagrams, spot the differences – to name a few – and then I came up with the idea of an “Odd One Out’ and ‘Guess the…….’ series. Below are a couple of examples of each series. All these were top performing posts; the ‘guess the destination’ below generated 2.6k likes and 1.6k comments (boosted), and the ‘odd one out’ ships generated 266 likes and 268 comments (unboosted). This was a 14% engagement rate, exceeding well over our target, with our KPI being 4%.
Our Advocate Quote campaign has been our most consistently successful content on P&OC social. The idea is using people’s stories to promote P&O Cruises, as consumers now respond better to influencer marketing rather than traditional marketing; trusting the reviews of other people rather than huge corporate companies. We use this content organically, strengthening our loyal community by sharing their stories, encouraging our audience to then share their own stories in the comments. At the same time they are also used as paid ads to the extended audience (those who don’t follow the P&OC page and who wouldn’t consider cruising for a holiday), in hope that other people’s reviews would surprise them and change their perspective on cruising – leading them to consider a P&O Cruise. This content achieves around a 10% engagement rate (our KPI target is 4%).
