Sales and Brand Awareness Campaign
This post is part of a series of guides demonstrating how to create CrowdValence campaigns for various use cases. In this guide, we’ll be creating a campaign to monitor posts related to a specific type of product, with the goal of promoting a product to relevant posts’ authors and readers.
Specifically, we’ll be creating a sample campaign for Acme, a Twilio alternative that offers lower prices on the same SMS and MMS APIs Twilio offers. Acme’s goal is to drive sales + signups by converting and increasing brand awareness among audiences interested in SMS/MMS APIs, particularly those looking for alternatives to our competitors.
The end result will be a campaign that monitors for relevant posts based on keyword and contextual filters we create, then notifies us of new posts meeting that criteria as shown below:
Choosing Initial Keywords
Because Acme is a startup, there aren’t many posts on Reddit mentioning their brand specifically. If Acme only interacted with those mentioning their brand, they’d be missing out on people who don’t already know about it.
Twilio on the other hand gets lots of posts mentioning their brand. If we run a search for Twilio on Reddit, we’ll get a wide range of different kinds of posts. The high volume of posts mentioning Twilio suggests this is a good keyword to start with.
Some of these results are highly relevant (like the one asking for a “Twilio alternative”, while others simply aren’t. On the other hand, we also see posts talking about Twilio’s hiring process and its stock, which aren’t relevant to our purpose.
Setting Up Filters
Keyword Filtering
To exclude these, we’ll first add a few Negative Keywords to take care of the lowest hanging fruit. These will include TWLO (the stock ticker), stock, hiring, and job. Now we’re starting to get more relevant posts.
We’ll simply enter “all” to track all subreddits. If we decide we want to target specific subreddits later on, we can add them by editing the campaign and replacing all with those specific sudbeddits.
We can also optionally add a filter for Minimum Subscribers to filter out posts in subreddits with less than, say, 100 subscribers. We recommend leaving the Minimum Subscribers filter empty to start. If you start getting notifications in subreddits that are too small, simply change the minimum later.
Contextual Filtering
While negative keywords helped remove some irrelevant posts, you’ll notice we still get posts that aren’t relevant to our goal. This is where CrowdValence’s Contextual Filtering comes in. Specifically, we’re going to set our Campaign to filter for posts relevant to our specific use case.
First, we’ll enter the brand’s Name (Acme) so CrowdValence knows who this filter is for. Second, we’ll enter the Filter Criteria for posts that are relevant to our campaign. CrowdValence will estimate how well each post fits with the criteria holistically, so you can enter multiple different kinds of posts here if you’d like. We’ll also enter a Description of what we do and offer, which CrowdValence will use to see where that fits particularly well (e.g. posts looking for a lower-cost Twilio alternative).
Relevance Scores
Using all of this information, CrowdValence will measure new posts that otherwise fit the campaign parameters (i.e. including the keywords we set, not including the negatives, etc.) for how well they fit our Criteria. It will then generate a score estimating how relevant the post is, which is used to rank posts in your notifications.
You can also explicitly filter for posts above a certain relevance score (e.g. only notify me of posts with a score >30%). We recommend leaving the hard filter off until you’ve seen enough posts below a certain threshold that you feel comfortable excluding posts below that score.
Suggested Replies
To make things particularly easy for me, I’ll also ask CrowdValence to Suggest Replies by checking the box under Advanced Settings. I’ll then describe the style of replies I want suggested (e.g. “Suggest replies that highlight how Acme is a better alternative to their current SMS/MMS API provider, or how Acme can address their specific issues. Where relevant, highlight features such as Acme’s 50% lower pricing than Twilio and major competitors on SMS + MMS sends, and 24/7 customer support”).
CrowdValence will use this to assist me with writing replies that fit both the post and our goals.
The Result
With all this setup, we can create the campaign, which we’ll now see in our Dashboard. CrowdValence will now check for new posts matching your campaign criteria every hour (or other custom update frequency if you set one for the campaign). When new posts match the criteria, you’ll be notified by email, like below:
Improving the campaign further
Improving Filters
As we can see in the case above, we might want to explicitly exclude posts below a certain relevance score, which we can do by editing the campaign from our Dashboard. Similarly, if you get a number of irrelevant posts including a specific keyword (like “[Offer]”) above, you can simply add that keyword to your Negative Keywords from the same campaign edit form.
Expanding Scope
Alternatively, we might want to expand the scope of this campaign. For example, we could add other highly discussed SMS/MMS API providers, or non-branded keywords such as “SMS API”, “MMS API”, or “SMS service”.