Canadian brand Tweed, North America's largest federally regulated producer of cannabis, scored a coup in 2016. It struck a deal with Snoop Dogg, one of the world's most prominent hip hop icons (and marijuana enthusiasts), to market Leafs by Snoop, the artist's own line of cannabis products. To the layperson, a perfect marriage like this sounds like a product that would sell itself. PR pros know better, though; a good campaign is everything.
Jordan Sinclair, director of communications, caught a lot of eyeballs with the Leafs launch campaign and came away with various lessons, which he will share with the audience of the PR News webinar Product Marketing Tactics That Capture the Attention of Your Customers to Drive ROI, Jan. 19 at 1:30 p.m. EST. A brief selection that he is sharing with us in advance:
1. Sponsored content needs to feel native. Make sure it resonates with its intended audience and is formatted the way that audience is used to seeing content on the specific platform in question.
2. Virality goes down as campaigns get longer and more complicated. If your campaign is comprised of multiple videos that each only carry one facet of your message, you're putting lots of onus on your audience to share your whole campaign, and you can't control who's sharing what piece of content. It's likelier that one great video will have more of a reach.
3. Ask yourself if media or influencers are the right fit (and research the matter). A good reporter will often reach out to various sources for their perspective on a story, but sometimes that's just not something you want. Influencers tend to be more one-sided in the exposure they can offer you, and they may offer more exposure than you might think compared to traditional media. Tweed's research found that it stood to reach more people with a solid influencer campaign.
4. Use all the distribution tools available for your content, and where possible, ask the service what they would do in your situation. Sometimes when you're trying something unique a wire service will be able to custom-tailor something for you, or otherwise provide you with some best practices.
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