#Washorbrush viral campaign

Do you even run a creative agency if a client has never said “please can you make this go viral?”

I have been on the artistic end of some fairly contagious campaigns, but I was not convinced that I could honestly say I’d ever ‘gone viral’. I felt left out. I wanted to add this prized, pestiferous feather to my marketing cap.

The idea

Good ideas always creep up on me. If I try to sit down and come up with a good idea, it will not happen. I will sit there like a visionary hen, waiting for the idea to pop out – in vain. Then, a few hours or days later, once I’ve stirred some research, data and hours of internet inspiration into my brain and left it alone to marinate, it will happen. Maybe while swimming, walking the dog or stacking the dishwasher. 

One morning I got out of the shower and – BOOM – the idea struck as I reached for my moisturiser. Thanks to years of using face creams, my skin is wholly incapable of producing enough sebum to stop my face feeling like a tight, itchy balloon when freshly cleansed. So immediately after washing and drying my face, I have to slather on face cream. Before I do anything else – even before brushing my teeth. 

As I began this morning routine for the thousandth time, I thought – I wonder if brushing my teeth after cleansing and moisturising my face is bad? What if I’m stripping off all the moisturiser I just added to the lower half of my face when I brush my teeth and then dry my face again with a towel? Will this make the bottom half of my face age faster than the top? I bet I’m not the only person who would like to know the answer to this. 

And there began the #washorbrush campaign.

The goal

It’s useless ‘going vial’ unless you are going to get something out of it. The business objectives for this campaign were to:

• Engage and grow social and subscriber audiences
• Direct traffic to the client’s website
• Generate unique data
• Gain mailing list opt-in email addresses
• Promote the launch of new cleansing cloths
• Use data in a press release to get more coverage and take the campaign further into press coverage
• Raise brand awareness
• Sell products

I would do this by surveying a relevant audience on whether they wash their face or brush their teeth first. I would encourage entries by tying it into a competition. I would use the unique data in a beauty news press release.

I pitched this idea to my client. She LOVED it. 

The process

Step one

My client is a skincare expert. We would create a thought-leadership piece on my client’s website about whether it’s better to wash your face or brush your teeth first, and why doing it wrong can prematurely age your skin. We would also have a photoshoot of our regular model washing or brushing, to add on brand imagery to the campaign.

This page would also:

1. Host a survey – for data
2. Host a competition – for engagement
3. Capture email addresses – for email marketing

Step two

Launch the online survey asking whether people wash their faces or brush their teeth first.

Step three

Run the competition to win a skin cleansing product bundle, in return for completing the #washbrush survey and giving my client permission to add their email address to their mailing list.

Step four

Push the competition through social media and the client newsletter, and share the campaign with news and magazine social media editors via a press release to gain traction and data.

Step five

Publish the results of the survey to all health and beauty journalists, with a quote from my client about why you should ALWAYS brush your teeth first.

Step six

Sit back and watch the discussion go viral  and traffic and sales soar while the world learns to brush and then wash.

The result:

Spoiler alert – this idea did not go viral. It did not even catch a little sniffle. The entire concept is arguably still in rude health.

But – I still consider this campaign a success. Over six weeks it achieved 101 mailing list signups, 361 page views and visitors spent on average 1.5 minutes reading the #washbrush article, which shows that they found it useful.

101 people completed the survey – that is unique, usable information on people’s current cleansing routines – ideal for journalists. It gave a strong hook to the story that half of people are cleansing WRONG!

The social media posts achieved fairly normal levels of engagement. 217 clicks to the web content came from social media, leading to a further 509 page views as people browsed the site for an average of 2 minutes 35 seconds. There was only one sale that came directly from the page.

So far only one piece of coverage was achieved from the survey results press release in That’s Life magazine’ beauty news section.

We all learned a lot about how tough it is to ‘go viral’. In future I would boost the social media posts and find a way to increase the survey entries. I would speak to social media managers and beauty editors about my idea and see if they thought it would work, would they cover the news, and if not, why not?