British insurance comparison website Compare The Market have something of a hit on their hands with Aleksandr Orlov, their mongoose mascot and face on Facebook. Clearly, cute sells, and can also go viral.
Aleksandr is a cute Meerkat character and founder of Compare the Meerkat, a fictitious company, pretending to be mildly annoyed that the two companies are being confused as being the same.
Right now, Aleksandr is fronting Compare The Market’s Page on Facebook in fine style, with over 350,000 fans. But why?
Take a look at the number of comments and “likes” (votes of appreciation) each of his updates get and you’ll see that they have a hit on their hands.
Rather cannily, Compare The Market know that they need a better bridge between Aleksandr’s Compare the Meerkat and themselves, or they risk just coming over too strong on the commercial front, which is why they have the Compare the Meerkat spoof website, littered with videos, bloopers and the option to join their Page on Facebook, as well as following Aleksandr on Twitter, who has nearly 12k followers.
According to Alexa (not the most accurate assessment of web traffic by any means), the Compare the Meerkat website is ranked in the top 25k, with several thousand daily visits, while Quantcast doesn’t (as of writing) have enough data to go on, most likely because the website is too new.
And according to Michael Litman writing for Mashable about the Compare the Meerkat campaign:
“In the first 3 days of the campaign over three quarters of the monthly quotes target had been achieved. The year on year uplift in quotes was 45% and vitally, over 50% of the site traffic in the first week was going directly to comparethemarket.com. Finally, the number of quotes is up by 90% on the same period last year.”
Sadly, he doesn’t provide a source for his data. However, I suspect the figures to be a favourable reflection on the success of Compare the Meerkat’s .. I mean, Compare the Market’s social media marketing campaign.
As for the viral aspect, that’s a little more difficult to pull off and remain genuine. There have been some notable examples of viral marketing horror stories. Not even the big boys are exempt or immune, as Sony discovered with their ham-fisted stab at “yoof”viral marketing.
I suspect Compare the Meerkat succeeds because of the non-commercial nature of Aleksandr’s updates, which are usually casual, light and funny. Plus there’s the cute Meerkat being pushed into tens of millions of living rooms all over Britain. People want to share this stuff, which then becomes self-sustaining after a while.
Replicating the viral aspects is always going to be the hardest challenge of all, since the backbone of the campaign is the animated Aleksandr and the videos, which aren’t cheap to reproduce. But the rewards are huge. Even for someone like Compare the Market, the kind of exposure they’ve attracted would have cost considerably more via more mainstream marketing channels.
Using social media to manage your message
In terms of planning and execution, as social media marketing goes, this one went all the way to eleven (a reference to another spoof, of the heavy metal kind). All of the ingredients were there, from the micro-website, to the Twitter and Facebook profiles, as well as the official video on YouTube.
As I see it, there are some basic, entirely reproducible ingredients for social media marketing success:
- Tight integration between the various channels (website, blog, Twitter and Facebook profiles, YouTube video etc).
- A consistent theme and brand image of you, your business and your core message.
- Keep things moving and remain fresh, with plenty of updates, news etc.
So what can we take away from this? I guess most of you won’t have the kind of budget or resources these guys have at their disposal, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to learn from their efforts — just remember that Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are all free to use, which counts for a lot.
