Covid News: Content & Campaign strategy
Soon after Covid threw the world up in the air, I stepped in as Covid-comms lead at a Danish media development organisation.
Within the next two months, webtraffic grew by 103%, organic social grew by 400% and globally, through our network of partners, we got around 400,000 organic social views on a campaign I designed.
So how did we do it?
First off, we were sharing important information at an extremely difficult time. People suddenly had a lot of extra time on their hands, and they were motivated to learn. So in terms of social growth, the timing was definitely a factor. But we still managed to get significantly more traction than our competitors, and that came down to strategy.
Social media campaign
First off, we ran a social media campaign on freedom of information and restrictions on reporting (in many areas of the world where the authorities aren’t big fans of free media, press freedom was declining rapidly).
The strategy was simply to say what people were already thinking, but to say it a little more eloquently than they could say it themselves. If we could nail that, then users would share our social spots to get their own point across.
We produced 6 social ads based on a visual analogy that linked a covid mask with a gag. And to boost traction, we offered to reversion the campaign to make it work for any organization who wanted to repost it (adding their logo and translating it into their language). 40+ media brands worldwide joined the campaign, which added up to around 400k organic views, and we even got a mention in the Guardian.
103%
Traffic growth
400k
Organic views
400%
Growth in organic social
Content strategy
Getting past “No”
We also produced nineteen articles on what was happening around the world at the beginning of the epidemic.
We had partners in 35 countries globally who fed back the insights that became the meat of our content. Our challenge was presenting all that info in a way that would really engage people.
I think a smart way to begin strategy is by figuring out,
a) What’s going to stop people from engaging?
b) What can we do to pre-empt and overcome that?
For this project, we figured:
Covid is actually pretty boring from a narrative point of view. There’s no antagonist, no human action (unless you believe the conspiracists), no overarching narrative, no grand drama for people to get invested in. And let’s be honest, drama is what drives a LOT of news engagement. It’s a soap opera on a grand scale.
On top of that, it’s hard to get people interested in fires around the world when their own houses are burning.
We also needed to get past oh dearism. There’s an endless parade of horror that makes up so much of our news diet. We can’t do a damn thing about any of it, so often our only possible response is a numb, “Oh dear.”
And lastly, we needed to get past ‘should.’ A lot of NGO content isn’t really content at all. It’s commercials dressed up as content. “Look at us. We did this!” The underlying assumption – and this is a huge problem – is that, “This is important. People ‘should’ be interested”.
Important, it may well be, but there’s no meat to that kind of content; nothing to dig into. It doesn’t tick any of the STEPPS boxes, and the engagement stats tend to speak for themselves.
So we asked two questions: how could we make our content into more than just a series of commercials? And how could we make our content appeal to as broad an audience as possible?
Broad audience appeal was key to the campaign’s wider social impact. Too many campaigning organizations get digital media strategy wrong. There’s an algorithmic incentive to niche – the tighter the niche, the more engagement you get. And the reason is that, in business, it’s better to have a hundred highly engaged fans than a thousand people who feel more or less “meh” about you. But when it comes to social and political ideas, this incentive is driving too many organizations to reinforce the walls of their own echo chambers with content and ideas that are inaccessible to anyone outside. It’s a big part of why our societies are becoming so polarized and vulnerable to disinformation.
So when we’re talking real social impact, the more we niche, the less weight we have.
Audience Insights
Next, we asked ourselves, what’s the audience’s deeper motivation to engage with this kind of content?
This was for a media development org, and at its root, media is about rights, democracy, transparency and justice. So anyone who would connect with our content would have to be at least somewhat interested in democracy, politics and transparency.
The first insight that gave us was that we needed to avoid the trap of getting too deep into the local dynamics of each situation. It’s not possible for our audience to care passionately about the individual situation of every country globally. We needed to keep the content rooted in their higher level interest.
And digging deeper into this audience's values and their current situation gave us clues as to how we could connect emotionally and create content that served them. Fans of democracy aren’t having a great time of it these days. They feel under threat. Many of the ideas they thought were public consensus seem to be up for grabs again, and well, Trump, Putin, Bolsonaro, Modi, Orban – you name ‘em – there’s a general sense of hopelessness about where we’re headed.
Clearly, this audience could use a little hope and inspiration; something they're not getting enough of from the other actors in this space. That meant it was relatively easy for us to differentiate ourselves and lay down a strong brand narrative: “We’re actually creating the change you want, and we’re doing it right now: here’s how.”
Strategy
So the strategy we arrived at was to unify all our content with an overarching narrative: instead of presenting a collection of isolated local stories, we tried to connect everything into a coherent whole – a kind of health check on the values our audience cares about.
A couple of inches north of here I wrote that Covid is boring. What's interesting is the human reaction; the hope and the solidarity, the corruption, power grubbing, the incompetence, the light and the darkness. And most interestingly for us, there’s real narrative in the creative ways in which media brands have stepped up to provide solid information.
A story has to have at least two parts. Something needs to happen, and there needs to be a reaction. Without that reaction, a story doesn’t go anywhere. We tried to begin our stories with a problem – corruption or incompetence, for example – and show how independent media was responding. Wherever we had nice stats or concrete developments, we put them front and center with big graphics or subheadings. We wanted to foreground the outcomes, and center the stories around the media’s impact; the brave journalists fighting to expose the truth.
You can’t get it wrong but you can get it dull
We actually made a mistake as we were starting out. We put forward a narrative that was too optimistic. We titled the campaign page, “A Turning Point for independent Media.”
The problem was that, although were among the first to report on the “Covid boost” for independent journalism, we missed the downside. Our partners’ traffic was increasing across the board as more and more people realized they needed solid information to understand the pandemic. But the more urgent turning point for most media outlets was that their ad revenues dried up almost instantly with the economic downturn. They were struggling to survive.
I absolutely believe we were on the right track being bold and pushing a narrative. Without an angle it would have been bland and academic; the kind of stuff no one can be bothered to look at cos it’s not sure what it’s saying. So we ended up toning it down, and settling on the headline:
THE COVID PARADOX: RECORD AUDIENCES, SHRINKING REVENUES
Worldwide, media business models are collapsing with the new economic downturn, and attacks on media freedom have increased sharply. But if there is one ray of hope in the tragedy of this pandemic, it’s that Covid-19 is re-awakening people to the vital role that independent media plays in their societies.
Here’s how the numbers broke down.
We set a new record for monthly users (an increase of around 103% from the previous month)
Total page views went up 105%
Unique page views went up 90%
Average session duration was 00:01:53 & pages per user averaged 2.18
84% new users.