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5 marketing campaign lessons from Middle East brands By Lama - May 20, 2019 The busiest ad season of the year comes with its share of excitement, competition, and marketing campaign lessons to be learned. Traditionally, big brands competed for prime TV spots during Ramadan where they could reach the highest number of viewers (at very high costs). However, recently, there has been a noticeable shift as brands are starting to focus more on pushing their marketing campaigns online. Not only is it more cost-effective, but it also allows brands to expand their user reach and accessibility. What's not to love about that? It's a marketer's golden ticket...if they are armed with a solid digital marketing strategy. Get your free marketing strategy eBook! A shift to online doesn't start and end with uploading your TVCs to social media. You have to understand your online audience to be able to effectively engage them. You also need to adapt your marketing campaign reporting to accurately measure ROI and showcase success. And that's exactly what I'll guide you through To start off, let's take a look at some of this year's Ramadan campaigns and how they were received online Why Ramadan? To give some context for why this is an optimal season for digital marketing. I used Talkwalker analytics to check how many times Ramadan was mentioned online in various languages globally and found over 22 million online mentions just in the first half of the month, 90% of these mentions originated from the Middle East and North Africa region. No wonder regional brands are vying for the online audience's attention! But who succeeded at capturing the most attention? And did they do it for the right reasons? The top 25 emoji associated with Ramadan in the first half of the month (May S-May 201 Digging deeper... Let's take a look at some of this year's Ramadan campaigns that generated high engagement rates online. From there, we can identify marketing campaign do's and don'ts and hone in on the top metrics that need to be incorporated in a digital marketing campaign report. 1- Vodafone This ad was shared on Vodafone Egypt's Facebook page on the first day of Ramadan and has received a whopping total of 934.5K engagements so far. It's all too common for Ramadan ads to feature celebrities, varying from singers to actors and sports figures. Vodafone opted to go for a beloved pop icon, Amr Diab, but their marketing strategy went down a somewhat new route as the video resembled a biopic more so than a marketing campaign. Let's take a look at the top themes in online conversation about the ad to see how it was received unpopular diab songs Gayunpopular opinions unpopular opinion amir diab The top 2-word themes associated with Vodafone's Ramadan ad in the first half of the month (May 5- May 20) That's a whole lot of unpopular opinions." Social users piggy-backed on a recent Twitter thread format (unpopular opinion) to share their two cents on the ad. They used this format because they believed their opinion on the ad is controversial and therefore unpopular Digging deeper into the context these two words were used in on Talkwalker analytics. I found that their unpopular opinion was that this ad is better than the rival's (Etisalat, we're looking at you and you're coming up next). And since that's the unpopular opinion, it's safe to say the popular opinion on the ad is that it was not that good. Certainly not better than Etisalat's. Too bad, Vodafone. Seems the old trick of casting a beloved regional celebrity isn't enough. On the bright side. a look at the top hashtags associated with the campaign show that Vodafone's campaign hashtag was quite catchy and helped the campaign gain traction online. Bonus points for that. Overall, getting a little creative with celebrity endorsements certainly fared better than just sticking to a household name. 3- Telecom Egypt The next Ramadan marketing campaign that clocked in super high engagement figures was the work of yet another telecom provider, Telecom Egypt. This ad was shared on the Telecom Egypt Facebook page and featured two local celebrities, Karim Abdel Aziz and Maged El Kedwany, in a comedic storyline showcasing the provider's extensive data coverage. XPLUS Poeted befTelecom Egypt This marketing campaign video currently has over 299.7K engagements which led to a 850% increase in engagement with the brand compared to the previous 15 days. Pretty phenomenal. But if we've learned anything about telecom brands relying on celebrity endorsements, it's to be skeptical of how that translates to a successful marketing campaign. It's probably a good idea to check the sentiment of conversation. This marketing campaign video currently has over 299.7K engagements which led to a 850% increase in engagement with the brand compared to the previous 15 days. Pretty phenomenal. But if we've learned anything about telecom brands relying on celebrity endorsements, it's to be skeptical of how that translates to a successful marketing campaign. It's probably a good idea to check the sentiment of conversation. Tolkwalker analytics tool - sentiment key drivers provide a visual display of common word triggers used by the audience along a positive, neutral and negative sentiment spectrum Talkwalker's sentiment analysis reveals a 61% neutral, 35% positive, and 4% negative split in sentiment - not entirely successful or disastrous. But, most brands don't just want to leave their audience with a lukewarm sentiment If your brand is serious about making the shift to digital marketing, having a sentiment analysis tool should be at the top of your list. Social media sentiment analysis will improve your bottom line as it provides you with an excellent source of data for measuring customer opinions and attitudes towards your brand, products, services, and campaigns