Lead Generation & Brand Awareness

H Barber & Sons

VIDEO CAMPAIGN RESULTS

1 M

Video Views Facebook, Alone

1 %

INCREASE IN SEASONAL LEADS

1 %

INCREASED ANNUAL SALES $

Challenge

The family business, H. Barber & Sons, works in an extremely niche, low-volume, high-value industry: beach cleaning machines.

Having been the forerunner in the industry (started 1966), they rely on an established dealer network, but were struggling to expand their reach to international markets beyond that scope.

Especially considering their newly-expanded manufacturing facility, they needed a way to break into new markets, expand awareness, and sell more machines.

Solution

Barber was already performing well in Google SEO, but their social presence and performance showed huge potential for improvement. Social is unique, however, in that it is more of a B2C, instead of a B2B platform (save Linkedin), which was what their marketing had been optimized around.

So we re-framed their product in the language of their mission, as opposed to what the machine actually did, in an effort to drive broad interest, instead of just those who would purchase the machines. If we could stir broader interest, we could reach circles we previously didn’t have access to.

Since Barber’s social footprint was small, we decided to leverage already-established Facebook interest groups to gain exposure. We reached out to topic-based Facebook group admins that focused n unique/new technology and socially-minded, daily-inspiration groups. who might resonate with their mission of saving the earth.

In our messages, we stressed how each group’s audience would be interested to learn about this new technology was trying to save our beaches and linked to the highlight reels and YouTube library we’d already developed for reference.

Results

The first interested group, “In the Know” decided to feature the Surf Rake product and requested to re-cut the videos we had referenced.

Within several days of posting the video to their 3.5 million subscribers, the video had been viewed 26 million times, received 4.2k comments, and over 80k reactions.

Almost immediately, leads began to break down the doors, and Barber’s entire staff began answering the phones. As a mostly seasonal business, they saw their online leads jump 280% from the same time period the previous year. This doesn’t include the myriad of phone calls that came into the office, which weren’t recorded.

Multiply the Effects

One of the major benefits of a video going viral then began to happen. Other pages and news outlets heard of how popular the previous post was, so they wanted to cash in on the action and share it with their followers. June-August, multiple other channels with huge followings featured their cuts of the video, dramatically increasing the initial exposure. (click photo to enlarge)

You can see where each video was posted on the graph that highlights the website traffic. Each spike was another platform releasing the video.

Here are a few of the examples:

As the awarness built, the President of the company, who had been traditionally unsure about investing in social videos and marketing sent us this e-mail:

Key Takeaways

To nail a viral video requires getting a lot of things right: a strong, resonant message that is in line with the times, solid research/strategy, and a strong product/subject. One of the major lubricants for creating such momentum was that Barber had already invested in creating pillar content. We’d created a library of videos that clearly highlighted what they did and why. This provided the raw materials for the channels to draw from when creating their own take on Barber’s message and products. In this way, the one-time viral video was the result from an accumulated investment in video marketing over time.

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