Planning behind Tea for Trump real time marketing campaign

#TeaforTrump campaign started its journey from India to create required noise across the globe. The core of digital campaign execution strategy was real-time marketing, turning our content into liquid content & discoverable over the Internet.  The intention and endeavors behind this campaign was to spread the word about the power of tea. ARM Worldwide's strength apart from paid media & technology is digital PR & content marketing. For TE-A-Me we focused on reaching out to audiences in India & US, capturing & curating their real-time responses from the global audience and encouraging everyone to join us requesting Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump) to #drinkthetea. The recipe behind the perfect execution of this campaign lies in an exact and opportune mix of timing, audience targeting, distribution channels, amplification, seeding, and cross-promotion on multiple platforms.  Velocity is what we wanted to achieve = (views + articles + conversations + impressions) / time.  For the first 72 hours, a team of 11 members @armdigital were working day & night to capture & engage into the real-time emotions and reactions activated through #TeaForTrump & #DrinkTheTea across the globe.

If you are still wondering, this is the Tea for Trump video in which a tea company sends 6000 tea bags to Donald Trump to ‘purify mind’.

As a result of relevant and timely content targeting, hundreds of publications easily discovered the content. In less than 24hrs, we received 1M video views & with organic content marketing activities we achieved more than 3M views in less than three days. Later many internet celebrity figures & NRI's organically joined the #TeaForTrump revolution on digital. So far, Tea for Trump campaign delivered 350M impressions from 80+ countries (lead by india & US) having more than 150000+ digital engagements, 42000+ video shares, 3.2M video videos(in first 72 hours), 22,000 tweets (having 60+ twitter verified profiles) & 710+ stories. We also monitored & analyzed more than 200K tweets(all across the word) in our command-center and observed that Share of Voice (SOV) for TE-A-ME in Donald Trump conversations was greater than 7% during first 48hours of RTM which clearly indicate the successful execution of our amplification strategy. Breaking down any Real Time Marketing campaign, we go by the experience and experimentation. Essentially, there are four quadrants to plan, execute and analyze the campaign.  The RTM Framework is more inclined towards the planning stage but also helps for the overall analysis. The first quadrant is when we list down all those things which we can plan proactively. #TeaForTrump had many scenarios under this piece.

• ORM is critical for any digital campaign, you can not predict the response, but you can think of various scenarios and create a tactical plan for that. We did the same, lot of negative and positive scenarios were created,  anticipating negative comments and we were ready for the action plan if any of those were triggered.

• We constructed a flexible and a sound Media Plan backing it up with the proper audience targeting. We were confident enough to spend the budget as per our Media Analysis and was also ready to tweak to get the objective completed. US media played a critical role as we wanted their attention.

• Nothing is more important other than your plan for  Content Distribution.  A detailed Content Seeding Framework was created along with the Integrated Channel Strategy, and we followed the framework throughout the campaign.

Sometimes, a robust planning is not enough for an RTM campaign; we need to monitor and adapt accordingly. All the activities need to be Proactively planned but in real time. That is the second quadrant in the RTM framework.

• Activities like monitoring conversations on @RealDonaldTrump were essential as any reaction or communication on Twitter could have been a game changer for the campaign. It could have lead to a crisis, and we needed a comeback in the shape of Crisis Communication Plan. The bold nature of this campaign made it ORM sensitive, no matter how much planning we did, there were surprising responses, so we tweaked our tactics accordingly.

• Our timeline for executing the campaign was near the time of  Republican National Convention, and we wanted to leeway the campaign in between that.

The third quadrant is more about analyzing the possible reactions by the various stakeholders.

• We brainstormed the potential crisis that can happen, what would Donald Trump say if he has to comment on it (negative of course). The other part of this quadrant is more about content drivers and strategy. There can be a constant change in the content which was planned according to our core communication.

Essentially when we execute this framework, there is an ongoing evaluation on the scalability at regular intervals. The last quadrant is the most complicated and tough thing to execute on a tactical ground.

• Imagine all your planning is wasted as the face of the campaign turns out to be different as you thought of. We were ready to unlearn everything and respond in real-time to the media reaction.

• We made sure we were patient and ready to take anything on #TeaForTrump managing sentiments and responses to the real-time comments.

Time being the most valued factor, with the help of this framework we were able to manage #TeaForTrump on digital and made it a liquid content. Innovation doesn't need a license, it needs a leader and we found one as Sumit Shah, executive director, Madhu Jayanti International, the makers of Te-A-Me. He was working closely with us in building the real-time strategy to turn #TeaForTrump into a breakthrough, widespread and interactive campaign, day & night. Last but not least, #TeaForTrump is not the end of TE-A-ME intervention but the start of #DrinkTheTea initiative for spreading the power of tea. We urge you all to stay tuned.