You had me at Star Wars. (Full geek bias disclosure up front.)
If you truly want to tap into social media marketing, and video marketing on YouTube is certainly that, then you need to be timely. You need to anticipate trends.
Sending out a new video that links up with one of the most anticipated movies on the year right after it releases a HUGE teaser trailer is the way to do that. This is exactly what Quizno's has done with their Startourage video on YouTube. Read on to see what else is great in their Toasty.TV world.
What is Quizno's Startourage campaign?
Star Wars is the it, It, of the movie world. When a new movie is on its way nearly everyone has some promotional tie-in. Riding the momentum of a Star Wars release is an easy way to gain followers and subscribers rapidly.
Quizno's didn't want to just put out some video related to Star Wars and walk away. They took it the next step and added an Entourage spin to it that made the video completely unique and memorable. Have a watch:
I'll bet you haven't seen a Star Wars movie like that before! It has worked to tie not only the (pointless) controversy from the first trailer, but the entire Star Wars universe. Also, we will never make fun of Jar Jar enough in this lifetime.
Mashups are always huge online. Combining two huge, but completely unrelated, franchises has been drawing some huge views for Quizno's already, as it has for them in the past in what is emerging as a trend of their particular video marketing style.
What I like about Quizno's Startourage campaign
Star Wars.
Okay, time to get serious: the video gets the meme-obsessed social media world right on this one. There are way too many quotes in here that deserve to be stuck to a photo and shared. "I'm super hoarse, bro" is just one. There are many meme-worthy dumb quotes.
The second best thing about it is how they didn't cheap out. They went all in and spent some serious money on this. The special effects all look great, the lightsabers look like they came right out of the movie, and they chose a good set for shooting for a kind of "party on Endor" feeling.
Where this really starts to take off is the tie-in promotions. They're subtle, while also being in your face. The moments I'm talking about are when you see one of the characters eating a Quizno's sub at the craft services table. Subtle, but it's there. Then, later, a certain round droid knocks it out of his hand:
"MY TOASTY SUB!" It's subtle, in an in your face way. Got it? Good.
The ending of the video is where they shine brightest as they were sure not to waste any of their video marketing dollars:
There's a link to their other 2 most popular video mashups on Toasty.TV, a button to subscribe, and a link to a $1 off coupon. The link for the coupon is in the bottom left corner during the whole video, but oooooone more push never hurt anybody. The links do the job of keeping people watching their content. The subscribe button keeps viewers around for the long term. The $1 off coupon is, likely, tracking ROI on this video through a unique code.
They maximized their social media worth with a hashtag, #startourage, and have kept momentum going by using it themselves:
(Image chosen at random, of course.)
What I don't like about Quizno's Startourage campaign
Quizno's have #failed where so many other social media marketers have before. They have forgotten that the best social media marketing is online marketing in disguise. Their homepage, days after the video was released, looks like this:
Not a single mention of the video anywhere! Even the slide of rotating images that features Toasty.TV doesn't have the new video in it. For better online marketing you need to make sure that your Big Thing, like a video you're trying to take viral, incorporates with the most important thing in your online world - your website.
They could have embedded the video, used a background image from it, or thrown the people a behind the scenes clip, to get around this. Instead, they have their same old boring website and YouTube viewers who arrive there are going to be bored to death and leave.
They got this image incorporation right with the profile images for their Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages. Why did the drop the ball (droid) in the most important place?
Looking at Toasty.TV overall, their videos are very uneven. I know that they can't make every video Star Wars #epic, but all of those extreme sports video with less than 100 views have got to go. I think they should focus more on bringing their original content to their viewers. It's what they want and it would give the account more focus as it feels all over the place right now.
Last, this is a fault pointed out in the world through this video: Why aren't there actual pretty Stormtroopers in the Star Wars movies? Yes, yes. Jango Fett clones. But the Emperor had to have a few well trained, and pretty, bodyguards around...right?
Content Marketing Minds is an exclusive Social Media Today column written by Matthew Yeoman every other Wednesday.