A campaign full of stories

Home A campaign full of stories

This spring, the team of classifieds website 2dehands.be took a close look at the results of the Brand Tracking survey undertaken by InSites Consulting. The good news: we have a very loyal and enthusiastic public and a large group of brand ambassadors. On the other hand, a lot still has to be done on brand awareness. 2dehands.be is already the most popular website, but we still must let people hear more from us.


This guestpost is written by Aldine Reinink, Marketing and communications manager at 2dehands/2ememain.be. www.facebook.com/2dehands. Twitter: 2dehandsBE.

 

For the last few weeks, the very campaign for www.2dehands.be can be seen on the Belgian channels. The spots show a living room, an office and a garden which, with a few simply mouse clicks, are given a complete make-over. Nothing special, you might say. Except for the fact that the items shown in this series of 3 spots all come from 2dehands.be. Together with Michiel van Deursen, the founder of the site, we travelled the country to pick up the items ourselves and to meet the sellers in person. At the same time, we made short films of this and we blogged about the events, the meetings and the special finds on www.2dehandslifestyle.be.

The importance of spin-off

Why this choice to spend so much time and energy on the preparation of the TV spots? We had 3 reasons for this. First: we thought it important that the ads on and the visitors to 2dehands.be should play a central role in the campaign. We are a website. It is, by definition, difficult in our branch to build up a relationship with all those visitors at their computers. They have no idea about the team of people that work on their site every day. For us, this was the perfect opportunity to come out from behind our screens, to talk to the visitors personally, and to hear their tips and opinions about the site. We got a lot of very valuable ideas from these conversations and we were able to implement some of them almost at once. What’s more, we got to know a bunch of very nice people.

Second, this approach was right for us. Why should we look for things in other places if we have a site where anything can be found? In fact, it’s the largest flea market in the country. When we opened our new offices in Brussels, we were able to find the complete interior on 2dehands.be. An additional advantage is that the team made considerable use of the site, which in turn led to useful insights.

Third, we were able to integrate this making-of stage completely in the campaign. The advertising agency Kunstmaan, which was responsible for the whole concept, were able to use the limited budget creatively to expand and broaden the campaign. The series of films produced an online spin-off that would not have been possible with the commercials on their own.

Remarkable stories

The series of 14 films show that there is a remarkable, amusing or moving story behind every single item on the site. The films are first and foremost intended for our own 2dehands community. They were therefore principally distributed via the Facebook pages, Twitter, the YouTube channel and our own site. Our visitors had already had the preview before the campaign appeared on TV. Many will recognise themselves in the events that were shown in the films. And others will see the pleasure and simplicity of buying and selling via the platform.

The first 3 films have already appeared on www.youtube.com/2dehands and there have been thousands of views since. At the launch of the next 2 commercials, the films about the items concerned will also be available.

 

Dialogue with visitors

Recently the report Social Media around the world by Insites Consulting showed that “44% of consumers wish to be actively involved in the development of new products or advertising campaigns for ‘their’ brands.†Kristof de Wulf pointed out quite correctly in his blog post: “This is an opportunity rather than a threat.â€

At 2dehands.be, we apparently subconsciously anticipated this comment. For our advertising campaign, we have been appealing for the help of the ‘consumers’. But we also often turn to our visitors for the on-going development of the website. After all, our visitors spend hours on the site and know the product better than anyone else. Their ideas are extremely valuable to us. In this way, we can continue to take steps in the area of user-friendliness and innovation.

More and more, the personal contact with the visitors takes place via social networks. The Belgian Facebook community currently has more than 43,000 fans. Every day, they ask questions, and make comments and suggestions. Sometimes a whole discussion arises, sometimes we are able to give a simple answer. We always express our gratitude for this feedback, whether it is positive or negative. You must value everybody who takes the trouble to type a message. And naturally we like all the compliments.