Is Vine the Diamond in the Rough of Social Commerce?
While I was at the IRCE, I was pretty excited when one speaker, Danny Gavin, stopped me and told me he had seen me speak years ago at an event in Austin. Danny is one of the Internet’s top marketers… developing cutting-edge Internet marketing and social media campaigns for Brian Gavin Diamonds. With his expertise, he’s helped to propel BGD to the ranks of Internet Retailer’s Top 1000 and 50 Fastest Growing E-Commerce Companies.
We’ll share some of the amazing BGD Vine loops throughout this post from Brian Gavin Diamonds, to put some visuals to how they’ve leveraged the platform.
From Idea to Design
I asked Danny why he was there and he told me that he was speaking about the incredible success that BGD has had with Vine. And we’re not talking small numbers here:
- Using Vine influencers, BGD was able to reach over 6 million loops on Vine (which is approximately 2 million people) and over 445 shares on Twitter.
- Their Vine campaign received high recognition from multiple publications, as well as being ranked #2 only behind Tiffany’s for jewelry store advertising campaigns in 2014 (JCK).
- Despite the decrease in competitor sales between Black Friday and Christmas, BGD received a record 45% YOY growth as well as a 13% YOY growth in Q1 of 2015.
- BGD also saw a remarkable 20% increase of direct traffic to there website from the first half of 2014.
That’s not a simple task given the aggressive competition in this industry. Brian Gavin Diamonds is a self-funded custom jeweler and diamond e-tailer that strives to increase brand awareness online while competing with the large scale budgets of its competitors.
The challenge is that BGD needed to find a cost effective method to compete with established online and local competitors through the use of social media that will establish brand identity increase web traffic and increase sales.
Danny’s strategy was to create a flexible editorial calendar that allowed BGD to capitalize on timely and relevant events by releasing weekly videos that are entertaining and whimsical on a highly shareable platform.
#MarchMadness Vine
They developed concepts around our editorial calendar, produced the video content, and promoted it through their social media channels as well as with Vine influencers they reached out to.
Thanksgiving Vine
Christmas Vine
The tone and approach of the creative message was to align our online presence with our offline image of elegance and innovation. In order to compete with high budget competitors, we needed to choose a medium that their target audience (18-44) was, but where our competitors were not.
Halloween Vine
By utilizing Vine, BGD was not only able to tap into the younger audience (18-20) on the platform, but also the Twitter audience (18-49) due to the high shareability and integration of the two platforms. The content is vivid, interesting, and unique, but moving fast enough to demand the viewer to watch it again.
The 4th of July
These types of videos connect to the mobile generation (which is skewing towards an older more educated demographic) and are short enough to distract and educate without wasting the viewers time. This approach and tone was effective in driving traffic to the website as well as driving sales.
Stars Align
Special thanks to Danny for helping me put together this post! Be sure to visit Brian Gavin Diamonds for your custom jewelry!
