Dogs Victoria

Dogs Victoria

The Brief

The legislation was already in the lower house, so the time pressure was huge!  Dog’s Victoria needed help in order to Lobby the legislation and quickly stop it before it was passed as law. Our job was to strategically digital marketing strategy and communicate to all members and gain awareness to the plight of purebred dog breeders with proposed Pet bill.

OPPORTUNITYDigital Lobby Campaign
INDUSTRYCommunity & Animal Welfare
WEBSITEamendthebill.org.au more information https://dogsvictoria.org.au/family-pet/.html
CLIENTDogs Victoria
DATE2016-2017
FOCUSLobby Legislation Campaign, communication strategy, design, full brand roll out, Social Media and Website

The Challenges

Campaign challenges

  • The bill was created with no engagement from the national or state canine associations and It was quickly passed into the lower house mid October with a final decision to be made 6th December.
  • Timing was thus critical and it was required to get all the campaign elements rolling immediately.

Implementation challenges

  • Digital White Space had a budget approval, but limited brief and absolutely no creative to start off with.
  • The creative and website were to be built, signed off and made live with only 24 hours of time on hand.

Objectives

  1. Stopping current bill for new legislation, but rather getting the government to edit it in consultation with ethical breeders
  2. Driving awareness for DOGS Victoria who support ethical breeding
  3. Highlight DOGS Victoria’s approach for breeding and bring about the code of ethics followed by all DOGS Victoria breeders.
  4. Driving petition sign ups to alter the bill that is in lower house

Approach

Digital White Space team devised a strategy focused on;

  1. Building a strong petition base to take to government
  2. Informing everyone what the bill means to them
  3. Increasing brand awareness for DOGS Victoria
  4. Supporting the 10,000 members of DOGS Victoria
  5. Driving targeted traffic to the website to collect signatures in the form of votes, to sign a petition to alter the bill that is in lower house
  6. Developing a database of targeted audience
    Educating current and past customers on the direction of the legislation

Focus

Digital White Space took a customer-centric approach by crafting a website to educate and support the DOGS Victoria community online, complete with a voting area and back-end CRM to manage all petition signatures.

Solution

Digital White Space put together a marketing and digital strategy which was applied with a multi channel support, in alignment with an above the line Public Relations strategy. The approach included social listening and effective monitoring of consumer behaviour in order to be highly responsive on all platforms. The team crafted multiple campaign messages, and creatives in order encourage and drive traffic. This is achieved through the analysis of behavioural metrics including brand mentions, social sharing, open rates, click through rates, multi variant testing, exit rate analysis and goal path analysis amongst others. Ultimately, this resulted in a process of continuous improvement for DOGS Victoria, enabling the team the ability to quickly adapt whilst providing the best interface and platforms.

Social Media

  • Social media profiles were created across; Facebook, Twitter and Instagram were also integrated with the website and managed.
  • Utilising internal social media management tools were also used to track analytics and adapt the social strategy based on results.
  • Active heat mapping was implemented on the web page which allowed the development of an optimum user interface.
  • All video, photography and advertising assets were managed across all social media profiles

SEM, PPC & SEO

Adverts were designed strategically for Google and social platforms with a custom audience target derived from the DOGS Victoria database.

Video & Photography

  • Photoshoots were set up across various locations in conjunction with Dog Victoria members.
  • Multiple Video campaigns were crafted using powerful emotive messages to drive awareness. The President, as well as various members of DOGS Victoria, were interviewed for footage.

Website

  • The website was designed to be responsive on all devices, especially mobile given that major traffic was from mobile users
  • A count down clock was created on the site to drive VOTES closing on 6th December 2016
  • Photographs collected from DOGS Victoria members were pushed to various channels: social posts, adverts, blogs etc to share the live story of all who would be affected by the proposed bill.

Emails

EDMs were designed and sent out regularly to members and voters to keep them up to date.

Public Relations

Digital White Space also reached out to other breeder websites and magazines to join the campaign and increase the reach to their viewers.

Results

The response from members and the wider community for the campaign supported Dog’s Victoria to successfully manage to stop the current bill in the lower-house of Parliament from becoming legislation. Further they were able to propose changes to the Pet bill, which was passed in to law in 2017.

“This is Mitchell” campaign was a huge hit and the boy Mitchell became the face of the campaign. Digital White Space team were flooded with posts from supporters, member and the wider community wanting to add their personal photos as well as their name to the campaign.

The website- www.amendthebill.org.au and the facebook pages received  numerous reactions on the same day it was posted. All the marketing efforts combined together drove 10,000 signatures to vote for changes to the proposed legislation in less than a month of launching the campaign.
In just under a week of being live, the website was seen by 22,714 people and attracted 3,371 signed “votes” of petition. On average we had been generating 280 petition votes a day to amend the bill that was in the lower house of parliment. Organic Facebook posts were responsible for about 80% of the votes with the remainder coming from direct, google adwords traffic and paid facebook posts.

Adwords Search

A total of 450 clicks were achieved across a variety of keywords with the most traffic from “dog breeders”. These users were most likely looking to find a dog breeder so increasing awareness among their clients was our intention. In addition, we saw over 30 clicks on brand terms like “purebreddogs.org.au” which shows users were actively looking for the site, most likely after seeing a Social, Display or Youtube video ads. This shows our multi channel strategy was effective and the effectiveness of combining search with social + display and video together.

Google Display Network

The campaign successfully delivered 560,519 impressions at outstanding cost CPM of under $4.00 across Google Display Network.

Google Remarketing

This campaign was very effective in driving back visitors to the website with 190 clicks at a fraction of the cost. A combination of ads were used including text and image ads. Text ads received the most clicks due to getting more impressions.

YouTube Video Ads

Two videos were promoted using keyword targeting on Youtube. This meant that when anybody searched or watched a video related to dogs, puppies, dog breeders etc The videos showed up in the top right hand of the screen. In just 2 days being live, 878 people clicked and watched the video in Australia. The average cost per view was well under .30 which represents very cost effective reach and awareness amongst the audience.

Facebook

A custom audience pixel to allow retargeting across Facebook, the ad drove people back to the website with the call to action “Vote Now to Amend the Bill”. This campaign went live on the 8th of November and in just 2 days received 484 clicks at well under a dollar per click. In comparison, Google Remarketing CPC was almost double that rate.

Organic & Promoted Posts

Organic reach was impressive with 133,754 people seeing the post in this time. A total of 23,339 post engagements represented a high reach to engagement rate of 16.7%. A total of 8,728 video views from Facebook was also a highlight.

Adwords Campaigns

  • 3 main campaign were across Display (GDN – Image – Au), Search & Remarketing.
  • Most clicks came from GDN at the lowest cost per click.
  • Click through rate was highest on search ads followed by retargeting ads which is to be expected.

Gallery

Video Gallery

Supporters Image Gallery