Social Media & PR – PoolUp

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Project Background

For college students seeking an accessible and affordable way to carpool long distances, PoolUp provides a simple, safe, and secure app-based platform so student drivers and student passengers can connect and travel together. 

In my role as a Creative Strategist, I conducted target market research and customer segmentation, built a 3-month content calendar, and built a media list and pitched to California-based journalists as part of a larger go-to-market strategy for PoolUp. By doing this, we wanted to ultimately increase more email signups for our client’s beta launch of their product.

Business Goals:

1. Determine which social media platforms to focus on for our PoolUp’s target audience.
2. Determine what type of content our client’s target audience engages the most with.
3. Build a media list and pitch to California-based journalists.

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Process

I collaborated with 2 other Creative Strategists (along with a cross-functional team consisting of 3 Digital Strategists, 2 Designers, an Account Manager, and a Project Manager) to build out a comprehensive marketing strategy for our client, PoolUp.

Research Questions:

1. Which social media channels should PoolUp concentrate on? Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and/or Twitter? And why?
2. Who is PoolUp’s target audience and how will their content, copywriting, and hashtags appeal to them?
3. What kind of content do we want?
4. How many posts are we scheduling over a span of how many months?
5. How are we going to bring attention to PoolUp’s social media?
6. How will we pitch to journalists?
7. What are content ideas for journalists?
8. How will we compile a list of school newspapers, journalists, their contact info, and social media info? 
9. How will we compile a list of newspapers/magazines that are not student-run?

To go about answering these questions, we first needed to get an in-depth understanding of our client’s brand identity. 

We then conducted target market research to deeply understand our client’s target audience. 

We did this by:

Afterwards, we determined our client’s competitive positioning and informed ourselves on what their value proposition is. Because we had done a thorough job researching our client’s target audience, we decided to focus on the social media platforms of Instagram and Facebook. We chose these two platforms for several reasons:

1. Our client already had a Facebook page and Instagram account
2. College students (our client’s target audience) often use Facebook to look for rideshares
3. College-aged students (18-24) were the second largest age demographic on Instagram

We focused on organically growing client’s Instagram and Facebook account as part of our short-term marketing plan. We thoroughly researched what content performs the best on either platform, and set to work via content creation and scheduling social media posts using Later.com. Additionally, we tracked what content performed well via Facebook and Instagram analytics and sought to create more well-performing content.

As part of our long-term marketing strategy, we focused on public relations by pitching to California-based journalists. To do this, we built out a media list for our client (see the deliverable section below) and created pitch templates for our client’s future needs.

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Results

Here are some quick highlights of our results:

• We had a 5.25% engagement rate on Instagram (the average engagement rate on Instagram is about 1.22%)
• We had a 364% increase in Typeform responses for email signup leads.
• We had 2 features written by Santa Barbara-based journalists (check out the Noozhawk article and The Bottom Line article)

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Deliverables

• Pitch Template
• Social Media Editorial Calendar
• Media List (not pictured, due to privacy concerns)

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