How One Company Scored 7 Cents A View With Twitter Promoted Video

Sometimes you find the perfect fit. In denim and marketing campaigns.

For Paige Denim, it happened with a successful Twitter Promoted Video effort that produced 94,000 video views, 1.77 million impressions and a good bit of traffic back to the Paige.com e-commerce site.

The elements of the campaign designed to promote Paige Denim’s spring collection couldn’t have lined up better: a supermodel/actress with a huge social media following, video of said supermodel and targeted social media distribution.

In the video, a behind-the-scenes look at Paige spokesmodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley’s shoot of the company’s spring collection, Huntington-Whiteley also talks with Paige founder Paige Adams-Geller about how they originally met by chance while shopping in London.

“It’s such a sweet story actually,” Huntington-Whiteley says in the video. “I’d been wearing Paige for a long time, so the collaboration felt really organic and it felt really real, which is what I always look for when I match with brands, and I’m a big denim lover so it feels perfect, like the perfect fit.”

Direct Hit: 94K Promoted Views For 7 Cents Each

Like all the major digital platforms, Twitter has been pitching advertisers that video is an especially effective way to reach consumers. It wasn’t hard to convince Paige Denim to give Promoted Video a shot.

The company had been getting strong results from garden variety promoted tweets, especially when including influencer partners, social media coordinator Jenni Adishian told Marketing Land. She said they’ve had engagement rates as high as 20% and that Twitter has become the brand’s main way to communicate with fans. So when a Twitter rep asked if they’d be willing to try promoting a video, they jumped at the opportunity. It happened that People Magazine had interviewed Huntington-Whiteley about the spring collection and was willing to allow Paige to use it.

Paige’s targeting wasn’t complicated. Because one of its goals is international expansion and Huntington-Whitely is British it focused on people in the U.K. as well as the U.S. market. The brand also targeted both genders. The spring collection highlights their women’s line, but the brand also is interested in building awareness among men, and video of a Victoria’s Secret model was certainly going to do that.

The results? Outstanding. During the two-week campaign in February, the tweet was viewed 1.77 million times and the video got 94,000 views at the low cost of 7 cents each.

“It really exceeded my expectations as well as Twitter’s,” Adishian said. “They were pretty blown away with the cost per view and the majority of people were watching 75% to 100% of the video, and it was pretty lengthy.”

Furthermore, the campaign appears to have pushed more traffic to the Paige.com e-commerce site. During the campaign, Twitter accounted for 35% more referral traffic than usual and was the second highest source, behind only one of the publishers (InStyle, WhoWhatWear, PopSugar, Refinery29, etc.) that Paige.com partners with and buys display ads on. Another nice stat: 88% of the visitors from Twitter were new to the site.

Paige Put 75% Of Social Ad Spending On Twitter

The brand was obviously pleased with all the new prospects and believes that the ad campaign is a big part of the overall success of its social and digital strategy, which also includes influencer outreach on Instagram and Pinterest.

“It’s really hard to directly track [social] conversion but with all the efforts that we have been putting into our e-commerce site in the past two years,” Adishian said, “we’ve really ramped up the social and digital and our e-commerce site is growing so quickly in sales.“

About 75% of the brand’s spending on the campaign went to Twitter. Paige didn’t have the rights to post the video on Facebook, but it used some of its social budget to promote posts on Facebook. The results weren’t great. Adishian said they are seeing diminished returns from Facebook lately.

“The audience on Facebook is a lot older for us, more mature,” she said. “We just see that people who are really excited about the brand and want to talk about the brand are on Instagram or Twitter. So that’s really where we put the focus.”

Key Asset: A Socially Savvy, Engaged Influencer

Whatever the platform, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a social media star like Huntington-Whiteley helping the effort. The actress, who appeared in the 2011 film “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” and has a role in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” has 570,000 followers on Twitter and 3.2 million on Instagram. More importantly, she shows genuine love for Paige Denim and is very tuned into her social accounts.

“Partnering with someone like Rosie — she’s very hands on, she pretty much runs her own Twitter — has been great,” Adishian said. “She loves to retweet everything and she’s super engaged as well and I think that was vital to this being successful,” Adishian said. “Having someone who is passionate about the brand, gets the brand and is really excited about the partnership has been really great.”

Paige’s initial success with Promoted Video has caused the brand to adjust its strategy going forward. It recently completed its photo shoot with Huntington-Whiteley for the fall campaign and there was a video crew on hand to capture behind-the-scenes footage. “We’re going to find a way to make it fresh and different,” Adishian said. “but still kind of mimicking what we did because we saw that really worked.”

About The Author

Martin Beck

Martin Beck is Third Door Media’s Social Media Reporter, covering the latest news for Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. He spent 24 years with the Los Angeles Times, serving as social media and reader engagement editor from 2010-2014. A graduate of UC Irvine and the University of Missouri journalism school, Beck started started his career at the Times as a sportswriter and copy editor. Follow Martin on Twitter (@MartinBeck), Facebook and/or Google+.

(Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)