Project Details
Project type: Social media video series
Target audience: People connected to New Zealand’s agriculture sector, primarily farmers
Purpose: Build rapport with existing and potential customers
Measures of success: Views, engagement, link clicks (for product review videos only) – both organic and paid.
In 2018 Norwood undertook a brand ambassador partnership with Taranaki dairy farmer, and former rugby legend, Kevin Barrett. Norwood’s aim was to use the ambassadorship as a channel through which they could produce content their customers would genuinely love and relate to (measured through social media engagement).
For over 3 years now, Avodah has partnered with Norwood to create the “Beyond the Farm Gate” video series – more than 10 videos that capture both authentic storytelling content about the Barrett family and life on their farm, and Kevin’s product review videos for Norwood’s extensive range of farm machinery.
A selection of the films
Q&A with Holly Killgour
Norwood Marketing Manager
What were your goals for the brand ambassador partnership and the “Beyond the Farm Gate” video series?
Norwood were a little bit late arriving on the social media scene, so some of our key goals in 2018, when the ambassador partnership launched, were to really step up the quality of our content and to better use Facebook and Instagram for building rapport with our audience.
For this series, we wanted to utilise video to create engaging content that our customers were genuinely interested in, and we wanted to do this through an authentic voice that they would relate to.
Views
Engagements
Videos
Why did Norwood chose video as the primary communications tool for this project?
The partnership was centred around creating engaging content for our social channels, so video made the most sense. We also felt that Kevin’s genuine nature would translate really well through video, and that our customers would be able to better connect with Kevin if they could see and hear from him on farm, rather than through polished written content or any other medium.
This was a campaign unlike anything we had done before; it was about genuine relationships, genuine products, genuine stories. We wanted to utilise video to create engaging content that our customers were genuinely interested in, and we wanted to do this through an authentic voice that they would relate to.
Was the project a success? In what way?
Our followers love this content! The video series has been amongst our most successful social media posts time and time again over the last three years. The top performing video achieved 104k views – an extraordinary level of engagement for a page that had roughly 4,000 followers at the time.
All videos have performed well in terms of organic reach and engagement, which were our key measures of success. Anyone can pay to get views from the masses, but organic reach takes something a bit more special. Thanks, in large part, to Avodah’s storytelling talents, we were able to produce content that got people’s attention without needing to invest huge sums on advertising.
We’re also really proud of how genuine and down-to-earth the tone of these videos are, and how well they represent the core character of the Norwood brand – an important piece of the puzzle that Avodah have really excelled at capturing.
