Letting Search do the talking for Lumix
If you’re serious photographer, you need a big camera with a whopping lens, right? That’s the assumption many people make, so they follow the herd and head straight for a DSLR. Less bulky ‘mirrorless’ cameras aren’t even on the radar.
As you may have read in Campaign, our job was to disrupt this purchase journey, drawing attention to Panasonic’s Lumix range. How? By doing one of the things We Are Social does best. Listening.
Google Trends revealed something very interesting: growing speculation about the future of DSLRs. The most popular search terms about DSLRs were overwhelmingly negative:
Further probing revealed a great deal more debate, mostly on niche camera forums, buried far, far away from the typical purchase journey.
And so our idea was born. We’d simply surface the genuine opinion and evidence already out there.
We built whydslr.co.uk, a web forum organised entirely around the most commonly asked search queries, curating the latest articles from bloggers and experts around the web to answer them:
We also created the first in a series of video tests pitching DSLRs against comparable mirrorless Lumix models, all answering common Google search queries.
To create an audience, we bought the top slot on Google Adwords, ensuring that when anyone searches for DSLR cameras, their journey is interrupted by considerable speculation about the big demise of the big cameras.
Blogger outreach is underway too: we’ve set the most relevant bloggers and influencers their own Lumix vs DSLR tests to complete. While a comprehensive listening and responding programme ensures that when people are chatting online about the merits of DSLRs, we’re quick to respond, inviting people to visit our forum before they buy their new camera.
After just a couple of weeks, we’ve already had over 2,600 inbound links to whydslr.co.uk helping the site appear near the top of organic DSLR search queries – and we’ve had thousands of unique visitors to the site, without any paid media beyond adwords.
This is just early days for a platform designed to last as long as DSLRs do. But already, we like to think Why DSLR? proves two things. You don’t need a huge camera to take nice pictures. And you don’t need a big, traditional media spend to create a hard-hitting social campaign.