The Girl Scouts’ marketing approach used to revolve around cute little girls in uniforms peddling cookies door-to-door, mixed with a healthy dose of peer pressure from your co-workers with children.
However, this year, the Girl Scouts’ marketing tactics have gone high-tech, incorporating email, text messaging and social networking sites like Facebook. According to the Contra Costa Times, Northern California Girl Scouts are being encouraged to send out text messages to potential customers, saying things like “Ur a txt away from gr8 cookies!”
The article quotes Monique Lazzarini, the leader of Troop 30313, a troop of 4th and 5th graders, who said that “With the technology era and the different ways to communicate, we decided as a troop to capitalize on those technologies.”
It’s not just individual troops embracing social media, either. The organization released a video on Youtube called “What can a cookie do?” to help spread awareness of the programs that the cookie sales fund. In the three weeks since it was posted, the video has attracted 32,790 views.
In an article on DailyFinance.com, Girl Scouts of the USA CMO Laurel Richie explained why the Girl Scouts decided to create a viral video:
“We’re anxious to see how it works because it lets us get our message out in a cost-effective way,” Laurel Richie, chief marketing officer of the Girl Scouts of the USA, says. She also hopes the video will help engender trust among those viewing the ad. “There’s a greater engagement when a video is passed onto you, because it has the implicit endorsement of the person who passes it on,” Richie says.
The end of the video features a call-to-action that directs viewers to a website where they can find a place to buy Girl Scout cookies.
So, what’s next? Will there be a social media marketing badge? Considering how many non-profits and humanitarian organizations have been using social media to good effect, it wouldn’t be surprising.
The Girl Scouts of America are using social media and text messaging to get the word about their cookies-shouldn’t you be using them as well? Dukky makes it a breeze to integrate social media and mobile marketing into your next campaign. With a unique print, email, social media and mobile marketing platform that encourages social sharing, we can help you create a viral campaign that increases customer response by 8 times.
With that, I’ll leave you to consider what an 8-fold increase in customer response rate would mean to you. I’ve got to go get my Thin Mint fix!
