Writing: Social Campaign Indy 500 Sponsorship

While I was working at Intelisys, the company undertook a massive campaign to promote brand awareness. Intelisys, along with several technology supplier partners, sponsored Indy 500 driver Stefan Wilson. Stefan Wilson’s public image was defined both by personal tragedy, and his courage to move beyond it to change the world. Stefan’s older brother Justin, who was also a professional driver, died on the track before the brothers ever got the chance to race side-by-side in the Indy 500. Justin’s death saved five lives through organ donation. This was the impetus that drove Stefan to create Driven2SaveLives, a non-profit dedicated to funding and raising awareness for organ donation.

My manager tasked me with creating a full-scope social media campaign to promote the sponsorship and Stefan’s cause. The goal of the campaign was to raise awareness among our partner base that the indirect telecom and cloud sales channel was entering its heyday, thereby encouraging other partners to join us in sponsorship in the future. Our secondary goal was to drive general brand awareness and generate leads for new Sales Partners outside of our existing network.

We elected to leverage the social presence of a key influencer to get the necessary visibility. I ghostwrote an article on behalf of our influencer which we posted on LinkedIn. Our KPIs focused on engagement, with “Shares” being the top priority. We set goals to get 500 views, 50 likes, 20 comments, and ten shares. These numbers were ambitious and far exceeded our benchmarks for engagement on corporate content. This was the first article our influencer would publish, so we were cautious but still optimistic. We supplemented the article with corporate Tweets and Facebook posts, and created promotional graphics for Instagram as well. In total, we created over 30 posts across three channels to promote the campaign.

Our final numbers for engagement on LinkedIn exceeded our expectations: the article gleaned over 650 views, 71 likes, 32 comments, and 21 shares. Most importantly, three new partners reached out to get information about how they could support next year’s sponsorship. The campaign was a landmark success for the company and set the bar for how influencer campaigns would be executed in the future.