Travel lends itself to user-generated video more than any other activity. When people travel they love taking video, plus the scenery, activities and great food all make for great footage. This was one reason the New Zealand and Australia campervan specialist, JUCY invests heavily in user-generated marketing. The single best advert for attracting potential future renters is to showcase the company’s iconic green and purple vans in exotic locations around both countries.
JUCY has a product that people love. As a result, it has no trouble getting user-submitted images on social media. To incentivise its customers further, it often runs promotions.
However, video submissions were more elusive, despite being ubiquitous among its target demographic of 20-something backpackers. The other challenge Jucy’s marketing department had was expanding its user-generated submissions beyond this demographic and into new market segments such as baby boomers and families.
What the company needed was a way to unlock the videos taken by customers on their phones as they travelled in JUCY campervans and cars. “We have been looking for a way to easily allow our customers to share their road trips with us,” said Ashley Andrew, Sales and Marketing Executive at JUCY Group.
The Southern Hemisphere summer of 2020/2021 was like no other. Both New Zealand and Australia had endured lockdowns in the middle of 2020 due to the Coronavirus pandemic, but both countries have brought the virus under control. A such, they were operating largely as usual in the run up to the traditional peak period for vacationing, the long hot summer that lasts from December to February Down Under.
The cost for the relative normality that both countries enjoyed, while the rest of the world sadly passed into a second wave of the virus, was closed international borders and, in the case of Australia, closed internal state borders. For JUCY, whose target market is traditionally backpackers from overseas, this posed a unique marketing challenge. But equally, the hundreds of young Aussies and Kiwis who would normally be holidaying overseas were all stuck at home, looking for adventure. JUCY saw its bookings skyrocket in the weeks before Christmas and put extra vehicles on the road.
JUCY needed to build an authentic branded video library
The JUCY marketing team wanted to capitalise on the 2020-21 summer bookings to restock its video library. The brand’s visual identity had undergone a refresh and some new vehicles were in the fleet. But with all the uncertainty of 2020, no decision was made to launch a user-generated content campaign until early December, usually too short a time frame to set up all the elements required for a successful user-generated contest.
Previously, JUCY had two options when looking to source user-generated content. “We repurpose content tagged #JUCYWORLD from social media channels like Instagram. Then we’d DM [direct message] the poster and ask permission to use their content,” said Ms Andrew.
“The other option was to do a collab contra with influencers, where we’d give a free rental in return for content shot during the trip,” she explained. “But collab contras arrangements can be time-consuming, replying to and managing those who reach out via various channels, cold calling content creators, working through mutually-beneficial agreements, chasing up content deliverables and ensuring that the content is brand and user-friendly,” Ms Andrew added.
“The challenge with contra collabs is that we always get the typical travel influencer demographic contacting us and a lot of what they produce is great. But we have always really wanted more authentic and diverse content that is reflective of the wider demographic of our customers, reflected in our UGC.”
Ashley Andrew
Sales and Marketing Executive at JUCY Group
Another trend that JUCY wanted to capitalise on was the rise of video over images. Most posts on Instagram are still images, while videos posted as Instagram Stories disappear after 24 hours. “Our social media manager has tools to download videos from all the sites, but it’s time-consuming. Also, they often have stickers and emojis all over them, which kind of makes them unusable,” says Ms Andrew.
“Ideally what we wanted was some great authentic footage shot using our vans, and build a library of the amazing moments our customers have in our vans,” she added.
JUCY opened up video uploads to all
Instead of just relying on influencers, JUCY decided that with limited time (and a limited budget due to the travel disruptions of 2020), it would open its video contest up to everyone. It launched the #JUCYMOMENTS campaign where any campervan renters who submitted video could win back the cost of their rental. This reversed the traditional method of gifting complementary product to a pre-selected micro-influencer and waiting for the images and footage to come in.
Giving a prize is a great way to incentivise your customers to contribute video.
Read our 5 tips for successful customer engagement through regular user-generated video.
Instead, customers were given the option of either tagging in Instagram as usual or uploading via the Vloggi Uploader tool. “By opening up a new channel for ordinary customers to upload, we were hoping to unlock the amazing footage of people who aren’t necessarily on the ‘Gram all day,” said Ms Andrew.
JUCY could gather more authentic videos from a more diverse segment of its audience
The results validated this approach. JUCY pushed the Vloggi upload code via social media, via direct email newsletters and via posters at the time of customer check out that contained a unique QR code taking customers straight to the customised upload landing page.
The company reeived over 50 video clips from real customers in January 2021 alone. This was roughly half the number posted on Instagram, but the ones uploaded directly were more authentic and less influencer in style.
“For this campaign, we didn’t want people to go out and shoot to a brief. We needed authentic videos. So instead, we wanted to unlock what they had already shot for their own fun and memories. So by asking them after they’d returned the vehicle to upload, we wanted to get a wide range of customer types and increase the diversity”
Ashley Andrew
Sales and Marketing Executive at JUCY Group
“We have run UGC campaigns before, but didn’t get the quality of video we desired,” said Ms Andrew. But by widening the funnel, by allowing direct uploads from anyone’s phones, this problem has been solved.
For Ms Andrew, one video uploaded encapsulated this broader diversity. “Now our customers shoot we get more authentic video. I remember when a clip came in of an older man feeding ducks outside his campervan, I thought ‘that almost justifies the campaign cost in one clip’ as it was so outside what we normally get, but perfect for that demographic,” she said.
The clip was uploaded from Piha Domain Camp, a popular motorhome and campervan site on New Zealand’s west coast, some 40km from Auckland. Every clip uploaded via Vloggi contains the filming location, which can either be automatically captured from the phone’s metadata, or manually inputted, depending on the contributor preferences.
“Knowing the location of every clip helps our market intelligence, too, as we can see not only the Instagrammable locations that we all know, but the places where our vans are actually used. That will help in how we then target our customers through their journey,” Ms Andrew said.
Tourism New Zealand has launched a campaign called “Travelling under the Social Influence” aimed at persuading Kiwis not to always photograph the same locations as others have before and posted on Instagram.
JUCY’s library makes branded video easier
The ability to source video clips from customer’s own footage was the key draw card for JUCY. “Before we used Vloggi, we had no easy way for our community to share their video with us,” said Ms Andrew. Now the company has a live library of authentic video clips from real customers. Permission to use is assigned to JUCY at time of upload.
Because all video clips are branded from the moment they are uploaded, JUCY now has a library of fully branded video clips. From here making a compilation is as easy as selecting those relevant to a particular theme or location and merging those together. The smart video template then applies the transitions, intro and outro sequence specified by the customer.
“I initially thought Vloggi was a DropBox for video clips, but then I realised the value is way more – it provides a way not only for customers to share their video with us, but for us to edit and download professional looking videos for social media.”
Ashley Andrew
Sales and Marketing Executive at JUCY Group
The entire marketing tream at JUCY go into the Vloggi automated video creation platform and add tags to videos, making content management easier. They can also favourite the best ones, making compilations like listicles straightforward.
For JUCY, this means their entire authentic video library of customer-uploaded clips is at their fingertips, already formatted with their branded video elements like logo, hashtag, colours and fonts.
“Vloggi actually allows us to save on designer and video editing costs because we can do it in-house”
Ashley Andrew
Sales and Marketing Executive at JUCY Group
Following the success of the #JUCYMOMENTS campaign, JUCY has gone on to use Vloggi for additional campaigns targeting niche demographics, who travel more in the off-peak period. “Influencer content still has an important role in JUCY’s content strategy. However, having a subscription to a tool like Vloggi makes it easy for us to run small-scale targeted campaigns and get authentic road trip video from our customers as well,” said Ms Andrew.
The final result: A branded video compilation from the Nelson area
As with all competitions, there has to be a winner. In the case of JUCY, for the month of January 2021, the marketing team picked a montage made by Laura Fenwick as she travelled across the South Island from Nelson.
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