Creagent Marketing and the Guthrie Strategic Planning and Marketing team have been recognized by Ragan Communications for three Employee Communications Awards. The team won the category for Best Employer Branding for their campaign titled “Your Career in Full Color” in PR Daily’s Social Media & Digital Awards. The campaign was also awarded Best Recruitment Video and was runner-up for Best Recruitment Campaign.
Through billboards, direct mail, social media ads, and television commercials, Guthrie was able to successfully share nursing opportunities with the community. The campaign focused on the career benefits and competitive advantages Guthrie offers for their nurses. This campaign was successful in its mission, ultimately increasing the hiring of full-time nurses by ten percent.
“Winning the Ragan Employee Communications Award and PR Daily Social Media & Digital Award for our recruitment marketing campaign was an incredible honor,” said Maria Knapp, Marketing Manager at Guthrie. “It was a testament to the hard work of everyone involved in creating, executing, and managing the campaign. Our success is a direct result of our team’s commitment to delivering creative solutions that resonate with our target audience. Winning these awards has been a major milestone for our team, and I am proud of the recognition we received.”
Guthrie is focused on improving the health and well-being of the communities it serves, while providing an environment of compassion, learning, and discovery.
“We’re extremely proud of these awards, which reflect the hard work that everyone put in on behalf of our client,” said Sean Lukasik, owner of Creagent Marketing. “Our team – including Erin Panosian and Dave Rochelle – worked seamlessly with the Guthrie Marketing department to make this campaign a success.”
Creagent Marketing is dedicated to helping their clients stay on brand while capturing followers and leads along the way. Focusing on design, content development, and comprehensive digital marketing campaigns, the company has been successful in generating content that helps clients reach their customers in various ways. From creating new company logos to building video and podcast series, the team at Creagent Marketing has a wide variety of skills and knowledge. Examples of clients include Arbor Housing and Development, Corning Civic Music, and the Community Foundation of Elmira Corning and the Finger Lakes.
Ragan Communications has been delivering “trusted news, training and intelligence for more than 50 years to internal and external communicators, HR professionals and business executives.”
“It’s an honor to see our work next to some of the other winners like PepsiCo, Capital One, Disney Parks, and John Deere,” added Lukasik. This is the first time Creagent Marketing has been recognized by Ragan Communications.
At approximately 2:27 p.m. EST, on Sunday, April 14, Twitter erupted.
At that exact moment, Tiger Woods sank a two-foot putt, winning the 2019 Masters and successfully completing one of the sports world’s most remarkable comebacks.
Just minutes later, Nike dropped a 52-second video on its social media channels starring the golfer. In a matter of moments, the video was viral – garnering more than 26 million views on Twitter and another 13 million on Instagram. Three times as many people as Nike has total followers viewed, shared, and commented on the posts.
Nike’s tweet wasn’t all that special, when you think about it. It was just a quick video, a short caption, and a hashtag. The video even lacked a narrator, it was just a collection of clips from Tiger’s past and a pretty standard music bed. Nowhere in the tweet did Nike even congratulate the golfer.
The words that flashed across the screen along with the video’s images simply read:
It’s crazy to think a 43-year-old, who has experienced every high and every low and has just won his 15th major is chasing the same dream as a 3-year-old. Just do it.
-Nike
It’s exactly that script and what the tweet didn’t say that made it so viral.
Undoubtedly, Tiger Woods is one of the most accomplished athletes in the world. His success on the links is internationally recognized, and the failures in his personal life have become just as public. He has played both the hero and the villain of his own story. People love to love him, and people love to hate him. And people really, really love to talk about him.
Once Tiger made that putt, millions of tweets – recognizing everything from his incredible comeback win to those above-mentioned personal shortcomings – were shared. Nike took full advantage of that. Their tweet simply contributed to the conversation. It was a conversation that they didn’t start themselves, so they didn’t try to control its narrative. Nike’s content was specific to Tiger Woods and incredibly relevant in the moment, yet just broad enough that people were able to take the content and make it their own.
People quoted and shared Nike’s tweet as they added their own opinions and gave their unique takes on the situation. As they continued to contribute to that global conversation, Nike’s tweet earned more and more impressions and its video collected millions of views.
Nike is a global brand, so it’s sometimes easy to assume that each piece of its marketing strategy is supported by millions of dollars worth of research and creative. That’s probably true. But, at its core, Nike’s very simple and very viral tweet can still serve as a lesson for all marketers, regardless of the size of our businesses, our budgets, or our clients.
Here are some common themes of a successful tweet that we can all take away:
Interact with your followers and attract new fans by participating in the global conversation
Increase engagement by sharing original, highly relevant content
Make that content more shareable by limiting how “salesy” it is
Don’t try to control the narrative, join a conversation and let your fans, your content, and your do the work
Nike did all of the above. Its homage to Tiger wasn’t just a congratulatory nod. It was a well-timed, calculated yet simple, extremely successful social media marketing effort – one that deserves just as much recognition as Tiger’s historic victory.
I walked into the Creagent Marketing office for my first day of work as a Social Media & Public Relations Specialist on June 15, 2015. For nearly four years, I’ve had the immense pleasure of working with some of the region’s most dedicated nonprofits, exciting small businesses, and world-renowned tourism partners, alongside two of the most forward-thinking digital marketing professionals I’ve ever met.
Creagent wasn’t my first job – I had spent the previous year working as a Marketing & Communications Specialist for a small nonprofit – but it was definitely the one that’s shaped me the most as a young professional and pointed me in the direction I’ve always wanted my career to take. It’s been an incredibly rewarding experience, filled with both personal and professional success.
Each coworker and intern I’ve worked alongside has been an invaluable source of information, and the experience of working with various clients has taught me many different things about the marketing industry as a whole. Although some of what I’ve learned can only be applied to specific situations, a few key themes were always present. They are what I will take with me as I continue my journey as a marketing professional.
Here are four of those takeaways:
Data Is King
The most important aspect of any kind of marketing is evaluation. I’ve know this in theory since I was a freshmen at Susquehanna University, but thanks to the resources made available to me at Creagent I was able to really put this theory to work.
With certain software, I was able to dig deeply into my clients’s digital footprints. I was able to quickly determine who were were talking to on their behalf, and why those people mattered to their businesses. This data influenced everything – and I literally mean everything – we did for our clients, from their social media management, to ad buying, to influencer relations. Additionally, having high quality data to back us up allowed us to effectively convey to our clients why the strategies we suggested for them were in their best interests. Numbers don’t lie, after all.
Less Is More
Quality over quantity can sometimes sound like a cliché, but when it comes to social media marketing it’s absolute fact.
This was sometimes difficult to convey to clients who, with the best of intentions in mind, wanted to see daily Facebook or Instagram posts. Algorithms are scary, and as major social media platforms seemingly altered theirs daily, some clients were nervous that if they weren’t posting a lot of content, that they simply weren’t going to succeed online. We knew this not to be true. It sometimes took a little trial and error, but with the above-mentioned data in mind, we always found just the right amount of social media content to post each week.
What I came to realize was that small amounts of high quality, highly engaging, and highly relevant information was much more effective on social media than posts that were unauthentic and “posted just to be posted.” Less content always netted more reach, fans, and engagement in the end.
Take A Hands On Approach
I’ve had the pleasure of working with a variety of clients across a variety of industries, each with various wants and needs. As Creagent’s primary social media manager, I’ve directly managed each of our clients’ social media channels in one way or another, spending hours each day on their Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts.
As a small agency, it might have been more efficient to plan and schedule posts ahead of time, allowing me to put time and energy into other tasks at hand, but I definitely wouldn’t have learned as much about each client’s brand if I had done so. By taking a hands on approach and spending time manually crafting posts, engaging with their followers, and actively contributing to their industries’ conversations, I learned much more about who our clients and their ideal customers were, and better understood their role within their respective industries.
Learn From Your Coworkers
The Creagent Marketing office is an extremely collaborative environment. Collaborating with my coworkers allowed me to develop new skills and ultimately made me a more well-rounded marketing professional.
Perhaps it was a lack of that collaboration in my previous working environment that led me to believe I would only stick to what I was good at – social media management and public relations – while my coworkers focused on their own unique sets of skills. This couldn’t have been further from the truth.
I did spend the majority of my time managing social media and interfacing with influencers and the media, but I was also writing blog posts, helping on video shoots, and lending a hand on website rebuilds almost as soon as I stepped foot in the Creagent office. After time, I wasn’t just helping with these projects, I was leading some of them. Thanks to those opportunities, the videos I’ve directed and the websites I’ve redesigned have become some of the pieces in my portfolio that I’m most proud of.
Looking back, the last four years have been truly transformative. I’m incredibly appreciative of the experience that I’ve gained and the skills that I’ve honed, and I’ll be forever thankful of the people I’ve met along the way who’ve taught me, encouraged me, and most importantly, become my friends and family.
