Mobile phone manufacturers, Tecno Mobile on Sunday turned an ordinarily quiet day on its head with the epic-est set of Tweets to ever come from any brand in 2016 or indeed any time since I remember.
The tweets which came from the official @tecnomobileng handle took us on an emotional journey with a young woman of middle age (25-45) describing chaos in her love life, a very real daily occurrence on African/Nigerian twitter.
The tweets which had a lot of people hooked turned out to be a brilliant content marketing campaign to introduce the Tecno Phantom 6 and 6+, #BeautyandTheBeast as they have been dubbed.
2015/2016 has been a big period for Tecno with the launch of the Tecno Boom J8, Tecno w4, Tecno Camon C8, Tecno L8 and Tecno L8 Plus and other devices that have continued to distinguish it in a market it disrupted a few years ago when Nigerian entrepreneur, Nnamdi Ezeigbo, approached a former Bird employee for a partnership to manufacture affordable dual sim phones that Nigerians could easily afford.
The Tecno Phantom 6 and Tecno Phantom 6 Plus which will be launched in Dubai and subsequently in Nigeria are rumored to be packed with features and at prices that will blow competition's recently launched devices into the water.
Returning back to the content marketing masterclass from Sunday, there were 4 particular boxes Tecno ticked that I particularly liked;
i. Audience Profiling: Audience profiling is extremely important in defining your content marketing strategy. For the success of any successful content marketing initiative, a brand will have to understand the target demographics and create content that will influence and lead to action from that audience. Key questions to ask are; what age is your audience? Is your audience male or female? Is your audience wealthy, middle or lower class? Is your audience aspirational or contented? These are some questions that will affect your tone, voice and direction of the content created. Looking at Tecno, the audience seems to have been defined as "aspirational, middle class, both sexes".
ii. Tone: The tone goes a long way in helping the audience flow with the voice and direction of the content. It sets an expectation for the audience.
iii. The Voice: This describes the personality of the writing and allows the audience to have a picture in their minds when reading the content. The voice for Tecno is a working class woman between 25-40 navigating love and career.
iv. Direction: Direction is extremely tricky and the audience's reaction to the content can cause a brand to have a radical change along the way. It is however very important to have a starting direction for the content, and for Tecno, it was taking a very African/Nigerian reality and building out a character that led to their #BeautyandTheBeast direction. Mobile phone companies launch phones all the time, but the uniqueness of a brand's approach goes a long way in differentiating it from competition.
Tecno's strategy was so good that people started claiming to know the lady that had hacked the Tecno account and was tweeting from it.
The brand trended organically on Twitter with over 3000 tweets before they finally confirmed it was an official campaign.
I personally can't wait to get my hands on the devices, my personal favorite already looking like the Tecno Phantom 6 dubbed "Beauty", maybe because every Beast wants a beauty in his life.