#MarketingMasterminds: Blue Robot | Facebook Marketing Partner | Kyle Oosthuizen
Tell us a bit about Blue Robot.
Blue Robot is a marketing and social automation company that delivers experiences, chatbots, and technical services across platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp.
We have offices across South Africa, Kenya, and the United Kingdom, and since being a Facebook Marketing Partner for Technical Services, we provide services to brands globally.
Our partnership is extremely valuable, as it shows that Facebook trusts us to give the right advice to clients and to provide a safe environment in which users can engage. Working with the Facebook team allows us to align with their vision, so that we grow in the same direction. The Partner badge, and the benefits it carries, means we always work within best practices.
We’re also able to get advice, straight from Facebook, on how to improve a user journey, based on best practices in other markets. Ultimately, our clients are the winners because they benefit from our and Facebook’s expertise.
What kinds of campaigns has Blue Robot run?
We’ve worked on a bunch of really great campaigns, including:
Adidas ‘Rent a Pred’ | New product awareness campaign
To raise awareness about the latest iteration of Adidas’s Predator football boots, we created a WhatsApp hotline to help amateur football teams replace missing players at the last minute. Through the WhatsApp Chatbot, users could ask for a player to assist in their non-league games.
What users didn’t know was that high-profile player Kaka would show up and play their non-league games.
WhatsApp was a perfect fit as users felt comfortable providing their details due to the platform’s encryption.
On game day, players – including Kaka – showed up and it drove massive conversation and attained global media coverage on Kaka's Facebook and in Contagious, Multiple Medium articles, creativemoment, sportbible, Sky Sports, and 90min.
The campaign received thousands of online mentions within minutes of being found via platforms such as Instagram. This was one of the most talked about sporting campaigns of 2020 and it was all made possible via a WhatsApp Chatbot.
Telkom Kenya | Convenient recurring purchases
Telkom wanted to create a platform that allowed users to make common and repeated purchases, like buying airtime. We created a WhatsApp Chatbot, which allows users to do exactly this.
All Out India | Dengue fever awareness
We partnered with All Out India to offer an education chatbot on Facebook Messenger. The bot aims to educate people in the region about dengue fever, to help curb the infection rate and supply information on treatment options.
Educating people about diseases like dengue fever is difficult because no one actively reads about them – especially the youth. By using Facebook Messenger, we could target users on a platform where they felt comfortable and were already engaging and viewing content daily.
Reading about dengue fever on a Facebook Messenger Chatbot was certainly better received than reading about it in a 'boring' online article. Plus, in providing the information in a consumable format, the campaign was a great success.
SuperSport | Keeping the Rugby World Cup top of mind
SuperSport required a quiz platform to drive multiple user engagements and interest in the 2019 Rugby World Cup. The goal was to build anticipation around the tournament by delighting and entertaining SuperSport’s audience and keeping the event top of mind.
Building excitement and anticipation is an effective way to drive viewership. Together, we came up with the concept of a quiz. We decided to make this quiz difficult – even a hardcore rugby enthusiast would struggle getting 10/10.
We reached 20,000 highly engaged users on Facebook. Of those, nearly 40% came back to take the quiz again. Users spent, on average, three minutes engaging with SuperSport – that’s a long conversation to have! The emotion and excitement that we unlocked definitely worked towards driving anticipation around the Rugby World Cup.
In the end, only one person got 10/10 for the quiz.
What’s the secret behind Blue Robot’s success?
Blue Robot delivers social messaging and interactive experiences for brands across the globe. We're a tech company but our secret sauce is our humans, who have poured their hearts and souls into more than 2,000 social campaigns.
We truly believe that our team makes us special. Our combined experience allows us to offer our clients the best possible chance of success.
What are your marketing tips for success?
We always use a reputable partner/platform for any campaign. There are far too many companies still trying to do everything manually, or by themselves. There’s a lot of legislation and policies that brands need to comply with, while simultaneously trying to achieve results. It’s no easy task.
User Experience (UX) and best practice are more important than ever. With so many things happening at once, you only have one chance to capture a user’s attention, while remembering that the smallest thing might get them to lose interest.
The user journey is never perfect; keep iterating and making changes as the data from users’ interactions come in. It’s the only way to know what users respond to and what interests them.
What sets Blue Robot apart in a saturated market?
Global partnerships with key platforms and agencies, and a dedicated customer success team who help deliver client campaigns and optimise them once live.
We use feedback loops in everything we do, which ranges from bi-annual client surveys to in-depth internal reviews, to ensure we’re always identifying areas where we can improve, both internally and externally.
Being an automation business, we automate as much as we possibly can. Our internal team automates up to 10,000 menial tasks every month, freeing up time and mental capacity to focus on what really matters.
