How do you create marketing campaigns that attract and delight different audiences? As the Paper and Packaging Board (P+PB) knows, the key is engaging experiences that are interactive, imaginative, and exciting to share.
P+PB’s How Life Unfolds® campaign is a paper industry-funded program that helps educate consumers about the sustainable benefits of using paper and paper-based packaging. Although P+PB is a consumer-centric program, industry stakeholders like paper manufacturers remain a key audience. We spoke to Sarah Meiburg, Senior Director of Industry Outreach, and Jen Nguyen, Senior Manager of Social Media & Communications, to find out what it’s like to run campaigns for various audiences from consumers (B2C) to manufacturers (B2B) all over the United States.
Challenge #1: how to engage and educate a B2C audience
P+PB speaks to consumers through their nationwide marketing campaign that ranges from digital and print advertising to website content to social posts, all to increase preference for paper products by highlighting their sustainable benefits from sourcing to recycling.
“We’re an education campaign,” explains Sarah. When P+PB started using Wyng, they were looking for ways to increase engagement with their community and ensure the consumer understood all the information.
P+PB’s How Life Unfolds® website was already using metrics such as scroll depth and time on site to measure site engagement. However, there were still pieces of the puzzle missing: a way for their audiences to interact with the information, and a way for P+PB to measure its actual impact.
“We needed a good way to gauge whether people were understanding the content. For example, getting answers correct in trivia quizzes,” is how Jen summarizes the need. “That means we’re getting our message through in an efficient way that people understand.”
Challenge #2: high stakes and big scale
The United States is the world’s second-largest consumer of paper and paperboard, using about 64 million metric tons each year. The pulp and paper industry is worth almost $60 billion.
That means P+PB represents a colossal audience of workers.
“There’s probably hundreds of thousands of employees who work within the paper industry,” says Sarah. “From mill employees to people who work in box plants, who work in corporate offices … They’re in every aspect of manufacturing.”
So that means on top of educating consumers about the convenience and environmental credentials of paper, P+PB also aims to provide an outlet for papermakers to show their pride in the industry they work for. But where to start in addressing the needs to further engage with consumers and industry employees?
Bringing paper to life with Wyng Experiences
First, P+PB came up with a list of ways that they wanted to engage workers. It started with a couple of animated characters that acted as physical representations for the industry – named Casey and Page.
“We were looking for a platform that could help us create a way to introduce the characters to the industry and provide a get-to-know-them experience with sweepstakes and prizes,” recalls Sarah. P+PB launched a naming ballot amongst the industry through Wyng. “They weren’t meant to be named originally, [but then] we had something like 10,000 entries for naming the characters… That was a lot of fun.”
P+PB team quickly discovered that they could build brand affinity by interacting with their audiences through experiential digital campaigns. Sweepstakes, trivia polls, competitions, app-based games, and personality quizzes were popular with consumers and industry workers alike.
“An astrology quiz was one of the first ways we used Wyng on our website,” says Jen. “It was just a fun way of disseminating information and encouraging [consumers] to recycle. And then we found out that people are really interested in learning what their personality says about them.”
P+PB took this learning when launching their latest consumer campaign. The Papertarian campaign centers around defining a lifestyle for people who choose and recycle paper products knowing their environmental benefits. So to add an interactive element to the campaign’s landing page, P+PB featured a Are You a Papertarian? Quiz. Since April 2023, the quiz has counted over 400,000 sessions, including some repeat users. Articles about the Papertarian campaign have also notched a higher engagement rate (7.9%) than the rest of the P+PB website (6.3%).
Following the Papertarian campaign launch, P+PB ran their latest successful B2B sweepstakes titled “Test Your Papertarian IQ.” Starting with a series of video spots starring the comedian Retta, the team built a short online quiz to test employees’ knowledge — with prizes including $500 Visa gift cards and merch. P+PB more than exceeded its goals: the team tripled their target for landing page visits to 21,000 and achieved 6,000 contest entries – 1,000 more than the goal.
The outreach and social media teams quickly realized they could recycle content between their industry and consumer audiences — just like recycling a piece of paper.
“We take the employee contests and employee activations that my team will work on, like the Papertarian IQ, and then Jen and her team will repurpose them for our consumers,” explains Sarah. “We have a great consumer experience, because we will have already tested it with the employees.”
How the Paper and Packaging Board works with Wyng
“We really, really enjoy the ability to do the kinds of activations that Wyng has allowed us to do, and to really, really phenomenal success,” says Sarah. “On the employee and the industry engagement side, they now look forward to the next thing we could possibly come up with!”
P+PB uses the full extent of Wyng Experiences to engage their audiences, from quizzes to contests and games.
Plus, they integrate social sharing with every campaign that they release. “We’ve been able to make the Wyng platform work for us to enhance and educate and have great outreach, to get our message out,” says Sarah.
Her team also loves the flexibility of Wyng: how they can work independently, customize existing templates, use the Wyng Services team, or create hybrid campaigns.
“Some of those early engagements were super collaborative,” Sarah remembers. “Wyng was super engaged in the creation and vision that we [wanted] to have with the industry.”
“It’s the one platform that has been able to support us in that journey throughout our campaign,” she concludes.
Want to experience the freedom and creativity of Wyng Experiences? Start a free trial of the platform today.
