Charm Bracelets for Satanists

2 Hour Campaigns

A new year and a new challenge for the Cake Mix team.

We love great campaigns, collaboration and the sounds of deadlines whooshing by. So we’ve challenged ourselves to produce a marketing campaign from scratch, to a randomly selected audience, for a (semi) randomly selected product all in under two hours.

Whilst it’s definitely produced some laughs, and how could you not, selling bracelets to Satanists (yup, you read that correctly), it’s also a really valuable exercise for us to keep our work-shopping and creative tools sharp and highlight strengths and weaknesses associated with our approach and how we can use tech to overcome the limitations of all working in isolation.

Normally if we were approaching a new campaign for a client or launching a brand new business, we’d have quite a few more steps involved than what you’ll see, but we normally would have more than 2 hours, so excuse us if our analysis and exploration isn’t quite what you’d expect!

This is something we’re definitely going to be repeating and recording throughout the year so stay tuned to see what our next sub-culture – product marketing campaign is, but for now let’s learn a little more about the problem we’re solving for Satanists, with beaded bracelets…

Bracelets for Satanists

First up, we spin the “Wheel of Misfortune”. This is where we select our market segment from, or sub-culture as we’re referring to them and our first spin today gave us Satanists. Now I’m not sure how much research Nielsen or Mintel have done into this particular lifestyle segment but we didn’t have the time to check anyhow.

Next, we had to select our product, using a random object generator. Now as we were worried about ending up with something truly boring we gave ourselves the choice of six.

After seconds of deliberation we landed on beaded bracelets. I would like to tell you of the detailed reasoning behind this, but in truth, I think we just thought it was the most incongruous and therefore the funniest.

Following this we had 5 minutes individually to come up with our ideas around marketing beaded bracelets to Satanists. These ideas were then entered into Miro for all to see.

We then voted on those ideas we all liked the most. The voting process is a great way to avoid a strong personality or loud voice in the room dominating with their thoughts.

After that we grouped the top voted options together. As you can see, they made a lot of sense as a collective idea. We wanted a Pandora’s style charm bracelet, available on subscription, made from sustainable materials, that benefited good causes.

The thought process…

Now on the surface, Satanists for good causes might seem an amusing contradiction, but in reality it’s not.

A lot of the time in marketing you have to test stuff based on assumptions and knowledge you already had, and this certainly featured here, and is what made this idea coalesce as something credible.

Believe it or not, The Satanic Temple is actually a thing! It’s a kind of rights group in the US. It doesn’t believe in a literal Satan, they instead focus on secular, science-based messaging and defend civil liberties and reproductive rights to name a few. But not many would know this, which gives a problem that needs to be solved for our sub-culture (that is if Satanic Temple members want more people to know they’re the good guys). They have a PR problem and subscription charm bracelets, raising money for good causes, is a great way to solve this problem whilst being perfectly aligned with their M.O.

From there the sharing of ideas continued; we wanted to give people a choice as to which causes they donated to, so decided to have seven causes available, each assigned to a different deadly sin. Next, we took our nascent ideas and split off to each create our part of the campaign before bringing it together as our 2 hour timer drew to an end.

Lets see how the team tackled their areas and how the campaign unfolded:

Jamie – Logo & Ad Creative

As soon as the highest voted sticky notes were arranged, I was already thinking of the logo and what font to use. I had a quick discussion with Ed Dench about the best direction to go creatively. We decided going for a simple wordmark logo was the best bet, due to the time constraint.

After this, Dench found a colour palette with a simple google search. I went straight to Adobe Fonts. I was after something that was decorative and dark. It only took me two minutes to find ‘Amador’ which was gothic and perfect but it needed something else to balance it out. I went with a stencil font for the other half of the logo ‘Little Sins’. There is a feeling of rebellion to Satan’s Little Sins and the stencil font portrays that well. (I used Clarendon Wide Stencil from Adobe Fonts).

Whilst making this, I was using my time to think about how the ad creative would look. As time was short, I knew my best bet was to head to ‘Freepik’ (We subscribe to a premium account, giving us access to premium content). I needed a hero image, something that was going to stand out and sell the idea.

I searched for ‘Satan bracelet’ which obviously returned nothing because they are not a thing and are definitely not going to be on stock image sites (you never know). Next search was ‘Satanic’. This is where the perfect image of a bloody hand came up. I then spent a few minutes looking for a bracelet to add to it. In the end, I found a woman wearing some bracelets that I could cut out and add to the hand (these really don’t match what I have in my head of what Satan’s little sins wrist band would look like but again, time was an issue here and it did the job… sort of).

What really brought the ad creative to life was the texture. I got it from ‘Freepik’ and edited it a little in PhotoShop.

Jamie top tip – Texture can give a flat looking, single colour background depth and bring your ad to life. It wont work every time and depends on the look you’re after.

Let me know what you think in the comments below!

Doyle – Landing Page Copy

When approaching the copy for any campaign, it’s important to consider your value proposition. Your value proposition should influence every bit of copy you write so, in theory, before putting pen to paper, you’ve got to figure out what it is. You can do this by answering some important questions about what it is you are trying to achieve;

Why are you doing it?
Who’s it meant for?
How are people going to see it?

I expect the question you are asking yourself right now is; ‘how the hell did they answer these questions so quickly, in order to start selling bracelets to Satanists?’

Well, in short, it was a combination of having plenty of experience in creating marketing concepts, bunched with some educated guesses and even some sheer luck, in that our winning concepts/ideas seemed to gel so well together form the offset. We are all aware that this will not always be the case.

During our initial brainstorming session, we came up with some great ideas and narrowed them down to our favourites. Not only had we come up with some catchy taglines, a Brand name and an idea of what it is we were going to sell exactly (not just a pretty – or scary bracelet in this case), but we had tackled the exercise with the value proposition in mind. We only gave ourselves 20 minutes for this, and concluded a few things.

What did we conclude?

Satanists weren’t just into Satan and sacrificing goats

Members of the Satanic Temple were actually pretty interested in making a difference
The bracelets don’t have to be stand alone items. Why not make the product, or bracelets, part of a subscription service – Satanists can collect charms rather than just buy a bracelet
The business model can be non-profit – All profits go to good causes nationwide – This would get people onboard that like to help a good cause.
Those that are interested in giving back are likely to be interested in recyclable and sustainable materials
Reddit would be a great platform to use to find the right crowd – At least as an initial try. We would set up a Reddit Ad and build a landing page to sell our bracelets and charms.

Having discussed all of this in double time, we had indeed answered the questions needed to find our value proposition. Whether right or wrong, we didn’t have time to dwell on it and could now tackle the campaign assets themselves.

My job was to write the copy for the landing page we were going to produce. This landing page would tell our market audience about our product and convince them to join up and subscribe or buy.

The copy basically wrote itself, based on the findings of our brainstorming session – it was interesting to see how a quick collaborative effort that explored the whole topic really made the copy-writing easier. But, as you can imagine, there’s a little more to it than that when it comes to the execution. You need to write for what you are actually trying to get done; a landing page, an ad, an email – the copy will all be different, although they will all resonate the same values as they are working towards the same goal. When approaching a landing page, it’s really important to consider it’s structure and value.

What approach should we take?

This is how I approached the landing page copy for this campaign:

Headline

Open with a catchy benefit-oriented headline. Add a sentence or two introducing the product

Value add & Data Capture

Right away, give visitors somewhere to leave their details for more information. This adds value as they get more information on your product, whilst it also means that you have their contact details for future marketing campaigns and better event tracking.

Clear and concise copy – Define Tone of Voice(ToV)

With our time constraints it was important to write clear, relevant, and concise copy. It was very much going to be a short-form landing page so we had to sell the product without the fluff. There wasn’t a lot of time to really dig into the right ToV for Satanists, but with our findings we were able to take a stab and at least keep the message concise.

Include the right sections – The devils in the details:

What is it?
For £X you get XYZ – Include the USP

Why do you want it?
It’s great AND you get to make a difference

How does it work?
It’s not hard to sign up – I promise

Include a CTA
Focus on getting visitors to take one specific action – In this case ‘JOIN’, or in other words buy the product.

And it’s as simple as that really. Check out what I put together below and then take a look at the finished landing page to see how this ‘boring looking’ but imperative bit of stuff turns into something cool:

Webb – Reddit Targeting and ad campaign

My work for “Bracelets for Satanists” involved pitching in with the copy with Doyle and creating the ad campaign within Reddit. Doyle had created the majority of the copy for the LP, and I researched and assigned the charities suited to each of the seven sins that would be the benefactors of the charm sold.

Pride – LQGBTQ + rights

Greed – Transparency International anti corruption charity

Wrath – Women’s aid

Envy – Cyber security for elderly

Lust – Sex workers rights

Gluttony – Support free school meals for kids

Sloth – NSPCC

From there it was time to create an audience to target on Reddit. We chose Reddit as a platform as the users can be quite counter-culture, quite anti-establishment and still caring. So it seemed a perfect fit for a brand featuring Satan doing good deeds that would often be traditionally associated with the Christian church.

Normally we would create personas and target them with unique campaigns, copy and LPs but time was short which is why they were all bundled together. We wouldn’t normally show the same ad to Reddit subscribers of the Church of Satan and Parenting. Though I’m sure the two sub-Reddits have some overlap.

From there it was case of taking the creative Jamie and Dench had conceived and producing ad copy that was inspired by and therefore coherent with the LP copy Doyle had created

Et voila – the finished ad!

Dench – Landing Page design

If you told me yesterday our new client wanted to sell beads to Satanists my first question would have been.. Who made that decision to have them as clients? I am happy to put my hands up and say don’t judge a book by it’s cover as today we accepted the challenge and we prevailed victorious.

2 hours is truly not a lot of time to make the magic happen and especially when we are all in isolation due to Covid restrictions. I took on the challenge of the landing page that a user would arrive at from the Reddit advert.

Without having time to really research the inner mind of a Satanist to understand how they would best like to receive information I went with a tried and tested formula of What is it, Who is it for and why should you buy it. The hardest part about this challenge for me was the time restraint and not having the team around me to bounce ideas off, where normally we have several calls a day having lots of quick ones in a set time is very time consuming in itself. That being said next time I am sure there will be less waffling as everyone felt the time slip away.

Check out the video below for the final result:

https://xd.adobe.com/view/a5dfd7d0-4c3e-4920-b651-daee039f49b0-f08c/?fullscreen

Can’t wait for the next challenge, this was a great trial run!

Jan – Data strategy

There wasn’t enough time to get anything set up for this campaign but this is the strategy that I would follow if we were setting it up for real:
First things first, I would make a Google Analytics account to put onto the website, or in this case, landing page so that we could track where people are coming from, the best performing pages, bounce rates etc. This really helps you see how things are going, what needs improving and needs to have a watchful eye on it. Then all I would need to do is put the code into the page(s).

Next up is Google Tag Manager; this is the next step up in tracking as it lets you add event tracking (if people click certain buttons, how far they get through forms etc) to really see where things are at in terms of how well it works. Where I would put those in this case is on each sin and bead option so that you would be able to see which ones were most popular to be able to put out deals etc for them.

Now that the landing page is nicely tracked, we are going to need to have somewhere to store our lead and customers data, and where we can send follow up marketing to. A CRM is what’s needed here, where any information that is given through forms (purchases/newsletters/support tickets etc) on the landing page is securely stored and managed. Most landing page builders or website builders like WordPress have extensions where you can connect things like forms into your CRM, or you can embed forms built in and using fields from your CRM by just putting the code into the desired block or location on your page.

This is one of the bigger and more important steps as setting it up right is important as you want to make sure that data is stored correctly so that it’s easy to draw on for your marketing and general reports. In most CRMs you can do sales, marketing, and support ticket work in one place and a lot of it can be automated to save you time and effort.

For the marketing, we could get the data for who’s interested in what and be able to push the relevant products until they have bought, then we could move onto the next favourite to really target properly and boost sales

Conclusion

For our first pass at this as a concept I think it’s safe to say we’re all pretty happy with the result. Not only did the 2 hour marketing sprint work conceptually, we produced a campaign that had us all thinking “This could really be a goer you know!”. A common thread from everyone’s experience was less about the time pressure, (we’re quite used to working fast) but more about how working in isolation impacts idea sharing and creativity. We did a full debrief following the exercise and so hopefully you can spot the improvements in methodology next time round, where we hope will be equally as successful and this not just being a case of the devil getting the best tunes.

Our Tech Stack

What did our stack look like?: