Being brave with the brand: Vancouver Island University’s #ILearnHere Instagram campaign and the power of content marketing through social visual communications

In 2013 VIU’s strategic marketing team launched a successful Instagram campaign that focused on connecting with their target audience in a popular digital location. This campaign intended to boost stagnant enrolment at the University while increasing brand awareness within their region. This paper shares insights on what made this campaign successful with an audience interaction rate almost seven times higher than projected, how they controlled the campaign on a digital platform, and how they created and maintained a hashtag that resonated with their audience and continues to be dominated by the University today, with over 8,000 posts made by users since 2013. The information shared by Debra Jacklin, Strategic Marketing Manager at the time of the campaign, will explore the strategy and tactics developed for this campaign, how VIU measured meaningful results, as well as how the campaign concept was scaled and adapted for other purposes. The tactics shared by John Gardiner will explore how to effectively run the ‘day-to-day’ operations of a social media campaign.