In response to this brief, Mobas developed the ‘Elements’ campaign which was a social media strategy, built on a foundation of content marketing, to educate, inform and inspire early-career chemists. The campaign had two main objectives:
1. To grow a social media presence with content that is valuable and shareable. Traction will be gained with content that stops people scrolling. To do this, all content needs to be branded, visually aligned and recognisable.
2. The second objective is to foster the overarching primary message of Commonwealth Chemistry, which is ‘be a part of our inclusive community’. This campaign needs to inspire those it connects with to follow our calls to action and invest in the Commonwealth Chemistry Federation community. They do this by following our accounts and signing up to events (as individuals) or signing up as an organisation.
The top-level proposition of ‘Elements’ can be thought of as ‘Elements of the lives of Commonwealth Chemists’. The campaign aimed to build a community, by relaying the work that chemists are doing in different nations of the Commonwealth by highlighting the similarities in their daily lives and work, and showing the relatable nature of each chemist’s stories, demonstrating the strength of the network that Commonwealth Chemistry provides.
‘Elements’ profiled seven Commonwealth chemists from a range of different countries: India, New Zealand, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Trinidad, South Africa and the UK. Each chemist also specialised in a completely different field allowing the campaign to show their diverse chemist network. Their specialisms included: biological chemistry, analytic and organic chemistry, environmental chemistry, and computational. Each chemist was interviewed and quizzed on their day-to-day lives, which was used to create engaging video content for Facebook. Overall, the chemist video stories were designed to be the centre of the ‘Elements’ campaign and key to the growth of a community on the Commonwealth Chemistry Facebook channel.
The videos created were posted periodically over a three-month period alongside supporting and reactive content based upon ongoing Commonwealth Chemistry events and topics. This content was planned through a social media content strategy, where each piece had to relate to one of the five content pillars: UN SDGs, career progression, the Commonwealth, diversity and inclusion, and community engagement. These topics were specifically chosen because they were deemed to be the most likely topics to facilitate community engagement.
Once the content was created, Mobas used a Facebook PPC campaign, which put media spend behind the most popular organic content (chemist videos) and targeted specific audiences around the Commonwealth to encourage growth on the newly created Commonwealth Chemistry channel.
Over the three-month period the targeting was adapted to ensure that the content was reaching new audiences, who would be interested in the Federation’s aspiration to champion, promote, drive innovation and encourage equality within the chemical sciences.
