Custom Ink Honors 10 School 'Unsung Heroes' to Grow K-12 Business
Custom Ink's "Unsung Heroes of School Spirit" campaign has drawn near six-figure video views as the brand targets growth with its 100,000 annual K-12 customers, CMO Philip Auerbach says.
Updated
The brief
- Custom Ink honored 10 K-12 school employees with an "Unsung Heroes of School Spirit" award, announcing winners Aug. 28.
- Campaign videos have drawn nearly six figures in views, with winner interviews earning the highest engagement, per CMO Philip Auerbach.
- Custom Ink counts 100,000 K-12 customers each year and plans to extend the 'Unsung Heroes' theme to other categories such as the workplace.
Custom Ink has honored 10 kindergarten-through-12th-grade school employees with an "Unsung Heroes of School Spirit" award, and campaign videos have already drawn nearly "six figures" in views.
The custom T-shirt and swag brand solicited public nominations for teachers and school administrators who go above and beyond, then announced the winners Aug. 28 with videos showcasing each employee. Interviews with the winners are pulling the highest engagement rates of the campaign's content, said Philip Auerbach, Chief Marketing Officer at Custom Ink.
"We are looking for this to build brand awareness and hopefully have the customers that we already have in this market feel our gratitude because we appreciate that they've got lots of choices in this space and we want them to know that we don't take their business lightly," Auerbach said.
Why school administrators matter to Custom Ink
The majority of Custom Ink's sales are business-to-business, including orders from major enterprise accounts for employee onboarding and gifting. The remaining share comes from everyday consumers, such as families buying matching vacation outfits, and from organizations such as nonprofit groups.
Sales to K-12 organizations — a school band or chess club, for example — fall into the organizations category, Auerbach said. That segment is not the majority of the company's sales, but it is a "sizable" share, and the brand counts 100,000 K-12 customers each year.
A majority of U.S. schools sell branded gear for fundraising, and swag helps enhance school spirit, Auerbach said. The people coordinating those orders — teachers, club leaders and parents — often spend significant time on the work even though it is not their main responsibility. That insight gave the campaign its name.
"The reason we ended up focusing on and launching this campaign is that people spend a lot of time on this, and almost nobody's full-time job is to be the official swag buyer," Auerbach said. "It is something that people are dedicating their own time, usually after hours, to doing."
Amplifying through local media
Custom Ink's public relations team pitched local media in all 10 winners' cities, after first getting the winners' permission to share their stories, Auerbach said. A few local news outlets picked up the story, and Custom Ink helped the winners prepare for the coverage.
The earned-media push comes as brand marketing teams work to boost their coverage amid the growth of AI chat platforms such as ChatGPT. These platforms often source information and links from news organizations, so brands have worked to make their names more visible in those channels.
"We're thinking about the role that AI plays in consumer discovery," Auerbach said. "We had some [winners] that showed up in our major markets, but it wasn't an explicit goal of the campaign to show up better in an AI overview. But we were certainly hopeful that this would get picked up by local news and that they'd want to cover the roles that these people are playing in their community."
Campaign goals
Custom Ink wants other educators and parents to see the videos, and Auerbach expects that will happen through organic sharing of this type of content.
Alongside brand awareness and affinity, the brand will measure the campaign's impact on its K-12 business. Results, including orders, will likely show up from homecoming season through the end of the year.
"We'll be looking at the increase that we see in our K-12 business," Auerbach said. "One of the things about K-12 schools and particularly parent-teacher association customers is that they are also customers in other aspects of their lives."
Custom Ink has run contests before, but never on this scale, Auerbach said. Given the positive response, the brand plans to recycle the theme for other unsung heroes, such as those in the workplace.
"This idea of 'Unsung Heroes' is something that we see as a more pervasive opportunity and pervasive role that's played across all of the categories of customer that we engage with," Auerbach said.
Based on linkedin.com
Filed under brand-awareness, earned-media, custom-ink, k-12-marketing, awards-campaign
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News editor covering industry trends and analytics at Marketing Herald.
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