Epic for Kids’ always-on partnership with XOMAD leveraged the insights of trusted social media messengers to launch content that reached parents and drove engagement.
Epic for Kids is a digital reading subscription service with one mission: making books more accessible to kids. Smart devices give kids access to a variety of entertainment options like streaming YouTube, watching shows, and playing games. The result is that parents find it harder than ever to get their kids to read at home after school. That’s where Epic for Kids comes in. With a library of more than 40,000 titles accessible through its award-winning and kid-safe app, Epic for Kids aims to inspire children to a lifetime of discovery by making reading and learning fun.
Epic for Kids’ award-winning digital platform helps families, but reaching parents to let them know can be like competing for kids’ attention after school. So Epic for Kids partnered with XOMAD to target parents with children aged 3 to 12 in an always-on, year-long arrangement that allowed Epic for Kids to gain insights from social media messengers, generate a library of content for Epic for Kids’ own channels, launch a TikTok account, and support two national campaigns.
At the outset of the program, to gain insights about reaching Epic for Kids’ target audience, XOMAD vetted and selected social media messengers, all with children aged 3 to 12, to generate ideas and feedback on Epic for Kids’ product, pricing, and social media presence. Selected social media messengers provided content and strategy recommendations, observations about the competitive landscape, as well as information about category differentiators that their followers would value. These insights provided the basis for Epic for Kids and XOMAD to develop and execute social media strategies.
“We have loved working with XOMAD on our variety of programs! They helped co-create a multi-staged, year-long program, starting with helping us gain insightful and actionable feedback from creators on our brand and messaging. They also curated quality, authentic creator content for us to use as a library as we launched our new TikTok channel. Then, XOMAD executed two excellent campaigns during the mission-critical Back-to-School and holiday seasons. They are easy to work with, deliver amazing results with real ROI’s, and have extensive reporting not seen in the influencer industry. We can’t wait to continue working with them to fuel curiosity and reading confidence in children.” – Kiki Burger, Senior Manager, Communications at Epic for Kids
To help Epic for Kids launch its own TikTok account and boost its Instagram presence, XOMAD vetted and selected 22 social media messengers to create original content for Epic for Kids to use on its @Epic4Kids channels. 40 authentic and engaging videos made it from concept to execution under XOMAD’s briefs, notes, edits, and standards. Since Gen Z and Young Millennials prefer social media content produced by their peers rather than brands, this peer-generated content library will help Epic for Kids’ social media accounts remain active, relevant, and growing with their target audience.
For another component of the always-on social media strategy, XOMAD assisted Epic for Kids with two campaigns: #NationalParentsDayOff and #CozyUpWithEpic. Using the insights from earlier research, XOMAD recruited and activated trusted social media messengers to reach parents with young children.
Between the two campaigns, the 1,312 posts and stories from XOMAD-deployed social media messengers drove 160,000 engagements and reached a combined audience of more than 7 million, including more than 1.75 million parents. With the help of XOMAD’s proprietary Target Audience Overlap™ technology, 94% of the US audience reached saw content posted from multiple participating social media messengers. In a world where people need to see something many times for it to be effective, XOMAD’s Target Audience Overlap™ technology ensures that your target audience sees content from multiple trusted social media messengers.
In the #CozyUpWithEpic campaign, which aimed to drive downloads of the Epic for Kids mobile app, comments from followers of social media messengers demonstrate that exposure to multiple unique posts from creators moved them from awareness to consideration to download.
By partnering with XOMAD in an always-on arrangement, Epic for Kids was able to leverage the insights of trusted social media messengers to develop successful social media strategies to reach parents and drive engagement.
Advice for Brand Marketers:
- Insights lead to better social media strategies. Conducting research with social media messengers prior to launching a campaign helps develop messaging that connects to target audiences and drives engagement.
- Parents know parents. By partnering with social media messengers who fit the target audience to develop relevant content, peer-generated posts averaged more than 120 engagements.
- Enlist creators to bolster your own social media channels. By working with creators, brands can build a library of relevant content to keep their social media accounts active with content that their target audience will find engaging.
- Reach your audience and then reach them again with another messenger. When social media followers see multiple, personalized posts from multiple creators they know and trust, they are more likely to take the action you want them to take. XOMAD’s technology and strategy are built on this philosophy.