Adobe Lightroom: building a strategy to grow-in-market.

Driving awareness by inspiring amateur photographers.

Adobe Lightroom is well established as a core tool for professional photographers. To grow its user base, Adobe wanted to showcase the software’s capabilities to novice photographers and content creators, inspiring them to take their images to the next level.

Through autumn and winter, reaching new audiences via a digital campaign is easier, purely by the fact that people spend more time inside, glued to their screens. But how would we engage amateur photographers in summer, when they’re out and about?

Introducing the product to a new audience.

To demonstrate that Adobe Lightroom isn’t just for the pros, we developed the ‘Lightroom Stories: Share your Summer’ social campaign. Spotlighting travel photographers who are passionate about their craft, we went behind the scenes to share their tricks.

From finding the photo opportunity to adding their unique stamp to their images during the editing phase, we documented the whole creative process for our carefully selected influencers.

With tutorials featuring the Lightroom user interface (UI), the content we produced showed beginners just how easy it is to elevate imagery – and how satisfying it is to see the transformations.

Encouraging everyone to get involved.

To inspire the amateurs to experiment with Lightroom and try out its features, we set different challenges with each of our influencers. We wanted these to simultaneously showcase the breadth of tools available with Lightroom and inspire all kinds of creatives to take part, so these challenges ranged from ‘get the best out of bright days’ to ‘create the perfect portrait’.

Building on the high-quality online films we created – documenting how integral Adobe Lightroom is to our influencers’ editing process – we asked our budding creatives to take on the same brief and share their summer, in their own unique way.

Adding a healthy dose of competition.

Having shared inspiration and expert guidance from creatives they admire, to increase engagement we asked our audience to post their ‘before and after’ summer shots on Instagram. With a weekly chance to win a drone and a Creative Cloud Photography annual subscription, we were thrilled to see it pique our target audience’s interest.

The campaign reached a whopping 2.3 million people on social. While our landing page, brimming with how-to tutorials and inspiring films, earned 45,000 visits every week that the competition was running. This resulted in nearly 3,000 stunning entries to the contest and some truly impressive winning images.

Fashioning a follow-up campaign.

To capitalise on the success of the campaign and maintain the momentum, Adobe then asked us to engage a completely new audience group – social content creators and influencers. Not necessarily as passionate about photography, this younger group still regularly use images to engage their followers. So for the second phase of the campaign, we focused on lifestyle and fashion photography.

To address a concern that Lightroom is ‘only for professionals’, we partnered with a respected influencer to show the value the app adds to their content. We used the Adobe.com EMEA Photo Beginners webpage as the campaign content hub for all the assets we created and positioned it as the place to go to learn how to create visually engaging social content.

After considerable research, we chose to partner with Kelsey of @kelseyinlondon and made a start with a video and photoshoot in Kew Gardens and at Kelsey’s flat in South-East London. We created a hero video and a series of story videos for the content hub – focusing on selecting the right outfit, choosing the best location and creating the perfect fashion accessories ‘flat lay’.

To help the newbies…

We also created a series of short tutorial videos and the content hub had a blog article from Kelsey, sharing her tips for creating the perfect Instagram feed. A series of weekly emails drove the audience to these assets, offering a free-to-download Lightroom preset which Kelsey had created as an incentive.

To increase the impact of this campaign amongst her followers, we also invited a small group of keen fashion photographers to join Kelsey for a ‘photo walk’ in Notting Hill, followed by a photo-editing workshop. The final asset for the campaign was an interactive livestream on Adobe’s UK Facebook and YouTube channels. For this, Kelsey answered questions posed by her live audience.

Results that made an impression.

The campaign was a huge success, achieving significant engagement with the target audience, with over 2.5M impressions across social media and 9.6M impressions from paid media. This resulted in over 245K clicks and 95K visits.

Adobe

Adobe

Driving awareness by inspiring amateur photographers.

Introducing the product to a new audience.

Encouraging everyone to get involved.

Adding a healthy dose of competition.

Fashioning a follow-up campaign.

To help the newbies…

Results that made an impression.

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