End-to-End Expertise: The WHY Z-WAVE eBook and Social Campaign

800,000+

Impressions

4000+

Clicks

2X

Web Traffic

650% 

Key Vertical Audience Growth

1.5%

Under Budget 

Campaign Highlights

  • Caster created a seven-book eBook series and a targeted social campaign to drive engagement with the Z-Wave Alliance between major announcements.  
  • Caster managed the social campaign budget to achieve pre-set KPIs, creating content and social graphics in-house and proactively adjusting social media posts to maximize engagement with minimal paid social spending. 
  • The campaign exceeded every benchmark by more than double, including impressions, clicks, audience, and website traffic growth, all while staying under budget. 

Scope

  • Consulting + Strategy 
  • Content Creation 
  • Social Media Messaging 
  • Paid Social Media Strategy 

The Client: Z-Wave Alliance

The Z-Wave Alliance is the member-driven standards development organization dedicated to developing and advancing the Z-Wave® technology platform for smart home and IoT solutions worldwide. Alliance members are market leaders in cutting-edge products and systems, delivering increased comfort, convenience, energy conservation, safety, and security. Z-Wave Alliance brings together companies in the residential and commercial connected device markets and champions Z-Wave as the preferred standard for developing new smart home and IoT devices.  

THE CHALLENGE

Open standards development requires broad consensus-building, meticulous technical inquiry and testing, and exhaustive review and commentary. As a result, Standards Development Organizations (SDOs) often enter an extended “quiet period” between major specification releases. During these times, organizations are extremely busy beneath the surface but not producing any new outward-facing announcements or materials.  

This was the case for the Z-Wave Alliance. With development as a core objective for the brand in 2023, the release schedule featured predictable “quiet periods” between planned announcements. However, the Alliance couldn’t afford to go silent: In the fast-moving smart home landscape, even Z-Wave needed its Alliance to continually demonstrate its relevance to device manufacturers, technology integrators, end users, and the media. The Z-Wave Alliance required a creative approach to allow them to stay top-of-mind for these stakeholders, engage their social media audience, and attract new members even without a heavy news cadence. 

THE STRATEGY

 

Caster drew upon a valuable yet underutilized resource to make noise during quiet periods: the annual Z-Wave Ecosystem Report.  

This comprehensive market research project contained a wealth of untapped data and storylines, which Caster had worked closely with the research analysts to develop and promote. Having been immersed in the report’s data and the industry’s trends, Caster was well-equipped to tackle the eBook campaign with expertise. The team methodically dissected the material from the 2023 report to create the WHY Z-WAVE eBook series, which formed the backbone of the Alliance’s outreach campaign. 

Caster designed a release calendar that included seven individual eBooks, with releases timed across a five-month period to maintain the momentum of the Z-Wave Alliance between scheduled events, announcements and Board of Directors updates. Caster created the written copy for all seven eBooks in-house, relying on the Ecosystem Report to minimize the time required from client subject matter experts.  

Each eBook release was supported by a dedicated social media campaign, leveraging paid LinkedIn and organic social promotion across X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. The goal for the paid LinkedIn campaign was to generate at least 2,000 website visits without increasing the original budget, which Caster knew would require at least 400,000 impressions. Given that each eBook targeted a different vertical, leveraged current Alliance member data to allocate the LinkedIn budget according to each audience segment’s size and predicted response. Caster also streamlined the budget by creating all LinkedIn campaign graphics in-house. 

Throughout the campaign, Caster monitored the live performance of each post, proactively replacing any posts that didn’t reach predetermined engagement metrics and using learning to optimize future posts. Each social post contained a link to a gated landing page, where users could download the eBook for free in exchange for their contact information.  

 

 

THE RESULTS 

By combining compelling content with a targeted social media campaign, Caster transformed the Z-Wave Alliance’s “quiet periods” into a season of lively engagement and dramatic audience growth. The eBooks, combined with meticulous paid and organic social strategy, helped build the Z-Wave member database, drove new traffic to the website, and grew the Z-Wave social audience across key target vertical markets.

The WHY Z-WAVE social campaign exceeded every target while coming in under budget in terms of cost-per-click (CPC). 

  • We hoped to achieve 400,000 LinkedIn impressions in five months – the campaign generated more than 800,000 impressions. 
  • The LinkedIn campaign goal was 2,000 clicks, resulting in over 4,000 website views. 
  • Paid social CPC was $1.97 – 1.5% under budget. 
  • Overall client website traffic doubled compared to the same period last year. 
  • The Z-Wave Alliance’s LinkedIn page audience grew by at least 650% across every targeted industry vertical. 

The WHY Z-WAVE campaign demonstrates the power of having a versatile creative agency with true industry expertise on your side. Caster delivered strategy, content, graphics, and execution across a complex five-month social and thought leadership campaign, transforming the Z-Wave Alliance’s social presence and exceeding their expectations by every benchmark. 

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