GreyStone Vegetation Management
CREATIVE BRIEF
Goal: To educate GreyStone Power’s 127,000 member-owners about how their cutting-edge vegetation management program prevents outages.
Audience: 36% of survey respondents were Gen Y and 29% were Baby Boomers, representing 65% of respondents.
Deliverables: Print ads and supporting collateral, including digital ads, social media content, and email marketing.
The Spark
Georgia’s trees aren’t so peachy when they’re falling into power lines. GreyStone Power, an electric co-op serving 7,100 miles of line, needed an impactful communications campaign to educate their members about how trees are the number one cause of power outages in their service area and what they’re doing to solve the problem. After reviewing their creative brief, we conceptualized a multi-faceted marketing and communications campaign that educated and engaged their entire demographic.
GreyStone uses state-of-the-art vegetation management technology, such as satellite photography, geospatial technology, and piloted drones with infrared cameras, alongside expert crews to identify areas where vegetation is growing into their utilities and pinpoint high-risk vegetation. By bringing these initiatives to the forefront of the campaign’s messaging, we aimed to highlight their commitment to reliability and keeping the power on for their 127,000 member-owners.
Our Solution
To execute the campaign, we focused on celebrating GreyStone Power’s impressive 99.98% reliability rating, highlighting the 525,495 minutes of power their members enjoy each year. By using bold, eye-catching numbers in the creative, we emphasized the extensive power uptime that residents in GreyStone’s service area experience. We also included a strong tagline: We stop outages before they start.
Our approach spanned multiple channels, including web design, print and digital advertisements, email marketing, social media, and print collateral to ensure we reached the entire range of their member demographic where they engage most.
From the Designer
“This was a particularly fun art direction for me to execute. The big bold numbers intertwining with their photographic environments was a challenge and a delight. My goals was to make the boldness eye-catching and enticing, enough to stop and read the rest of the ads.”
-Laura Sanders, Chief Creative Officer
First Things First
Our first step was to create a landing page that served as a hub for member-owners seeking more information about GreyStone’s vegetation management program. Encompassing the basics of vegetation management, in-depth information about GreyStone’s dedication to reliability through cutting-edge technology and expert teams, and FAQs, this eye-catching page optimized for UX established them as a valuable and trusted resource.
Print Collateral
Baby boomers make up a significant portion of GreyStone’s member-owners. As such, print collateral was a key component of our strategy. We created messaging that let people know that GreyStone stops outages before they start in newspaper ads and monthly newsletter features.
Digital Marketing
The vegetation management campaign we created for GreyStone also encompassed several digital marketing initiatives. We created email campaigns, digital ads, and social ads to both reinforce messaging and ensure we met Gen Y where they’re at.
Social Media Strategy
Social media is an essential way to effectively communicate the ins and outs of vegetation management to member-owners in a way that is informative, engaging, and easy to understand. Social media posts with eye-catching graphics created for Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok supported each aspect of GreyStone’s campaign.
