Custom T-shirt and swag brand Custom Ink honored 10 kindergarten-12th grade school employees with an “Unsung Heroes of School Spirit” award as part of its latest marketing campaign.

After soliciting nominations from the public for teachers or school administrators who go above and beyond, Custom Ink announced the winners Aug. 28 with videos showcasing these employees.

The initiative is resonating with consumers as campaign-related videos have nearly “six figures” in views, with the highest engagement rates on interviews with the winners, 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, such as orders from major enterprise accounts for employee onboarding and gifting. The remaining share of purchases comes from everyday consumers, such as families wanting matching vacation outfits, and from organizations, such as nonprofit groups.

Sales to K-12 organizations, such as a school band or chess club, fall into the “organizations” category, Auerbach said. While that segment isn’t the majority of the company’s sales, it is a “sizable” share of its business, he said, and the brand has 100,000 K-12 customers each year.

A majority of U.S. schools sell branded gear for fundraising efforts, and swag helps to enhance school spirit, Auerbach said. The people who coordinate this effort — teachers, club leaders and parents — often spend a lot of time organizing the swag orders even though it is not their main responsibility. This is why Custom Ink marketed the campaign as “Unsung Heroes of School Spirit.”

“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,” he said. “It is something that people are dedicating their own time, usually after hours, to doing.”

Custom Ink Amplifies the Campaign with Local Media

To further amplify the campaign, Custom Ink’s public relations team pitched the local media in all 10 of the winners’ cities. Custom Ink first got the winners’ permission to share their stories, Auerbach said. A few local news outlets picked up the story to highlight the winners, and Custom Ink said it helped the winners prepare.

A number of brand marketing teams are working to boost their earned media coverage amid the growth of AI chat platforms, such as ChatGPT. These chat platforms often source information and links from news organizations, so brands have worked to make their names more visible.

“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 aims for other educators and parents to see the videos, which Auerbach is confident will happen based on organic sharing of this type of content.

Along with increasing brand awareness and brand affinity for Custom Ink, the brand will be measuring the campaign’s impact on its K-12 business. It will likely see the results of the campaign, including orders, 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 done contests before, but nothing on this scale, Auerbach said. Because of the positive response, Custom Ink 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.