With entries open for the Performance Marketing Awards 2015, we’re showcasing some of the finest campaigns we saw at this year’s PMAs. iProspect were highly commended for the ‘Best Use of Social Media’ award for its campaign with Asda. 

Asda has consistently secured itself a spot in the top five supermarket brands. But with customers more fickle than ever, the retailer was looking for new ways to achieve a greater market share for less spend, in order to keep its competitive edge going into 2013. The supermarket appointed iProspect UK to handle its digital activity with the core focus of growing its market share for a smaller budget.

Challenge

Asda identified three goals to help it take a greater market share in this increasingly competitive sector:

  1. Drive more traffic to and increase sales through the Asda Direct site for 20 percent less budget.
  2. Reverse the dip in online grocery sales following the traditional summer low.
  3. Establish the George range as a desirable fashion brand, beyond its traditional ‘Asda mum’ audience.

It was clear that smarter targeting on its own simply would not be enough. iProspect therefore created new conversations that Asda could own. In areas as diverse as fashion, groceries, homeware and electronics, iProspect identified strong conceptual themes that could be communicated through the right interdependent channel mix, while carving out untapped audiences on a tight budget.

Strategy

To achieve Asda’s targets for this project, iProspect developed a year-long approach, across multiple online channels whereby they could attain the highest performance results.

Blogger outreach

The brand’s aspiration to build the appeal of the George range was approached through establishing and deepening blogger relationships, to not only drive engagement through social media, but also to generate content that would help improve organic search engine results. This provided the perfect opportunity for iProspect to demonstrate how linking SEO and paid-social can provide a virtuous circle.

For the first time, influential bloggers were invited to preview and try-on the new spring and summer clothing ranges. The bloggers were then given photographs of themselves wearing the clothes leading to multiple blog posts, tweets and Instagram posts. Using the online hype around the launch of the new season’s range, iProspect launched George’s presence on Instagram.

The boost in organic online content pushed George’s SEO results far above predicted, with the brand hitting number one for ‘women’s clothes’ and ‘women’s clothing’ on Google’s search rankings. This lead to a 35 percent increase in sales traffic and orders through the Asda Direct site. This event-driven outreach was repeated for the launch of the Christmas jumper range, which saw matching results, with George shooting to number one in Google’s search rankings for ‘Christmas jumpers for women’ and fifth for ‘Christmas jumpers’ overall.

Asda Black Friday

iProspect then looked to build upon Asda’s new social media success pushing for further engagement with an #asdablackfriday campaign, which saw the supermarket effectively own the shopping event. The hashtag was taken across multiple channels and tied to Asda’s television advertising; particularly around I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here!, to raise awareness of Black Friday and Asda’s own promotions for the event. Famous American personalities, sports stars and iconic brands were all brought into the conversations online to raise the profile of the campaign further and build an authentic association with America, which other British brands were lacking.

PPC and paid-social

As part of the project, PPC and paid social were seamlessly integrated alongside performance display to promote the ‘Save Summer’ campaign, aimed at helping parents plan activities for their kids with products that could be added to an Asda shopping basket.

The campaign was hugely successful in driving engagement and boosting click-through rates, and for the first time allowed iProspect to show Asda how multiple digital channels could be used effectively to reach the target audience.

In another first for the George clothing range, PPC scripts were intelligently used to push summer clothing when the weather was good and warmer clothes and knitwear when it was colder.

Results

Overall, iProspect outperformed on all KPI targets, with 117m site visitors (105m target) achieved with a cost per sale between 6 and 8 percent (15 percent target).

The Black Friday campaign, #asdablackfriday, received over 5,000 mentions and 57,000 engagements, with overall engagements up 12.9 percent. This rise in social media presence drove a high number of unpredicted sales through the Asda Direct site. The campaign was also singled out as one of Twitter’s highlight campaigns of 2013.

The social summer holidays campaign was hugely successful in reaching 11m mums, achieving a click through rate of 0.67 percent, along with 68,000 likes, 20,000 comments and 9,000 shares. All of which positioned George as a credible fashion brand with excellent blogger outreach and SEO positioning, keeping Asda front of minds for mums’ during the summer holidays.

Have you been part of a campaign this year that would give iProspect a run for its money? Find out more about entering here.