ScS (Sofa Carpet Specialist), is a home furnishings retailer in the United Kingdom, specialising in sofas, carpets and flooring, dining and occasional furniture.

Challenge

With over 97 physical stores across the country, ScS wanted to address three key challenges:

⦁    Drive customers to ScS stores and thereby increase footfall to stores.
⦁    Reach local customers on mobile with locally-targeted ads.
⦁    Increase awareness of the ScS brand and build association with its products.
⦁    Prove the value of digital marketing to justify further investment in the channel.

Solution

Since ScS required a tangible output in the form of increasing store visitors and brand awareness to prove the value of digital ads, they engaged with Media iQ. We implemented a combination of location-based segmentation, rich-media creative and a high-scale brand uplift survey tool to provide them with unique insights on ScS customers, further helping them understand the prospects of using the media mix.

Process

Media iQ implemented our hyperlocal targeting solution – Locate to help ScS leverage GPS data to execute accurate targeting of users during and after a visit to a relevant place.  

Customer segments creation:

  • ScS Customers: we created segments of users who had visited at least one of the ScS store geo-fence locations (locate audience) and targeted them in real-time while they were at these stores (locate context) on their mobiles.
  • Competitor Customers: We created segments of users gathered from Locate place database (locate audiences) who visited competitor geo-fences (locate context) and targeted them in real time.
  • The combination of the location-based segments and our targeting technology enabled us to target: 
  • Customers that visited ScS stores and/or competitors’ stores.
  • Customers that were at ScS stores and/or competitors’ stores.

We were able to target surrounding postcodes within a 20-mile radius of stores across mobile and desktop large formats. Additionally, we were also able to provide analysis on how users moved between competitor stores and SCS stores, how much time they took to visit their first store and their last store, thereby mapping their overall user journey.

Using the creative provided by ScS’s creative agency MTR in Newcastle, we leveraged our rich-media creative feature (Engage, powered by Scoota) to generate awareness amongst highly relevant users at the best time and on the best device. This was to reinforce the association of the ScS brand with Sofas and Carpets in the consumer’s’ mind.
The expandable ‘lightbox’ creative included:

⦁    30s video.
⦁    Details of 3 separate deals, with deep-links to each on the ScS site.
⦁    Call-to-actions for finding stores and sharing on social media.

Creative used:

Leveraging our brand uplift product – Elevate, we were accurately able to capture an ad’s impact throughout the customer journey and also measure the branding impact of our display campaign.    

About Media iQ’s Elevate – Our brand uplift product that measures the uplift in key brand metrics driven by display advertising.

To calculate the uplift in exposed users visiting the client store we used an ‘always on’ panel of users (Geowave) to calculate this uplift, thereby accurately determining the footfall attribution of the campaign. 

Results 

  • Increased brand awareness by 25%.
  • 57% increase in Digital Advertising ROI.
  • Ability to target users with OOH campaigns due to the accurate mapping of the distance from user’s’ home and work to ScS stores.
  • Optimise future campaigns with the help of the multiple cross-device insights we provided to get: 
  • An accurate view of how many actual users have been reached and at what frequency 
  • A holistic view of performance by every device combination 
  • A complete understanding of shopper journey 
  • A better understanding of hidden conversions