Paid Social Strategy Increases Brand Affinity
A premier regional tire dealer wanted to boost customer outreach through paid social media marketing. By focusing on metrics that aligned with their brand pillars, Portent’s Social Media team executed an advertising program that successfully reached new customers while maintaining the brand’s relationship with its core base.
Social
Automotive
Having served as the region’s premier tire retailer for decades, customers view this well-established business as local experts in tire and automotive services. They have built a long-lasting relationship with these customers by consistently mapping to their three brand pillars:
- Community-building
- Customer service
- Quality of service
In 2018, the regional tire retailer brought in Portent’s Social Media team to execute on a social media advertising program that effectively lifted all three pillars using Facebook and Instagram outreach channels. But for a well-established brand, digital marketing can be a challenge. Reaching new customers must be carefully balanced against maintaining the relationship the brand has with its core base, many of whom have been with the retailer for decades.
The primary objective was to increase brand affinity for the retailer’s established, emerging, and new markets (more than 400 stores). Portent partnered with the retailer’s marketing team to ideate and execute on a best practice approach that leveraged three distinct advertising methodologies over the course of the year. These methodologies were:
- Always On
- Community Engagement
- Direct Response
Leveraging Facebook and Instagram, Portent’s team curated posts around promotion holistically across each market to reinforce awareness and affinity for the brand. Success metrics were measured in three outcomes: estimated ad recall lift, post engagement, and overall site traffic generated through the campaign work. Broadly, these three outcomes built the foundation for the overall approach to the work at large.
By balancing these three complementary tactics, Portent sought to effectively move customers—both new and old—from awareness to consideration, and lastly to in-store conversion. This approach helped the retailer gain an overall increase in brand affinity in 2018.
On a monthly basis, we delivered a variation of promotional advertising for more than 20 different markets and over 400 stores. Centered around marketing campaigns, holiday promotions, and blog content, these advertisements were designed to complement concurrent radio, television, and out-of-home (OOH) advertising. This resulted in a 55% increase in click-through-rate and a 69% increase in estimated ad recall on Facebook, quarter-over-quarter. This work was balanced carefully against maintaining the integrity of the brand as a whole, as we were careful not to oversaturate customers with unwanted ads.
Leveraging tactics like retargeting, broad lookalike audiences, and location-based targeting, the social media team set CPM benchmarks and optimized against them using well-defined creative on an ongoing basis. This resulted in an 11% year-over-year decrease in CPM.
