Our Thoughts

SPCA Petfood – Social Media Case Study

April 15, 2010 by Duncan Shand

Making the Case for Change

How SPCA Premium Petfood created a Facebook Monster
Recently we were asked to assist with the launch of SPCA Premium Petfood. This brand is managed on behalf of the SPCA by Brand Support the people behind Cancer Society Sunscreen. The business is a case study in itself – a company dedicated to helping charities by developing products and paying them a license fee. They generate near a million dollars a year for the Cancer Society and want to do the same thing for the SPCA.

Situation

Unlike the Cancer Society Sunscreen the SPCA Petfood didn’t sell itself. Our assessment was that petfood is a more habitual, high involvement purchase, one where changing products can cause both pet and owner grief. So it’s easier to stick with what you know than to change something that’s working. There already was a TVC in production but this wasn’t due to air for 4 weeks. They needed to do something fast to drive awareness of the product and generate sales to keep the trade onside.

Solution

Because of the SPCA’s strong brand values and the cause related nature of the product we believed a Facebook campaign targeting key buyers would work well. The key objective was to not only generate Facebook Fans but convert these into real customers as well. Do to this we put several ideas into the mix to try to do something special.

1. Custom Landing Page – Rather than just set up a Facebook Page we developed a custom landing page within Facebook which explained to people what we wanted them to do when the arrived on the page. We designed something visually interesting to capture the visitors interest immediately. The page is here – while you’re there become a fan!
2. Build a Database of Qualified Buyers – To drive sales we added the ability to request a sample right from the landing page. We understood that a lot of people would just support the SPCA and that’s great but we really wanted to engage with people that would try and buy the product.
3. Story Forms to Engage – To make the form more interesting we used the story form approach. Rather than a long boring list of fields we created a story to engage the user and build commitment to take action.
4. Secure a Personlised URL – To have a simple memorable easily spreadable url it’s important to have a short personalised Facebook URL. Once you have 25 fans you can go to facebook.com/yourname to claim your branded URL.
5. Build Initial Fans through Friends – rather than jump straight into advertising we tapped into the personal networks of everyone involved in the project. This built a strong core fan base that would help spread the stories.
6. Laser Target Initial Advertising – We didn’t advertise to everyone in New Zealand we looked to target the most important buying group for the client. This was slowly opened up as the campaign matured. Also we used the ability to target friends of fans. One of the main reasons people join new fan pages on Facebook is because their friends have become fans. This helped make the advertising even more effective.
7. Test Multiple Ad versions. We ran several versions of ads to optimise performance. The top performing ads had 2 to 3 times the conversion and a significantly lower cost per click.
8. Engage Engage Engage – The clients did a fantastic job answering questions and posting content on the page to keep things fresh. This was a significant element in the success of the campaign as every post by every fan is seen by all their friends which fuels the viral growth of the Fan page.

The key to the solution was talking a considered marketing approach and uncovering the solution that best fitted the client rather than jumping to the latest fashionable trend. This marketing led solution, with a great visual design and smart technical integration between the different systems delivered results.

The Results

For a very modest spend SPCA Premium Petfood attracted 10,000 fans within a week and had over 25,000 fans after three weeks. The campaign generated 40 million impressions and four thousand sample requests from qualified buyers. This also created a secondary benefit of an email database to be used to contact customers in the future.

The value of the engagement and dialogue with this group of customers cant be underestimated. The ability to answer concerns, address issues and help customers with the product has been of remarkable value.

Overall a great cause, a great product and an outstanding result. Just proves if you have something worth talking about people will listen.

Download the SPCA Social Media Case Study.

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Tags: facebook, Marketing, social media

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