Social Media Strategy

Let's be - Shop Direct

Shop Direct is a multi-brand online retailer and financial services provider based in the UK and Ireland. The company recently decided to open a new state of the art fulfilment centre in East Midlands called Skygate, and they needed our help to let the world know all about it.

One big challenge in this project was that Shop Direct is a big heritage brand in the North West. As their distribution is normally around Manchester, moving a large amount of roles to another area is quite hard and brings a number of complexities and hiring issues.

Improving brand awareness was key here. As they aren’t a customer-facing brand, Shop Direct needed to get people excited about the move through our marketing efforts. They needed help with finding and reaching out to the necessary audience.

THE IDEA

As a first step, we wanted to use their Facebook page as a landing page and their website to attract and funnel the right people to these new roles. This included making branded content and translating key messages from the employer brand (why Skygate) into copy.

Following this, we used the fantastic imagery sent across by the Shop Direct team to create useful employer branding social assets based on the ‘Let’s be Shop Direct’ strapline.

These were used in conjunction with some repurposed video content. This was branded and messages were added to make it as eye catching as possible for its target audience on Facebook.

We really focused this campaign on targeted content rather than bombarding people without focus. Our ads were clearly targeted and helped to funnel the right people towards the right roles at Shop Direct.

We’ve got two ads in the campaign. The first is based around awareness building (targeting on job descriptions and location). We also have a pixel on the site that allows us to retarget people who visit. Another benefit here is that we can use information from the people that do visit to grow the audience.

THE RESULTS

Speaking of growing the audience, this group now sits at around 7,500 people. Here are a few other stats that show how effective this campaign really was:

PPC

Impressions: 131k
Clicks: 891
Conversions: 0.7%
CPC: £4.53

Social

Impressions: 71.4k
Reach: 28.7k
Clicks: 786
Conversions: 2.7%
CPC: £0.54

Our campaign was something that Shop Direct haven’t really tried before. We helped them to move beyond their traditional channels and try some new marketing techniques, which worked a treat. It gave them a chance to understand their audience. And, if they need another recruitment drive, we’ve already got an audience to reach out to.