Projects
SPAR Scotland
Scotland
2022 Results Ring TikTok Tills – Success For SPAR Scotland’s 2022 Student Campaign
Early in 2022, we generated terrific results for SPAR Scotland as a result of our work as the extension to their inhouse marketing team.
What we delivered
- Campaign Management
- Content
- Design & Animation
- Digital Marketing
- Marketing Communications
- Social Media
- Strategy
Our Approach
We achieved, for example, a 37% increase in website users, a progressive downward trend in bounce rate and markedly increased engagement rates across Facebook and Instagram.
But this was just the start…
Continuing to work with the team to enable and empower their brand to achieve their envisioned goals, specifically engagement and reach to students in Scotland, we further utilised the Meta channels and also TikTok. Across five separately themed campaigns we devised the creative, social media strategy and delivery to generate further positive results, as it turns out, particularly through TikTok.
Getting into TikTok
In getting to grips in more detail with TikTok, we were careful to not take our eyes off the data – we are all about the data (you will hear us say this a lot) and as we found, although the results are indisputably positive, it comes at a price.
Five refreshingly everyday campaigns
Here’s what we did.
We refined the strategies for targeting students Scotland-wide, namely, men and women aged 18 to 30 over a two-week period. The result was five different messaging and campaign streams to increase brand and offering awareness via video-led adverts in Facebook, Instagram stories and TikTok instream ads.
Working together to understand the Spa Scotland audience and the common problems faced by students across the course of a week, when it comes to grocery shopping and meal planning, we identified five highly recognisable scenarios.
- Parents visiting? Quick and easy dinner/snacks to impress…
- Date night? Here’s how to score some points…
Friends coming over to make a mess of yours? Easy clean-up snacks… - Lunch prepping like a pro is easy this way…
- Midweek can’t-be-bothered meal required? Look no further…
- We revamped and sparked up the creative look and feel for each campaign, presenting the realistic scenario of a student facing the problem and the easy-to-obtain solution, in four to five simple soundbites. All headed, “Student essentials” and including, “You’re never too far from your local SPAR… click to find your nearest store”; to ensure the campaigns were cohesively recognisable, each strengthening the other by cross-building brand awareness.
Our Solution
Some surprising results
As we saw the first time around, CTR is stronger on TikTok; we achieved a 113% increase. But, interestingly, and contradictory to what we saw previously, in our campaigns with SPAR Scotland was that both impressions and reach on Facebook and Instagram are higher than that achieved on TikTok.
Taking the ‘Lunch Prepping’ campaign alone, here are the figures for both TikTok, and Facebook and Instagram combined.
Our audience reach on Meta channels was higher, however, the audience reached on TikTok was more engaged once reached, demonstrated by the higher CTR.
Other campaigns followed the trend of this one, resulting in an overall CTR of 0.62 on TikTok, compared to 0.29 on the Meta channels for the five campaigns combined.
More expensive to achieve reach on TikTok – worth it?
Although it costs more to reach people on TikTok, we did find once reached, it’s cheaper to buy engagements. CPC was, on average, half the price of that on Meta channels and clicks on TikTok were substantially more, at over 1000 compared to less than 700.
Continuing to utilise the mix of channels is best
The cost and mixed results across the platforms provides us with the takeaway that a mix of utilising TikTok and Meta channels is the most advantageous.
Our first TikTok campaign prior to these, achieved a 2% CTR, which could lead us to believe that this campaign’s success was much reduced. However, what we know is that TikTok is growing in popularity, even in this short space of time and as the channel has realised its potential as an advertising mechanism, the cost increases for advertisers.
Flexible and adaptive wins the race
Showing time and again that we do the creative work to cut through, analyse the results and adapt accordingly, we are excited for further iterations of campaigns for SPAR Scotland.
As channels develop, the metrics reveal the next ways forward, and, as always, in line with best practice for managing social media and running effective marketing campaigns we take these as our strategy starter for ten.
