Spaulding Communications worked alongside S4Lights to create awareness and drive sales leads for its revolutionary NxG technology. Here’s an overview of the strategic approach we took and the results we generated.
Background
During our discovery sessions, we established a strong foundational understanding about S4Lights. We learned two key items: S4Lights is an innovative leader in decorative commercial lighting, but is not recognized as such within its industry; S4Lights needed a breakthrough marketing approach to drive awareness and ignite sales leads for its newest light string construction innovation called NxG.
Challenges
Several challenges needed to be addressed as we embarked on our campaign. First: S4Lights had never instituted a comprehensive digital marketing campaign focused on one singular product launch before. Second: While a true innovator, S4Lights had not successfully showcased its market-leading thought-leadership, a significant competitive advantage. Third and most challenging: S4Lights was looking to spark sales during their industry’s “off season.”
Campaign Goals
We established these campaign goals:
- Position NxG as a revolutionary product for the industry
- Increase awareness of NxG among key audiences, primarily commercial lighting installers
- Increase sales leads during the “off season” from the previous year
- Develop a successful and replicable integrated marketing approach for future product launches
Strategy & Tactics: Education & Inspiration
We developed a two-pronged, fully integrated marketing strategy designed to both educate and inspire customers on the advantages to NxG. Our approach included the following:
- Audience & Customer Identification – We worked to fully understand the target audience for NxG and to determine why or why they might not need NxG
- Core Brand Messages – We developed core messages to leverage across all marketing and sales efforts to create a unified brand message
- Dynamic Landing Page – We created the content and messaging for a dynamic landing page where customers could learn and be inspired about NxG’s benefits
Integrated PR and Digital Marketing – We implemented a fully integrated PR and digital marketing campaign. Tactics included: A customer email campaign; press release and media relations; long-form blog articles; highly targeted paid and organic social media posts; brand design and messaging consultation
Campaign KPIs
A key to any campaign is to establish goals and metrics to evaluate. Working with the client we identified these core KPIs to measure the campaign’s success:
- Traffic/hits to the NxG landing page
- Product sample requests
- Inspirational NxG video views
- Facebook and LinkedIn engagements
- Sales sheet downloads
- New customer sign-ups
Results
The campaign was executed from early December to mid-January. Despite this timeframe as the industry’s “off season,” the results exceeded nearly every performance indicator during the same timeframe in years past.
The KPIs results included:
- Traffic/hits to the NxG landing page = Nearly 1K qualified visits, the second-most trafficked page during the campaign time frame.
- Product sample requests = 36 sample requests (approximately one per day). The opportunity to provide online sample requests had not been considered prior to this campaign.
- Inspirational NxG video views = 76 plays (approximately two per day), including a 30% finish rate
- Facebook and LinkedIn engagements = A 425% engagement increase on S4Light’s Facebook Page; 103 post engagements on S4Light’s LinkedIn page (up 9%) and 96 click-throughs to the landing page (average of nearly three per day)
- Sales sheet downloads = 69 downloads (nearly two per day)
- New customer sign-ups = Nearly 400 qualified leads in 45 days and 272 new customer registrations
Summary
All campaign goals were achieved. The educational and inspirational strategic approach created a proven method for future product launches and set a stronger foundation for positioning S4Light’s as the industry leader it is. And, with nearly 400 qualified leads, including 272 new customer registrations – results that far exceeded previous years – S4L was well positioned to generate an ROI far surpassing the total cost of the campaign.
