What we did

Social Media Marketing

The Client

Smartpod is part of the Smart Modular Group Ltd. The company produces multi-purpose pods that can be altered to fit the customer’s needs. Hence the slogan “one space…endless uses”.

The pods can be used for commercial and private use and range from personal leisure pods to commercial business pods. The pods can be built and ready to use in as little as 4 weeks, so the product offers a great alternative to less flattering looking static caravans or conservatories that often requires some construction work.

Smartpods can also be built in the warehouse, which removes the disruption caused by daily visits and noise made by builders.

With the capacity to grow the business, Smartpod were looking to digital in order to increase the number of leads and take the business to the next level.

The Brief

Smartpod is a relatively new business with little exposure on social media. Aware of the potential, the client approached Fifteen to create a low-cost ad campaign during the Coronavirus pandemic.

The low budget was set in order to minimise financial risk, but from an agency side, this gave little margin for error. In most circumstances, the initial months are used to experiment with different types of targeting, artwork and concepts before taking the learnings and optimising the long-term strategy.

The end goal of the campaign was to increase the number of leads and it was to run for an initial two week period.

The Solution

The focus of this campaign was gym pods, due to the temporary closing of all gyms around the country. With an increased focus on how to stay fit during isolation, the gympods offered a perfect solution for people with enough space to support a pod.

The completion time of just 4-6 weeks also meant that the pods could be available for use in a short space of time.

As an additional selling point, the first 10 orders were offered free nationwide delivery.

Visual

We briefed our designers with the task of creating an eye-catching single slide for this ad, that featured the key selling points and showcased the product in an effective way.

The artwork came out great and managed to cover several bases without clutter while keeping on brand.

Text

The description allows you to expand on the teasers in the visual, so it’s important to effectively relay the key selling points in the text.

Smartpod has a number of benefits that could strike a chord with someone, so instead of creating a large chunk of text explaining, we opted for a bullet-point format that is quick and easy to read.

The Result

Despite being limited to a smaller budget and targeting limitations due to no Facebook Pixel, the campaign had a flying start. We were uncertain when it came to exactly how well the ad would perform under the uncertain circumstances, but it became evident that there were several factors benefitting the situation.

The lack of competition was a major factor we identified. On social media, your ads are part of a huge auction for the audience, so the fewer companies that are advertising the fewer companies are bidding for your target market – which means lower costs.

This particular campaign was a traffic campaign, optimised for link clicks and compared to averages, the stats were through the roof.

After just a couple of days, it was evident that the campaign was a high performer. The initial cost per link click was £0.03 and that remained the same throughout, that is a fraction of the average CPC on Facebook of between £0.77 and £1.38. With the fitness industry being slightly higher than average at £1.52 according to Wordstream.

As the campaign went on, this cost remained the same and resulted in a total of 4,951 link clicks, the majority of which were clicks through to the website. If you include all clicks on the ad, there were a total of 10,594 clicks with a £0.01 CPC. As a traffic ad alone, the campaign performed exceptionally well, but it also overachieved in other aspects.

The cost per 1000 impressions, CPM, was just £1.47 compared to the average of £5.75. The best performing ads in terms of CMP are usually awareness ads, as they are optimised to make as many meaningful impressions as possible.

In rare instances, like this, the cost per click (CPC) is so low that the ad is displayed to more people than usual, meaning it not only generates traffic, it also generates mass awareness. The end result in terms of awareness was that the ad made 102,076 impressions and reached 74,224 people.

Another area where the ads stats were through the roof were click-through rates, CTR.

The overall CTR was 10.38%, over 10x the average in the fitness industry – 1.01%. It also had a link CTR of 4.85% which again is very high.

Now, these stats are all well and good, but at the end of the day, the success of a business relies on people actually making purchases, and in many cases it takes time to build up momentum, trust and brand awareness before people move further down the marketing funnel.

With Smartpod, the ad appeared to have a rather immediate effect, with a clear spike in leads during a time that otherwise might have been silent due to the unfortunate circumstances.

Daymon Nicholson, Managing Director of Smartpod, said: “Our leap of faith to make a small investment in advertising across social media is paying dividends. Smartpod is enjoying an unprecedented number of enquiries not only for our Office pod and Gym pod but across our Smartpod range”.

Smartpod