By conducting in-depth customer research, Sport Chek recognized their key demographic of 18-34 are consuming media online. To target this audience, Sport Chek has invested heavily in Facebook as their key brand channel and built a highly engaged audience of more than 700,000 fans. With an engaged online community, Sport Chek was faced with the question, “How do we get our Facebook audience into stores to make a purchase?" In response, Sport Chek partnered with Facebook to develop the global-first ‘Social Flyer,’ a measurable social campaign to digitize its paper flyer and increase brand awareness, lift purchase intent and drive in-store sales. Sport Chek aimed to stand out in a competitive retail market and appeal to its target audience by using Facebook in a concerted, tested and large-scale manner to drive in-store sales of seasonal and relevant products featured in the paper flyer. Following the success of its initial two month test period targeted to 18-34 year olds in the Greater Toronto Area, Sport Chek expanded the campaign to target its audience across Ontario from March to June 2013. The campaign was developed to optimize delivery of relevant flyer content to Ontarians weekly during the key in-store shopping period of Thursday to Sunday and reach a consistent number of users in the target audience to facilitate testing against the paper flyer. Sport Chek worked with its agency North Strategic to use a combination of organic posts, page post ads, sponsored stories, albums and video posts featuring inspirational lifestyle and product content to boost reach and engage with its Facebook fans. To remain true to Sport Chek’s “Your Better" brand positioning and resonate with its target audience, the retailer for the first time used custom photography to create inspirational, action-based product shots combined with concise, motivational copy. Both the copy and images served to build the connection between products and the healthy, active lifestyles of Sport Chek’s core customers. Simultaneously, special attention was paid to ensure the successes of the traditional print flyer were being replicated for the online community.Sport Chek effectively engaged with its target demographic, increasing brand awareness by serving 106 million impressions to the 18-34 demographic not reading the paper flyer, exceeding the initial objective of 50 million impressions. The retailer also saw a 1.6x positive return on ad spend from the Social Flyer campaign, while driving a 40 per cent peak lift in awareness of weekend sales and a 32 per cent peak lift in purchase intent. Since its launch, the Sport Chek Social Flyer program was featured in the first video case study for Facebook Canada. The program has also been presented at numerous conferences (eTail Canada, Facebook Canada Strategy Summit, Facebook Global Conference and Ad Week) as an example of how social platforms can be used to achieve key business objectives. The Social Flyer campaign proved that Sport Chek can effectively target and sell on Facebook and reach a larger audience that was not reading the weekly paper flyer and, additionally, that Sport is leading the world in social.
https://www.facebook.com/SportChekOfficial https://www.facebook.com/business/success/sport-chek
