Year after year, Mohawk Flooring supports Susan G. Komen and the fight against breast cancer via our Decorate for the Cure Program, in which Mohawk donates proceeds—between 2 cents and 15 cents per square yard of SmartCushion™ carpet cushion sold—to Komen. Our SmartCushion does so much more than just protect our carpets by adding extra comfort, durability and an instant warranty upgrade. It helps save lives!
In addition to our Decorate for the Cure Program, Mohawk Flooring also sponsored all seven Susan G. Komen 3-Day walks in 2016. From Seattle to Atlanta, members of Team Mohawk spent three days interacting with participants and providing them with emotional support and also physical support via rolls of SmartCushion, which were used at meal times and underneath sleeping bags each night. Mohawk Flooring was literally helping #CushiontheFight against breast cancer.
Throughout the fall of 2016 and particularly in October, during Breast Cancer Awareness Month, our primary objective was to drive awareness of Mohawk's continued support of Susan G. Komen and the organization's fight against breast cancer. Our secondary objective was to promote our sponsorship of the Susan G. Komen 3-Day walks and bring brand awareness to our SmartCushion.
Our social media goals included:
To accomplish our objectives and goals, we created an in-depth digital and social media strategy that incorporated multiple platforms and mediums. Like our SmartCushion, which provides additional support and comfort to our carpets, we decided to focus our campaign on cushioning the fight for those who support women currently fighting breast cancer and breast cancer survivors. We created a visual campaign incorporating both professionally shot video and live, event-day video with compelling imagery and interviews, and accompanied them with a series of social posts that drove our campaign goals forward.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but a video can leave people speechless. Our in-depth social media strategy began with a heartwarming video from the Seattle 3-Day walk that went viral. We embedded the video into Mohawk Flooring's Facebook page and then created a paid ad to help increase video views, reach and engagement. To support our efforts, Susan G. Komen also shared our video on its Facebook page, which has more than 2 million followers.
We followed up our video social post and paid ad with photos—creating a #CushiontheFight Pinterest board where we shared images of walkers enjoying our SmartCushion from all seven 3-Day walks across the United States. We shared live, event-day videos across Mohawk's YouTube, Facebook and Instagram; and shared images in albums on Facebook and in individual posts on Google+, Twitter and Instagram.
In addition, Mohawk Flooring's home décor and design blog—Creative Home—shared our experience with the Susan G. Komen 3-Day and promoted Mohawk's SmartCushion. We drove readers to Creative Home by sharing links to the blog post across all of Mohawk's social networks.
We tapped into a database of thousands of Mohawk Flooring subscribers by dedicating the bulk of the content of October 2016's newsletter to our work with Susan G. Komen. Four out of six vignettes in that newsletter focused on the Seattle 3-Day video, the Creative Home blog post, the SmartCushion page on Mohawk Flooring's website and the #CushiontheFight Pinterest board. October's newsletter had one of the highest open rate and email click-through rates of any of our newsletters in 2016!
To further increase impressions and engagement, we mobilized our retailer network using Promoboxx, a digital marketing platform that enables Mohawk to share branded content with retailers who then share that content across their own social networks. Hundreds of Mohawk Flooring retailers shared video and images, links and the blog post on Creative Home. They included our #CushiontheFight and #MohawkGoesPink hashtags in social posts across Facebook and Twitter.
Finally, we supported Mohawk Group's goal to reach 1 million impressions by incorporating the #MohawkGoesPink hashtag into most of our social posts across all of Mohawk Flooring's social media platforms.
Over a period of three months in the fall of 2016, and with a modest ad spend of $700, our #CushiontheFight social media campaign was a tremendous success!
Campaign highlights included:
To date, Mohawk has raised more than $10 million in donations to Komen since 2001 through sales of its SmartCushion.
