In 2014, the challenge was to drive consideration for Philips Zoom Whitening treatment. Based on market research that stated weddings were consumer's number one reason for getting their teeth whitened, we focused on brides-to-be who we knew would invest in a costly treatment for an important day.
When looking into statistics, a key social insight showed that within 24 hours of being engaged, over 50% of women update their Facebook status shaping the strategy.
Because of this, the main focus for our efforts on Facebook aimed to engage our target audience around trigger moments during her year-long journey to her big day, making sure Philips Zoom was on her wedding check list.
The efforts succeeded in tracking over 576K click thrus to the website which resulted in 1,693 conversions, or people entering their zip code to find a dentist who could perform the treatment. Additionally, we increased the fan base by 40,906 fans which included over 722.5K post engagements and 18.6M impressions.
The Challenge: Drive awareness of Philips Zoom among brides and brides-to-be
In recent years, costly and time-consuming in-office teeth whitening services have been challenged by inexpensive (but less effective) in-store shelf brands, like whitening strips. For Philips Zoom Whitening, this was a battle that had to be taken head on in order to keep their successful treatments top-of-mind.
Research conducted by the Philips Zoom brand found that the number one reason consumers would even consider whitening their teeth would be to attend a wedding—a photographic hub where everyone, especially the bride and groom, want to look their best in every scenario.
As the brand's social media agency, Zócalo Group identified an important social insight: within 24 hours of being engaged, over 50% of women updated their Facebook status—and possibly even created a Facebook "milestone" with photos of the happy couple and the ring finger.
This allowed us to target a laser-focused audience that was self-identifying themselves on soical. Facebook campaign efforts targeted a community of about 1.42M brides to be, as well as those who expressed interest in weddings or wedding services. This was the first time that brides-to-be were targeted on social media for the brand.
It is important to note here that from a business standpoint, it was extremely important to reach brides at the start of the engagement. As time grew closer to the wedding day, professional teeth whitenening would grow less important to the bride. The status change on Facebook allowed us to create a sense of urgency for the recently engaged to get their teeth whitened for camera-ready smiles.
The Proposal: A Strategy Driven by Social Insight
With these insights, our "Year of You" campaign focused on Facebook, targeting this "wedding-specific" audience during trigger moments along the way to the altar. From the time a woman said, "Yes!" to the time she actually said, "I do," there are hundreds of photographic opportunities – from engagement photos to bridal showers, bachelorette parties to those pics your mom won't stop taking and posting on her Facebook page.
Zócalo Group took on the mission to make sure that teeth whitening was a priority on the bride's checklist of things to get done for the wedding; it didn't matter if it was the first thing they did or even the last. "Is your wedding just days away?" began one of the Facebook posts.
The content strategy balanced informational product posts with brand-related oral heatlh content and unbranded bridal topics that drew in our target bride-to-be.
The Halloween-themed post, which asked, "Ever been to a Halloween wedding? Show us the pics!" passed the relevancy test with flying colors. The post received 339 comments that included photos, along with more than 2K shares. This meant that our fans and consumers were willing to share our content out on their own social channels!
This exemplified that with relevant content, we were able to reach the right target at the right time with a very deliberate paid strategy.
They said, "Yes!"
As one can imagine, with an already existing bridal community online, paid promotional targeting and relevant content, we were able to see success in both social KPIs, in terms of engagement, and business KPIs, like getting brides-to-be to the Philips Zoom website to find her local dentist.
Through the end of the year, the Philips Zoom Whitening website saw 576,911 click thrus, thanks to Facebook efforts, resulting in 1,693 tracked conversions, or people entering their zip code to find a dentist who could perform the treatment-- an important key performance indicator for the brand team. The ability to track these conversions was only available for the last 40% of the year.
The community grew a total of 1549% from May 1 to the end of 2014. The conservatively budgeted program garnered over 18.6M impressions and over 722.5K post engagements with an average engagement rate of 3.8%. Typically we aim for anything over 1%. This was much more than that. Compared to our competitors, including Crest 3D White and Opalescence, we exceeded in Fan Growth Rate, Fans Gained and Engagements.
Over the year, we were able to establish a highly engaged community on an additional channel for the brand with a category, like teeth whitening, that isn't inherently engaging and unlock a winning formula: that of finding the people most likely to whiten and catching them with relevant content during those pivotal trigger moments.
