Using social media as the primary channel to promote and celebrate a B2B partner event Nectar Business delivered high levels of engagement and positive brand sentiment demonstrating value of social for targeting SME audience
Nectar Business is part of Nectar, the UK’s largest loyalty programme. It is specifically aimed at small business owners, allowing them to collect Nectar points on business purchases with a range of coalition partners including Brakes, Hertz and DHL Express, which they can then spend on rewards for themselves or the business.
Nectar Business is always eager to deliver new and exciting ways to deepen collector engagement, and is committed to proving value to partners who belong to the programme. One way it achieves this is through bi-annual coalition collect events – promotional periods where Nectar Business partners run bonus offers for the benefit of collectors. These twice-yearly events seek to increase collector engagement, celebrate and promote the coalition nature of Nectar Business and drive positive brand sentiment.
Promoting coalition events is difficult because the message has to cut through a high level of everyday programmatic communication, so it’s important to find creative ways to reach collectors. Knowing it needed a clever approach to maximise the impact of the September 2013 coalition, Nectar Business turned to its marketing and social media agency, The Crocodile.
Integrated approach
The Crocodile went about creating a unique name and identity – Superpoints – to underscore the generosity of the coalition event and act as an umbrella concept for communicating a mix of double and triple bonus point offers and prizes.
Taking an integrated approach, The Crocodile devised a mix of below-the-line communications including social media content, email and DM to promote the Superpoints event – all driving collectors to a dedicated landing page. In addition, The Crocodile created a Superpoints social media competition to get collectors excited and foster genuine dialogue and engagement around the event among its 11 thousand Facebook fans and 20 thousand Twitter followers.
The Crocodile commissioned award-winning illustrator, Rod Hunt, to create a bustling street scene featuring participating partners (Brakes, Hertz, DHL Express, DDC and BOC). This formed the focal point of the social media competition.
Each day, for 21 days, the Superpoints logo was hidden in a different location within the scene and a clue was given to its whereabouts, in the form of a question relating to the participating partners and the event. Collectors had to correctly locate the logo to be entered into a daily prize draw for the chance to win 10,000 Nectar points. Its unique, fun style made the competition stimulating and memorable.
Daily clues
Exposing collectors to the breadth of coalition partners was an important part of driving participation. The unique visual nature of the competition and tactics such as ‘daily clues’ reinforced the coalition USP in a new way that really struck a chord with the audience.
Using social media as the primary promotion channel for the event and the entry mechanic for the competition, allowed Nectar Business to ‘talk’ to collectors regularly, generating buzz and engagement to increase awareness in a way that other channels couldn’t.
The Superpoints competition met all objectives. It grew positive brand sentiment with 76 per cent of collectors surveyed saying the campaign made them feel it was worthwhile belonging to Nectar Business (demonstrating the value perception) and 66 per cent agreeing it made them feel the programme was generous. The execution and simplicity of idea behind the campaign contributed to its success.
The results
The competition element of the campaign achieved unprecedented levels of engagement for Nectar Business on social media and exceeded all expectations:
- 14,317 views (143 per cent of target).
- Over 10,000 entries (214 per cent of target and equivalent to 1/3 of total event participants).
- 75 per cent entry conversion rate (25 per cent above target).
- 45 per cent of people who entered, shared the competition.
- Engagement score: 401,422 (161 per cent of target).
The overall social engagement metrics also reflected the campaign’s success:
- 66 per cent increase in Facebook page likes.
- 2880 per cent increase in Facebook post likes.
- 622 per cent more comments on Nectar Business Facebook (versus previous month).
- 531 per cent increase in tweets mentioning Nectar Business (versus previous month).
- 162 per cent increase in social referrals to Nectar Business website.
- Participating partners amplified the message on their social channels and were amongst the top 20 users of the hashtag #NBSuperpoints.
“Superpoints was a fantastic celebration of the Nectar Business programme and our most successful social campaign to date,” said Kate Madden, marketing manager, Nectar Business. “The Crocodile demonstrated a clear understanding of our objectives and came up with a clever, engaging idea, which delivered outstanding results.”
Since the 2013 Superpoints event, the campaign has been repeated twice – only being replaced by the Nectar Business’ 10th anniversary campaign in 2015. Lessons learned from the Superpoints campaign, in particular how social content was used to better engage collectors, was invaluable when shaping the 10th anniversary campaign.
