Challenge:

Lidl Hellas had accrued a large audience but was struggling to engage them or attract more without ever-increasing paid budgets. Their audience was unevenly distributed between platforms and they didn’t know how to prioritize growing new channels vs. serving existing audiences. They had no e-commerce assets, so the measurement of success cannot be directly linked to sales. Finally, targets for organic KPIs set by HQ in Germany did not reflect the realities of Greek social media audiences.

Approach:

We executed an in-depth audience analysis across channels, developed digital personas and produced an A/B testing guide that their internal team adopted.

• First, we conducted a statistical analysis of their followers across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn. We weighed the relative importance of each channel and developed broad audience sets by combining the findings.
• Next, we turned those audience sets into four digital personas by comparing the social data to an in-store customer survey conducted previously with a particular focus on the brand affinities and demographic traits of the Facebook audience, which comprised 92% of the entire online audience. Each persona also came with targeted campaign ideas.
• Finally, we developed a step-by-step guide to creating digital content focused on personas, with detailed instructions on A/B testing, market-specific benchmarks, ideas for experiments and instructions on scaling those results into paid promotions. We called this the Content Testing Framework, which was supplemented by an A/B test significance calculator where they could track their experiments.

Results:

The clients were thrilled by the new personas and immediately started to plan campaigns based on them, A/B testing messaging and executing segmented campaigns across channels.

• Our deliverables kicked off 3 months of A/B testing content which saw excellent returns. We reviewed their data every month and caught up for a consulting session where the clients reported big improvements and a new approach to their work.
• Lidl Hellas’ social media team went on to win 10 awards at the Social Media Awards Greece in 2018, a Bronze Award in the category Social Media Retail Strategy of Retail Business Awards and a Gold Award in the Hellenic Responsible Business Awards. (We like to think we helped!)